When you’re first getting going with your business, getting those first few people onto your mailing list, or clients booked into your diary can be a real struggle. This is one of the hardest periods for any business owner – and can often be really frustrating. After all, you set up in business to have all that choice over how you spend your time, and indeed to spend more time with friends and family and choose your working hours.

And yet all to often what ends up happening is that you’re working every minute of every every day (and most evenings and weekends too) and seeing very little return on all that effort. Maximum effort, minimum rewards.

But let me reassure you that all that hard work is worth it because behind the scenes, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re building the secret of business success and that’s momentum. Right now you’re shoving that rock up the hill, you’re putting in the legwork and getting maybe 10 or 15 new people onto your mailing list each month.

But what you’ll find is that when you reach the top of the hill, your efforts at building your mailing list (and therefore the ease at which you can attract more clients) will start to take on a life of it’s own. You’ll start to notice that you’re putting in the same amount of work, but getting 30-50 new people join your mailing list each month, and then more and more each and every month.

And  of course the same time you’re learning how to work smarter and more effectively, discarding those tactics that aren’t working for you, and streamlining those that do, so you start working less hard and getting better results.

And as long as you’re continuing to deliver top quality products and services to you clients, they will refer you to others and the whole networking effect kicks in. When you’ve only got 15 people telling 10 other people each how great you are, that’s 150 people that are going to hear about you. When those 150 people join your database and buy your products, you’re going to have 1500 people that are hearing how they need to be finding out more about you and what you do – and this is how the momentum starts to take effect.

For me, I reached the top of the hill at about 1000 subscribers on my mailing list. For others of you it might be just 200 people you need to be in contact with, start really listening to what it is they want from you, create products that solve their problems and you’re at the top of the hill.

It gets easier, I promise you, but unless you put in the effort to climb the hill, you’ll never get to the top.