How I Got My First Clients

25% effort, 25% good decision-making, 50% luck

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Client Number One

In 2006, I started a PR blog while interning at a small marketing & PR firm in Cheltenham. The blog wasn’t great - mostly because I had no idea what I was speaking about. I was an intern trying to write like a veteran. It was a generic ‘me too’ blog cursed by the arrogance of youth.

But, remarkably, it did get me my first client; a local digital marketing company in my town that paid me £120 per week. At the time, this paid almost all my student bills.

I spent two years on that blog and gained only one client from it. But I wasn’t too concerned. I figured when it came to looking for jobs having a blog would show interest and enthusiasm for a topic other candidates wouldn’t have.

Clients Two and Three

By 2008, it had (finally) dawned on me it was a bit silly to have a generic blog on a topic outside of my passions. So I shifted the topic to managing online communities - something I had already been doing for years in the video gaming space.

Very quickly, I lost my old audience and began to gain a new one. I didn’t know how to blog well at the time, so I copied Seth Godin. This meant one short post per day with one useful tip. The style worked and I began to attract a tiny audience (it worked so well in fact that I kept doing it for 14 years).

Then I benefited from the first of a few lucky breaks.

In early 2008, Seth Godin hosted a summer school which I was accepted into. I spent 3 months in New York. Afterwards, he featured some of the interns, including me, in this PDF.

This led to a surge of traffic to my blog (I went from a few dozen readers to a few hundred fast). At the time, the blogosphere was still the delightful nascent era with blogrolls (just as we have again now in Substack). Once you gained momentum you could attract more traffic quickly.

Also as a result of the blog, two organisations reached out to me about helping them build a community. I remember having no idea what to charge them. So I asked them what their budget was. I would’ve taken $1k per month at the time. That felt like an acceptable number. One said $5k per month, the other said $6k per month (this is why you always ask the client what their budget is).

I felt it was prudent to accept these terms. This meant I went from earning $150 per week to $2.8k per week (or equivalent to $132k per year). I remember feeling awed when those payments hit my account - I couldn’t wait to start investing it!.

Clients Four And More

At the time I thought consultancy was something to dabble in before I figured out what I really wanted to do.

Someone I met via Seth’s internship sent me a job opening at the United Nations Refugee Agency in Geneva, Switzerland. I applied, and (somehow) got the job. I moved to Geneva for a year. When my boss left UNHCR about a year later, she brought me with her to The Global Fund.

During this time, I kept my blog going - mostly because it seemed a shame to close it down given it was growing.

Towards the end of my contract with The Global Fund, a couple of consultancy opportunities arose. I remember charging £2k for a one-day workshop in Denmark. Again, I thought this was an insane amount of money at the time. Then Novartis found me through my blog and I spent a few months flying between London and Basel supporting them on a community project.

After 2010, my memory gets hazy. I remember working with the RSPCA in Horsham, Oracle, and EMC (now part of Dell). All of whom found me through my blog. In 2011, I launched a training course. The first cohort for the course generated around $40k in revenue - which blew me away. But it had the benefit of being one of the first courses in my sector and proved a powerful lead generation tool.

After that I began doing a lot of work with The World Bank and other clients soon began to trickle in on a more regular basis.

I remember it was a huge deal if a prospect reached out in the early days. Over time, it became a lot more common.

Luck Plays A Big Role In Your First Big Break

While I believe I’ve worked hard and taken some smart decisions, it’s clear luck plays a huge role in success.

You can create more opportunities to be lucky. If I hadn’t decided to shift the topic of my blog from PR, none of this would have happened that’s for sure. But sometimes success in a consultancy career depends upon timing and personal circumstances as much as anything you do or don’t do.

If Seth had hosted that internship a year earlier, I would have been too busy studying. If he had hosted it a year later, I would probably have had a job I’d be unlikely to leave.

It’s also clear, looking back, my passion for gaming and running gaming communities equipped me with a tiny amount of expertise in something organisations suddenly became extremely interested in. That was sheer luck. I was managing gaming communities largely because I was a terrible gamer but still wanted to be part of the scene.

As the years progressed, I think luck became less important than my actions. Writing a book and creating my training course opened up a lot of doors. Learning how to do sales and develop a website certainly helped. Those were both conscious decisions which paid off. Overcoming my fear of public speaking also helped a lot. As a kid who grew up with a stutter, that’s not easy. Luck creates opportunities, but you need to invest the effort to seize them.

Lessons

The obvious lesson here is you need to create opportunities to be lucky.

Yet even with all the hard work imaginable, you might succeed or fail simply due to bad luck. You might not get that first big break that I and others had. Your timing might be off by a couple of years (or even months). Forces beyond your control might play a big role in your fate.

In situations like these, you need to be honest about whether it is or isn’t working out. You have to think carefully about how long you can wait for your big break to happen and decide early on what your metrics of success are (and stick to them). If it doesn’t happen by [date], it’s time to move on and gain employment.

You might simply have tried something that didn’t work. That doesn’t mean it never will. You might simply have to wait for your current market to mature or for a new market to emerge. You can still build your knowledge, skills, relationships, and resources to become a consultant - but it might just take a little bit longer to get lucky.