I used to think the answer was more marketing. I was wrong.

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The best clients I've ever had all found me the same way.

Not from an ad. Not from a networking lunch. Not from a postcard.

They came from a book.

For years, I missed it. I kept doing more of everything else.

This letter is about why I was wrong, and what I'd tell you to do instead.

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I tried everything. I mean everything.

Before the book, this is what I did to get clients.

Direct mail. Buying leads. Facebook ads. Speaking. Organic social media. Email marketing.

And networking. Lots and lots and lots of networking.

You name it, I did it.

Some of it worked a little. None of it added up to anything that lasted.

I looked around at the most successful people in my industry and noticed one thing they all had.

Every one of them had a book. Some had several.

So I tried to write one.

It went in the trash.

I tried again the next year. That one went in the trash too.

Two years. Two drafts. Both not very good.

If you've got a half-finished manuscript sitting in a drawer somewhere, I know exactly how that feels.

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What's in this letter

• The Saturday that ended with a roadmap by 4:00, and the week 5,268 people got my book
• The man who never read my book, and hired me anyway
• How a roof quote turned into a financial planning appointment over one weekend
• Why most books never bring in a single client
• The question prospects stop asking once you've written the book
• What it takes from you (you won't write a word)

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The accident

In 2014, I went into my office on a Saturday.

I told myself I wasn't coming out until I had a roadmap for the book.

By 4:00 that afternoon, I had it.

Then I wrote an hour a day for 35 days. That's it. One hour, every day, for five weeks.

In July 2014, I published Unstoppable Referrals.

I had no idea what it would do.

The week it launched, using some of the same launch strategies we now teach our clients, 5,268 people got a copy.

Around the world.

At the time, we were a one-and-a-half-person consulting firm in Tallahassee, Florida.

Then the inquiries started. From all over the U.S. From Canada. From the UK. From Australia.

These were people who'd read the book. They already knew how I thought before we ever spoke.

For the first time, I had something doing my business development for me.

The business doubled that year.

Then it doubled again the next year.

Then it doubled again the year after that.

All from one book I wrote an hour a day.

Two moments from those years stick with me.

A couple of months after launch, HubSpot picked me to speak at Inbound, their big marketing conference in Boston. By the time the conference came around, I was standing beside the stage getting a mic clipped on, about to talk to a room of several hundred business owners.

A man walked up holding a copy of Unstoppable Referrals. He told me he'd changed how he got clients because of it, and his business was doing better than ever. Then he asked me to sign it.

I didn't see that coming.

The moment I remember most came two years after launch.

I got on a Zoom sales call with a business owner from the UK. The first thing he said was, "I've never read your book. And I'm not going to read your book."

That's a strange way to start a sales call.

Then he explained. A friend had given him a copy right after it came out. He took it home, put it on his nightstand, and never opened it.

It sat there for more than two years. He saw it every night when he went to bed. He saw it every morning when he got up. Like a little billboard.

"I've been staring at the cover of your book," he told me. "I need what it promises. I know I'm never going to do this on my own. How can we work together?"

It was one of the easiest sales I've ever made.

He never read a page. The book sold him anyway.

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"Fine, Steve. That's your story."

That's fair. One story is an accident.

So here are five more. Five different people, in five different fields.

A consultant. John Phillippe published Prospecting Hacks. Here's what happened next, in his words:

"I launched my book, Prospecting Hacks, and one client emailed me saying, 'Hey, I saw your book on Amazon. Can you come meet with me?' Within three and a half hours I had a $38,000 contract. I made six to seven times what I spent on the whole process. $100,000 in just six weeks. I never did any marketing in my life. I wish I would have thought of this 20 years ago."

Three and a half hours.

A speaker. Chris Cornelison wrote Superculture. He doubled his keynote fees. Nobody pushed back. Within three months he landed Coca-Cola as a client.

"Before, everybody I spoke to was asking for a lower price. Now it's literally: 'Could you fit me into your calendar?'"

A financial advisor. John Curry wrote Preparing for a Secure Retirement. A man came out to his lake house to quote a roof. They got talking. The roofer mentioned his son should do some planning.

John handed him two signed copies.

"By the next day, the father had already requested an appointment. I don't have to argue or persuade. If it's a good fit, the book already handled that."

A roof quote turned into an appointment. Over a weekend.

A niche consultant. Chris Ling wrote The Architect's Standard of Care: A Forensic Analysis. It's about as niche as a book gets.

