3 Your first 20 jobs are already in your phone
How to pull them out of your contacts without feeling like a beggar.
One idea changes everything: you are not asking for favors. You are announcing what you do now. When somebody's cousin needs what you do, you did them the favor by being easy to find.
The list of 100 names (from the whole family)
One evening, phone in hand. Open your contacts, WhatsApp, Facebook friends. Write every name on paper, in four columns: family, old coworkers and old bosses, people from church and school, and everybody else (your barber, your mechanic, the guy at the parts counter).
And do not stop at YOUR phone: your wife's network counts double (her friends, her work, her family, her school group). If you have older kids, their friends and their friends' parents have houses too. The list belongs to the family, not just to you. Do not skip anybody because "she does not need a fence". She knows nine people who do. Most people think they know 15 people. On paper it comes out to 120 to 300.
The announcement text
Send it to 10 names a day, one at a time. Never as a group text. It is an announcement, so nobody can say no to it:
And stop there. No price list. No paragraph about your experience. Expect a lot of answers and 2 or 3 jobs the first month. The big prize comes later: 100 people now know what to say when somebody asks "do you know anybody?".
The ONE name question
At the end of every good job, when the customer says it came out well, ask for ONE name, not for "somebody":
The word "who" puts the brain to work searching. "Do you know anybody?" gets a polite no. About 1 out of 3 happy customers gives a real name right there. Hand them three cards: "keep one and give two away". A referred customer is worth at least 16% more and stays a customer longer (Wharton study of 10,000 customers).
Thank the person who sent you the job, out loud
The same day a referred job gets booked, text the person who sent it: "Hey [Name], [person] called me because of you. Thank you, really". When the job gets paid, do something concrete: a $25 gift card or $25 off their next service, and tell them what it is for. The person who gets thanked sends again. The one who does not never knew it worked.
The call to your old boss
Anybody you worked for already knows you do good work, which is the hardest thing to prove. Call, do not text: "I went out on my own. If you ever have overflow work, something very small, or something outside your area, I will take good care of it and I will never go around you to the customer". Say that last part out loud: his fear is that you steal customers. This is usually the first paid job of a new business.