You Never Can Tell

I never know where clients will come from, but I do know that the majority of them have met me in person, online, or that they know someone I know. My most successful client relationships come from referrals – but most of them are not a straight line, which makes it more fun and interesting. In this episode of the RocketGirl Show, I'll share some stories of how I’ve connected with new clients as a Virtual Assistant.

TRANSCRIPT 

I'm Belinda Wasser also known as RocketGirl. And today we're going to talk about the unlikely places where you can find clients.  

You just never can tell where they're going to be. Over the past 10 years in my virtual assistant business, I have been so surprised to look back and find all of the places that I've discovered clients. It would really surprise you, you know, it's never a straight line. It's hardly ever wear. I think it will be and I think that if I had tried to not really force but cause my clients to come from a certain place, you know, like really be fixated on them coming from either social media or you know different sources that I might not have had this successful business that I have today. So what I want to talk about I'm going to tell you three stories about three different clients and how I discovered them. And then I'm going to give you some tips. Okay. So here we go.  

The first story is about Bob. Okay, so I was on a project for one of my clients and he had an outside web developer who was brought in who built his website and I was there to talk about CRM since a little marketing automation and some things like that. So David was the website developer and I thought David was pretty smart. Not pretty smart, actually, really smart. I liked him. I liked his approach. I liked how he handles the project and I really enjoyed working with him.  

So once the project was over I reached out to David and I asked him if he'd like to jump on the phone. I wanted to hear more about his business and I wanted to tell him more about mine and I think we were both hoping that would. We would be able to work together on projects together, but it turned out that our skillset overlapped way too much for us ever to probably work on a project together.  

However, I don't know six, seven months later one of his big clients for who he built a website came to him and wanted some work that was outside of his scope. So David referred me to Bob. Bob and I decided to work together and Bob has been a very large portion, percentage of my revenue for probably the last four years, and it's been a great relationship. I'm still working with him and I don't see any plans in the future to change that. So that's one pretty unlikely place. Right? I do make an effort when I find someone who I think is on the same wavelength as me, you know in terms of my approach or my style or you know, really understanding their work. And so what I did was I just explain what my business was and that happens. And all right.  

So now let's talk about Roselyn. I went to a party in Massachusetts that one of my clients was hosting. I had arranged the party. It was an ice cream party outside for the afternoon and I was talking to someone there named, Oh my gosh, now I can't think of his name, Dan. I was talking to Dan and you know, we were looking for parallels, you know, we'll how do you know so-and-so and how do you know so and so and he told me about his business and I told him about mine and then he mentioned his wife and he mentioned her by name and she had a different last name than him and I said, oh did she used to work at Digitas, which is where I used to work and he said yes, as a matter of fact, she did and she's just gone out on her own and I said, oh wow, that so, You know that. So interesting and so exciting. I didn't know her well, but when she was new to the organization, I worked at IT and I remember she had something wrong with her at the laptop and my boss asked me to go up and find out what it was so we could fix it.  

So brief interaction with her, you know, not even a really a lot of history actually, but she told her but her husband went home told her we had met and then a few months later. I see that I added her husband to my email newsletter list because he said that I could I asked him and then what happened was she click the link to get on my calendar and we talked we decided to work together and she hired me and that's been a long time. That's probably been five years and I have a meeting, I had a meeting with her yesterday and I have another meeting with her next week. So we're ongoingly working together. All right, so that's two stories.  

Let me tell you one more. Rebecca, before I was RocketGirl, and had my virtual assistant business. I used to sell personalized baby gifts on the internet. I had a store was called "Blueberry Babies" and Rebecca's sold, she was a manufacturer and she sold the most beautiful burp cloths and bibs and hooded towels and just really I thought high-quality beautiful, traditional, baby accessories. And what I used to do is personalize them and we work together. Anyway, I loved her. I didn't see her very often. I met her. I would meet her in New York. She lived in Dallas and I would go to New York to buy my baby gifts and I'd stop by her booth at the trade show and we would chat a little bit. So when I started my RocketGirl business, I put her on my email list with her permission because I liked her and I wanted to stay in touch with her. I didn't ever really think she would hire me. 

Fast-forward probably 5 or 6 years ago, she still on my newsletter list. She gets on my calendar. She's scheduled a free 30-minute consultation turns out she sold her business. She has a job. She needs help with this special project at her job. She buys a debit card. We work together and we solve this problem. She goes away. I don't really think anything more of it because you know, everything was handled and then last quarter in 2020. Again, she pops up on my calendar we want to make it really easy for people to get on your calendar. She pops up on my calendar turns out she just bought a brand new business and her husband asked her. What's this? I love this, her husband asked her what she wanted for her birthday, and she said I want a Rocketgirl debit card, so he bought time for her with me and now we're working on her brand new business that she purchased and we're getting it off the ground.  

So really you can't tell where they are. You know where people are and I'm going to tell you some secrets to this are. These are really morals to the story. Okay, the world is really small, so be nice and do your best. I mean I say this to my daughter all the time like Emily the world is really small. I mean people, you know at jobs that I never like really Rosalyn. Are you kidding me? I never even you know, I wouldn't have even known where to find her. And here it is. You know, her husband is at a party that I'm at. Crazy, right?  

Don't write someone off because you think they'll never hire you because the thing is, is that David the web developer in the midwest who was working for my other client. We figured out he never would hire me. He would never bring me on a project and I would never bring him on because it didn't make sense. Our pricing was too close and you know our skills overlapped and it just wouldn't work. However, because I was clear about what I did, boom, right and I got this great client that I love and I'm an integral part of his business and have been really for years.  

Stay in touch with people you like. If you know just stay in touch. There are a million ways to do it. There are a million ways that I talked about it in The Virtual Assistant Connection and you can find them all there. I called sprinkling and stop, please, please stop get trying to get strangers to hire you and all of these cases. I wasn't trying to get someone to hire me. I was just letting them know about my work to put it in the back of their head. So if someone said, hey, I need blah blah blah. Instantly they would think Belinda can help you because that's how it works.  

All right, before we jump off. I just want to take a minute to invite you to my free online classroom. It's called The Virtual Assistant Connection. We're over on Facebook. Please click the join button after you type The Virtual Assistant Connection in the search bar at the top of Facebook. I'd love to welcome you. We are a community of almost 12,000 people who are either aspiring virtual assistants or have been virtual assistants for a while like me. There are tons of videos, resources, and community right there in that group, and I want to have you come and enjoy that with us. If you're watching on YouTube, please click the Subscribe button, so you'll be notified when we go live and no matter where you're watching this from, please tag me in a comment. If you have any questions, and I will circle back and answer your questions.  

In the meantime. I'm Belinda Wasser, RocketGirl signing off until next time. Bye.