"I had about a 40% bump in booked calls, proposals, and signed contracts. When I'm closing deals, I say 'I wrote the book on this topic,' and they say, 'Whoa, okay, we'll hire you.' One client for me could be as much as a million dollars."

His firm is now at capacity. He went from covering New York and New Jersey to working the whole East Coast.

A health coach. Katie Molumby wrote Purposeful Health. She was one voice in a crowded field.

"Within 6 months of publishing my book, I saw a 30 to 40% increase in booked calls and monthly revenue. Before the book, I was always reaching out to prospective clients. Now most of them reach out to me. I was swimming in a sea of coaches, and the book changed everything."

A consultant. A speaker. An advisor. A niche specialist. A coach.

Different clients. Different prices. Different markets.

Same thing happened.

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"But I know people with books that did nothing."

So do I.

You probably know a guy who wrote a book, printed a few hundred copies, and stacked the boxes in his garage.

His book didn't bring in a single client.

He's the reason a lot of smart people never write one.

Most books don't work.

They don't work because they're written to be a book. A nice thing to have. Something to hand out at a conference.

A book that brings in clients is built differently.

It names the problem your best clients have before they know they have it.

It lays out your method, the way you actually get results, and gives it a name.

It makes the reader think, "This person already understands my situation. I need to talk to them."

That's how a book as niche as Chris Ling's can fill a firm to capacity. It was written about his clients' problem, by the person who knows it best.

And even the right book does nothing sitting in a box. It only brings in clients when there's a plan to put it in front of the right people.

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You're the best-kept secret in your field

Let me guess at a few things about you.

You've been doing this for 20 years or more. You're very good at it. Your clients love you.

And almost nobody outside your current clients knows it.

Most of your business comes from referrals. That's worked. It's also why you can't predict next quarter.

Your referral partners like you. But when they try to explain what you do, they fumble it. So they say, "You should just talk to him."

Then a prospect gets on a call with you. And you spend the first 30 minutes explaining yourself. Again.

Here's where your best thinking lives right now.

In your conference room, with the door closed. You sit across the table from a client and give them the ideas it took you 20 years to figure out.

Then the meeting ends. The client walks out, and your best ideas stay behind that closed door.

The only way a prospect can see how you think is to hire you first.

That's backward. They have to trust you before they can see the thing that would make them trust you.

So every new client still has to come through you. Every explanation still comes out of your mouth.

And it's getting harder to stand out. AI can now write the same generic advice your competitors post. It can't copy a method with your name on it.

A book gets your thinking out of the room. It sits on a prospect's nightstand, like mine did for that man in the UK. It gets passed across a lunch table. It explains you when you're not there.

As Josh Howard, one of our authors, put it:

"When you put your own book in someone else's hands, you don't have to say anything. The book does it for you."

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I'm not the first person to notice

Dan Kennedy has written 37 books. He put it this way:

"One of the most certain benchmarks of an expert is that he is the author of a book."

People have always assumed authors are experts. That hasn't changed.

What's surprising is how few experts do anything about it. When Jenkins Group surveyed Americans in 2002, 81% said they felt they had a book in them.

Almost none of them ever write it.

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Why most marketing doesn't work for firms like yours

Most marketing advice was built for companies that sell products. It doesn't fit a firm that sells expertise.

Paid ads rarely work well for professional services. Very few people hire a consultant or an advisor because of an ad they scrolled past.

SEO can work. But it takes forever to pay off. And the rules keep changing. Right now search is moving to AI answers, and nobody can tell you for sure what will work there next year.

Go down the list of standard marketing moves, and most of them fall flat for a firm like yours.

So referrals became the default. For most professionals, nothing else seemed to work.

Referrals are great when they come. But they're slow. You can't predict them. And you have almost no control over them.

A book changes that.

It gives you the kind of reach that product companies get from ads and search. And it's built on the one advantage you have that nobody can copy: the way you think.

That's why your clients hire you. Once they've worked with you, they know you're brilliant at what you do. Most people never find out, because your best thinking stays behind that closed door.

A book opens the door.

You'll keep your referrals. The book adds a way to grow that doesn't wait on them.

And the timing matters. Almost every market is splitting into two groups right now. I call it a K-shaped market.

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How a book stacks up

Most firm owners I talk to get clients the same few ways. Here's how those compare to a book, on four questions.

Every other channel on that list depends on you showing up or paying up. When you stop, it slows down or stops.

A book is something you own. You build it once. It keeps working for ten years.

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The receipts

Since that first book, we've built a company around doing this for other experts.

Our team has published more than 300 books for clients in more than 40 industries.

