Constraints are great. It’s common knowledge that time constraints help you reduce fluff and help you focus.
So that’s why I’ve come up with the 1-hour business-building framework without spending a dime all from the comfort of your home.
What you’ll need to make the framework work for you?
Some huevos, cojones, pelotas, better known as a big pair of balls and 1 hour of your time.
Below are the steps I’ve taken many times to test out new business ventures. I’m sharing them with you because I know how powerful the steps are.
They can change your life. They did for me.
After completing this guide you’ll have three happy customers, three endorsements and the start of a portfolio to show to your ever-expanding customer base.
Repeat the below steps for any new business you would like to start and test out rapidly.
Still not convinced how easy the below process is?
I know someone who’s used the below step to test out three service businesses in one weekend and is currently killing it with one of them.
First 5 Minutes > What is my service?
Ask yourself: what do I like doing that I can do for others because they don’t want to do it themselves? That practice is exactly the thing we’re going to sell to your first customers.
If I had to do this myself I would pick writing blog posts for B2B companies in a space that I would like to research myself, for example writing posts for finance blogs or investment blogs. When I would do this type of work I would win on all ends:
- I would earn money with something that comes effortlessly
- I would be researching a topic that I would love the learn more about
- I would be sharpening a skill (writing)
- I would increase my network in a space I’m interested in
- I would be enhancing my business skills in the process
- And I would take the first step toward my wealth machine
I love to write since it will go effortless for me, and I know others hate it. It’s one of the creation hard skills that I have developed over the years out of personal interest.
Everyone has such a skill. You don’t? Then use the below steps to find your hard skill to leverage.
Todo:
Take no more than 5 minutes to figure out which hard skill(s) or even soft skills you possess that you can do for others professionally by asking yourself the following questions:
1) What type of work do I get compliments on in my current work?
Example: You are the one that is always in charge of making the graphics for the reports since ‘you are the best at your department’ when it comes to using Canva.
2) What type of work/jobs do people always contact me for?
Example: People always want you to make the PowerPoint since ‘you have such a good eye and know all about power point’
While doing this exercise you should be able to find a skill that you can leverage into a service business.
The Next 5 Minutes > Who and Where are my customers?
It’s very easy to overthink who you should sell your service to. Potentially this is one of those steps that most people overthink and spend way too much time on.
Trust me I have done it many many times and it sucks more and more the longer you take on this step.
Funny enough most people will instinctively have a good idea of who their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) might be when going through the ‘What is your service step’ from before.
For simplicity’s sake, I would advise you to pick B2B companies within a 10-mile radius as your ICP for now because they are easier to contact.
Additionally, pick an industry/niche/verticle that you know so you’ll have some personal connections and some insider knowledge. It’s always easier when you are an insider.
To make the process quick and easy follow the below steps.
Todo:
To help you out on the right track here are some things I would recommend when going through this step:
1) Think of businesses similar to the business you are in right now, those are your first ICP since you know the type of business. If you have connections at companies that fit your ICP, great! Add those to your list.
2) When your business is a b2c business, try to go for similar companies within your industry that are b2b businesses. It’s easier to sell to b2b businesses in my experience.
3) And finally to make it easier to drill down on your ICP, pick businesses that are within a 10-mile radius from where you work. If you live in a rural area go for a 25-50 mile radius.
Following 20 Minutes > Make a list of leads + find their contact info
Now it’s time to build a lead list. Find companies that fit your ICP and collect as many names and contact information as possible.
I would use LinkedIn with an added free tool like Lusha to collect personal phone numbers. Phone numbers are golden because we will cold call the entire lead list.
Todo:
We will be finding b2b companies that are within your close proximity that you can find contacts for to reach out to in a later step.
1) The first step is to go to google search and just type in: List of “niche” companies within “Location”.
Example: List of all advertisement agencies (companies that fit your ICP) in Amsterdam (close proximity to where you are)
2) Go for at least 30 companies on your list and collect the company names in a simple Google sheet or Excel.
3) Once you have the 30 companies, go on LinkedIn and search the companies up and look at their People page. Here you can find who works at the companies that are able to make buying decisions.
4) Use a free tool like Lusha to find their phone numbers. Check out this guide on how to use Lusha for LinkedIn.
5) If you can’t find the phone number of a decision-maker person at an ICP company just go on to the next one until you have a list of 30 companies and at least 1 contact with a phone number per company.
Following 5 Minutes > Your sales strategy
The strategy to kick-start your new business is straightforward:
- We utilize our hard skillset to get three initial jobs at three ICPs from our lead list from the previous step.
