Latest / GEL & Tell / Ep 5 - 6 Months of Building GEL | How to Get Your First Clients

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Ep 5 - 6 Months of Building GEL | How to Get Your First Clients · GEL & Tell

• Nora: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to episode number five of Jell-O-N-Tell. G: can't believe it's episode five, I thought it was episode four. That is pretty mad, that means we've been doing this for over a month. Nora: No, it's five. How crazy is that? Yeah, that's super cool. I'm actually really it. G: Good. Thank you to everyone that's tuning in. appreciate your feedback and suggestions and ideas for what we're talking about and the guests that we're bringing on. ⁓ you are listening and you want to come and join in the conversation on Jell and Tell, ⁓ currently recruiting for our next guest. So we're looking for someone to join us ⁓ a couple of weeks time. So if you want to talk about business, politics, the or any topics, we would love to chat to you. ⁓ so drop us a message and maybe we'll see you on a podcast soon. Nora: get into today's podcast. We are reaching a very important milestone, aren't we G, in our business? G: What one? Nora: What do you mean? G: yeah, so... ⁓ Nora: you can see, we're very synced. Yeah, so we are reaching a very important milestone in history of gel. We are almost at six months of running this business, aren't we? I feel like maybe we surpassed that by a few days now. G: I think we technically incorporated six months ago, three, so six months plus minus three days. So the 15th of September was our registration date for the business. So we are approaching the six month launch marker. ⁓ to us. Our business is now half a year old, which is very exciting, but it also kind of feels like no time's passed at all. Nora: Yeah. Yay. Yeah, Feels it's gone so quickly. G: It's exciting. Before jump into the episode, Nora, how's your week been? Nora: week has been great, it has gone quite quickly since we filmed the episode Craig. But it was Geo's birthday over the weekend. So, yeah, we had a lot of fun just celebrating his birthday. I went which was quite cool. Didn't come last. So, you know, that's what I aim when I compete at certain things I'm not very good at. What else did I do? Just more cardio, more eating ⁓ bodybuilding food and more training. But pretty standard, I'd But also made a very cool investment in our business this week, which I'm buzzing about, G: ⁓ I love that. Yeah, that's probably the highlight of the business week, isn't it? A big investment, new clients sign Nora: Yeah. G: client content shoot. We were in London again, which was cool. dressed our client up as a nun with new series that we've created with them, which ⁓ been idea that I've actually had for this particular client for around two years. So to bring it to life was nothing short of magical and it surpassed my expectations. I'm trying to think what I did this week. not much. walks. ⁓ yeah, took mum for lunch, saw some of the family. That was nice. And then went for a curry on Friday night with the gym lot and then went for a bottomless brunch on Saturday with my friend for her birthday. Yeah, it was quite social. I can't say I stuck to my nutrition plan last week, nor a fucking hell. ⁓ There was Nora: It was Mother's Day on Sunday. Love that. Or last night, apparently. G: ⁓ shit. I did. you heard that. ⁓ No, I, yeah, I had the new creme McFlurry from McDonald's and I have to say it did not disappoint. It was pretty good worth all 400 calories. Nora: I did. I'm very proud of you. ⁓ G: that's We are 10 days out now from, I think about 10 days out from Hirox London. yeah, ⁓ women's doubles the Sunday. I can't wait. ⁓ So today's episode, we want talk a bit about getting your first ⁓ So to of celebrate six months of gel, Nora: Woohoo! That's exciting. Yeah. G: We want to share a little bit about what we did in our first months of building this business and how we generated our first 10 clients. So, know, everyone online makes it sound like you need a really big audience, loads of followers, the perfect offer, everything organized and perfect to hit your first ⁓ 10K in revenue. We had none of those, ⁓ but we managed to do this within 90 days of starting our business. So in this we're going to break down exactly what we did to get our first group of clients. what actually mattered versus what we thought would matter and what surprise does, just some lessons and hopefully make this super practical and tangible for anyone out there that is running a business, wanting some more clients or thinking of starting a business. we have had a few questions in the DMs lately on, I want to do this, I want to start, but where the fuck do I get my clients from? So what we're going to talk about today. let me ask you, when we were launching, so rewind the clock, six months ago, we've got lots of things and running behind the scenes. We've registered the company, we've got our logo, we're working with a couple of clients, just people that we know, but we haven't launched, we're not And we go to do that first social media post to announce that we are launching a business together. Nora: No. G: What did you think was going to happen? Nora: To be honest, I was quite optimistic in the sense that I knew that our network would support it and we'll get the initial traction there, which I think happened as we thought it would. It was almost also a bit a nice surprise people that we don't necessarily speak to every day. know, show their support, share the page and, you know, with it as well. I I was in Dubai at the time, wasn't I? I was on a trip when we did the launch. Because we both trying to manage it at different time zones as well and like make sure that like, you know, the time is right and like the sequence of our posts are right. I