Hey, ADHD entrepreneur! Find your ideal clients at the ADHD pool party!

Hey new listener. Thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you, Squirrel Want to ensure that you're not leaving money on the table? I'm going to tell you how to throw the ultimate ADHD Business Pool Party. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the Weeniecast Squirrel. How do people become your clients? Today I'm going to be talking about the client journey, but I'm also going to be talking about what your responsibility is as the business owner to make it easy and comfortable for different types of clients to come into your world. With this episode, we also have a downloadable PDF guide that comes along with it. So if you want to go into the show notes and it is weeniecast.com pool party and you'll understand what I mean by pool party in a little bit. Once you click that link, you'll be able to download the Client Journey Guide, which will walk you through exactly what you need in order to transform absolute strangers on the interwebs into actual paying clients and eventually into super fans who will be the biggest advocates of your work. When you're first starting out, attracting clients feels like magic. And it feels like accidental magic, right? Like when Harry Potter before he got accepted into Hogwarts, where, like, he's accidentally growing his hair, spelly armors and jumping onto the roof of the school and all that stuff. He didn't intend to do it, but the magic just came out of him. In in times of need, it doesn't feel like you're getting clients on purpose, because it's not. As you develop your business, as you understand it better, as you understand your ideal clients better, you're going to be able to consciously create systems that attract your clients in. From your social media strategy, to running webinars, to building your email list, to speaking at events, all of it will tie into how you get clients. And as you get better at it, whenever you need a new wave of clients, you'll be able to look back and see what worked before and just redo it. But as you're getting started, where do you start? How are these first clients going to come to you? And to answer that question, I want to talk about pool parties for a second, and I swear I have a point here. If you've ever been to a pool party. You know that there are three types of people who come to a pool party. There are the deep enders, the Katie McManuses who show up, they're wearing their bathing suit on under their clothes. They are so excited to go swimming that when they get to the party, they wave at everyone, saying hello as they're like, stripping off their layers and jumping in the pool in the deep end. These are the people who, when you're out actively posting on social media, as they see your stuff and as they're understanding, oh my God, this person solves the problem that I have, they are the ones that will jump from reading your post to hopping on a sales call with you. I'm a deep ender. So, for example, when I hired my podcast producer, Neil, for instance, I had already decided to hire him about a year prior just from the posts that he made on LinkedIn. And every time I saw his post for that whole year, I was like, cool. I just want to remember this person because he's the person I'm going to hire when I'm ready to start a podcast. There are people out there, if you are consistent on social media, who will think the same things about you. All right? Which means it is your responsibility to keep posting, to keep talking about the problems you solve and the results that you get. Clients the second type of attendee at the pool party is the socializers, right? The socializers are the friends who will show up and they will never be bringing a bathing suit. They have come to enjoy your company, to enjoy the snacks, maybe some beverages. They will be the conversational glue that holds the party together. They are incredible. You want socializers at your pool party, but here's the thing. They're never getting in that pool. They might dip their feet in occasionally if it's a really hot day and there are people in the pool that they can talk to, but otherwise they're staying in the shade. They're not interested in swimming. Now, in your business, these are the people who like all your stuff, who will comment on your posts, who will come to your webinars. They will download all of your free PDFs, but they're never going to buy from you. You can choose to get bitter about them, but I prefer to look at them as amazing cheerleaders and we'll be talking about superfans later on in this episode. But these are the people who can actually become the best referrers to your work. Other benefits to having socializers in Your world is they are going to be butts in seats in webinars. They're going to promote all of your posts because they're going to comment on them and they're the ones who are going to give you positive feedback about what you're doing. Because remember your ideal clients, you're speaking too close to the heart for them. It's going to feel too vulnerable for them to tell you that you're speaking directly to their problems, their fears or frustrations, because they're not going to want to out themselves until they're ready to to sign up with you. Like I didn't tell Neil that I'd already decided to hire him. It wasn't until we hopped on that call when I was ready to start my podcast where I told him, shut up and take my money. He had no idea I existed in the realm of a potential client until that moment. He was getting feedback from the socializers in his circle and from existing clients, obviously, because he's brilliant. The third type of person that you're going to attract to your pool