- We will do these initial three jobs for free to minimise risk for the customer since we have no track record to show for it.
- Additionally, we do the three jobs for free because at this stage we only want to get client endorsements.
- These endorsements are the credibility that we need to kick start our business and show others that we do bring value when outsourcing the work to us.
- It’s important to understand that when you do a free job you need a cap on your work. This cap is a goal that you communicate with your customer.
For example, when you are a corporate blogger you can say that you will write 3 corporate blog posts of 350 words on x subject and clients only get to revise each blog post once. This way you safeguard yourself. You can always stretch the goal post as you see fit but my advice would be to keep it very clearly defined so you don’t get into trouble later on.
Most important:
Your initial leads from your list will not understand why you would want to do work for free. So clearly communicate to them upfront why you are doing the work for free:
1) Tell them you are working for their endorsement only and don’t need anything else from them.
2) Tell them you would like to use them as a reference after you’ve done a good job and only after they’re happy with your work.
3) So clearly define with your customer what a good job looks like.
For example, when we use the corporate blogger example again you could say: a job is well done when I finish the three posts within x timeframe, the word minimums are hit and you find the value of the posts high enough to post them to your company blog.
4) So you need only one thing from them: You need to be able to name them as a happy customer. When they agree to that up front, you have what you need.
Following 5 Minutes > construct a two-sentence sales pitch
Ok, you are a little over halfway into your business building 1-hour journey and you will feel exhausted since everything is happening at a rapid tempo. Don’t worry about it that feeling is normal, you’re doing the work.
You are working on your future. Hang in there and stick with it.
Entrepreneurship is all about muscle building. It’s a game you play to go to the next level. And at this stage, you’ve come to the selling stage. Sales are often times the engine of any new enterprise. If you’re not willing to sell yourself, then you are not fit to start a company. That is my opinion.
You build it and they will come
– Some random engineer at a start-up that died
The above quote is regurgitated but it’s false. Sales and marketing are always needed if you want to get any new venture off the ground.
Only on very rare occasions will your product be the driving force of growth and most of the time when this happens it’s engineered that way by very smart product builders that have done it more than once.
So, all in all, you will need to sell and you will need to sell over the phone.
I know people who hate phone sales and who hate selling at all. If you are that person, don’t worry about it. I still hate selling over the phone, while sales is my current exploited hard skill. It’s not fun, it’s very hard work, but it’s necessary. The better you get at it and the more practice you have, the less energy it will take to execute.
So how do we do it?
The 3-min sales Playbook
By this stage, you should have a list of 30 companies that fit your ICP, and you should have 30 names and 30 numbers for those people. We will now be calling them to pitch our offering and get our three first clients.
1) Pick three companies on your list that you intuitively think are the least likely to buy your service/offering. We will call them first since you will fuck up the first few times. You will stumble over your words, you will blank, you will screw up, that’s normal and it’s to be expected. Don’t worry about it.
2) Now call the first guy/woman on your ICP list and give them the below 3-line pitch. When a number is incorrect, look up the general number of the company and ring that number and ask them if they can transfer you to the correct person on your list. When the front desk person asks what it is for just give them the same pitch and tell them you want to tell this to the person you need to speak to.
“Hi, my name is (insert name) and I’m a (insert hard skill), and I want to help you operate your business more effectively by doing (insert your service) for you. I’m building up my client base and therefore I will do the work for free until you reach the A time milestone or the B result. Are you interested to talk further so we explore how I can help you reach your (insert your hard skill) ambitions?”
!) I would recommend you tweak the above sales pitch opener to fit your own style and your own way of speaking. If you find it too salesly, that’s fine, just change it to fit who you are. If the sales pitch does not work for your ICP, that’s fine, tweak it to something that works for you and your ICP.
Following 20 Minutes > Call all leads and pitch your services
Start calling those leads. Don’t worry. You’ll fail a lot in the beginning as I said before but that’s why we pick the highest hanging fruit to call first.
We will refine the pitch based on the lessons during these initial calls. So whenever you feel like you slack in an area when you’re on the phone with a lead, refine that part and keep going. Use the below instructions to get a better shot at winning.
My rule would be to do 5 calls using the same script and format and after those 5 analyse the calls instantly.
See what questions you got back after doing your pitch and write your answers down. Collect a list of pre-made answers and practice those to counter objections in your next five calls. Also, see what part of your pitch triggers objections or hanging questions. Change as you go to make it stronger and stronger.
Your ultimate goal during the phone call is to arrange a face 2 face appointment at the ICPs office to go into your service and how you can help your customers by understanding their needs. Which will hopefully result in a deal where they allow you to do the work.
