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The bodkin is the tool that makes the opening for the thread to be carried.

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The Bodkin™ … brings together your thinking, your approach, your proof, and the practical information that a prospective client needs.

A lot of good sales conversations lose something once the meeting is over.

You may have explained the problem perfectly. The prospective client understands how you work and can see why your approach makes sense. Then they go back into their business and the conversation continues without you.

Your website may be too broad to answer the questions that come up next. A proposal often arrives once the decision is already further along, and a slide deck is much less useful when nobody is there to explain what each slide actually means.

The Bodkin™ is no mere pitch deck. It's a pitch book designed to wow the key decision-makers when presented by the internal champion that we find for you. Write, design, print, liaise, deploy. A turnkey solution for an otherwise tricky problem – standing out and being remembered. 

It allows somebody to understand the problem, see how you think about it, get a clear sense of your process, and look at the evidence behind your work without needing you sitting beside them.

That can be particularly valuable when several people are involved in the decision.

IT IS NOT A BROCHURE WITH A SPINE

A Bodkin™ may look beautiful, but simply producing an expensive-looking book is not its purpose – the content needs to do the work.

Have you ever read something that truly hit the mark with you? Where the text on the page neatly sums up all your wishes and needs – even when you couldn’t fully put them into words yourself? The text on the page perfectly describes your requirements, your pains, your frustrations, your desires – that's where we begin. 

It captures the questions and concerns your prospective client already has – what are they dealing with now? Why has it become a problem? What have they probably tried already? And then the key: Where does your thinking differ?

From the very onset of opening your Bodkin™, your reader gets a clear understanding of your approach, what working with you will look like in practice, and the results you have achieved for other clients.

They have not simply been given twenty pages in a mediocre PDF telling them how brilliant your company is; instead, by the time they reach your services or offer, they understand the context around it, they have been given enough information to make sense of the decision in front of them, and have built trust that you understand their real needs and desires.

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From the very onset of opening your Bodkin™, your reader gets a clear understanding of your approach, what working with you will look like in practice, and the results you have achieved for other clients.

BUILT FOR THE CONVERSATION YOU ARE NOT IN

The person who initially meets you may already understand why they want to work with you. The problem is that they may now need to explain that decision to somebody else.

Instead of relying on their memory of a meeting, they have something they can pass on.

A colleague who has never met you should still be able to understand the problem you solve, why your approach makes sense, what working with you involves, and what evidence exists to support it.

That makes life easier for the person already on your side, as they no longer have to reconstruct your entire sales conversation from memory.

DOES THE BODKIN™ WORK FOR YOU?

The Bodkin™ works best for businesses selling expertise rather than something that can be chosen purely on price or specification. That might be a consultant, agency, coach, strategist or specialist service provider where trust plays an important part in the decision.

It becomes particularly useful when several people are involved in buying, when the sales cycle takes time, or when your current materials do not quite show the depth of the work you actually do.

If you already have an established offer, understand the type of client you want to work with and have good evidence that your work gets results. It is probably not the right tool for something low-cost or transactional where people make a quick purchase decision.

The Bodkin™ is designed for the higher value sale that needs a little more thought.

WHERE IT FITS IN YOUR SALES PROCESS

The three-pronged strike - your website, proposal, and Bodkin each have a different job.

Your website needs to speak to quite a broad audience. People may be researching you for all sorts of reasons, so it introduces the business and gives them somewhere to explore.

A proposal becomes relevant once somebody is seriously considering the work and needs the scope, price, and practical details.

The Bodkin™ sits in the space between those two.

It allows somebody to properly understand your value before the conversation becomes centred on cost. You might use it after an initial meeting, before a larger pitch, as part of a longer sales process, or when somebody needs something substantial to take back into their organisation.

Exactly where it belongs depends on how your business sells. But rest assured, finding your Internal Champion in your desired prospective organisation or corporation is all part of the deployment service that accompanies your Bodkin™.

That is one of the things we work out before we create it.

IT'S NOT WHAT YOU CAN DO – IT'S WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR THEM

If we think of a traditional capability deck, it usually tells people what your company does, but not necessarily how you think, how you work, and how you convert.

It may sound harsh, but the majority of your audience doesn’t care about what you can do; they care about what you can do for them. Rather than a generic list of every service, every award, the full company history, and everything nice anybody has ever said about you.

We are looking for the information that helps the reader understand why your approach is worth considering and gives them enough confidence to move the conversation forward.

FILLING THE VACUUM OF DOUBT

A prospective client may believe that you can achieve the result and still feel unsure about the experience of getting there. They want to know who they will deal with, what will be expected of them, how decisions are made, and whether working together is likely to become complicated.

The Bodkin™ can deal with those questions before they become objections.

We explain enough of the process for the reader to understand what happens once the work starts without turning the book into an instruction manual.

People feel more comfortable buying when they can picture what happens next.

IT NEEDS TO FEEL AS GOOD AS THE BUSINESS BEHIND IT ACTUALLY IS

If you are asking somebody to consider a significant piece of work, the material you place in front of them should reflect the standard you expect them to associate with your business.