parties are the ease their way inners. These are the friends who will show up. They brought their bathing suit in a bag, they're going to grab a drink, they're going to have some snacks, they're going to hang with the socializers for a little bit, then they will change into their bathing suit. And they're not jumping into the deep end. That is not their style. They're not comfortable with it. Also, they just eat something and they believe in that myth that if you eat something before you go swimming, you're going to throw up, which has never happened to me. I eat before going swimming all the time anyway. They will get into the pool on the steps and they won't just charge right into the pool. No, they're going to like, get in the pool and they're going to let their feet get acclimated to the temperature and then they're going to get on the second step and they're going to let their calves get acclimated to the temperature and then the next step and they're going to let their knees and then the next step and their thighs until they're finally in the shallow end. They take forever to get into the freaking pool. It drives the deep enders nuts. Because we want to play Marco Polo in the instance of your business. These are the people who will never hop on a sales call with you just because they read your post. These are the people who it's your responsibility to Create low pressure environments for them to experience you in different ways so that they can finally feel comfortable hopping on a sales call. The different versions of a shallow end of a pool in your business are going to be things like webinars, lives, videos, pop up, trainings, you speaking at events where they're showing up. These types of pool goers, they're interested in working with you, but they don't want to out themselves as interested in working with you too overtly because they don't want that pressure on them of being sold. They would prefer to show up and be one with a crowd that's learning how you work with people. And I just want to name that doing webinars and speaking at events and doing lives are a few of the same scariest things for new business owners to do. It takes bravery to host a zoom room with a bunch of people who are interested in what you're doing and you're basically teaching a class to a whole bunch of strangers and then also trying to sell to them. It takes bravery to turn on the camera and go live on social media where you could socialize, screw up in real time where people are watching. And it takes bravery to produce a little video that you share on TikTok. But without doing those things, you are not making it possible for these people to actually become your client. And if you want a successful business, I'm sorry to break it to you, but there aren't enough deep enders or Katie McManuses out there in the world to fill up your business. You're gonna have to build some shallow ends of the pool for the ease their way inners to come into your business. Now that being said, so you have a couple different ways that people are going to become your client. But how do you take someone who's an absolute stranger, who's never seen you before, never read a word that you've written or heard you speak before, how do you take them from being an absolute stranger to becoming your client and your super fan? If you've downloaded the guide you can see the visual. But if you haven't yet, or if you're driving and you're unable to do that, then I'm going to walk you through it. Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel, squirrel, Squirrel, squirrel. How do you take them from being an absolute stranger to becoming your client and your super fan? If you've downloaded the guide you can see the visual, but if you haven't yet, or if you're driving and you're unable to do that, then I'm going to walk you through it. So imagine there is a line and along this line there are five dots. Now the dot all the way to the left is where we're starting. That is the stranger stage. Everyone is a stranger before they meet you, right? So the strangers are. It's basically the whole sea of people that could potentially become your clients out there in the world. They don't know that you exist yet. Your job as a business owner is to take them from stage one stranger to stage two, follower. For someone to go from stranger to follower, you have to post consistently. And not just that, you have to post consistently about the things that are going on for them. You have to show how hyper relevant you are to their lives for them to have any reason to follow you. An example I want to use is on TikTok. There are some really fun cooks who share recipes. I'm not saving any of the recipes that have, like, pumpkin in it. I don't really like pumpkin. Right. That's not relevant to me. But if you're sharing a recipe for soup, I love soups. I'm going to be saving all of those. And I'm going to be following you. For vegetarians, they're not going to be following cooks who cook meat all the time. People who really love steak also are not going to be following vegan cooks. So whatever it is that you do for your clients, the transformation that you offer, the problems you solve, the outcomes that you deliver on, you want to be posting about that because that's what's going to draw people in from being a stranger to following you. So follower is the second point on this line. The next step from follower is going to be friend. Our goal on social media is not just to get people following us and thinking that we're cool. That's an amazing benefit if you can do it. What we want to do is we want to build enough trust with them so that when they go to talk about us to a friend or a family member, they're not quite sure