remember us like video calling and trying get like a voiceover reel together to like announce what Jellis and it was, it felt very, very exciting at the time. So I guess like with, with how we launched, I think one thing that we did apply was a bit of a warmup phase. So, ⁓ which we talk about on our socials as well for, business owners in general. So we started with a fresh page, didn't we? Like zero followers, which was quite scary, ⁓ but we had cause, you know, there's two of us in the business and I we bring a great, you know, energy, when we were together and we to showcase that and kind of. G: Yeah, we did. Nora: build the brand and what jelly is based on both of us rather than us utilizing our own individual accounts to do that. I still feel like that's the right direction. Would you agree? G: Yeah, think with any new brand or business, it needs its own entity. It's its own thing. Like it can't just be like, you backpacking onto something else. It definitely needed like a fresh start, a fresh page and an that was invested in that. You know, there's people that follow us that are obviously like supportive of us as individuals, ⁓ but I wanted like people to feel like they had to be engaging or seeing that content. I do sometimes feel like I share probably too much to my personal page of the business, but Nora: Yeah. G: At the same time, like it is what it is. It's my baby. It's our business. I want everyone to know about it. And that's kind of the point of marketing anyway. But for the gel page, a hundred percent, I think it was the right thing to do. It's always scary starting from zero though. Especially when are someone that has worked in social media and marketing. Like ⁓ think sometimes the thought of like, ⁓ well we should have more followers or like, you know, but when you're starting from zero. Nora: Yeah. Yeah. G: getting from zero to 1000 followers that first sprint, if you will, is always the hardest part because it takes so much longer to build that momentum to then grow a page from there on out. So we always knew it wasn't going to be easy starting from a zero page. But it also meant that we had like the opportunity to be quite creative with testing stuff all the time. Like, you know, it's it doesn't matter. It's fun. Nora: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. But yeah, if we, if we go back to that time ⁓ when did our warmup face, we did a bit of like a teaser campaign, didn't we initially, cause we did that photo shoot, which was quite fun. Shout out Daisy for helping us with the photo shoot and getting some incredible pictures that we could use for that launch. But yeah, we did the photo shoot and we use the photo shoot content to then tease that something's coming. We went for like business, like girl boss vibes. was quite, you know, very nice vibes to be fair, ⁓ back at it. And we then started hinting, but wasn't quite, you know, telling people what gel actually was. We utilized our personal pages quite a lot to bring traction to main page. And I think the initial ⁓ people that came onto the page were family and friends. And I think anyone who's building a business should expect their family and friends to be the first people that potentially not just support but buy as well. ⁓ And from that, we then did the official launch reel, which went so well. And that's where we got our first inbound inquiries, didn't we? Where we had, ⁓ yeah, had a couple of inbound inquiries from our network. G: Yeah. Yeah. Nora: which again shows, I think one of the biggest things starting a business is like don't underestimate your network. Because strangers will buy eventually, but the first people that will support the business and will buy from you would be people that already trust you and that's within your friends and family. G: Absolutely. We hear this a lot as like an objection from that we work with or coaches and they say, yeah, but they wouldn't buy from me because they're my friend or they know me, they're not going to want this. And I'm like, if anything, they should want it more. ⁓ Did see what I shared the other day where I was like, stop asking friends for freebies, try and get free shit from strangers instead. I think it was a whole mozie post and it was like basically saying like, support your friends businesses, pay them full wax, stop asking them for discounts. Nora: Yeah. more. Yeah. G: I think it's so true if you do support someone and you value them and you can see that they're good at what they do Why you go to a stranger over someone that you already like and know? It must be so much more fun to work with a friend than some random person. So yeah, I'm a huge advocate for that. And I'm super grateful to our friends and family that supported us from the off we had... ⁓ Nora: upside. G: Between us, we've got a lot of case studies of businesses that we've grown over the last six years. But what we didn't have as gel was case studies because gel was brand new gel, you know, between the two of us, we've also worked together on a lot of businesses. So people knew that we could get results, but they didn't know that the gel offering was going to get them the results. So the fact that they trusted in us as people and you know, willing to pay us was, ⁓ you know, so And I think that was a real like cornerstone moment for me of just like, Nora: as a brand, yeah. G: ⁓ my God, it's real, like it's happening. We're building something. And think it could be tempting at the start to work for free. I think there was a moment where we spoke about it. You know, should we do some like pro bono work? Should we be just like ⁓ some people in for free? And I'm really glad that we didn't do that. ⁓ do think in some businesses you could do that and it might be okay to do that for the right, you if you really have zero results so far and you