How to Generate Leads & Get Your 1st Client

what's up everybody I'm here with Mo my good friend and you know when you see Mo on the channel it's gonna get deep it's going to get interesting or at least you'll have a good laugh now I've been getting this question a lot about well how do you get your first gig because it seems like people are stuck at the gate the gun has gone off everyone else is taken off on the track and you're still inside the gate like Come on Feet Don't film me now let's go let's go let's go so I want

to take this back in the way way back machine I'm going to take you back Mo to the first time you got your very first lead I want to examine it I want to unravel it and unpack it for our audience and then I will also share with everyone how I'm able to get leads how I'm able to start new businesses and hopefully you can learn something from it hope you stick around for it okay Moe what's the first professional creative gig that you got my first professional gig was actually doing photography for a boutique

fashion store in my city how did they know that you did this I started my journey right after teaching college after getting my master's few years public speaking in particular but I just wasn't the Fulfillment was not there at the time I did not like the academic structure so I personally started making doing Vlogs at the time on Snapchat and from those Vlogs I built a relationship with my former business partner Christopher Franklin who has been on the channel before and I went up to him and I was like yo I want whatever you're doing

for people for me I want headshots I want the whole thing I will pay you for your work I respect your work all that kind of stuff so I was like I want to Shadow you I was doing wedding photography wedding videography at the time and I did just that he was the one who had that Boutique as a client and then from there he used me for his overflow so just by shadowing him learn the craft in my own studying YouTube University so that's how I got the first one first first one so did

you tell me you sneaked a client from your friend Darcy you do that thing you do that no I didn't sneak a client I got his overflow so for people who may not know that word overflow you describe that in a different way Chris was a solo shooter solo videographer solo photographer so he only had so much capacity bandwidth time however you want to put it so he could only take so many shoots in the span of one week and from there when he didn't have the capacity to do it he called me up and

he was like Hey the boutique needs a photographer let's just still listen to an actionable strategy now in a very different place how many years has it been uh five five years since that first moment I think so damn yeah you moved pretty quick all right so when you say I was really young back then I was like yeah you're still young now so Mo five years six years out how could you replicate this exact strategy in order for you to generate leads now because everybody's like how do I get leave now not to recreate

the entire process but what you did was you went to a rival or a mentor built a relationship with them and picked up their overflow work that's a real strategy what if anything could you use today in in real way not just like some fictional hypothetical thing I'd go to an agency who is Credible in the business who knows what they're doing in something that is adjacent to what I'm doing we'd probably either pitch a project that we can help them with the clients that they're working with or I would do it for free in

the beginning and let them know like hey I exist for what you need if what I have well I would know if what I have helps them to better serve your clients and then just continue to nurture that relationship if I had to do that right now I'm going to tell you to do something right now so the first thing I'm going to ask you to do it should not be adjacent it should be literally what you're doing now but just at a higher level so everybody get your pens out make a list of five

companies that are doing what you do at the level in which you'd like to be doing it at now and what I want you to do is to stock them everywhere in Social follow them everywhere listen to older podcasts to engage with them in a meaningful way such that over a period of time they get to know who you are and become naturally curious about you at some point if you're able to build some Rapport when it becomes natural for you to do so not obviously on the first interaction that's a terrible time to do

it say I'm a young and up and coming version of you if there's ever an opportunity where you get too much work and there's overflow I'd love to be able to service your clients and be willing to pay for those leads so can you think of five people who are working with the kinds of clients that you want that are making that kind of money that you want to make doing the kind of creative work that you want to make where you can actually literally follow this plan you need to First form the intention in

your mind like I want to work with people then you need to express that intention out into the universe so that people who want to help you can help you will help you and then you can organically bring them into your circle your orbit and then you build a relationship with them this is a really important thing so a lot of us have dream clients that we'd like to work with problem is we aim too high you just graduated school you're like I love to work with Nike I want to do something for Xbox and