how to describe us because we feel like a friend to them. Right. And how do you take someone from a follower to a friend? It requires you to share vulnerably about yourself, about your own journey, about the things that you struggle with or struggled with in the past, your goals, your hopes, your dreams, how you take your coffee. You genuinely don't have to share anything that you're not comfortable sharing. Vulnerability is a spectrum. What you want to offer is enough information that they feel like they know you. Once you have built this level of trust with your friends on social media, that's when they have two choices. If they are your ideal client, if they are ready to make a change, if they have decided this is it, I can't continue without this person's help. This is the point where they jump to the fourth stage of this line and that is becoming your client. Now, this is where the magic happens. This is where you get super excited. You get to actually have impact with them. And maybe you already have had impact, Maybe you've shared stuff that they have implemented in their life and it's made a massive difference for them already. But this is where you get to take it that step further. And of course, this is where you actually make money in your business, which is cool on its own. To get someone to move from a friend to being a client, you're gonna have to call bull on them. You're gonna have to name that. They can either stay where they are with everything that they're struggling with and everything they're afraid of and everything that they're getting sick of, or they can finally make the choice to change it. They can actually take control of their life and invest in working with someone who can help them transform whatever's going wrong. And because you've hopefully shown them that you understand them deeply and allowed for them to feel like they are connected to you, as if you're a friend, you're going to be the number one person that they're going to want to consider working with when they're ready to make this change. But you have to make them choose. One of the calls to action that I see in social media posts that drives me nuts is if you want to learn more. No, it's not if you want to learn more. If you want to learn more, you can check out my website. If you are ready to actually change your life, if you're ready to actually change this problem into something you actually want to happen, then book a call with me. That is the call to action that has far more power behind it. That's what's going to get them into the fucking pool. Now, I mentioned before that from friend, they have two choices. They can become your client. The other choice is they can actually jump over client and go to the fifth stage. And that's super fan. Now, there are people who are just never going to be your clients. These, these are the socializers. These are the people who will be so helpful in spreading your word in Showing up in your webinars and downloading your stuff and giving you all this positive feedback. But unfortunately they're just never going to buy from you. But they will probably jump to superfan. And as superfans, they are going to be the most supportive in your comments. They're going to refer business to you because they understand deeply what you do and they feel like they know you on a deeper level. So they're actually going to be really good at identifying your ideal clients out there in the world who would be a good personality match for you because they understand your personality. These are also where your business besties might live. People who are business owners, they have a similar life to you. The reason they started following you and the reason they feel like you're a friend is because they're struggling in their business in the same ways you are. Your super fans are a rich mix of people who have been your client and have had their life completely changed by working with you. And these people who are your biggest cheerleaders. Now, how do you take someone from a client or a friend to superfan? Unfortunately, you have no control over this. The only thing that I can recommend you do is you be yourself. Don't try to be anything that you're not. Don't try to cover up the weird things about your personality. Don't try to hide the odd things that you're interested in. All those things, when you're honest about them, when you're forthcoming about them, are going to draw these people closer because they either have it in common with you or. Or they just really enjoy that you're outing yourself in this way. I'll write posts occasionally about Harry Potter. I'll write posts about all the entrepreneurs in Harry Potter that I admire, blah, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't resonate with everyone. Not everyone understands it. Not everyone has read the Harry Potter books as much as I have. And yet there are people who will enjoy that. I'm just a super nerd about it. And there are other people who are also super nerds and they like that I'll understand them in that way. You get to be the same way in your business. The struggle for ADHD business owners is that we can get stuck in one mode. We can get stuck into inviting deep enders into our business, writing posts that are just designed to get people to read the post and book a sales call. When we get into that mode, we scare away the people who need the shallow end of the pool. There's no way for them to enter your business. When you only focus on attracting deep enders. Likewise, we can get super focused on attracting strangers to become followers and we forget to share about ourselves. Yes, we attract all these people and they, yeah, they hit the follow button. But if you don't also