Once I set up my company entity, I spent a lot of time talking to colleagues, friends and possible clients. Most of the conversations weren’t about closing deals immediately, but everyone I met strengthened my network.
Wall in My Head
Soon enough, I hit the reality of my incompetence. While finding the first four clients was relatively easy due to existing relationships, I failed hard to attract more.
It felt like I was weighed down, holding myself back. I think my lack of confidence showed.
I wasn’t sure what I was offering, and people could see that.
Finding Inner Peace
There’s a lot of advice out there about improving others — your team, your direct report, your strategy, your family. I was so caught up in it that I had no time to stop, look in the mirror, naked, and reflect on myself. I had to learn it.
That is why I decided early enough to find my own coach.
I was happy to find Joel in my network. He’s been keen to expose the details and the reality of his own journey as a well-established engineering leadership coach. He hasn’t given up on me and kept pushing me so that I find answers in my most blurry areas, mainly where my lack of confidence and fear of hypothetical failure was coming from.
After discovering the root cause and applying the fix on my own, I witnessed my “Father, the sleeper has awakened” Dune moment.
In six months, I made a leap from “I’m worried what a client could come up with” to “I hope a customer comes up with something unique or challenging”.
Initial Improvements
In addition, I decided to take a step back and boost my way of working. I improved the tactics in how I searched for clients, and I mastered my introduction sessions.
I tailored a website on my own, added mentoring and advisory guides and my wisdom of knowledge on my site. Most importantly, I started to pay extra attention to the tone of my voice from recording myself.
Gamechangers
There were two determining moments taking place:
- I was chatting one day with my friend, Roman Pichlík (SVPE at Ataccama), who’s famous for running one of the most popular tech and venture czpodcast in the Czech Republic. He got curious about the whole mentoring thing I was into. Together with his pal Filemon (TopMonks founder), they had me on their show to chat about what I was up to. I did my best to explain my mentoring purpose, motivation, and how it works. It was a blast generating the first wave of clients.
- In parallel, I met David Peknic, CTPO at kosik.cz. He needed to boost engineering teams across the company by providing them with a way to identify their potential drawbacks. We agreed on their situation’s most useful engineering efficiency metrics and tailored a solution using Jira, Keboola, and Tableau. Due to my decadent experience in building and adopting such dashboards, we closed a 3-month fractional contract, and my advisory stream was alive. Moreover, David pointed me to a pretty decent book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, that helped me to steer my thoughts around solo entrepreneurship.
My Market Value
Soon enough, I ran into a different issue: Although my advisory work was valued well, my mentoring fee was two times lower than my market price. I didn’t want to subsidize my venture from savings.
Therefore, I made a decision to move big from EUR 150 an hour to 300.
Due to my introverted mind, I was not sure how to approach it. Moreover, it felt risky with the RU-UA situation and companies trying to reduce costs. After explaining the price increase to my clients, I lost 2 out of 13. Another one decided to meet less often.
The majority of customers saw the value in what I provide and understood the significance of investing in their leaders for the long run.