The first three clients: how to win them without your old employer's list

The first three clients of the business you build will not come from the list you left behind. They come from three places that are yours and nobody else’s: what is public, what people already think of you, and roughly ten conversations you can have without betraying anyone. Win those three and you have a desk. Try to shortcut them with a former employer’s data and you will lose the deal, probably a court case, and the reputation that was your main asset. This article is about where to look and where not to.

Why three

Three is the number at which a backer stops wondering whether the first one was luck. One client could be a favour. Two could be a coincidence. Three, won from a standing start, in different places, by the same method, is a pattern. It is also roughly the number at which a recruitment, lead-generation or outsourced-finance desk covers its own delivery cost and starts producing profit. The profit share in the deal, 30% from day one, only means something once there is profit to share, and the shareholding comes later still. Three clients is usually where it all begins.

They are the hardest three you will ever win. You have no brand, no case studies under your new name, and no colleague to pass you a warm introduction. What you have instead is set out below.

What is public is yours

Every company that is hiring posts the roles somewhere. Every company that has just raised money, opened an office, won a contract or lost a senior person says so, in filings, in trade press, on job boards, on the professional network. None of this belongs to your old firm. It belongs to anyone willing to read it.

Set aside an hour a day to read it properly. Build your own list from scratch, in your own CRM, and note why each name is on it. A company with four open roles in a function you know is a recruitment prospect. A firm that has just hired a head of sales is a lead-generation prospect, because that person needs pipeline in their first quarter. A company announcing growth with no finance director is an outsourced-finance prospect. You are not guessing. You are reading signals that are published for anyone to see.

The list you build this way is thin at first and feels slow. It is also clean, defensible and yours for good.

Your reputation is yours

Over the years you have placed people, booked meetings, closed month-ends. Some of those people remember you well. The candidate you placed three years ago is now a hiring manager. The marketing lead whose calendar you filled has moved firms. The finance contact whose books you kept now sits on a board.

They remember you, not your former employer. Your relationship with them, as people who know your work, is yours to use. What you may not do is use your old firm’s records to find them. If you need the CRM to remember who they are, they are not your contacts in any meaningful sense. If you can list them from memory and they would take your call, they are.

Write that list from memory, on paper, before you open anything. That exercise alone tells you how much of your past relationships were really yours, and it is the first thing a backer will ask to see.

The ten conversations that are legitimately yours

From the memory list, pick ten people. Not the ten most senior. The ten most likely to answer, who know first hand what you can do, and who sit somewhere near a budget.

Tell each of them the truth in plain terms. You have left. You are building your own desk, backed by a partner who covers your living costs through a monthly allowance and shares the profit with you. You are looking for your first three clients and you would rather they were people who already know your work. Then ask two questions. Do they have a need you can meet in the next quarter. And who else should you be talking to.

Ten honest conversations like this usually produce two or three live discussions and a handful of introductions. That is enough. The introductions you get from these ten are yours because they were made to you, by people who chose to make them. That is how a real track record starts under your own name.

What is never yours

A former employer’s client list, in any form, including the version you could reconstruct from your sent items. Their candidate database and the CVs in it. Their pricing, margins, contract terms and pipeline. Anything marked confidential and anything you would be uncomfortable showing to their lawyer.

The reason this matters is not only legal, though it is legal, and the restrictive covenants you signed are usually enforceable enough to cost you a year. The reason is that the deal depends on a track record you can repeat, and a list you took is not repeatable. It runs out. Worse, the clients on it know where you got their names, and the first one who mentions it to your old firm ends the business you are building before it has a bank balance.

We say no to most things and quickly, and the fastest no of all is to any operator who turns up with a spreadsheet they should not have.

What to do this week

• Write your memory list, on paper, before you open a laptop.
• Pick ten names from it and book the conversations.
• Start a public-signals list in your own CRM with a one-line reason for each entry.
• Reread your restrictive covenants and write down, in your own words, what they stop you doing.
• Delete anything from your old firm that is still on your devices.
• Draft the two-sentence description of the business you build that you will say in every call.
• Aim the first three conversations at people who have a budget this quarter.