remember to share vulnerably about yourself, they're never going to make that jump from follower to friend. It's just not going to happen. And you can do. What I do fairly often is you can forget about posting about your ideal clients. You can forget about posting sales posts. I've done this multiple times. It's always puzzling to me because a few months in I'm like, wait a minute, I don't have any new clients. What happened? And then I look back at the last two months of post posts and it's all personal things. I can get so sucked into the relationships that I create when I share vulnerably and I create those friendships that I forget to post about my business. And this happens for my clients as well. And I bet this happens for you too. The type of content that we post as ADHDers is kind of like our go to dopamine breakfast that we get hooked on for months at a time, right? For me right now it's high protein toaster waffles, which I know sounds like a child's breakfast and it absolutely is, but it's the easiest thing for me to have in the mornings. I know at some point I'm gonna get bored of it and I'm gonna have to move on to something else, but for right now, that is what I'm stuck on. So just like it happens for us with food, it happens in our content as well. And I wanna remind you, there's nothing wrong with you getting stuck into one of these modes being because it means that you're posting consistently and that's a beautiful thing. And what do I always say? People can't give you their money if they don't know that you exist. And if you're posting consistently, you're telling people that you exist. Great job. However, that's not good enough if you want to have a consistent, sustainable business. So what does this look like? Ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. People can't give you their money if they don't know that you exist. And if you're posting consistently, you're telling people that you exist. Great job. However, that's not good enough if you want to have a consistent, sustainable Business. So what does this look like? I'm going to give you a really simple formula here. There are three types of posts that you could create. The first post is about a pain or a desire that your ideal clients have. And you're going to empathize with it. You're not going to try to solve it in this post, but you are going to tell them, hey, listen, this is normal. It happens to a lot of people. And by the way, if you're ready to make a change to either get out of the pain or, or get the thing that you want most, then book a call with me. There's gonna be the case study or the testimonial post where you're showing how you've helped other people do this before. Now these posts are where the cheerleaders, your super fans, are gonna be able to jump in the comments and be like, yeah, you rock. You're so good at what you do, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, I've seen you in action, they're amazing. This is where people are gonna be able to see that you're actually, actually know what you're doing. You don't have to show people how smart you are. You have to show people that you help your clients get results. And the third type of post is where you are sharing about yourself. Now this can be a completely besides the point post about how your dog farts in their sleep and wakes themselves up. It can also be about your personal journey in your career. It can also be about something that you learned early on. It can be about someone who inspires you. It can be about how much it means to you that you get to help people in the way that you do in your business. But in this post, it's going to help people really connect with you and friends. If you can consistently create those three types of posts and also create content that is that shallow end of the pool, you are going to be so easily accessible by your ideal clients. I know I'm throwing out there that like you should be doing webinars and you should be doing lives and you should be creating video content like it's easy, I know it's not. You get to make it as simple or as complicated as you want. And also if you don't want to play the guessing game on all this stuff, if you want to excel, accelerate it being effective. These are all things that I train my BYOB year long business incubator clients on. This is also stuff that I work on with my one on one clients. So if you're ready to create a shallow end of the pool that will attract these kinds of clients. Then I want you to book a generate income strategy call with me. Because if you're not creating these ways for people to experience you in a low pressure way, you are leaving so much money on the table. And that's not okay with me. And it shouldn't be okay with you either, because remember, this is your pool party. You want people swimming in the pool. That's the whole point. You bought floaties and shit for this. And like I said, if you want to see all of this mapped out and in a really simple way, there is a downloadable PDF that you can grab if you go to weenicast.compool party. And if you're a deep ender and you're ready to book a generate income strategy call with me, then I want you to go to weeniecast.com strategycall click the link, fill out the form, pick a time and we will hop on the phone and talk through what your strategy forward will be. Luna just gave the biggest sigh. Her life is so hard. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Join the weeniecast Hyper Focus community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls. Turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this. At the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast.com hyperfocus all one word. That's weenicast.com hyperfocus.