Marketing and client acquisition

A recurring error?
Often, business plans are drafted on a 3-year basis so there might be, I’ll just make it up: a turnover of €300 000 in the 36th month. That’s good. But you need to work it out the other way too. Imagine you’re in month 36, your €300 000 turnover, how many invoices is that? That’s something young entrepreneurs don’t always realize but there’s a part of the work, I very distinctly remember sending out the first invoices by hand that we prepared on Word or Excel typing in the 001 of our very first invoice ourselves. It’s something that’s very down to earth, you should always imagine yourself doing it in month 36. You say you’ll have a turnover of €300 000. What’s that? 100 000 invoices for €3, or 3 invoices for €100 000? Who are the clients? Name them. You should almost write it down: what lines are on the invoice? It’s a bottom-up exercise that’s very interesting to do because it lays out before you a lot of routes you should avoid.

What approach to take?
If you know what you’re aiming for your €300 000 is more 3 clients at €100 000, it’s a logic that won’t require much marketing. It’ll be more B2B, sales reps holding knives in their teeth trying to catch clients. So again, the whole exercise of “Should I get Google Ads” and things like that probably isn’t relevant. But if it’s the other logic of “My €300 000 will be more from 50 000 six-euro clients” your approach will be much more marketing-oriented. So, what’s the cost of acquiring a new client? etc. Those are also things we have learned.

What is the cost of acquisition?
If you to want “rule the world” you’ll need to acquire clients from around the world and that costs a lot of money! Each client… for our current startup, each client costs about €1000.