Five More Weird Things That Got Me Clients

None of this replaces good work. It just makes sure people find out about it. I told you about seven weird things I did that got me clients. Here's five more. I didn't plan these either. I just did them because they felt right. Looking back, they weren't accidents.

A quick note on where this comes from: I run gev.design, a fractional design studio. Everything here is stuff I've actually done to land the clients and projects you can see there. Not theory. Not a framework I read somewhere.

I went looking for the people everyone skips

I searched LinkedIn for people who had their status set to stealth mode. Most people scroll right past those folks. I sent them the same one line I send anyone: "Hey, I'm Gev. I'm a designer. Here's my website." No generic AI pitch that tries too hard.

You know the kind I mean. Four paragraphs, perfect punctuation, something about your "incredible journey." I don't have a journey. I have a Tuesday. You can always tell it's AI because it's too nice, too fast, and somehow already knows I'm "exactly the kind of visionary" they've been looking for. Nobody who's met me has ever called me that.

A few replied to my one line. One turned into a six figure deal. That client sent me to someone else, and that turned into two more six figure deals.

Everyone treats stealth mode as a signal to back off. That's exactly why it's underused. People building something new, right before they're ready to talk about it, are also the people about to start hiring and spending with no vendor locked in yet. Everyone else waits for the launch post, or worse, sends a bot. I showed up before there was anything to react to, and I did it myself.

I did free work for the right person, on purpose

I've done free work for a few people over the years. Not for anyone who asked. For a specific kind of person, doing a specific kind of project.

The project has to be something I'd actually want to do anyway. A friend's personal brand. A restaurant I already go to. A community thing in my own neighborhood. Something my friends are going to see and go "wait, you did that?" If it doesn't have that pull, I'm not interested.

The person matters more than the project, though. I look for the connector. The person running events for founders, or sitting at the center of a community that's full of exactly the people who'd hire me. My first one was a leader in a Toronto community running events for founders, the kind of room I wanted to be in the middle of. That's how we ended up doing the brand and site for TechTO and Peerscale, and later for the DMZ.

None of it was charity. I wasn't helping people out of the goodness of my heart. I was picking people who could put me in front of a room I couldn't get into on my own, and doing work good enough that people noticed. You can only really do this two or three times when you're starting out, so pick carefully. The work has to be interesting. The person has to be a door, not just a favor.

I check in with no agenda

I message people who already know what I do. I don't sell them anything. Just to ask what they're building now, what's changed since we last talked.

I'm not doing a strategy. I'm just nosy. I genuinely want to know what happened to that thing they were stressed about twelve months ago. Did it work out. Did they quit. Are they still doing the thing with the warehouse. I don't remember what the warehouse was about, I just remember there was a warehouse.

Because it's a real conversation, they usually ask me the same thing back. That's when I mention what I'm working on. Not before.

Most advice says to stay top of mind by posting updates and broadcasting your wins. Like everyone's sitting there refreshing your page, hoping for news. Nobody's doing that. But being curious about someone else's work, that they notice.

I built a dinner table on purpose

I still run a dinner series called Afterwork.rsvp. I put people in my circle together over a meal I plan myself, people I like and think are smart. The newer version is a twist. I partner with someone new each time, and they bring two or three people who don't know anyone else at the table. Less pressure for me, and my circle grows through someone else's circle instead of just mine.

Lots of people network to meet clients directly. I network to meet the kind of people clients come from. If you spend your time around A players, you get pulled into A player work. Not because you pitched anyone at dinner. Because they refer you to other A players.

I hired someone to say what I already do

I get almost all my business through word of mouth, and I barely talk about the work itself. I have case studies sitting on my site that even my own clients haven't seen. One client didn't know I'd done a certain project until I mentioned it in passing. I don't know why I do this. I'll finish a whole project and just move on like it's a secret I'm keeping from myself. So I'm hiring a fractional PR person. Just to say out loud what I'm already doing.

Everyone assumes weak word of mouth means you need to do more work, or better work. Mine wasn't a work problem. It was a talking about the work problem. Posting once on LinkedIn every so often isn't a strategy. It's a rounding error. People need to see the same story more than once, across more than one place, before it actually registers.

And the real shift came from a conversation about how to frame it. I don't want to be a McKinsey. I want to be the corner bodega that also serves drinks under the table. Small, trusted, known by the right people. Not built for everyone. Fractional work isn't just a smaller version of consulting. Strategy and execution stay with the same person. Nothing gets handed to a junior team you never meet.

One honest note before you try any of these. None of this replaces being good at the actual work. These five things just make sure people find out you're good, instead of you sitting there waiting to be discovered, like a nice restaurant on a street nobody walks down.

That said, some of these tactics only work if you can actually remember what happened, who promised what, and which client needs a follow up. I am, personally, very bad at this. I will have a great conversation with someone, mean every word of it, and then forget it happened by Thursday. So I got tired of losing that stuff in scattered notes and Slack threads, and I've been building Juggle, a tool that quietly captures tasks and notes from your client calls and tags them to the right client automatically. No bots, no manual sorting, nothing used to train AI. If you're a fractional or consultant juggling this same mental load, I'm opening up early access. Check it out at www.joinjuggle.com.

Which of these would feel too uncomfortable for you to actually try? Messaging a stranger in stealth mode, or hosting a dinner where you barely know half the table?

Thanks for reading,
Gev