want to practice, but we had half a decade of results. Nora: Uncerned. Hmm. G: to show for what the work we do. And it would have commercially not made any sense for us to have worked for free when we were already working another job alongside this. context, we were both working full time whilst building this at the beginning. So we have the luxury of time and space to do that kind of free extra work. So we had to charge from the off. Nora: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. And think that's spot on what you said about like gel a brand and as an entity by itself didn't have the social proof, but it shows the saying that we always say is like people buy from people. It's not the brand. It's not your fancy logo. It's not, you know, getting your brand colors right. That's going to get people buying. It is the people behind the brand. And, you know, we still see it to this day. We get people that we possibly helped four or five years ago. we've not spoken to since, enquiring and saying guys, I need your help because they had that great experience back then and they just trust the person and it's just so fulfilling and very special. G: Yeah. ⁓ we love that. Nora: But yeah, I think that was the biggest thing for us is like, at the start when you're launching, tease it, don't just go out and say, I'm doing this, like, get people curious a bit. Build up the initial audience by utilizing your personal network and telling people about it. is okay to ask for help when you're starting a new business. ⁓ You know, I think we were quite open about this, you know, going into it. think we both were like, yeah, you know, I will share it on my personal page and I will get people like, you know, asking for their help to share it with their network. Cause we knew of the impact that we could have in businesses. We just needed the door get these, ⁓ to talk these businesses. And yeah, I think that's, that's worked in our favors that we, did have. G: Hmm. Yeah. Nora: live with that curiosity then did this big reveal and utilize that network to get them in. ⁓ G: Yeah. Which I think we did a really good job of on Instagram specifically. do think that one thing that is kind of amazing that we've done, and don't know if I'd advocate for this for a business, like we're literally business to business ⁓ and not used LinkedIn, but we've been hitting 10K months for six months. Haven't used once, but I think, know, amazing and it can be really underestimated for like business. Nora: which is. G: business offerings, which we obviously love it and we use it a lot. But we've utilized our personal networks and our Instagram networks, but we haven't actually tapped into our LinkedIn networks and professional networks from that at all. So that's something that we do probably need to look at this year. Nora: Yeah. G: reaching out to people. I think that, yes, we got inbounds, but we were also doing some outbound work too. like sit back and wait for people to just come to you when you're starting a business is just not going to get you where you need to get to. like ⁓ being proactive and starting conversations, picking up the phone, talking to people when you're out and about, like I think I've got us two clients from the pub. ⁓ Nora: not gonna happen. Yeah. G: ⁓ essentially, like having genuine conversations and taking an in the kind of work that people do, and then naturally talking about what you do can lead to business. Okay, so like, if ⁓ like, someone like, okay, Nora, I'm starting my business from scratch. one thing you would say, don't fucking do this. Don't do it. Nora: I would say don't spend days, you know, working on your brand, because that's not going to get you clients, you know, one big thing. G: do think you're right though. think wasting time on branding and logo at the start is in a good use of time. think we wasted a lot time on diagrams. Do you remember diagram Ali? Nora: Yeah, but I do think that gave us a bit of like clarity on what does our workflow look like and like, I don't think that was a complete waste of time. We thought we would use them with clients. We didn't them with clients. ⁓ I do think we get, we both get hyper fixated on things that are potentially not very useful for the business at times. So I feel like we've gotten better with that. ⁓ G: No. Yeah, we have. That was so funny. We must have spent about 48 hours looking at work. Nora: Oh, and we were staying up late as well for them. We were like, these diagrams would change our life. What were we thinking? G: They were literally like flow charts. then like you were getting so annoyed at me when I was putting the wrong box shape on the thing. And you were like actually getting like so irritated. You'd be like, if you're going to put the circle there, just tell me and I'll do it for you. And I'd be like, okay, I'm just trying to add the steps into the workflow. And you'd be like, not the diamond. I like, Jesus Christ, it's trapezium. Nora: You G: It was so funny. Nora: I was just like, my OCD got very triggered. And I was like, please do not make me feel uncomfortable. I do not like it's the wrong shape. Change it. ⁓ Yeah. G: Yeah, I remember vividly and then we did finish them though. Nora: Do you want to talk about your things that you do during the day that we need to work through? G: I don't know what I do. I think I'm quite like good. Nora: Hahaha! G: right, what's next? The unhinged things we've seen business do to get clients? What unhinged things have we seen across the years other business owners doing to get clients or signups? What's the weirdest things you've ever seen? the worst. Nora: For me it's like cold emailing through AI random people. Yeah, that is not it for me. That is not a marketing strategy. I am sorry, but that is just pure annoying. Like if anyone emails me