A few months ago I discovered a way to easily add hundreds of new people to your potential client base with little effort.

This method works best in dense, upper class areas and you must match two requirements:

1. You must find an apartment building with wealthy people residing in them.

2. It must have a manned reception that aren’t just there to take calls, but also to help the people residing in the building. For example, the type that will make dinner bookings for its tenants.

These sorts of places are generally found in the middle of a decent sized city because apartment buildings are needed due to space restrictions and to live in such a central location, you have to be rich.

Once you have found such a place, take note of its name and create a small amount of advertising specific to that building. I do this on my home printer because I only need a few sheets.

On this advertising you would have your usual “what you do and what you charge” information and also have a 10% discount for all residents of that building.
Discounts tend to work better if they look like a cut out coupon and feel free to bump up your prices to cover that 10 percent.

Once you have created your advertising, print up about 10-20 sheets, staple them together and give them to the most senior person at the reception of the aparment building you found. Recite your usual self promotion speech (eg. that your a computer technician, local, certified, X amount of years experience, insured etc..) and convince them to hand them out to their tenants when they ask or mention a computer problem.

How do you convince them to do so? Make it about them. Don’t make it about yourself and how it will benefit you by having more clients.

To convince them you can say something along the lines of:

• Their business looks good to their tenants because they have the power to get discounts for services (your 10% discount)
• Its a value added service they can provide to their customers

I don’t know about you, but I often let my clients know that I have special access to certain things to make my business look better.

“Oh, and when you go there, tell them Bryce Whitty sent you and they will give you a discount”. My clients are thankful for that information and it makes me more useful to them. The method mentioned above takes advantage of other businesses desire to look good in front of their customers.

I have used this method on a few places near my location and out of those ten or so places, two of them appear to be actively handing out my advertising.

It may not sound like it is worth it given the fact you have to make up advertising specific to that location and put in time to sell yourself to the reception. However, one of the locations that I have succeeded with has over 300 tenants and another has around 550 tenants; when any of these 850+ people have a computer problem, I get called.

I am regularly called out to these locations and occasionally I get to fix multiple tenants computers in one day. Finish one, walk down the hall and start another. Its great!

Find some wealthy apartment blocks, get some advertising together and go get some of these for yourself. Its a nice client-base booster.