From the Desk of Janet Barclay

After I wrote about Using the 80-20 Rule to Attract Your Ideal Client last week, Jacki raised an excellent question: "If you don’t have any clients to begin with, how are you supposed to find your top 20%?"

In the early days of running my business, the question "who is your ideal client?" always threw me for a loop. In my mind I was thinking "anyone who is willing to pay me" and I’m sure that is pretty typical for people who are just starting out.

Some time later, I completed an exercise as part of the Turbocharge Your Business program. To identify our ideal customers, we wrote down the characteristics we wanted them to have, e.g. "financially able to invest in his or her business." Because we often have a clearer idea of what we don’t want, we also wrote down the characteristics we did not want them to have, e.g. "doesn’t follow through with plans." The negative characteristics were then turned into positive ones, so "doesn’t keep appointments" on the "don’t want" side of the page became "keeps appointments" on the "do want" side, and then they were crossed out, to allow us to focus on what we wanted and enable us to attract that into our lives.

Within a month of completing the program, I was contacted by someone who not only had all of the attributes I identified during the above exercise, but whose ongoing requirements brought my income to the level I was aiming for, and who remains a valued client to this day. Maybe that client would have come along even if I hadn’t done the exercise, but this experience confirmed to me that the Law of Attraction really does work.

So, if you’re having trouble figuring out "who is your ideal client?" try the above exercise. If you need some ideas to get you started, you may find it helpful to read Erica Nelson’s article, 7 Powerful Tools to Attract Perfect Clients and Yvonne Weld’s series of blog articles on Creating a Picture of Your Ideal Client.