XBox doesn't know you from a flying horse poop they just don't know you're just another person out there so what we want to do is we want to reach a little bit beyond where our hands can grab and start working with them and build a relationship and then develop some work and then you just keep reaching a little bit higher I find that one of the most natural ways to sell is just to tell people what it is that you're thinking if you love a brand tell them that you love them and express your creativity

and say I would love to work with you one of my friends he does this project where he does like one fictional project at every year and he loves Southwest Airlines I don't know why but he does and so he went through and redesign all of their touch points and he did this thinking nothing would come of it the next thing you know he's working with Southwest Airlines it's how it works I'll show you how I would do this exact same strategy right now so I have to figure out how do I find a rival

or vendor or a mentor who has the kind of clients in the body of work that I'd like to work with and say I'd like to pick up your overflow clients now I don't have the exact same situation because I don't really have clients but what I can do is to find people who are in Mastermind groups who teach a specific thing that is different than what I teach and I would like to be able to be in front of their clients their members and say if you find what I do valuable I'd love to

see you in my Mastermind where I teach people how to develop their brand how to innovate their business and how to do it in a fun creative way and so now I put that on the universe everybody will now know this is what I do see how that works facts now I'm going to share with people how I got my first clients or how I get clients every time I shift Industries it is kind of difficult and then you listen with the intention of how can I replicate this today for my business and on behalf

of our audience and that way we'll try to make this as actionable as possible and it seemed like work comes to me pretty easily so it's going to annoy some of you I just already know it okay so let's just deal with that part my first mini Big Break was I drew a lot in high school so I created a small reputation of someone who liked to draw so word gets around because I was making illustrations for the newspaper staff and I don't know how they found out but they were like can you draw this

I'm like sure So eventually it gets over to my brother's wrestling coach my younger brothers wrestling coaching you're like what does this have to do with anything well then he said does your brother want to go and work for a friend of mine who runs the silk screening company as a designer what you can find out from a couple of these things is if you practice your craft and you are able to get it out into the real world this is why I say quantity over quality if quality never happens I'm just doing work people

find out about it and people in your orbit your friends and your family and friends of family and friends friends will let other people know they're looking out for you to become an official salespeople for you I'll jump forward now okay now I'm in college and I establish a reputation amongst my classmates that I'm a designer so photographers who need to create promotional materials for their portfolios to send out to agencies and Reps they lean into me it's like can you help me with this at people who are in advertising Department reached out to me

I think they did this because I had a reputation of being an exceptional designer and I say this and I'm repeating this a couple of times because many of you won't work how do I say this but your work sucks it's just not good it's not even at the level in which I can recommend you right so people like hire me hire me and I look at your work it's like there's a reason why you have to ask people for work because your work is terrible objectively speaking it's terrible and then you say well Chris

that doesn't help me out at all because if I suck then or we just doomed never to make any money well if you keep taking that attitude yes so what you need to do is you need to say like this person's work I admire a lot and identify objectively what the gaps are between where you are and where they're at and do everything in your power to close the gap I would start by first quite literally copying all of their work really understand because then you'll start to learn like this is how they make decisions

and then the next assignment that you get try to apply those same principles in that thinking to improve your work if you do this consistently enough people will seek you out that's the bottom line the better your work the less you have to Market and sell if your work is so good you'll have to Market and sell at all we're not going to get there on day one but that's the ultimate goal so now I'm looking for opportunities well at school at Arts Center they post job opportunities all the time and so I just pull

those tickets down I applied to them show them my portfolio I get to work so work is abundant and if you're good and if you're willing to do the work necessary but so many of us so just sitting there thinking if I wish it enough it will happen for me and I gotta tell you something friends I've wished to have a six-pack for a really long time if I don't put in the work and the discipline it doesn't happen by itself there's no magic there that's going to happen right you actually have to work for

what you want so put in the time get out of school I have an opportunity to showcase some of my work on adobe's After Effects CD-ROM and I'll cut a demo reel together so that CD-ROM goes out that works as my marketing material to generate leads of people are interested the way I got to work with the legendary Kyle Cooper who does main title design was because one of my very good friends from school was dating him at the time and she knew that the two of us would get along because we have a way

of looking at the world you see a consistent theme Here everybody it happens over and over again I'll pause here most for you to dissect and Pull Apart any actionable things or questions you might have okay okay I figured out the five C's after our little back and forth if you are still early in your journey and you want to replicate either how I got clients or how Chris got clients number one is still choose you have to choose what it is that you want to do what your focus is number two is you gotta

commit to that choice if you think about some of the stories that Chris has set a year long commitment into that choice without any Roi return on investment but that eventually because of his for like a better term delusion in the vision yielded that return the third one is craft you have to be a practitioner of what it is that you want to be known for you start by copying the person that you were learning from you combine that thing that you've learned into your own style and then you create the fourth one is you

gotta claim it you gotta claim what it is to you do first for yourself this is where the confidence comes in and then externally to the world this is where the marketing comes in whether it's inbound like in Chris's situation or outbound like you're knocking on doors you have to claim and then the last one is capital if you did the first four well then inevitably it should turn into some moolah pretty good I like that so I'm gonna do one last thing before we get out of here I'm gonna jump forward in time because

