Glenn Grant is the co-founder and chief visionary of Selfassembled Ventures, a business advising and coaching firm specializing in working with self-made entrepreneurs. After spending a decade building and scaling his first company, Grant embraced a strong exit. He now helps fellow entrepreneurs achieve their dreams by building their companies’ value.
Business Challenges
Although Grant had built a decent network on LinkedIn, he had no tangible marketing list to increase his coaching clientele. He needed a platform to find prospects, but he specifically wanted bootstrap entrepreneurs like himself. By connecting with similar owners, he could immediately relate to the issues they faced in growing their businesses.
However, his clients also often asked for services he didn’t provide. When a client retains a business coach, they likely also need an accountant and, eventually, an M&A professional and a financial advisor. Grant needed a set of tools to provide—or at least refer—all the related services a coaching client would need.
Finally, he lacked support. He didn’t know where to start.
Why The Value Builder System™?
When Grant was preparing to sell his own business, he saw the benefits of The Value Builder System™ firsthand. “Value Builder has a great network of advisors,” he says. Now a business coach and part of that growing network, he knew he had found a platform that provided the right tools and technology to advise owners.
In order to address his clients’ needs beyond coaching, Grant started the Selfassembled Partner Network. He wanted to align with other service advisors along a business owner’s entire path — from building a valuable company, exiting, and life after the business. These partners could share potential clients and create a circle of referrals.
Grant reached out to the people who had helped in his own company’s sale. He invited his accountant, his M&A advisor, and his financial planner to join forces. He threw the pitch: They’d have a short but purposeful meeting each week, build a simple marketing campaign, and then host a webinar in 90 days. “Whoever is a client for one of us,” he said, “is going to be a good potential client for the others at some point.”
The presentation template, the marketing material, and the supporting assets for the webinar were all provided in The Value Builder System™. Grant used its prebuilt marketing materials to quickly populate a content calendar with customized social media posts. Each partner would simply copy and paste the message to their LinkedIn page once or twice a week. Then they’d share and comment on each other’s posts. During the webinar, each member of the partner network would speak. Once completed, they provided takeaway material for attendees, also derived from The Value Builder System™ . It was a win–win for Grant’s fellow advisors.
“There’s tons of great content in the Value Builder portal for advisors,” Grant says. For example, he focuses on the Value Builder Questionnaire. Its 34 questions pinpoint the 8 Key Drivers of business value. “If you have someone fill out that survey,” Grant says, “you’ve got a lot of valuable information.” Grant then leverages the Value Builder Engagement as his coaching framework for each client. It’s a proven 12-step process for increasing a company’s value.
Grant also enables other specialists in the Selfassembled Partner Network with the appropriate tools. For the M&A advisor, the Exit Checklist was the perfect asset for their clients. Similarly, they could leverage the PREScore™ Questionnaire (Personal Readiness to Exit Score) to assess an owner’s psychological readiness to leave their company. The financial advisor embraced the Freedom Score for their clients, providing them with a financial planning guide for life after the business. The prebuilt content and an organized marketing plan kept everyone in the network accountable.
To keep their contacts’ information confidential, the partners sent out email blasts individually to support the webinar. Grant had the smallest list, and the partnership immediately paid off for him. “I didn’t realize how valuable an asset that was going to be,” he says. But the other partners were also surprised at the response from their own contacts. They were now able to offer a complete package of services instead of only their specific niche.
About half of the registrants attended the webinar, and of those, 91% stayed the entire two hours. This meant that no matter which partner drew in the client, they were all able to connect with them. Each partner presented a portion of the webinar, and they combined their takeaways in a single workbook.
But the event wasn’t the end. By recording the webinar, the network members now had an evergreen product with perpetual value. Half of the registrants who didn’t make the webinar watched it later. Grant also edited the recording into segments and uploaded them to YouTube. Each partner continues to recirculate their individual video by linking it to a mailing list or sending it to a particular prospect. The registrant and attendee list also became a new set of contacts for all the partners.
Repeating this process creates the perfect funnel for Selfassembled to generate new business owner leads and convert them into paying clients. As individual advisors, they once had to turn prospects away if they didn’t fall in their niche. Today, the network can close more deals because they have specialists who support the entire business owner lifecycle.
Results
In The Value Builder System™, Grant found prebuilt content that he could easily leverage to grow his practice in an instant. With a wide range of marketing content that could be used by all types of advisors — from business coaches to M&A professionals — Grant was able to start and accelerate his firm. With the Value Builder Engagement, he also has a repeatable coaching framework to help each of his clients build valuable companies.
But, Grant says, “The best source of customers is referrals.” Each partner refers clients to the others, but webinar attendees and other potential clients who find the videos are now connecting with multiple network members. “The results have been really good from our team effort.”
