The Waitlist Effect: Become the Rolex of Your Niche

but Dean, I only need a couple of leads, a couple of clients. Why do I need to do all this stuff? That's what we're going to talk about today. So when I'm working with my clients, they'll often say to me, but Dean, I only need one or two clients.

And it's logical, isn't it? If you're, you know, a solopreneur, expert, you're working with people for high ticket fees, you can only take on maybe six to ten clients a year or you know there's a certain you know capacity on your ability to deliver before you have to kind of scale up and maybe you don't want to scale up any more than that the logic is well one or two great clients is all we need and that is actually a very deceptive way of thinking about it and I want you to think about it in a different way.

I want you to think about the stuff that you're doing out there online, LinkedIn, Facebook, email, newsletter, those kind of things that you're doing are not there to just get you that one or two clients. They're there to build a wait list and they're there to protect your pricing. You think about it like this, it will change the way you do it. Over the 25 years I've been in business, I have seen a number of brilliant anding people, people far cleverer than me, go out of business, have to go back to corporate to sell off parts of their business to somebody else because they didn't think about how am I protecting my pricing and how am I protecting my business for the future.

And if you reframe it as my activity on LinkedIn, my activity on wherever I'm doing it, my newsletter, my email list is actually about building a wait list. Now, what do I mean by a wait list? Your business should always, always have more demand than supply. if you have potentially five clients that could come on board with you right now your pricing is strong you can charge solid pricing you can choose who you work with when i'm talking to clients and they say to me but dean just one client this year or two clients this year would be everything i don't think like that i think well i have to think about this in a slightly different.

What happens if one of those clients that you've already got has to shelve things for a little while? What if somebody comes along and kind of poaches them? What if, you know, if you're working one-to-one with people, what if they get sick or get laid off? Now, you don't want to be put into a sticky wicket because of somebody else.

You don't want to be put into a position of going backwards because of somebody else's decision. So you need options. And so one of the great things about the way I've built my business is I have, and if you talk to many of my team, they'll tell you, we have more leads than we can possibly deal with, like way too many, like tenfold too many. But that's why we have weathered every financial storm, every crazy thing that's happened.

We've been able to weather it through two years of lockdowns and all sorts. We weathered it because we always had more opportunity at our feet than we could capitalize or benefit from And you need to do the same Maybe not to the same extent You know I got 20 odd people in my team And back then before AI it was like 50 odd But you need to have that wait list because it's going to give you options. It's going to allow you to charge more. It's going to allow you to be actually in control.

Because look at it. If you look at Rolex watches, If you walk into a Rolex shop today and try and buy a watch, you can't. You can't. There's no chance.

They might let you buy a little puny one, but the ones that everybody wants, you can't buy. There is a wait list. Now, I'm not meaning like you have to build a physical wait list. What I'm meaning is that you need to build the infrastructure around you that creates more demand than you need.

Now, a lot of people will go, I agree with you, Dean. Absolutely. I'm already doing a lot of stuff. No, no, no, no.

Not a lot of stuff. Stuff that drives demand. Stuff that makes and positions you as the best person to work with. Stuff that positions you at the top of the market.

The people want to pay more for. That's positioning. That's having a solid proposition. But it's also what I call pre-selling you.

So lots of people know about how valuable your work is. Lots of people know all of the stuff about how you work. So you eliminate a lot of time wasters, but you have people see that you're serious about what you do. So your proposition has to be set up to help you create that kind of wait list, that demand, excess demand, that reselling, what you're doing day to day on social media and in your email list needs to set that thing up as well.

So it's actually creating that desire and that trust. So a lot of the stuff, the heavy lifting of sales is done. And then when we get to pipeline, you've got a flow of leads, a flow of conversations that mean in essence, think about it like this, when the pandemic, when the pandemic fired up and as it was kind of easing down, we had this weird scenario where there was more jobs than people and about half a million people disappeared from the workforce. And we had huge, crazy things happening where people were just hiring people like crazy.

And it was very difficult to actually get somebody hired and keep them because somebody was constantly offering them more money. You want to be in a position whereby the market is working at your you've built a bubble an ecosystem around you where in essence you have more offers coming at you more opportunity coming at you exactly like those people where they were being offered job after job after job and more and more money because when you're in that level of demand you can pick who you work with you can pick the price at which you work with them at and it just gives you more control but most people don't think this is possible and that's because they've been busy on social media, but they've not been doing the right things in the right order to get there.

And so they felt like they're banging their heads, their beards, the brick wall. I don't have, by most people standards I have a big audience But in the internet worlds I don have a big audience but most of my competitors have a smaller business than me because I can create more demand I know how to create demand for what I do And you need to be able to create that demand. Use your social channels, use your content to create that demand so you have more opportunity at your feet than you could possibly deliver.

