I like to cook. In fact, during my dozen years as a single dad raising three young boys on my own, I got pretty good in the kitchen. By necessity. But… I was never great at winging it. That is, I’m not an improvisational cook. I need a recipe.

In business too.

The Early Years

When I first started my law firm nearly 30 years ago, I was winging it. I had no clue. I had no clue how to advertise or market or have sales conversations. I had no idea how to do business development or land clients… let alone how to actually do the work! I had no clue as to what actually yielded results and what didn’t.

I was good at throwing money at stuff… but pretty randomly. I’d chase the latest Yellow Page promotional schemes (that’s dating myself I know), and then later lead generation gigs, and then Internet pay per click advertisements. SEO and SEM and S & M… just checking to see if you’re still reading… .

I was successful. But by accident; not by design. And not without wasting a lot of time and money. And not without a lot of stress. Because the success wasn’t linear. There were these huge ups and downs. The entrepreneurial roller coaster as Darren Hardy might say. No predictability that I could rely on. Up and down. Feast or famine.

Because I had no system; no recipe.

The Pivot

That’s, of course, how I stumbled into my coaching and consulting biz. Haphazardly. Without a plan. Without a system. Without a recipe. And when you do (or don’t do!) the same thing, you tend to get the same results. Haphazard. Inconsistent. Unreliable.

But, at that juncture, I couldn’t afford haphazard. Too much was at stake. I had a lawyer’s income that I relied on, that my family relied on. There were mortgages and bills and overhead and infrastructure. I didn’t have the luxury of ‘doing what I loved’ hoping that the money would follow. (Hope is not a strategy as I tell my clients.) I didn’t want the risk. I couldn’t have the risk.

So after stumbling around in the darkness… and experiencing way too much uncertainty (you may read this as way too many really lean months with bills that were late, and credit card companies that were calling, and college tuitions that were due), I sought out a system. And found one.

The Recipe

Book Yourself Solid®. The fastest, easiest, most reliable system to get more clients than I can you can handle even if you hate marketing and selling… so the pitch went. I looked at it closely… and it made a lot of sense. I bought the book. And then I invested a shitload of money in mentorship.

From time to time, I got tempted to go rogue… to try out my own entrepreneurial ideas. And then I stopped myself short. Somebody… this dude Michael Port… took the time to engineer this system… to write out the recipe. I better follow the recipe, I thought. And I did.

And it worked. Together with my beautiful business partner (and life partner) Ann Sheybani, I created a way to do the work I cared about deeply… serving talented entrepreneurs and business professionals all around the world… coaching, collaborating, creating…writing, speaking, sharing… with the freedom to travel and adventure all around the globe… with the ability to spend much of our year on a beautiful hillside overlooking the North Atlantic in County Cork, Ireland, with a prosperity and joy we could once only dimly hope for.

Because I followed a recipe.

Book Yourself Solid® is not the only business building recipe. I happen to think it’s a damn good one. And I am now privileged to be an Elite Level Certified Book Yourself Solid® Coach. But my teaching point here is that, while some of you may be good at winging it, most of us (like me) are better served by following a recipe.

Sometimes when I’m coaching a client just starting out in  business, I’ll see them trying to deviate from the recipe… wanting to go off piste like I once did… wanting to do it their own way. Of course it usually doesn’t yield the results they imagine.

Early in my cooking excursions, I learned (the hard way) that substituting baking powder for baking soda didn’t work out very well… I didn’t get the rise the recipe called for.

If you’re building a biz, find a find a system, a reliable system. A recipe. Then follow it.

No substitutions. Avoid the baking powder.

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93% of those who follow the Book Yourself Solid® recipe see a 40% increase in revenue in the first year. I have coached folks right from the start, beginning from zero, to a healthy 6-figure business in a year’s time. If you’d like a recipe like this, then we need to talk. Email me at: walt@walthampton.com

Oh… and by the way… we’re teaching this program LIVE in IRELAND in September… you just MIGHT want to check it out. Go HERE now!