We decided that just looking after 500 people in and around Oxford was really not where we wanted to be. We wanted to be something bigger and bigger and bigger. So, we set ourselves the goal of growing 500 percent in seven years.

We are now halfway through our vivid vision, and we’ve learned a lot over that time. These are just three of the strategies I’ve learned from experience over the last two and a half, three years that are crucial to growing the business 500 percent:

1. Break your referrals into two groups

We have introductions and referrals. Introductions are those referrals that just come to us. I’m sure you get telephone calls all the time or emails from people saying, “Joe recommended me to you. Joe gave me your details.” Those are introductions. Referrals are the leads that you go out and get, that you push. Because an introduction you can’t control. You can’t control if people just phone up and give their name to you, but you can control how you ask them.

What we found is that when we didn’t have a specific process, it was very random. The moment we put in a specific process, we can turn this on and off as we need it. The process is really straightforward. It starts with the fact find. We are not asking them, “Whom do you know?” We are asking them, “Tell me about your family. Tell me about your brothers and sisters. What do they do for a living? Tell me about your parents. Tell me about your children. Tell me about whom you work with.” We’re trying to identify someone whom we would like to ask for as a referral.

Once we have identified that person, the next thing is to ask the client if they would allow us to use their name as a referral. “It’s really interesting you spoke about your brother, Ian. Do you think he’d mind if I dropped him an email because I think I might be able to help him now that you mentioned that he’s about to go bankrupt,” or whatever it is. Very rarely do they say no. At that point we do an email introduction. We would ask Ian to email us and his brother. Let’s say his name’s Colin. “Colin, I was with David the other day, and we spoke about you. I think you should have a chat with him.” I’ve now got an email lead to Colin, and I had the introduction from Ian. We will then contact Colin via email and ask for a chemistry meeting, which is much easier now because you can do that via Zoom or via Teams. A chemistry meeting is a 15-minute meeting to see whether you really want to work with them. Pretty much everybody says yes to that.

In doing that chemistry meeting, what works more than anything else are very simple questions: “Would you like a second opinion on your pension?” “Would you like a second opinion on your investments?” “Would you like a second opinion on your life insurance?” “Would you like a second opinion on your taxes?” I’ve yet to have anybody say no to those questions.

“You know what, Colin? Because Ian referred you to us, I’m not going to charge you.” “Oh, thank you very much.” We’ll go for the first full meeting or the second opinion service. The vast majority go for a second opinion service.

Then, on the back of that, we have a bunch of relevant prerecorded videos that we send. If we are speaking about pensions, we send them the prerecorded pension video. If we are talking about investments, we send them the prerecorded video about investments. If we are talking about estate planning, we send them the prerecorded video on estate planning. That starts to make the sale.

2. Be strategic about your marketing system

We use a seminar system, which many people in the U.K. use simply because it is very effective. It starts with identifying a group of people whom you would like to speak to, and we use data mining. We employ a company to look at the data to see if it can locate our ideal client. We want to deal with people who are age 50 and over, who live within certain locations and who are worth more than a million pounds.

The next stage is to mail them. We send out about a quarter of a million mailing pieces a year to people inviting them to a public education event. These are either about wills or about inheritance tax planning. We have somewhere between 20 and 60 people attend these two-hour events. From there we need to qualify them.

If you structure it quickly, you can get 100 percent of the people to say yes — they want a meeting. You don’t want to see 100 percent of the people. You only want the ones who are really interested. The way we qualify them is that we charge them for the first meeting. You don’t pay for a meeting if you’re not serious. We get a closing rate of between 45 and 60 percent for those who pay for the first meeting.

3. Prioritize your agenda

If you wake up on a Monday morning and decide the three things that you need to do this week to drive the business forward are A, B and C, it will not be dealing with staff problems. It will not be handling the client issues that come in. It will not be handling the emails. It will be about the big things that you need to do to drive the business forward. That’s your agenda.

This means you must let go of your email. Let somebody else do it. Yes, manage your own personal email, but within business, the moment you look at an email, you are responding to somebody else’s priorities. It’s what they want, not what you want. Why is your assistant not answering all your emails, calibrating what’s important, putting them to one side and passing them to you at the right time?

Likewise, with incoming client queries, your clients need to understand you are not at their beck and call. You can’t love all of them. When there are 1,000, when there are 2,000, when there are 5,000, you can’t do it. So the clients have to be trained to understand that they have access to you when it’s appropriate. But guess what? There is probably a bunch of other people within the company who can do it even better than you. And if not, you need to have those in the company to do it better than you.

In the same way, you need somebody else to look after your staff and do the day-to-day management of the company, just as any problems that come into the business need to go to somebody else. If you are doing something that is not your agenda, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.