And that protects you from recession. That protects you from something going wrong with an existing client. That protects you from a client coming along and they want to pay less. And you then have to kind of, because of, you know, needs must take it on.

It protects you from, you know, having to deal with a client that's a pain in the ass. Because you can just say, there's your money back. I don't think this is a fit. See you later.

I've done that with a couple of clients where they, when I had the first calls with them, they were really serious about the business. but then I realized as we got into doing the work their emotions were ruling them and so if they had a bad day they wouldn't do the work and if they had a good day they would do the work and they would do the work they liked and not do the work that they didn't like and that's just not a grown up way to build a business if your emotions run your business if your emotions control how you feel about your business like you need to get a job and so I just went we can't work like this we We can't have a scenario where I'm investing my time, which is, you know, somebody else would have.

I'm going to invest my time in helping you, but you won't help yourself. You can't control yourself. There are times when I don't want to do things and I go, I have to do it because it's the nature of the beast. People who say, well, you do what you love and you'll never work a day.

Every business has uncomfortable things that you have to do every now and then. But if you don't do them, they get more uncomfortable. So having that control to be able to say, no, sorry, this isn't working the way I want and move on. And also when you've got that excess demand, more demand than you can supply, it gives you options of referring work to other people.

It gives you options of creating other ways to serve them. So, you know, something a bit more one to many. There's loads of different options you get when you've got more demand than you can supply. But my experience has been people say, yeah, yeah, I want that.

I'd love to be in that position. And they don't realize it's possible. Now, if you were HSBC bank, or you were some global business, and you said, we want more demand than supply, and you're a global bank, something like that, I would probably say that's not achievable. It's not achievable.

Because there's only so much of the entire market you can get. HSBC is huge. So there's only so much of the market you can get. But when you're a small business, The market is huge, like huge.

Even a niche market, my niche market of expert led businesses, it's millions of businesses. Yeah. If you're a coach to a CEO or you're an MSP, there are literally millions of businesses or thousands of businesses, right, that you can serve. So it doesn't matter what you're in.

If you're a small business, you've actually got the ability to create more demand and supply. HSBC would struggle to do it, but you can't. Because think about it. 1% of the market would overwhelm you.

1% of your target market, 1 of your niche would overwhelm you It be way more than you could possibly imagine Way more work than you could possibly 1 of your niche is is probably a hundred customers a hundred clients now if you a msp with a 5 10k retainer like a hundred customers you would buckle it's way too much you'd end up you know that would be a crazy if you're a sole entrepreneur consultant a hundred clients would break you but think of the power it gives you when you know actually, maybe not 100, maybe it's 0.

1% in the market, 0.1. So instead of 1% is 100, say, 0.1 is 10.

At any given time, you've got 10 people that could take on as clients. You see how that changes the way you do your business? See how that changes the way you make decisions? Because if you know there's 10, you can change the way you market and go, well, actually on my inquiry form where people sign up and try and book a call with me they've got to ask questions first I've got to know a bit more about their business before I take a call because I don't want to waste my time so whereas if you've got nothing you'll take anything see how it changes the way you do business so this concept of building a wait list doesn't have to be a physical literal wait list but you have to create the infrastructure around you that will give you that kind of wait list effect.

Because when you've got that wait list effect, you're in control. You have autonomy, you have agency, you can make better decisions, you can make better long-term decisions. And that comes by doing the right things in the right order online. Not chasing virality for virality's sake, but chasing engagement from the right people.

Talking about the things that will drive that desire for people to want to work with you. And then you become like unstoppable. You've got so much at your feet. It's incredible.

And I want this for you guys. I want you to experience this, but you have to do the deep work of really figuring out who do we really want? What do we really want? Yes, you can take a retainer for 2000 a month, but do you really want it?

Is the pragmatist in you going, well, I'll take it right now. Or do you want the 10,000 retainer? You've got to really decide what you want and then build the infrastructure around it to get it. The systems that actually help you create that excess demand.

Now, before I sign up, I want to also just say, what is this infrastructure? See, people think infrastructure, they think big mechanisms, funnels, they think all of these things. It's the systems that make selling easier. It's the systems that make creating that demand easier.

If you don't have systems, you're making it up. If you don't have systems, it will suck the life out of you and it will take forever. What you need is a process and going, right, this is how we get leads. This is how we get them onto calls.

This is how we propose our services. And this is how we convert them. And this is how we do it over and over and over again. And if you're doing that and doing it effectively, it won't take a lot of time.

It should not take a lot of time. It should be simple and straightforward and it will be not, it won't feel icky. That's the good bit. It won't feel icky because you've built a system that you just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

And then that lead generation, that getting clients problem goes away. And now you've got long-term security about how your business works, functions, and your revenue is more predictable. And you can be way more picky about who you take on and what you do.