First 100 Customers Guide
Start winning customers this week with a 7-day warm outreach sprint. Turn first jobs into repeat ones. Then open the right doors in the right order, and work out your own honest date for customer 100.
Warm first. Then 1 more door, picked by what you have more of: time or money.
The Full Guide
17 parts. Every script and worksheet inline, plus a worksheet pack and a tracker.
- The 15-minute quick win: 5 personal messages, and what to say to each kind of reply
- The honest arithmetic: customers = attempts x your rate, and the time check most plans skip
- The Four Doors, ordered for launch: warm first, then 1 more door chosen by time or money
- The 7-day sprint: 100 contacts, about 20 conversations, about 4 first jobs, with the tracker pre-filled day by day
- Referrals and local partners: the ask treated as an offer, a Dream 25 partner list, and reviews done by the rules
- Turn the first job into the next one: the job-end rebooking ask, a plan priced against the one-off, and the rebooked-within-30-days count
- Local cold outreach, the legal way: doors near your jobs, business calls, compliant email. No cold texts
- Paid ads, last and gated: 5 gates and the 30-day maths that make an ad pay for itself
- 4 labelled composites, including one that fails, with every sum shown: cost per customer with hours and discounts, checked against what a customer is worth
- Your own date for customer 100, a baseline, and 30 and 90-day look-backs
WHYWhy Most New Businesses Stall Before Customer 10
Most new owners do not fail because their work is bad. They fail for 2 boring reasons. They knock on the wrong door first. And they knock on far too few.
A stranger has to decide 2 things before they hire you. Are you any good? Can they trust you in their house, on their car, in their yard? With no reviews and no photos of past work, a stranger cannot answer either question yet.
The people in your phone answered the trust question years ago. That is why every plan in this book starts with them. It is not the biggest door. It is the one that opens fastest.
20 messages over 6 weeks is not a test. Work the whole list, 3 touches each, then judge it.
THE MATHSWhy "100 Customers in 90 Days" Usually Fails
Every customer comes from 1 equation: customers = attempts x your rate. The second equation is the one most plans ignore: hours needed = attempts x minutes per attempt / 60.
100 customers in 90 days is about 33 a month. At the warm planning rate the book uses (4 first jobs per 100 people, from the warm outreach principles in $100M Leads), that is about 825 warm contacts a month. At about 13 hours 20 minutes per 100 contacts, that is about 110 hours a month of outreach, on top of doing the jobs.
You can buy customers with time, with money, or both. Someone pays. The book shows you how to work out what your own plan costs and when your customer 100 really arrives, with your own rates, not ours.
THIS WEEKThe 7-Day Sprint (preview)
100 people who know you, up to 3 touches each over about 3 days, about 20 conversations, about 4 first jobs.
The book gives you the plan for every day, the follow-up schedule, the minutes, and a tracker already filled in with the planning numbers. You add what actually happened, then find the stage that leaked. After your first 100, you cross out the planning rates and use your own.
THE RULESWhat You Will Not Find in This Book
- No cold texting. Texts go to people you already text, or people who asked you to. Strangers get a knock, a call to their business line, or a properly built email.
- No review gating. Ask every customer for a review the same way, and never trade a discount for one.
- No borrowed benchmarks dressed up as facts. Every number is a labelled hypothetical, a rate from a named book or study, or a blank for your own figure.
- No targets. No target ratio, no "healthy" repeat rate. The only hard line is a customer who costs more to win than they leave you, and that is arithmetic.
- No client results. We do not publish client results. The 4 worked examples are labelled composites, and one of them fails.
Do This Today
Before you close this page, do this 1 thing:
Open your texts. Write down the first 30 names. Circle the 5 warmest. Send each of them a personal message: a real opener about them, what you do now, and 2 easy asks. Could they use it? Do they know 1 person who could?
Chapter 1 gives you the exact message, what to charge your first 5 customers, and what to say to every kind of reply. It is free.
Read chapter 1 free.
Start with the first chapter. The full book is $27.
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