Meet The Person Behind The Business...

Dear Fellow Professional:

Welcome to the Rainmaker Gateway website.

This is probably the most important page on this website and it will only take you approximately 3 minutes and 48 seconds to read.

Before you do business with anybody, you need a few moments to briefly meet them, get to know their history and learn something about the purpose of the business they represent or own.

This page will give you that opportunity.

A 26 Year Development Process That Started Long Before

The Internet Existed... 

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 26 years later that I'd be spending 100% of my time speaking and writing about marketing high value B2B, complex services instead of doing the business of "accounting, taxes and consulting."

Back in the early '80's the "Big 8" (yes...there were eight big firms way back then) talked a lot about marketing, but placed no where 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 managed to determine three things about "real" business:

1. Real business is not run by accounting theory or fancy financial statement disclosure.
2. Cash is king and,
3. You have to make decisions quickly or you get killed.

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...and...increased revenues can ONLY come from a systematic marketing and sales process.

A business owner will pay you anything if you can show him how to improve sales, boost his cash flow or avoid catastrophic loss and...you can show him the results in dollars and cents!

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 "B2B High Value" intangible services sales and marketing.

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...and I sold those services through practices and businesses of my own, always competing against some "industry behemoth." And I was pretty darn good at it.

My best year came in 1996-97 when I personally marketed and sold over $650,000 of SEC reporting and filing services (a fiercely competitive segment of the market) starting from scratch to eleven different small publicly traded companies in a city where I was new in town and didn't know one soul in the business community when I arrived. I did this out of one small office with a legal secretary and a "junior" staff member. That year I even spun off an additional $275,000 in external audit work to one of the Big 4 firms from these same eleven accounts. And all of this work was sold at premium rates of between $350-$650 per hour. Heck, I even farmed out my own internal accounting work to a  small one man local CPA practice to the tune of $24,000 that year.

All in all -- I personally generated $949,000 in accounting and accounting related consulting billings in one year...from ABSOLUTE SCRATCH.

None of my business has EVER come from the Chamber of Commerce (I've never been a member of one), my professional designation (which doesn't do you much good when you're in a different country), networking, seminars or the "old boys" connection club (in fact...the "old boys" are my main competition when I'm playing the consulting game.) I do it the old fashioned way...I go out and find the problems that businesses have and then...provide them with a solution.

I have discovered that marketing your professional services is a process, the principles of which can be described and implemented 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. You must build relationships for this to work.

The internet offers the ULTIMATE relationship building vehicle if used properly. 

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 or metrics" in your business work and,
3. The process of combining #1 and #2 together so that you don't loose "your shirt." This is called testing...which leads to "quality" profits!

Done correctly, your marketing through the internet can accomplish the following:

• Get people to come out of their offices in the middle of a snow storm to see you at your office...even for something as "dry" as business consulting services.
• Have a steady stream of prospective clients calling you to book your services.
• Provide you with endless referrals from satisfied clients to new prospective clients.
• Allow you to charge the highest fees in your market and have your clients happily pay them.
• Give you rapid market dominance in your trading area in specific high profit niches.
• Provide you with a stress free lifestyle where you don't work tons of overtime and weekends because you know where your NEXT piece of business is coming from..and..you can "fire" small, unprofitable and troublesome accounts and clients. 

How This Web Site and This Business Came To Be 

Shortly after the tragic events of 9/11,  I happened to be in Chicago on business when I came to the realization that business travel and all that it entails was not something that I was prepared to live with in my life anymore.

Having marketed and sold only high value professional services for all of my adult life combined with the decision not to travel for business presented me with two potential courses of action:

1. Confine myself to doing business only in the local geographic community in which I live, or
2. Find a way to market and sell my professional services globally WITHOUT having to travel to endless sales meetings.
   

Thus began my odyssey through the arcane, over complex, over hyped and generally misunderstood world of marketing and selling high value B2B services through the internet.

I rapidly discovered several important things:

1. Most internet advisory firms or gurus (including the ones that claim to understand the B2B marketing of services) have NEVER really sold anything worth more than a few hundred bucks or so in their lives over the internet.
2. Marketing B2B high value services using the internet is NOT the same process that Amazon uses to sell you books for $25 a pop, and
3. There are far too many people and disciplines who "claim" to have the internet figured out. You have "web design artists", programming geeks, blogging geeks, podcast geeks, statistical geeks, social networking geeks...well...you're getting the idea...far too many "geeks"...not enough real street smarts. 

Over the last six years and mostly out of total frustration I've personally had to develop the systems and procedures (through a lot of trial and error and through the expenditure of several hundred thousand dollars of my own money and time) that I use today in my own businesses to regularly sell five and six figure B2B consulting services and other related products exclusively via the internet. 

During the summer of 2006 I decided that there had to be a better, simpler way for you and other providers of B2B services to gain access to the systems, methodologies and procedures that I use in order to cost effectively market their services through the internet using systematic and proven internet marketing strategies. 

The end result of all of this work is the website and the consulting business that you see here.

I didn't develop this stuff sitting in a university or hiding out in a giant consultancy...nor did I let my "giant" consulting firm experience prevent me from learning what REALLY works out there. 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 payroll coming due tomorrow that looks like the debt of a third world country and you've got $3.98 in the bank...you start learning what works and what doesn't work in a hurry.

If you have been looking for a proven internet B2B marketing system (one that allows you to exponentially multiply the time resource effectiveness of yourself and your sales people) and all the required "bells and whistles" that have to go with it to make it work...all in one place...all in one "turn-key" package then this site is for you.

If you'd like a bunch of "consulting babble and buzzwords" I am very capable of DROWNING you in them if you REALLY think that would help your business...but...I'd much rather give you the "straight goods" in plain English...no babble, no acronyms, no big math formulas...no consulting gobbledygook...no "BS"...period! 

Now that you know the story, the history and the purpose of this site...please...accept my cordial invitation to explore the rest of this site and learn what the various ideas and systems presented here can do for your B2B high value service marketing efforts. 

What you will see and learn here will work if you're a small million dollar shop or if you're a giant billion dollar complex B2B service provider. 

All that remains is for you to familiarize yourself with the rest of this site and what we do here and then contact me so that we can begin a mutual dialogue to determine if these methods can help you.

To all your best success!

Warmly,