cold, when I've never spoken to them, they go in my spam and I actually block that email as well because it's just not a vibe. G: Cool. Yeah. Nora: Like do not... Where did you get my email in the first place? That's what I'm thinking. G: People sell them, don't they? They sell databases. I know, we know some business owners that buy database emails and then cold outbound them. I really also don't like that. And I've never once responded to one, because when I was head of marketing I would get them multiple a day in that inbox. And I always think, where have you got my email address from? I never gave it to you. They're very, very What other things have seen? are, this is it, fake Instagram of people that are not real ⁓ I remember people making Instagram pages me and messaging coaches as me when it me. trying to get them to sign up for business coaching. I'm sorry, is not acceptable. That's bad, that's unhinged. Nora: Yeah. Yeah, it is. G: What else have we seen? Nora: booking into someone's calendar to sell them their thing? G: Bad. ⁓ my God, I've got another one. Creating a job ad for personal trainers saying that there's a job available in the gym and then jumping on a call to sell them business coaching. But that poor personal trainer thought they were gonna get a job. Yeah, I saw that. I saw that firsthand. Disgusting. And apparently that's called growth hacking. I call that gross hacking, personally. Nora: Disgusting. That's really unethical. G: Someone got hired to do that. I'm sorry. Like, and I, you're listening to this, like, I really don't mean to offend you, but like, no. Nora: It's just not a vibe. What happened to just being a nice human being that wants to help people and maybe you get clients because your work is actually good? G: Well, for the right businesses, that strategy works. I when that's not working, people get impatient and then move to tactics because they're expecting a magic bullet, ⁓ which is why they end up like investing in programs of people that do these tactics. So one thing that I would say on this is like, if you're going to invest in a mentor or a program, a course or whatever, like think about how that entity has onboarded or got you as a lead. So like if you've been reached out to you, Nora: Yeah. Yeah. G: hold or you've been sent one of these AI mass emails, or you've gone through a fake job advertisement, those kind of tactics and methods are going to be exactly what they recommend to you. So if you don't like how you've been on boarded, then don't sign up with that company because it's going to be a very similar thing that they're going to get you to do, in my opinion. we don't that. We don't like unethical, we? Okay. ⁓ Nora: Yeah. No, it's not our vibe. G: things we've spoken about then. warming up before you launch, making sure that you've got like clarity before you go in, not wasting too much time on your logo, networking, talking to your people that you know, friends, family. What else did we do? Posting every day. We've posted every day since what, September, October? Nora: Yeah, and that I think has helped massively. Yeah, just on the awareness piece, you don't have to go viral, you just have to like, show up and like get people to see you and then get people to always of you when they think of what do. You know, to think of that particular topic that you specialize in, ⁓ you should the first person that comes to mind and that happens with getting content out there. It doesn't have to be the perfect content and we've... G: Mm-hmm. Nora: kind of had to. We followed that when it was uncomfortable to do so. And were times where we were like, ⁓ should we post this today? And then we did. And, you know, it got more ⁓ eyes our page and it got more people interested in what we do. G: Mm-mm. Exactly. And then when people are engaging with your content, talking to them and having conversations and using your stories and actually engaging with your community, not just having them as like people that look at stuff, having them as people that feel involved with the brand and that like, you know, can ask questions and have chats. We've got some almost like pen pals now on our page, haven't we, that we've like made like connections with and yeah, they're not clients yet. Maybe they will be down the line. Maybe they never will be, but they're people that we could potentially collaborate with. Nora: Yeah. G: chat to me, you know, like it's just nice to connect with other people on social media, because it's called social media for a reason. So I think that's one thing that we've done particularly well. We've got loads of work to do. We've got LinkedIn to leverage. We've got email marketing to leverage. We're looking at paid advertising. You know, we've built our business to where it is with literally just organic marketing and referral marketing. So clients recommending other clients as having conversations with our network. And I think the key thing is it doesn't have to be complicated. It's not easy, it does take hard work, but the actual processes are relatively simple if you stick to them consistently. that's what we teach our clients too. So ⁓ you've been listening and you're thinking, ⁓ I would love to start my business, I'd love to get some clients, but I just need a helping hand, then us a message. We would love to speak to you as that exactly what we do at Joe. Nora: 100%. And if you enjoy these episodes, make sure that you stay tuned for the next one. But also guys, rate the podcast. have we're up to now seven ratings of five stars on Spotify, which I'm quite proud of. ⁓ G: Very good. But make sure you rate it five stars, please don't put under if you're going to rate it only five stars or don't rate it at all. Nora: If you rated under 5 stars, you're mean. G: hit subscribe. See you soon, bye. Nora: Okay, bye.