those seem like real basic beginner types of things I hope people will find to be useful and before I get into the last bit take this opportunity to go and hit that like button and leave a comment because it'll help us with the algorithm you know what to do you've done it before and we truly appreciate that when you pivot when you do a hard pivot which many of you are potentially in that position now where you've been known to do one thing and now you want to do something else and it's very difficult to

reposition yourself that did quite literally happen to us we're working with advertising clients we have sales reps I want to do brand strategy Identity Design marketing Communications Marcon stuff and this is very different because we're used to working with an agency as their intermediary between the client who figure out the strategy right to copy sell it through but now I want to work with clients directly because I just wouldn't have access to different types of clients and so the way I wanted to do was to lead with brand strategy something I had just learned how

to do and for the period of about a year anybody that was willing to talk to me about doing work together other I would do a soft pivot so we had the body of work as you said Mo it's kind of important for you to keep doing what you're doing to keep the money flowing yeah so people would call upon us and say hey yeah I think I need a video made and they knew that we could do that I said great come on to office let's talk and here's the line that I would use

with them I know you're here to see us or talk to us about making a video but before we do so I find it helpful to engage with our clients about their overall strategic business objectives so I can make sure that if it does require a video we know what we're doing it for and if something else should come up that we're able to address that would you be interested in doing this of course they're going to say yes it seems like you've got a good head on your shoulders that's where I say now normally

when I run these sessions my clients will pay me ten thousand dollars I want to do something for 45 minutes it's free this one's on me you find this to be helpful if you want to proceed with us we can talk about engagement later so I'm addressing all their thoughts and their concerns why are we doing this what are we doing what is the value of this are you trying to sell me something and I just address all those issues right up front I did that for about a year putting the price tag at ten

thousand dollars to have someone pay me to do brand strategy for them I got a lot a lot of responses like that's too much money I don't think we need this I don't know if we can afford it what am I getting again and I did this for a year while maintaining my original business my original clients and eventually someone said yes that makes perfect sense and then We're Off to the Races the funny thing is it's really hard to get your first yes but once you get your first yes it'll lead to that whole

confidence thing where they get more value than what they paid you to do you start to believe in this idea that you have and now you can go out and sell even more it takes a year to sell our first engagement for 10 grand quite literally a year but the next one came in weeks the next one came in days it just became easier and easier and we were able to increase our brand strategy service from ten thousand to thirty thousand to over a hundred thousand dollars as we grew into this phase it was wonderful

to do so let's peel away the layers bro how does someone replicate this all right here's what I think to kind of summarize that if you you're already in a position where your craft and your professionalism and your tenure can speak for you I think at that point it's just a level of confidence to introduce this new thing that you're doing and that's all it took from you because you had the flow of leads you had the flow of customers inquiring for your business and then you just gently introduce them to this New Concept but

for that to even happen it's just the confidence to introduce it to the person that's my take away from that story personally you would be missing a lot of the finer points there as good as I think I am as as well connected as I am it takes a year of just pitching one after the other and hearing no after no after no and I got a lot of counter offers dude under this way for this long for this price and every single one of them I said no so back to my guns you can

try this Mo I mean you've been in business five six years so if you spent a year of your life trying to achieve some results whether you wanted to be a public speaker an Entertainer whatever it is give it a year really working at it and then tell me what it is because that would be 20 or 18 of your entire business career that you would spend trying to achieve this and of course along the way people like what are you doing why do you think this would work how did you arrive at this idea

I'm like it doesn't matter I don't want to explain it to you I'm not going to prove anything to you you'll see you'll see when we're there and as soon as we get there all those naysayers either disappear or like I knew you can do it I knew this was gonna work they always do that so I just didn't sit there for a year and just imagine like it happening I read books I watched videos I attended workshops I sought out mentors and I figured out like what do I need to do to make this

happen I kept pushing and learning until I was a person who had this skill set that someone would say yes this sounds like a good idea and that's all in the beginning because once you get yourself into hot water like that you have to learn even more because now someone's committing real money and your professional reputation is at stake and I don't want to risk that that's what it is by the way this is a meta lesson right here I want to be careful to say this generally but like people are scared to put their

back against the wall when it comes to that moment that's why it's much easier to just live in the the pondering or hoping someone into its that you want this because the second that someone paid you you're on the line now I have two questions for you on this what is stopping people from making that jump to commit for a year to something that they have a vision on let's just start there and then I'll ask you the second question I suspect that their self story isn't one where every single time they commit to something

