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Your first step, before finding a client. Before setting your pretty little website. Before anything else…

…is to upgrade your skills. Or, ‘upskill’ yourself.

You see, running a service-based agency, takes a lot of hard work, discipline, and skill. Invest your time into improving 3 skills in particular; marketing, sales, and your level of skill within the service you want to provide to the market.

Beyond those core skills, you’ll also need some additional skills to help your start, grow, and scale your agency.

* Which you can read more about here *

I say ‘find’ but, really it’s about choosing your niche. Listen there are all sorts of ways to find or choose a niche – *some of which I address here *. But, in the end, success favors the brave.

You can spend the next 6 months thinking of a niche or you could just choose one and tweak your strategy as you go along.

Your niche will be a mixture of; your service you want to provide, a sub-section of that market, and possibly something unique you might bring to that market too.

So you’ve got your niche in place, you’ve carved out space in the market you want to serve – now it’s time to get your clients.

After all, without paying clients you don’t have a business.

Now there are many ways to go about this stage in the process. And, there are also a few steps within this process you’ll need to start getting good at.

* I explain everything you need to know here*

At this point, you’ve captured a few people interested in your service – now it’s time to close them. 

This is a whole skill in itself, and it takes a bit of time to acquire it. 

Check out this post here to learn how to upgrade your sales and closing skills

Congratulations! You’ve closed a client. At this point, you should’ve agreed a price and everything is ready to go – or is it? 

There’s one step left in place before you get cracking on the project – onboarding your clients. Listen, it’s not the sexiest part of the process but I assure you – without this step in this step in the process you could be setting yourself up for a massive headache down the line. 

* Here’s how to onboard your clients like a pro…*

So once you’ve got all the onboarding stuff out of the way it’s time to get cracking on delivering your service at nothing less than the best. 

Here’s a tip: learn the basics of project management – it’s a game-changer, trust me. And maybe this is just me – but after completing some work for one of the biggest project management software companies in the world – I dare say, project management is actually enjoyable. 

Yeah, seriously. Don’t believe me? * Check it out this guide * – you’ll be glad you did.  

If you’ve completed your project successfully, you’ll have ‘visited’ the project closure stage in step 6. 

However, we have a double close. 

In fact, you’ll want to * check this post out here * as it might be the difference between scraping by every month and really taking your agency to the next level…