The Ultimate Guide to Referral Networking: Ch.11

 

Chapter 11 Establishing a Focused Practice

When setting up a referral network, it is important to concentrate on what is important, and that is focusing your network on providing you with increased income.

There are a number of ways to focus your practice, and they start by focusing on the building your referral network which will help you increase your reach and get you more introductions to work contracts.

What is Focus?

The focus is a method to concentrate on completing a specific task. However, it is not just about eliminating outside influences from taking your focus away it is about perfecting your task and continuing to perform future tasks in the same manner.

The focus is found in manufacturing industry quality and production cycles, it has other names, such as Kaizen and 5S methods. These are methods used to organize the workplace and make a production process efficient.

The same is with setting up a referral network and environment to increase your income.

The Five Pillars of a Focused Practice

Plan:         This means that you must first create a plan, a project outline and define your objectives.

Define:    This means you must define each task according to its relevance to the success of the objective.

Organize: This means you must organize out your objectives based on the tasks to be performed.

Act:           This means that it is time to stop planning and begin producing.

Evolve:    This means that you must continue to evolve your process by adapting to problems and issues as well as to research and change.

Let’s put each pillar into practice, for example; you want to set up an operations engineering consultancy for manufacturing plants. You have a specific set of skills that enables you to perform expert factory layout for high workflow efficiency. Here is how we would focus your approach.

Plan:           Planning is about managing your referral network and work environment to create successful work/employment contracts. You will define what you can do and how you can do it, write it down and create a message. Explain why you can do this, what is your experience as well as your success stories. Now plan out your e-presence requirements, what do you need to reach as many clients and where will they be able to read up, order and converse with you online? You will need a website, a forum for Q&A and links to references and citations of your work as well as links to conferences and presentations that you have made or will make. Your plan must start with your target and only then start to build up the tools and resources you need to reach it.

Define:      Start by defining which market niche you want to attack. Manufacturing covers every science known to humanity, so you should decide what your strongest sectors are. Are you a specialist in liquid (chemical) facilities or in Automotive? Perhaps Aerospace and Defense? Or FMCG and Hospitality? By defining your sectoral scope, you are setting your market and referral network to a specific range. Now you begin to create your network of connections, where you concentrate (focus) on people that are directly connected to manufacturing companies. You don’t need to make the location local, you can go national, which will broaden your marketing reach. This is the stage you define who will help you reach your specific targets, such as which online company will help you design your website, create an online marketing campaign, and help with SEO issues.

Organize: Once you had a plan and defined each section, you will now organize all the activity to work in a cohesive manner. You are building up your referral network using all the tools at your disposal (as discussed in the article – link here). You are managing all the companies and people that are helping you define your e-presence, and you are managing the budget used to pay for each activity. You are also scheduling your time between building your referral network, developing your e-presence and actually working with clients as you do so. You are also active in conferences, trade shows, and practical research.

Act:             This is when you have started to receive requests for information or been given leads from contacts to open negotiations. This is the moment you have been working hard to reach; it is the focus of your endeavors. The path you chose and tools you used to get here was the means, not the purpose. This is the purpose, closing the deal and starting to work with new clients, all the time maintain and evolving your network to produce more. You will be visiting clients on their site, giving quotes and trying to seal the deal. If you are overloaded with acceptance quotes, it is time to grow, and employ engineers to represent you, or to build partnerships and collaboration with other freelancers.

Evolve:      All the time you are focusing on your business and increasing your potential, you are also evolving. You. are adapting your style, changing the nature of your business to match your progress and keeping your edge over your competition.

Bottom Line

A successful referral network is built to expand, and a successful practice is designed to increase income and enable the individual to grow from a self-employed individual freelancer into a company providing services to many clients. With growth comes a change in personal focus, where at the outset you focused on every detail, you will find that you will start to delegate issues, and focus on larger pictures. Just remember one important fact, no matter how big you grow, never lose sight of your roots.