Apparently, I need to manifest my ideal client

I'm quite a spiritual person. I don't talk about it much, particularly in a business context, but I am. I believe there's something after this, I believe quite strongly in intuition, and I have a pendulum that lives on my desk and occasionally gets brought out when my imposter syndrome is being particularly noisy.

But before you ask, I don't let it decide where to spend a client's advertising budget. I’m not that daft.

I've always been interested in manifestation too, though I'm probably a better believer than I am a practitioner. I'm perfectly prepared to accept that intention, energy and what you put out into the world can shape what comes back to you. Have I diligently followed a manifestation practice and watched £10,000 drop unexpectedly into my bank account? No. Would I be willing to test the theory? Absolutely.

Which is partly why Helen Tudor's book about ideal client attraction and spirituality caught my attention.

Full disclosure: I haven't finished it yet or worked through all the exercises, so I can't tell you whether the process works. What I can say is that the premise struck a chord with me immediately. Getting really clear about the people you want to work with, and then consciously putting something out there that attracts more of those people, doesn't feel particularly far-fetched to me.

What it did do was make me realise I don't actually know who my ideal client is.

That sounds like something a person running a marketing business should have a beautifully polished answer to, doesn't it? I don't.

Most of my career has been spent in agencies, and I still work agency-side now. When you're representing a business, you're not just representing yourself — you're embodying its brand, its way of doing things, its relationships with clients. Your own personality comes through, but there's always another layer sitting on top.

I've been lucky with the people I've worked with over the years, and I have some brilliant clients now. Warm, generous, knowledgeable. People who share what they know, appreciate support and are genuinely good to work with. So this isn't a story about escaping something I didn't enjoy.

What's different about Market'ere is that there's no other brand in the room. It's just me. Which means, for the first time, I get to think properly about how I work, how the business feels and — this is the part that's taken me by surprise — who I actually want to work with.

And I don't mean what sector they're in, how many employees they have, or whether they fit neatly into some imaginary customer persona called Marketing Manager Mandy, aged 42, who enjoys Pilates and apparently makes all her purchasing decisions after reading LinkedIn on a Tuesday morning.

The actual people. What are they like?

I think I'm beginning to work that out.

They're curious and open. They'll tell me what they know and they'll listen when I tell them what I know. They don't mind me questioning something or suggesting there's a better way of doing it. They don't need everything dressed up in marketing language, and they can quite happily say "I don't know, what do you think?"

They appreciate help. They care about doing things properly without making everything unnecessarily complicated. They're generous with their knowledge — because I love learning about other people's businesses — and ideally they have a decent sense of humour, because we're probably going to spend quite a lot of time talking to each other.

When I look at the clients I most enjoy working with, a lot of those things are already there. Perhaps defining my ideal client isn't really about inventing a perfect person at all. Maybe it's about looking at the working relationships I already value and understanding why they work.

And perhaps that's why Helen's book landed with me when it did. I'm building something that is much more me than anything I've done before, and I'm gradually becoming more comfortable showing that.

The more I've written since starting Market'ere, the less I've worried about what a business blog is supposed to sound like. Sometimes there's a neat marketing lesson in there and sometimes there isn't, but taken together the pieces reveal quite a lot about how my brain works.

I question things. I like fixing things. I like being useful. I'm interested in people, I'm nosy about how businesses work, and I'm not particularly interested in marketing theatre.

Which makes me wonder whether I'm already doing a little bit of this ideal client attraction without consciously realising it. My writing is increasingly showing people what I'm actually like to work with. Some people will read it and think, yep, I'd get on with her. Someone else might read exactly the same thing and decide I'm absolutely not for them.

That's probably fine. You don't need everybody. You need people who value the way you think, the way you work and what you bring to the table.

I still need to finish the book. I still need to do the exercises properly and give the process a real chance. But it's already made me think harder about who I want around me while I build this, and about the fact that I now have the freedom to choose — in a way that feels genuinely new.

So perhaps that's my homework: work out what I want, be clearer about who I am and see what comes back.

And Universe, if you'd like to chuck the £10k in while we're testing all this, that would be helpful too.

Just in case.