Our authors have been featured in Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox Business.

Do the math on your own firm. For most of the experts we talk to, one to three new clients cover the whole cost. Malcolm Turner's firm had been around for 16 years. Here's what happened when he published:

"Within 3 weeks of publishing, I got a client from it that more than twice paid for the cost of the entire program. My ROI was already covered."

Jason Gates didn't even wait for launch day:

"I upsold three clients just by talking about the book."

Those three clients paid for the book twice. Before it was published.

And we guarantee it. If you sell a service at $10,000 or more and complete 80% of the launch steps, you earn your investment back within 90 days of publishing. If you don't, I keep working with you until you do.

We've never had to.

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The method has a name

For a long time, I didn't have a name for what happened to me in 2014. All I knew was that it worked.

Now I do. We call it the Only Name Method.

It has four steps.

Extract. We interview you and pull the method out of your head. The thinking you use every day but have never written down.

Name. We give that method a name you own. Something no competitor can copy and no AI can fake.

Package. We write, edit, design, and publish the book. It's 100% your ideas, run through a process we've used on more than 300 books.

Activate. We put your book to work. Getting it into your prospects' hands. Onto stages. Onto podcasts. In front of referral partners who finally know what to say.

Most publishers and ghostwriters stop at step three. But a finished book by itself isn't enough.

So we build the marketing machine that turns your book into business growth. And we build it for how professional services firms actually win clients, which is different from how a product company sells.

Now, you're probably thinking what everybody thinks at this point.

"I don't have time to write a book."

I get it. I wrote mine an hour a day for 35 days. And I had two failed drafts before that. Most of the people I talk to don't have an hour a day to give up for five weeks. They're running a firm. Every hour they spend writing is an hour they're not with a client.

So you won't write a word.

You'll spend about eight hours talking with us in the first week. Then 12 to 15 hours over the next few months reading drafts and telling us what to change.

That's it. About 90 days, start to finish.

And if you're ever in a real hurry, we can move faster. Mike Koenigs has written 19 books. He needed a new one in 23 days for a big event. In his words: "Steve said yes to an impossible deadline, and the team delivered the finished book to the printer in 13 days."

That's not something we do every day. And it wasn't a rushed book. It became a USA Today bestseller.

Rob Ibrahim, a financial advisor, put it this way:

"What you guys did for me that I was unable to do for myself, you organized my brain into chapters."

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What happens after

The book is where it starts. Here's what our authors tell us happens next.

Devin Sizemore:

"I got on a meeting and they held up my book and told me their takeaways. That's how it started. It fundamentally changes conversations because the person fully understands you, your approach, and what they can buy from you."

M.C. Laubscher, a wealth advisor:

"Within the first two weeks after launch, we're positioned to recoup the full investment. I thought I was just going to get a book published, but what I got was a book strategy."

Roger Sitkins had one reader love the book so much he bought 300 copies for his whole group. Then he brought Roger in as the keynote speaker. Sixty people in that room were the exact kind of client Roger wants.

In every one of these stories, the first question from prospects changed.

It used to be, "How are you different?"

Now it's, "How do we work with you?"

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Is this for you?

This isn't for everyone.

It's a good fit if:

• You run an established firm with a team behind you
• A new client is worth $10,000 or more to you
• You're great at what you do, and too few of the right people know it
• You want clients who show up already sold

It's not a fit if you're just starting out, if you want to write a memoir, or if you want a book on the shelf and no plan to use it.

If that first list sounds like you, the next step is simple.

Book a 20-minute call with my team. We'll learn about your firm, your clients, and what you're known for. From there, you'll meet with one of our book strategists.

By the end, you'll know:

• Whether a book will help your business right now
• What your book should be about
• How it could position you as the leader in your market
• What new clients it could bring in, and what they could be worth to you
• How to put it to work so it starts bringing in clients fast

If a book isn't right for you yet, we'll tell you that too.

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I spent years doing more marketing. What I needed was one thing that did the explaining for me.

It took me two failed drafts and a Saturday to figure that out.

It doesn't have to take you that long.

Steve "hour a day" Gordon

P.S. Remember Mike Koenigs and his 13-day book? It was his 19th. Mike says each of his 18 earlier books brought in about $1 million in its first year. This one got there in 30 days. In his words: "Out of the 19 books I've published, this one made over $1 million, in just 30 days." Your book doesn't have to do that to pay for itself. For most of the experts we talk to, one to three new clients cover the whole cost. The 20-minute call is the first step to finding out what a book could do for your firm. Book your 20-minute call

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