How do I Get the Right Clients to Find Me?
There’s a question I’ve been asked so many times recently. How do I get the right clients to find me? And it’s funny, because the answer is almost never what people expect. It’s not about marketing. It’s not about Instagram. It’s not about being more visible. There’s something else going on, and I think it’s the missing piece that nobody’s really talking about.
What I Keep Seeing
Something has been on my mind all week. I’ve been having some amazing one-to-one conversations with creative entrepreneurs. People at all different stages, in all different industries. And I’ve been thinking about those conversations a lot.
I get on a call with someone, and within a few minutes, I can already start to see something about their business that they can’t see. And this is most definitely not because I’m cleverer than they are. It’s simply because they’re so inside their business. They’re so close to what they do, so immersed in the day-to-day, that they can’t step back far enough to see what makes them different.
And it’s a really strange thing, because quite often these are people who are genuinely brilliant at what they do. Their clients love them. They’ve often got years of experience. They’re working incredibly hard. But when you ask them what makes them different from everybody else who does something similar, they sort of go quiet. Or they give you this very broad answer that could apply to anyone in their field.
And I think that’s where so much of the struggle comes from.
Four Very Different Stories
I spoke to an artist recently who’d sold a painting to a really well-known person. And she’d panicked about the price and dropped it, simply because she couldn’t articulate why it was worth what it was. She knew it was really good. She just couldn’t explain the why behind the value.
I spoke to a florist in California who has this incredible boutique, this European-inspired space with the most beautiful aesthetic you’ve ever seen, and she described her market as saturated. She couldn’t see that nobody else in that town was offering anything remotely close to what she’d created.
I spoke to an incredible weaver in the Cotswolds who makes these extraordinary handwoven pieces using yarn she sources from all over the world. No website. No real visibility. Because she didn’t feel ready. She didn’t feel like she had the right to call herself a professional.
And I spoke to a personal trainer in Scotland. She’s building this extraordinary wellness retreat on a smallholding, with a woodland gym and a cabin with no Wi-Fi, and she freezes up the second anyone asks her to describe what she does.
Four completely different people. Four completely different businesses. And every single one of them was stuck for the same reason.
And so often, we immediately go to this being a marketing problem, but it’s not. It’s also not a confidence problem, exactly, although confidence is part of it. It was that they couldn’t see or name what makes them distinctive, what makes them so unique. And without that, everything else they were trying to do (the Instagram posts, the website updates, the networking, the newsletters) all of it was built on something quite vague. And vague doesn’t attract the right people.
What Changed for Me
I think it took me a long time to understand this in my own business. When I had my flower business, there was this period where I was just another florist. I was good. My clients were happy. But I was one of many. And I was doing all the things you’re supposed to do… the marketing, the visibility, the showing up, and it wasn’t really working the way I wanted it to.
The change, when it came, was simply about understanding something very specific about what made my work and my approach different from everybody else’s. And once I had that, so much changed. The marketing became simple, because I knew exactly what to say. The pricing became calm, because I understood the value underneath the work, not just the deliverable. The right clients started finding me, because they could see something in how I described what I did that made them think, that’s exactly who I need.
A Real Transformation
I see this happen with the people I work with. There was an interior designer I supported who’d been running her business for six years. Unbelievably talented, like really talented. Clients loved her. But she couldn’t explain what made her different from every other interior designer. She was taking on a different range of projects that came her way, trying to make a profit in an industry she was really passionate about.
And she followed the steps and answered the questions that I gave her, and she began to uncover this thread that ran through everything… this beautiful combination of earthy, natural materials and raw textures, and her own values around sustainability and wellbeing, and this really approachable warmth. And it wasn’t that she invented something new, or that she became someone entirely different. It was already there, every single thing that she needed. She just hadn’t seen it.
And from that clarity, she got multi-page editorial features in Living Etc. She won Homes & Gardens Next in Design. A luxury rug company invited her into their London showroom. Her dream clients started coming to her.
She described it as having her brain completely flipped into a different way of thinking. She said it untangled everything in her business. And that she’s in a different lane now.
She didn’t change who she was. She just finally understood what she had.
The AI Trap
There’s something else I want to mention, because I think it’s really important and really current. I’m seeing more and more creative entrepreneurs turning to AI for help with their marketing. Asking it to look at their website, compare them to competitors, write their copy. And the output looks polished. It looks professional.
But… this is so important to really know and grasp, if the foundations aren’t clear underneath, if you haven’t done the deep work of understanding what makes you genuinely distinctive, AI is just polishing what’s already there. Or worse, it’s looking at your competitors and making you sound more like them. Which is the exact opposite of what you need.
You end up looking more polished and more invisible at the same time. And that’s not AI’s fault at all. AI is brilliant at what it does. But it can only work with what you give it. And if what you give it is vague, you get back something shinier and vaguer.
A Conversation I’d Love to Have With You
I’m hosting a free live conversation, and I would really, really love you to come along. It’s called The Missing Piece.
And it’s about all of this. Why the marketing isn’t converting the way it should. Why pricing still feels uncertain even though you know your work is worth more. Why the wrong clients keep finding you while the right ones don’t. And what I believe sits underneath every single one of those things.
I will also talk about The Bright Line, the six-month programme, during our conversation, because if you’re sitting there recognising yourself in what I’ve just described, I want you to know what’s available and what it looks like to work together. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the conversation itself is designed to be genuinely helpful and valuable, and it takes one of the core philosophies from the six-month programme, and I’d really love you to have that. The conversation is very much for you, whether you ever work with me or not. I care about that a lot.
It’s a conversation. About 45 minutes, plus plenty of time for any and all questions at the end. You’re welcome to have your camera on and ask questions, or you can keep it off and simply listen and take notes, whichever you feel most comfortable with. There’s absolutely no pressure either way. It is a live conversation, and it’s not something that will be recorded and you can watch later.
You can REGISTER HERE
A Final Thought
I think the thing I most want to say today is this. If you’re doing all the things and it still feels like something isn’t quite clicking, there is almost certainly nothing wrong with you. And nothing wrong with your talent. There’s just something underneath that hasn’t been uncovered yet. A thread that runs through your work that makes you impossible to compare. And the frustrating thing is, you probably can’t see it, because it’s so natural to you that you don’t even register it as distinctive.
But the people around you can see it. Your best clients can feel it. It’s there. It just needs to be drawn out.
And you don’t have to become someone different to build a successful creative business. In fact, the people I see building the most extraordinary businesses are the ones who’ve leaned further into who they already are. Their warmth. Their quietness. Their sense of humour. Their way of noticing things. Whatever it is. They’ve just learnt how to build something strategic around it, so the business finally matches the level they’ve been operating at all along.
Come along, see if it resonates. You can REGISTER HERE.
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