Are you a hunter or farmer in your business?

For the first several years of my business I thought the best way to attract new clients was to keep my prices low to compete with other web developers.

After all, lower rates means more work, right?

I was right, I was able to attract a lot of clients.

The bad news was that I attracted the wrong type of clients.

Headache clients.

High-maintenance clients who wouldn’t pay and had unreasonable demands.

They hired me because I was cheap.

And I kept the cycle going by suffering through a difficult client and then repeating the process and getting new, difficult clients.

I was a hunter – I constantly chased after new clients.

When it comes to marketing our businesses, there are two different categories of service providers – hunters and farmers.

Hunters kill and eat, kill and eat, kill and eat.

The merry-go-round perpetually runs in the same, familiar circle.

Hunters ‘hunt’ for new clients and fill up their customer pipeline. Once they get a bunch of new business they leave their hunting behind and their customer pipeline dries up.

Once their customers’ needs are fulfilled, the go back to ‘hunting’ for new clients, never building a sustainable business, always either hunting or performing their services but rarely doing both at the same time.

Farmers, unlike hunters, choose what seeds they want to plant and thus, the food that they’ll reap later.

They surpass the reactionary survival mode and have more control over the feast and famine cycle of business.

Farmers intentionally plant seeds that attract the right kind of clients by working on their business, not just in their business.

How do we stop hunting and start farming? Well, the first step is to acknowledge what group you’re in.