that they get the results that they want whereas myself stories every time I commit to something I always get what I want and so it begins there my wife's always asking me like how do you know this is going to work it's like when has it not work and when it doesn't work I just change the plan a little bit until it works again like I'm so committed to this new Mastermind group I can already see the hundred people who are signed up and then I can already see what I'm gonna do with the money

that's generated from this and the experience I'm going to be able to deliver I'm already four five six steps ahead and see what happens when this other goal that people feel like it's not going to happen they lack Faith they lack the conviction to see this all the way through and when you open the door for doubt to come in doubt comes in I always have a problem right so let me just share some something with you anybody that's ever worked with me in the entire history of my professional career has learned something about me

in that I don't have a lot of room to try to convince people why they should work with me I have Supreme confidence that what I'm doing for the price in which I'm doing it for is a bargain so why people get stuck why don't they commit I don't know why something's obviously holding them back they don't believe in it enough and we're all tested at different times in our life sometimes we take that step forward and we pass our tests sometimes we don't I don't know why I think you answered the question it's that

undeniable belief in oneself and committing to the fact that you will deliver in excess of what you promised when it comes to Value but it starts with that belief piece which brings us back to Landing This Plane wait wait before you do that you said there are two things well you answered the second thing so I'm not going to be redundant about it right it's the the second thing was how to make sure when you are in the position where someone says yes that you don't fumble the bag and what you said was it's because

you feel like it's a bargain and that you know because of how you are wired professionally that you were over deliver on the value so there's never an option for you to not get that desired end result or or let doubt creep in let me ask the question of myself that you didn't ask me but I'm going to ask please do it yeah the question is how can you know you're going to deliver more value than what you're paying where it is this supreme confidence come from this belief in oneself because that might be a

big unlock for some people so I'm going to answer that question obviously with a question okay before I tell you the answer which is I want you to take inventory of your life and what you do with your time because that's all we got we got this few precious hours every single day to get us towards our goal I want to ask you when you have a moment when you're not working when you're not taking care of your responsibilities to your partner or to your children to your parents whoever it is that you have some

responsibilities towards what are you doing in your free time and that will tell you a lot about why I have Supreme self-confidence and why you might be lacking I give you some options about what people do in their free time they relax they sit on the couch they read a magazine they do a crossword puzzle so people get caught up in routines because routines give us some comfort because it's a known thing it's familiar to us and if you were to look at me like Chris what are you doing I'm constantly trying to be a

better person so you'll see like there's a lot of house projects that never get done at the house because it's actually very low on my priority list I've got books I need to read I got people I need to talk to because I want to surround myself with people who inspire me who challenge me who know something I do not know people think I do the podcast because I want to go up in the rankings of the podcast that's a result that's a result of something it's not what it is I'm trying to do I'm

trying to have conversations with really smart people and ask some questions that help me solve a problem and I take our audience along the way and I think they benefit from me asking the question that they're thinking themselves so I'm constantly working on myself because they do not know when or where but what I learned today what I learned yesterday will pay off so I don't think this of myself I don't think I'm some great reader but when I get onto podcasts and people interview me or on Instagram live like how can you remember that

concept from that book I read that same book I don't remember how do you how are you able to cite this book their conclusion is they need to read more I don't think they need to read more they need to read better because there's not a game of volume it's a game of depth how well can you understand something such that you can explain to other people without notes without rehearsal with that preparation this is really important I become insanely or radically curious about the things that I'm curious about and that's what I'm doing with

my spare time and so I already know this Mo there are a few problems that you're going to come to me with that I can't figure out either on the spot through dialogue with you through a little research or punt it for two weeks let me do my research and I'll figure out an answer for you and if I can transform your life and your business your relationships your communication your mindset your confidence I know that has a value to you I want to share some words of encouragement because I know getting that first client

that first big break is very very difficult but for you to be committed to be uncompromising and wanting to get that result and putting in the time the work necessary to get it it doesn't mean that everybody that has a goal and is committed to it is going to get it because I think they haven't put in the work I see it all the time in my DMs where you say I do this and I look at the work and it's actually not very good at all and so it means that you're expecting something to

happen without having to put in the work yourself the greatest investment that you're ever going to make in your life isn't in the Darwin Jones or standards and poor Market it's not in Gold it's not in crypto or web3 it's in yourself work hard on your job and you have a career as Jim Ronan said work on your personal development and you'll have a life [Music]