Would you like to discuss online lead gen as an option?

You might invest in some high-conversion-rate landing pages, placed in the right traffic flows, with some attention paid to branding.

In other words, that's a bit of web design, a bit of copy writing, a bit of A/B testing, a bit of domain buying, and probably some ongoing pay-per-click campaigns which could be managed by you yourself or by an SEM expert.

I would usually recommend investing in such marketing tools first, since they're semi-passive and cheaper. Hiring someone to go find clients is probably costly, and you'd be dependent on that person indefinitely.

Eventually, business owners who don't invest in harvesting their own leads will find that someone else has stepped in as a middle man to sell them on at higher prices – possibly on an exclusive basis to a competitor.

Paying per lead is more expensive yet more convenient. Building the lead generating pages and SEM campaigns is more work up front; but ultimately it might be simpler, cheaper, and function more as a business asset.

A tradeoff. Really, it's the difference between renting a home and building a home where none exists. And in your case, you don't have that pay-by-lead option yet because nobody has seen your niche and spontaneously offered to sell you leads.

This lead-gen approach is more passive than hiring a dedicated human being to work for a salary or commission. You might not have someone knocking on doors, but you would have some equipment to harvest whatever market interest is already out there – meaning people who may already be looking for solutions or simply curious.

Hard to say if this would work for your business, since we don't know what that business is. But it does work extremely well for certain industries and business models.

What I've described involves some professional expertise beyond what I do. Maybe I have 1 or 2 pieces of the puzzle, though, in case you'd like to chat.