She’d sent around 1,000 emails.
Architects, interior designers, construction companies. One after another, introducing her new business and offering her services. The replies? A trickle.
About halfway through telling me this, she stopped and heard her own email back: “It’s probably just boring loaded text.”
(I’ll be honest, I’ve written a few of those myself. We all have.)
This is the story of one of my Brown Paper Strategy Workshops, a two-hour business strategy session at my kitchen table. I’ve kept my client anonymous, but I wanted to share it because so many of us have done exactly this. Lots of effort, very little back, and no idea why.
Meet my client
She’s professionally qualified, with around ten years spent managing building projects, and she’s still doing that full time. She’s driven, organised and seriously good at what she does.
This year she took the plunge and set up her own company. It has two sides: project management for residential building work (extensions, refurbishments, new kitchens), and a ‘life’ side helping busy women organise everything from holidays to trades to household admin.
She came to me because the work wasn’t coming in, and she’d started to wonder whether she was wasting her time. Her words on the questionnaire: not sure whether she was doing the right things, or whether her pitch was any good.
What I Heard
Every workshop write-up I send starts with “What I Heard”. Before we talk about where someone is going, I play back where they really are. Here’s what I heard at this business strategy session.
Effort was never the problem. A thousand emails is a lot of work, alongside a full-time job. Most people would have given up after fifty. She has the drive. What she needed was a better target for it.
The email was all about her. Who she was, what she offered, a bit about one side of the business, a bit about the other, and her background. Everything a reader needed to know about her, and nothing about them.
Two sides in one message muddied both. A builder reading about holiday planning, or a busy mum reading about contract administration, has to work out which bit is for them. Most people won’t. I see this every month at networking: pitches that describe everything someone does, so nobody leans in.
There was no follow-up. One email, then silence. And as she pointed out herself, plenty of those emails probably landed with an admin inbox, and the director never saw them. We can’t know for sure, but it’s very likely.
Her real strength was hiding. She’s spent years on the client’s side of building projects, keeping budgets and programmes on track. That’s exactly what a stretched builder or an anxious homeowner needs, and it was buried halfway down the email.
Where she wanted to get to
Point A: a new company, a full-time job, and outreach that wasn’t landing.
Point B: leave the 9-to-5, with three or four days a week of her own consultancy work and the freedom to manage her own time.
The work needs to be there before the job goes. (I’m not a financial risk taker, so that’s always where I start.) So the question became: what’s the quickest route from A to B, using the hours she actually has?
The priorities from her business strategy session
1. Start with their problem, not your services
A busy builder isn’t searching for ‘project management services’. But he might be exhausted by the client who rings five times a day asking how the job’s going, while he’s trying to actually get the job done.
So I gave her a deliberately different opening line. Something like: “Hi, I’m [name], and I take the stress away from those clients who drive you nuts phoning for updates on their project.”
The point wasn’t to copy it word for word. It was to lead with what changes for the person reading: fewer interruptions, a calmer client, more time to build. Then, and only then, a line on her experience, and an invitation to chat.
Her reaction said it all. She realised the thing she’d missed was “actually being a person.”
I learnt this one the hard way myself. When I started networking with my interior design business, the pitch that finally landed was the simplest one: what the client got, not everything I could do.
Business lesson: nobody buys your list of services. They buy the end of a problem they recognise.
2. Twenty thoughtful approaches beat a thousand generic ones
Instead of another blanket mailout, we talked about choosing 20 to 30 local builders whose projects might suit her. Higher-end builders looked worth testing first. On smaller jobs, an architect or interior designer often handles the project management already. A builder delivering a substantial project may well welcome someone to take on client communication and coordination. (A route to test, not a guarantee.)
Then research each one, personalise every approach, and use the channel they actually use. Email, Instagram, WhatsApp or a phone call. As she knows from her partner, email is often the last thing a builder gets to.
And track every contact and every follow-up, so she can see what gets a reply and do more of it.
Business lesson: volume feels productive. But twenty conversations you’ve thought about will teach you more than a thousand emails nobody reads.
3. Borrow the words from the people who live the problem
She has a golden nugget close to home: her partner is a builder. I suggested asking him for his 20 worst client and project headaches.
Those become her outreach language. Not an abstract list of services, but situations a builder reads and thinks, “That’s me. That was last Tuesday.”
Business lesson: the best messaging isn’t written at your desk. It’s borrowed from the people who have the problem.
4. Follow up, and pick up the phone
One email is a knock on the door. If nobody answers, it doesn’t mean nobody’s home.
She agreed to try an email as a first touch, then follow up on a different channel. And, despite the discomfort, to pick up the phone. (Nobody loves a cold call. Me included.)
We also talked about her networking group. Rather than a broad pitch about everything she does, she’ll ask for something specific: introductions to local builders.
Business lesson: the follow-up is where the conversation starts. And a specific ask gets you specific introductions.
What we parked
Sometimes the most useful part of a workshop is what you decide not to do.
Another mass mailout. The first thousand taught her what doesn’t work. A second thousand would only teach her the same thing again.
Architects and interior designers as the first route. They’re not off the list for good. But on smaller projects many already manage the build themselves, so builders are the better place to test first.
The pitch about everything. For now, every approach talks about one problem for one kind of person. The rest of what she offers can come up once the conversation has started.
Bringing it all together
The lesson from 1,000 emails wasn’t “don’t do outreach”. It was that effort alone doesn’t make a message relevant.
Her next experiment is smaller and much more human: find the right people, understand what drives them nuts, open with the problem she can solve, and follow up like she means it. Twenty thoughtful approaches, tracked properly, will tell her far more than another thousand.
She arrived at her business strategy session with the drive and the expertise. She left pointing them at the right people.
Watch this space…
I’ll be catching up with her at her three-month momentum call, and I’ll share how she’s got on. Did the builders pick up the phone? Which opening line worked? Watch this space. (In the meantime, you can catch up on my other [Real Client Stories](https://vickylabinger.com/latest-posts/).)
In the meantime, if you’re putting in the effort and not seeing it come back, this is exactly what my Brown Paper Strategy Workshop is for. It’s a two-hour business strategy session at my kitchen table in Hockley, with brown paper, coloured pens and Buck greeting you at the door. You get a written plan within one working day, then a 30-day check-in and a three-month momentum call to keep the momentum going. You can find out more about me on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/vicky-labinger/).
Selected dates are available in December, but why not get yourself booked in for January? Book a discovery call
If you enjoyed this Real Client Story, you might also like More ideas than hours, the story of a business owner whose new business took off faster than she expected, with more ideas than she had hours to build them.