That does not mean throwing every expensive finish at the cover. Good paper, considered typography, strong design, and appropriate binding and finishing options usually say much more.

The aim is to create something people want to keep, refer back to, and pass around. If it feels disposable, it is much more likely to be treated that way.

The finished Bodkin™ should feel completely at home within your business rather than looking like a 3 ferns template with your branding added afterwards.

THE BODKIN™ IS PART OF 3 FERNS BUSINESS EDITIONS

Business Editions sits within 3 ferns and is built around a fairly simple belief. 

A business book should have a job. The Bodkin's job is to support an important sales conversation.

It is there to help prospective clients understand you more quickly, make your value easier to explain, and give the people involved in the decision something useful to work with after the meeting ends.

We bring more than 30 years of publishing, print, and design experience to the production side of the project, but the starting point is always the business problem the book needs to solve.

Packages start at US$28,000.

• Full Done-For-You concept to creation services, strategy, and deployment.
• Printing and binding not included. Quoted according to your custom specifications. 

Presence & Planner™

Pitch books that convert clients. Planners that retain them.

STRATEGY IN PRINT THAT EARNS THE YES.

Introducing Presence & Planner™

THE MOST VALUABLE THING ABOUT ANY BUSINESS isn't its brochure or its logo. It’s really the people behind it.

It’s the experience they’ve built over years, the stories that shaped the business and the way they approach helping their clients.

Those are the things people connect with, yet they’re often reduced to a few paragraphs squeezed into a Capability Statement or Deck.

Presence

PRESENCE IS THE STORYTELLING ELEMENT OF THE EXPERIENCE. Rather than beginning with a list of services or explaining what your business does in neat little bullet points, it starts with the bigger picture. Who are you? Why did you start your business? What do you believe in? What do you want people to feel when they work with you?

Those might sound like simple questions, but they’re often the questions that prospective clients really want answered. Long before they compare prices or read testimonials, they’re trying to work out whether you’re someone they can trust. They want to understand the person behind the business and whether your values, approach and way of working align with their own.

That’s difficult to communicate in a brochure. It’s almost impossible to achieve with a business card. Presence is a client pitch book with custom copywriting, design, and printing & binding finishes. By the time someone has finished reading it, they should have a much clearer understanding not only of what you do, but who you are, how you think and why they should choose to work with you.

It’s sent out ahead of the booked sales conversation so that your prospective client is holding it in their hands, feeling the cloth binding, seeing the light reflect from the foiling – it’s tactile, stunning, and one of a kind.

Planner

PLANNER BUILDS ON THAT RELATIONSHIP IN A MUCH MORE PRACTICAL WAY once your new client signs up to work with you. Rather than simply entering your Dubsado or Honeybook workflow, your client starts engaging with your bespoke framework and methodology in a sensory and hands-on way.

They can make notes, work through ideas, answer questions and begin thinking about their own goals in the context of the client calls you’ve started. There can be room for journaling, meaningful quotes, and yes, a literal planner for mapping out their tasks and “homework”.

There’s something powerful about giving people the opportunity to slow down and reflect. We spend so much of our lives scrolling through content, skimming websites and jumping from one notification to the next that we rarely give ourselves permission to sit with an idea for more than a few moments.

Planner encourages exactly that. It creates space for meaningful thinking and, in doing so, keeps your new client engaged and committed to your framework and to you.

Many businesses focus on making a good first impression. Planner is really about what happens after that first impression has been made and acted upon. It helps your new client to fully commit to whatever work is needed to get their desired results. The outcome of your framework, the transformation they’ll receive, is what they signed up for, after all.

What will this gorgeous two-volume set help you achieve?

EVERY PRESENCE & PLANNER SET becomes part of a consultant’s sales process, helping prospective clients understand complex ideas before they commit to working together. It then becomes a client delivery tool that helps them fully engage and commit to the work required by you.

The two-volume set becomes a premium onboarding tool that makes new clients feel supported from the very beginning. This fully customised set adds real human warmth to what may be highly automated client delivery processes through Dubsado, Honeybook, and so on.

For coaches, consultants, and service businesses, they become practical resources that clients return to again and again, while they also communicate expertise in a way that’s far more engaging than traditional marketing materials.

The goal isn’t simply to produce something beautiful, although that’s certainly important to you, your perceived value, and your brand. The goal is to create something that people want to touch and hold – a tactile artefact – that puts the fire in their belly to choose you as their service provider.

Something that reflects the quality of your work and something that continues adding value long after your client has begun to work with you.

These beautiful books are physical tools to uplevel your sales and client delivery processes. So that you can start to sign and serve the clients that you’d really love to work with and perhaps don’t right now.

Clients who don’t balk at your fees, clients who see your true worth and the value that you bring them. Clients who say, “YES. You’re the ONE.”

Packages start at US$20,000.

• Full Done-For-You concept to creation services, strategy, and deployment.
• Printing and binding not included. Quoted according to your custom specifications.