As the leader of a boutique IT service firm, how often have you asked yourself...

"How much more profitable could we become with better marketing?"

Do any of the following hit just a touch too close to home?

• "We have a great story, but don't know how to tell it in the most engaging and profitable way."


• "We've fallen into the dreaded feast and famine hellhole and have been unable to climb out."


• "We don't know exactly how much poor marketing is costing us, but, we fear, it's a painfully big pile."


• "Our gross revenue is more impressive than as a dancing hippo wearing a tutu and ear muffs, but our net profit is thinner than Pontius Pilate's cat."

All in all, your firm is capable of higher performance, but something is missing.

Yes, sure, you can always respond to another over-scoped and under-priced RFP and duke it out with price-obsessed procurement agents, and then hope and pray that your firm gets selected.

And then the absolute worst thing can happen: Your firm does get selected.

And when you receive the contract to sign, to your shock, horror and chagrin, you find the that project's scope and deliverables have got bloated and the price and the deadlines have shrunk to a heart-attack-inducing degree.

So, what's the point in marching into the same ring with the same opponents, fighting, being beaten to pulp and losing matches and more and more teeth again and again? Especially if your opponent uses rock-hard plaster in his gloves and every punch feels like a head-on collision with a speeding freight train.

Why compete with dozens or even hundreds of other firms when you can get droves of qualified buyers come looking for you, so you no longer need to use cold calls and other obsolete labour-intensive methods to chase them all over hell's half acre?

Howdy. I'm Tom, and have no earthly idea how in the name of the holy sausage you've ended up here, but if you run a boutique IT service firm - IT consultancy or custom software development - and steady, sustainable and profitable growth are in your plans for the future, you may well be at the right place, definitely in the right dimension, and perhaps even at the right time.

Anyhoo...

I'm a Vancouver-based tech marketing strategist and copywriter, specialising in helping boutique IT service firms to acquire better clients with sexy, exciting projects at premium prices.

Since 1998, I've designed, built, reconstructed, tweaked and fiddled with client acquisition systems for over 700 boutique IT service firms.

Systems that passively attracts sifted, sorted, screened, self-qualified and self-selected prospects who have an explicit need for your expertise, perceive a good fit with your firm's personality, approaches and ideas and are predisposed to doing business with you regardless of your prices.

In a previous incarnation, as a graduate electronics/computer engineer, I worked in the high-tech industry as an engineer, programmer, project manager and corporate tech buyer, giving me a unique perspective on the B2B tech buying process and a good understanding of your industry's inner workings.

And I use this oddball skillset to design systems and to write copy.

This skillset also makes me one of the handful of IT marketers with both subject matter expertise and hands-on experience at working on all three sides of the negotiation table: Built, bought and sold IT systems.

What that means to you is that, after designing, building and launching it, such a system works 24/7 with significantly less human effort than traditional client acquisition approaches with high labour intensity used by field sales forces.

The little required human effort goes into tweaking and maintaining the system, NOT into chasing, hunting hounding and pounding mildly interested or even totally apathetic suspects setting up dog-and-pony type PowerPoint presentations and writing proposals that are rejected even before you finish writing them.

Would such a system make a difference to your client acquisition?

As a result of working with me, my clients have been able to price their services way above the competition, so they feel empowered and confident in their new capabilities and they have highly automated client acquisition systems attracting the cream of the crop of their target markets 24/7.

I can help if...

• You are the sole or majority hands-on owner of a specialist type boutique IT consultancy or custom software dev shop.


• You're ready to start proactively marketing your firm but you feel like a mosquito on a nudist beach: No idea where to start.


• You want to gain an objective perspective of where your firm is right now and where it's headed.


• You want to turn the individual components of your client acquisition marketing into one seamless system and automate whatever makes sense to automate.


• You want to know which forms marketing offer you the biggest bang for your buck.


• Instead of the traditional "We do it FOR you" approach, you prefer to work WITH an industry specialist on a "Let's do it together" basis in close collaboration. Someone who understands your industry and how your prospects make buying decisions.

What I can help with...

• Specialising your firm in a target market that appreciates your expertise and is both lucrative and enjoyable to serve.


• Distilling your target market down to a specific perfect client profile.


• Developing your niche services matching your perfect clients' requirements and expensive problems.


• Systematising and automating your client acquisition.


• Reviewing, revising and revamping your pricing model to detach effort (time, materials and costs) from price.


• Spicing up your brand messaging and collaterals (web pages, emails, newsletters, case studies, white papers, etc.) for higher level of engagement and conversion.


• Writing new collaterals based on your spiced-up brand messaging and the new perfect client profile.


• Designing and building your "From first contact to signed contract" buyer journey, a.k.a. sales funnel and filling it up with the appropriate copy.

What I can't help with...

• You're running a generalist IT firm based on high volume of competitive(ly low)-priced projects.


• Outsourced "Done FOR you" type lead generation services


• Selling your services on a commission basis


• Website design, programming, website maintenance and many other things that would make this list obscenely long. But, most probably, I can refer you to some trusted professionals.

So if you believe...

... what you've read here may apply to your firm, and you're sure that client acquisition must be more than...

• ...pounding your fingers numb cold-calling and getting hung up on and screamed at...


• ... spending more time on Zoom calls with interested intermediaries without budget and authority to engage your firm.


• ... responding to more RFPs turning your firm into a proposal manufacturing factory.

As the first step, this peddler quiz (Free, no registration), you can see where your firm is on the fungible IT vendor-respected IT authority scale, so you get an idea of what to improve first, second, etc.

The reality is that it's your market that hangs your brand around your neck based on the outside perception of your firm. And only you can change that by changing the inside reality, a.k.a. culture, of your firm.

And you can influence the outside perception by tweaking your firm's inside reality by consciously transforming your firm from fungible vendor to respected authority.

In this peddler quiz, you can check whether your firm is more of a fungible IT vendor or a respected IT authority.

In the meantime, don't sell harder. Market smarter and your business will be better off for it.

With victory on high!

Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan