Hey there,

Yesterday I showed you the five phases of the PROOF Process, plus real students at different points on that journey.

Today I want to walk one relationship through all five phases, start to finish.

It runs about seven years, and it ends with my client being successfully acquired by a bigger company. But it starts with an invoice small enough that most consultants wouldn’t think twice about it.

My 2X ROI Client Story:

They Paid Me $1.9M

The relationship started with this $2,475 invoice…

My past client was called Fit Small Business: a website that creates helpful content for small business owners. Then, to monetize, they published ads.

Simple enough…till you realize they were scaling very fast. We’re talking 80 million readers in just a few years.

That meant their website was turning into a “technical house of cards” (like many fast growth companies, rapid success also meant visible and invisible problems might be scaling even faster).

Given their success, they’d outgrown the $200-$300/mo. cookie-cutter website providers. But, on the flip side, they weren’t ready to hire a pricey in-house team or even know how to vet one (very similar to the situation our AI consultant students find their clients in as well).

Which is why I (and my team at HDC) came in with our (intentionally) small team of web devs.

And, like we train our AI consultancy students to do, the “massive result” isn’t always where we start. Instead, we start in a small, but ROI-impactful way, and then earn the right to keep working as the business scales.

Why? Because every client relationship moves at the speed of trust.

And if you’d rather keep clients for years instead of chasing new clients every month, then you’d better be good at deepening trust over time.

Sure, client relations matter, but the biggest trust builder is providing undeniable value. And, the undeniable way to do that is to identify and solve a ‘ROI-related problem’ that connects to bigger ‘90, 180, and 365 day problems’ over time.

Here’s the high-level of how we went from the first invoice of $2,475 to a client lifetime value of $1.9M.

7-Days – Find the key metric & demo your process

The first 7 days actually happens before you sign a client.

It’s not always 7 days but if you’re in an industry where folks have an urgent need, then it can be, especially for a first project that’s an appropriately small scope and tied to a meaningful (ROI) win.

How to mess this up: A lot of people pitch a big project too fast, too soon. And, sometimes, it’s not even the consultant’s fault – sometimes it’s the client that pitches a big project!

If you’re a consultant with their act together, then the potential client might just see you as the unicorn magician rocket neurosurgeon they’ve been looking for.

And, then, hey, you like money so you say yes to the too-big project