The most important decision self-employed professionals must make

Revenue Secrets EPISODE # 6

Revenue Secrets, when you didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, is a weekly article for #revenueclimber club members and other self-employed professionals.

At our weekly Revenue Connections event, the importance of a critical factor, which I'll explain in this article, was brought to my attention by one of our club members.

Master community builders Scott Gerber and Ryan Paugh wrote about exactly the same thing in their book Superconnector that I'd been reading before the event.

The night before our call I'd been working my way toward the end of Napolean Hill's classic Think and Grow Rich, and read it again. That's all crazy timing.

There must be some sort of cosmic synchronicity in the ether. The power of allowing the universe to speak to us should never be underestimated.

Thinking of this powerful idea in the form of a decision led me to recognize something that may appear to have been an accident, but was clearly planned despite my not realizing it.

The concern expressed on the call was stated as more of a demand than a request.

"Make sure you keep the quality of the people in the Revenue Climber Club high".

Essentially the authors mentioned said the same sort of thing, as they all talk about carefully surrounding yourself with the right, not the wrong people or risk serious failure.

What I took away were feelings of accomplishment and positive forward motion. I got this right the first time. I'm grateful that in this one area my decision was sound.

My gut instinct when I started Revenue Climber was to only invite people into the club that had worked on their LinkedIn profile. It wasn't a hard and fast rule, but I felt that in this modern era if somebody had not put some effort into LinkedIn they might not be insightful, collaborative, or expert at their craft. My gut proved to be right.

Here's the first part of the decision that you need to make.

Think hard about whom you want to attract to your community, speaker roster, marketing partners, affiliates, prospect list, or sign as a client.

It's very hard to undo this decision once it's made and you have traction in the market. The time involved in connecting with people, getting to know them, and moving them into your universe can't be taken lightly. You can pivot but you don't want to start over again.

Knowing that the core of my community consists of like-minded high-quality people, as they judge each other, means that I'm following the right path and making progress.

This can't be taken for granted, but what happens at scale?

There are 3 critical things that I can do to make it through the next chapter.

1) Trust that as the base is solid the community itself will attract or repel the right or wrong members

2) Don't chase revenue as even a high-quality base of members will be overshadowed by a flood of new members who don't fit the core values

3) Continue to meet everybody who expresses interest or joins but switch from offering one-to-one meetings to group introductory calls when my calendar gets overwhelmed

At one point I thought of this exercise like a sales manager. I created different qualification scenarios and scores for different people. We thought in terms of having an admin sort out the people that we don't want and make sure that we attract the right ones.

This all seems like a waste of time to me now.

The current community will create the next phase of community. My job is not to overwhelm the place by forcing revenue to quickly and keep tight guardrails.

How do you attract only the people that you want and repel the rest?

#revenueclimber #selfemployment #businessowners