I emailed my friend I mentioned previously but she has not gotten back to me about "the process". No problem, I'll get to see her next week in class anyway. Hopefully she'll be able to clarify what she was talking about. In the mean time I've not been idle.
I have a service that I think is useful and I even have a target market that I believe would find the service useful. So instead of doing my usual, which is to do nothing, I went ahead and contacted a few people to gauge their reaction.
I'm honestly astounded by the response I've gotten. I've had one positive which is likely to lead to some actual business, two "I'm interested, lets talk", and one "we do that already".
The odd thing is that before I took this leap my biggest fear was that I would get rejected outright. The difference now (I'm still not thrilled by the idea of rejection) is that what I want to avoid is a no response. The one case of "we do that already" could be interpreted as a rejection, however I see it as an opportunity to talk to the person some more.
I'm still setting up my service and I'm still not real clear on how to market it. How do I describe the value I am delivering and why they should not do it themselves but instead pay me to do it. It is all a matter of presentation.
Luckily every one of the people I contacted responded. I'm not sure how to handle the case of a no response. Keep spamming until they tell me to quit? Not sure I like that.
One aspect of this is that what I did is a lot like cold calling. The books I've read say not to do that - "Avoid cold calling at all costs". However if like me you have not done a great job networking then what do you do? I do not have money laying around to pay for a marketing campaign. But here is the thing the people I'm contacting have contacted me offering me their services. So in some ways I'm not exactly cold calling. I know the people I'm contacting need this service so I actually have somebody to cold call.
Where I would be afraid of cold calling is where I don't actually know who to call. For instance, if I was selling an EAI package for doing medical claims processing for insurance companies (ahem) I would not have a clue who to contact. Do I just call the front desk at BCBS and say "give me the guy in charge of claims processing"? I might give that a shot but I would not expect it to get very far.
Actually, for the above scenario I have a few people I would talk to that could help me. That might be the key to it too - know when to ask other people for help.
I'm still interested in getting some coaching on how to start my own business (in many ways I already have). But I'm not going to sit around waiting on other people. I do not care if I what I try does not work. Failures here are not fatal. You just try something else until you finally find something that works. The trick to getting coaching is that hopefully your coach has already done it before and can help you jump over the n00b mistakes.
In the mean time I'm going to get my first five shots sorted out and see where it takes me.