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Meet Patrick McEvoy - President of Rainmaker Blueprints
Some people have called me the "Coach To Rainmakers."
While I'm always flattered at the remark, I want assure you that things weren't always that way.
In the aftermath of the tragic events of 9/11 I decided to show professionals who provide high value professional services that there is a better way to go about your business than simply "never meeting a billable hour" that you didn't like and working 2,500+ hours per year.
Like you, was making my living selling and providing accounting, consulting and related legal services. Not only was I sellling them, I was supervising the work, providing technical guidance and I was sleeping in airports, dealing with low quality, demanding clients and working more and more hours for less and less real income.
From relative obscurity back then, I've written 579 plus articles and delivered over 136 seminars and speeches on the process of how to become a Rainmaker, marketing and entrepreneurship.
Right now if you type in the Google search term "Rainmaker Best Practices" you'll find my old web site RainMakerBestPractices.com ranked Number 1 with some 211,000 other websites either linked to or making a reference to me.
You'll find similar results for my CPA marketing specialty site...CPAMarketingBestPractices.com with some 22,300 web sites mentioning me and my work.
Things have certainly changed over the last 6 years!
When I walked out of University in 1981 with my newly minted degree in Accounting to join Ernst and Young, I never thought that now, almost 27 years later that I'd be spending 100% of my time speaking and writing about becoming a Rainmaker and an entrepreneur instead of accounting and taxes.
Those first few years were an exciting time. Learning about "real" business, studying, making new friends around the world...all of the benefits of a "Big 8 Firm" (yes, there really were 8 Big Firms back then) and getting my professional designation.
I also discovered that I loved entrepreneurs and I loved the sales and marketing process.
Back in the early '80's the "Big 8" talked a lot about marketing, but placed nowhere near the emphasis on "selling" accounting, auditing, consulting and other financial services that they do today.
In fact, I was considered a bit of a "nutcase" because I actually liked going to client development presentations, seminars and "sales" meetings. I even made cold calls for the fun of it!
During those first few years I determined three things about real business:
1. Business is not run by fancy "university course" theory.
2. Cash is king and,
3. You have to provide real perceived value to clients or you become a commodity.
It didn't take long to learn that you can only cut costs so much from any given business and that any "real" improvement in cash flow over the long term had to come from increased revenues.
A business owner will pay you anything if you can show him how you add value to his business or his life!
By this time I had
switched firms and moved over to Peat, Marwick & Mitchell (the forerunner to
KPMG)
in their Global Tax Advisory Group and I had finally decided it was time to "do my own thing"
business wise and... to see the world while I was at
it.
Wanting to see the world and be your own boss creates a unique problem. I had to find a way to market and sell professional services (the only thing I knew how to do back then) in whatever city and country I might find myself in and I had to find a method of doing it quickly and do it every time, without fail or I'd starve to death!
Realizing that my marketing skills were "zero" at the time, I needed to learn everything about sales and marketing and learn it fast. So, I simply started reading every sales and marketing book that I could find and experimenting with the knowledge until I had developed marketing systems and "formulas" that worked in the intangible and nebulous world of "legal/accounting/consulting" services sales.
The rest as they say is
history. Since then I've been marketing and selling my way through
life all over the world... the United States, Canada, Europe and the Pacific Rim
countries. I've been fortunate enough to have owned my own
profitable companies (not all marketing related) and along the way I've sold and marketed just
about every kind of professional service you can imagine. Accounting services,
consulting, legal, tax, and investment banking (with ORION Over my total career to date I've sold more than $100,000,000 (yes - that is One Hundred Million dollars) worth of professional services of one kind or another either for a major firm or in my own boutique specialty operation.
None of my business comes from the Chamber of Commerce, my professional designation (which doesn't do you much good when you're in a different country or you're competing with 600,000 people who happen to have the exact same designation), networking, seminars or the "old boys" connection club (in fact...the "old boys" are my main competition when I'm playing the consulting game on my own.)
I do it the entrepreneurial way...I go out and provide clients with value added services and products.
I'm not telling you this to brag...I'm simply trying to show you what is possible when you have a proven marketing system...you identify the right niche...and you get off your rear end and go after it!
I have discovered that marketing your professional services when done properly is a process, the principles of which can be described with near scientific accuracy.
Professional Services Marketing In a Nutshell Marketing is simply about getting the most people to do what you want them to do for the highest revenues possible at the least amount of cost.
To do this you must understand three things:
1. The psychology of your clients...what moves them to take action NOW,
2. How the "crucial numbers" in your business work and,
3. The process of combining #1 and #2 together so that you don't lose "your shirt." This is called testing...which leads to profit!
Done correctly, your marketing can accomplish the following:
Sure, there are all kinds of "gurus" running around the legal, accounting and consulting professions pushing the latest "vogue" marketing thing. But, from what I've seen, it's mostly a bunch of crap. If these "gurus" ever had to apply the stuff they teach in a discussion with a Fortune 500 CEO they'd be laughed out of the office.
The number one problem faced by all professional service firms today large or small is the same as it was 20 years ago...how do you find more high quality clients on a consistent and predictable basis?
I didn't develop this stuff sitting in a university or hiding out in a giant consultancy.
I did this stuff in the real world for my own businesses where not only did my paycheck hinge on the outcome of things but a hell of a lot of other people's as well. When you have a $250,000 payroll coming tomorrow and you've got $3.98 in the bank...you start learning what works and what doesn't in a hurry.
I've taken my 26 years of doing this stuff "for real" and spent the last 6 years researching every facet of the professional services industry and where your growth markets will come from in the next ten years.
I'll tell you where those markets are and I'm going to show you the exact marketing and sales programs you need in place to reach them economically and effectively.
Best of all...none of this is going to cost you $12,000-$25,000 like some of the other marketing programs you see out there today.
I want to thank you for visiting my site.
Warmly,
Patrick M. McEvoy
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Capital)...and I've sold those services
through small practices of my own, always competing against some "industry
behemoth." And I was pretty darn good at it.
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