The 1-Minute Sales Playbook
1) Expect the following three answers from your leads when you have them on the phone:
NO, with a shitty reason behind it why not (no time, no need, etc). Don’t worry, just ask them one follow-up question: When would be a good time to get back to you on this subject? And should we mark down a date in our calendars to touch base again? If it’s still a no, just leave it and go on to the next.
Uhm this feels like a scam… This means that you have to convince them why it’s not a scam. I would just tell them you just started the company and hand-selected them to be the first company to work for free.
Okay, tell me more… HELL YEAH BOY!! Success!!! You crossed hurdle number one in sales. Now it’s GO time. You now need to sell yourself. The best thing to do so is by explaining what service you can do for them. What goals they will reach when you provide them with the service and how much time it would save them if you did it for them for free.
2) When someone is interested try to arrange a meeting with them over the phone to meet them at their office. At this meeting, you’ll have to scope out their needs and fit your service and offering to their need. You find a need by asking questions which will help you to uncover in what way you can assist them best.
3) Once you know what the customer expects from you, write an email after the first face 2 face meeting where you clearly line out what work you will be doing and when the job is completed. Ask for a confirm answer email from the customer and then you’re off.
Following 5 Days > Do the work and overachieve big time
When you have only a 10% success rate out of your 30 leads you should end up with at least 3 live meetings with the customer that is close to your area. And I expect you to at least bag one client out of those 3 initial meetings.
Congratulations, you’re IN. But hold up, wait a minute. Your journey has only begun. Now it’s time to show your worth and put all your effort into overachieving on the job that you promised to do for the customers even though you’re doing the work for free.
The goal here is to do such high-value work for them that they’ll instinctually ask you for your normal rate of price. Furthermore, the work should be so good that would like to keep on working with you after you’re finished.
And there you have it, your first potential paying customer.
No customers after speaking to 30 leads?
Don’t worry about it. This can happen and most of the time you encounter one of two situations:
1) You had the wrong ICP for the service you picked. This means that you can do another run while picking a different ICP. So go through the steps again but this time with a different ICP and keep the other steps the same. You’ll have done the initial calling so you should feel more comfortable with the selling and cold calling steps.
2) People do not trust that you can do the work even though you can do it for free. You picked the right ICP but these leads don’t find you credible. I get it though from the perspective of a lead. If you’re starting from scratch without contacting any personal connections this makes sense. Why should people trust a random dude on the phone? It could just be a hacker trying to social engineer them into something sketchy.
How to overcome the trust issue:
You need to overcome this hurdle by showing that you are for real. I would do this by looking at the lead list and making a short list of three companies with whom you felt the best connection even though they did not want to work with you.
Now go ahead and do the service for them without their permission. If you are a designer, design something for them. If you’re a writer, write a short blog post, If you’re a financial modelling guy, make a small model on how they could calculate project costs in a sheet. Just make something and send it to them and show that you are for real and want them as a reference.
This style is called Permissionless Service. Many service companies (even the large ones) do this type of sales and marketing for large enterprise clients. Why not do it for your first customers.
Expand the business > Get more customers through your first customers
After you’ve done three jobs for free, now it’s time to put a price on your work.
How to Discover your Price
Just ask the three customers what they would normally pay for the job that you did for them for free? Yes, it’s that simple.
Take that price and reduce it by half and get your next 7 customers with that pricing. It’s still a low price but that’s not important right now. The goal is to get to 10 customers as quickly as possible. Also, getting paid for a job you did yourself is insanely satisfying. So the amount does not matter right now. What does matter is that you get new jobs quick since you want referrals and recommendations.
!) I would not recommend you follow this strategy when you need money quickly to support your current bills. This strategy is a moonlight strategy, which means that you set up this business while you’re still employed somewhere else. Or when you have some savings to use as a cushion in the period that you test out new business ventures.
Keeping it cheap in the beginning is key but pitch your price as a big discount and always explain to your ICPs that you want to get referred to a warm lead within their network.
Make your new offer an offer-they-can’t-refuse offer where you can do the high-quality work inexpensive since you only ask for a few connections to get introduced to after finishing the work and doing a good job.
You’ll have more confidence since you have the three companies and the earlier work to refer to at this stage of the process.
All in all, you can start the backbone of this business within 1 hour and you shouldn’t take more time than that. It’s all about constraints baby.
Good luck with your three customers and have at it.
That’s how you start a business in 1 hour.
Good luck and let me know what business you started because of the above guide?