Jacob Ratliff - Client Attractor: Attract High-Paying Clients You Love & Keep Them Coming Back

Introduction

When I was four years old , I got the inspiration to start my first business. My parents and I, with my infant brother in tow, loaded into my moms purple Toyota minivan and headed to Home Depot. It was a sunny spring day, and we were going to mulch the flowerbed that backed up to our garage.

The four of us walked up and down the aisles of Home Depot until we found the mulch. My dad found the exact type we neededpretty enough not to be an eyesore, but effective enough to do whatever we needed mulch for in the first place.

He pointed to the bag of mulch we needed, and his eyes dropped to the price sticker. Gah, he said, Its not cheap, is it? He shook his head in defeat, and my parents set to work loading the bags onto the cart and then into the back of the minivan.

Back home, we set to work spreading the mulch in the flowerbed lining our garage. As we worked, I noticed that this mulch was just pieces of woodpieces of wood that my dad had complained about being expensive only an hour earlier.

Isnt this just wood? I asked my dad, confused that he had just spent money on something we had so much of; after all, sticks and branches littered our yard from the thunderstorm we had just a few days before.

Yeah, he said, chuckling. Mulch is just bits of wood and leaves to help keep the soil healthy for the plants.

My mind started turning as I went back to arranging these wood chips around each plant. Mulch is expensive, but its just sticks and leaves. And we have both of those things.

After luncha peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wheat breadI asked my mom if I could pick up some sticks in the yard.

Yes! she said a little too enthusiastically. You can get a trash bag out of the garage to put them in.

I went out to the garage and grabbed a single trash bag with my peanut-butter sticky handsnot one of those ugly black yard work bags that we always used when raking leaves, but one of the semi-clear ones where you could get a pretty good idea of what was in it if you looked closely enough.

While my parents returned to spreading their overpriced mulch across the flowerbeds, I marched to the biggest tree in the yard and started grabbing fistfuls of leaves, twigs, acorns, and anything else that would fit in my tiny hands.

Once the bag was half full, I tied it shut and started swinging it in circles above my head, watching the bags shadow circle on the ground like a hand on a frantic clock. I kept spinning it above my head until I was too dizzy to keep going.

As I slowed to a halt, I stumbled towards that giant tree and clutched it for support, so I wouldnt fall to the ground. Once my head stopped spinning, I untied the plastic trash bag and peeked inside, pleased to see the materials all mixed.

I scrounged up a cardboard box and Sharpie, and found my dad exactly where I left him, spreading mulch in the same flower bed by the garage. Once I got his attention, I asked if he would write something on the cardboard box that I had flattened.

Yeah buddy, he said. What do you want it to say?

Mulch For Sale.

That it? Want to put a price on the sign?

Uhm, yeah, I said. The price is free.

He wrote the price down and handed me my new sign.

Thank you! I yelled over my shoulder as I ran around the side of the house to the front porch, my bag of mulch in one hand and cardboard sign in the other.

I sat down criss-cross applesauce on the big blue front porch, holding my sign up and waving at my neighbors as they drove past. All afternoon I sat out there, waving at every single car, until my mom called me in to eat. I set the bag carefully next to the front doorstill as full as it was when I planted myself on the porch hours earlierand ran inside for dinner.

What have you been up to? she asked as she scooped her famous (to me) chicken stir-fry onto a plate and handed it to me.

Ive been selling mulch! I said with a wide smile, beaming up at her with pride. I didnt sell any, but Im going to work all day tomorrow and sell all of it!

The next day, I didnt sell anybut not because I was discouraged that I hadnt sold any the day before. Rather, just because I was a four-year-old with a four-year-olds attention span.

But not to worrymy failure to monopolize the mulching industry did nothing to deter my entrepreneurial spirit; rather, it was the spark that continued to show up time and time again throughout my childhood and well into adulthood.

Who This Book is For

One of the biggest benefits of going full-time with my business was the timethe newfound time I had to take on more clients, and the time I had to improve my business skills and become even more of a master marketer and business expert.

Ive always been an avid learner, so I was thrilled to jump back into learning mode. I decided that I was going to take every online course I could find and afford to hone those already sharp business skills even further.

Except it didnt work that way. I quickly realized that there was a gap: I was learning the strategy behind all of these business topicsdigital advertising, content marketing, copywriting, email marketing, social mediabut none of the actual tactics to make any of that work. It was like taking a CPR class where the teacher told you how to perform CPR but never actually showed you how its done, much less let you try it on a CPR dummy.

I wanted to know why all of these courses were explaining the theory of these concepts but entirely ignoring what they actually looked like in practice, and it didnt take me long to find the answer. The courses themselves were just steps in some experts sales funnel; the goal of the course wasnt actually teaching me, but rather priming me to buy whatever high-ticket offer came next.

But I wasnt yet in a place to invest thousands of dollars into working one-on-one with a coach, so I didnt. I just stayed where I was, all theory and no practical knowledge that I could implement.

Ive heard hundreds of stories similar to this, and the truth is that there are a seemingly infinite number of resources and guides out there that talk about how to build your coaching business. The sheer volume of resources out there is overwhelming, and its complicated by the fact that most of them arent inherently wrong. They talk about creating and packaging your offer, generating leads, and making sales. It sounds a bit like this: