Hey, it’s Samantha Hartley the Profitable Joyful Consulting Podcast. This season we have been talking about all things consulting business success. In this last episode of season 12, I’m going to do part 2 of the 10 drivers of consulting business success that I have identified. I did the first five last time, you can go back and watch that one. I’ll also recap them here along with the second 5.
Now these drivers are part of the strategies that I’ve identified that really help consulting businesses to thrive. If you want to get a copy of not just the 10 drivers, but of a self-assessment where you can discern for yourself and your business where you are ranking in each of these areas, then I have a new free resource for you. You can get it at the super page.
That’s where all the free resources from the show are located and I’ll have that in the show notes for you, but go there and download the self-assessment and you can follow along with me on the 10 drivers of success.
Learn a little more about the 10 drivers and also assess your own business and it’ll show you where the opportunities are and your gaps are. When you close those gaps you’re going to find your business more profitable and joyful and you’re going to be able to progress along the Path to $2 Million. You’ll remember the path to $2,000,000 is where most of my clients want to be.
They might tell me I just want to have $500,000 for myself. Some are like, I want that number, I want that top line revenue number. Whatever is your story and wherever along the path you choose to be, the drivers will help you.
One more time that link is super and it’s the self-assessment that you’ll find on that page.
Last time we talked about the first five of the 10 drivers. I mentioned that the way I discovered this is that when clients come to me a lot of times they’re in 1 of 3 places in their business.
The first group are those who have been struggling to get traction. It just seems like no matter how hard they push the boulder uphill it never starts to roll downhill. So struggling to get traction in your business is a frustrating place to be and it’s usually because some of the basic principles are not in place. Those basic principles are these levers so when you hear what these are, you’re going to be able to hear these are the things that you need to be starting with.
The second group that comes to me are those who have been doing pretty well, but they are stuck on the revenue rollercoaster. A lot of things keep us stuck on the revenue roller coaster. Doing one offs keeps us stuck, working with not the right clients keeps us stuck on the revenue roller coaster. Again, the drivers are going to help you to identify what you can do to get off of the revenue roller coaster.
The third group are those that seem like they’re doing great to everybody else. They’re the ones who are drowning in client work. They’re drowning and that’s not actually a good place to be so they need to create capacity. They need to be able to serve more people. They can’t grow the business until they can get out of the business. That’s really what a lot of the drivers we’re looking at in this episode are going to be doing so.
Driver #1 Clear Business Vision. Last time the first five that we looked at were having a clear business vision. Knowing where this thing is going and being able to say yes to things that move us further on the path to that vision. And saying no to things that drive us away from the vision. Having a clear vision for what you’re building in your business and why you’re building it.
Driver #2 Working Exclusively with Perfect Clients. It is really important knowing who your perfect clients are. That’s the second driver: working exclusively with perfect clients. You know that’s the number one determiner of profit and joy in any business. Not just consulting any business.
Driver #3 Clear Brand and Message. The third thing you really want to have is a clear brand and message. Intentionally created so that you know when people ask you what you want to be known for and known as, you can communicate compelling, clear messages that help them figure out: Is this someone I need to know, is this someone who can help me with my problems?
Driver #4 Strategic Visibility. You don’t need to be everywhere, but you do need to be in places where your perfect client is looking for someone like you.
Driver #5 Selling with Integrity. You don’t need to close every person who wants to work with you. You want to enroll those companies and people who are a perfect fit for your services and you want to be able to do that in ways that align with your values and the ways that feel in integrity with you.
Those are the first 5 drivers and now I want to take you through the second 5.
Driver #6: Delivery of Services. The sixth driver on the Path to $2Million of business success for a consulting business is delivery. We need to be able to deliver your services in a way that gets the best possible maximum results for the client at a minimum level of exertion for you.
When consultants come to me and they’re overworking I know that delivery is the issue. They’re putting in too much time trying to get results for the client instead of working through their clients. The actual why and how is something I can get into in another episode, but today I just wanted to share with you that this is one of the drivers.
Efficient, effective delivery is going to help you get off the revenue rollercoaster to create capacity in your business. The assessment for this one is amazing results for my clients without overworking
Driver #7: Transformational Offers. If you’ve been watching the show at all, you know this is one of the main ideas that I bring to my clients. You want to offer transformation, not just quick short problem solving. There’s so many consultants out there who are like, Yeah, we’ll do a 6-week thing, we’ll do a little three month thing, we’ll fix a small problem.
Little "one-offs" keep you on the revenue roller coaster. Really where the opportunity for transformational change for your clients to really make an impact is in transformational offers. These are year-long $100K plus engagements where you are asking the organization: What’s a major thing that is going on in the organization that you want to have it be completely different a year from now?
The challenges that companies bring to you, for example, one of my clients, they’ll bring her issues and she’ll say to them: What you’re talking about solving is actually a 3 to 5 year problem. It will take us 3 to 5 years to really really completely solve this challenge for you. What we do in the first year is X. So you’re really putting in perspective people who want to make big dramatic changes.
They have to do it through the people who work at the organization and people take a while to change. Working on the timeline for transformational offers is going to make a massive difference to your business. It’s going to provide stability for you. It’s going to allow you to make a huge impact on your clients and it’s going to create amazing results for them.
You know we can get quick results anywhere. You can come in and do something for six weeks or for three months, but if you notice when you leave, even a few weeks and sometimes a few months go by, and then the wheels fall off the train. They forget what they were doing or they move on to other priorities.
Transformational offers mean you’re going to stick with the client until the change metabolizes and becomes part of the organization. It’s completely installed so that your people are doing this naturally as a habit. That’s what transformational offers are, and it’s why I’m so passionate about them. I don’t just want to fix a little thing, I don’t want to solve a thing where they’re like, “Oh thanks, that’s great.”
I want to make a massive change for my clients, and through them for those clients out there whom they will help. So the question for you here is, “Do I have at least one offer that gets transformational change for my clients that really takes a year, and at least $50,000 would be the minimum on this?”
Fifty to one hundred thousand ideally, and all the way up to a million. I have clients who are offering million-dollar engagements because they’re talking about making massive change in the organization. So do you have at least one of those that you’re offering your clients?
Driver #8: Team. Even if you want to be a one person business and you don’t want to have any direct reports working for you, it’s still important to have a team around you. Doing things all by ourselves is lonely and it’s exhausting.
I want you to think expansively about what team means. If you have tasks or activities in your business that you do not want to do there is someone who works for you who can do those for you. If you say, I don’t want to have anybody working for me, I’m talking about contractors, I’m not talking about employees.
If you say, No No No, I’ll do everything in my business. Nothing is bothering me, that’s fine, I know people who do that. Then do you have any colleagues as referral partners?
Contractors who can come in and supplement the work. Do you have referral partners if you don’t want to work with a client, or you don’t want to work with them anymore, you can hand them off to someone else who can support them?
I’m talking expansively about having a team. Do you have mentors who are showing you the way so that you don’t have to make all of the mistakes? In order to get to where you want to go. You can learn on a proven path from someone who’s further ahead of you on the path, and knows how to make things happen.
Mentors and coaches are those people. All the most successful people have mentors and coaches who are helping them. That’s the thing for you to think about to have the complete support system. What is your support system like?
I talk with people all the time who say their friends don’t really understand what they do. Then they can’t really talk about $100K offers because that kind of money is triggering for them. It’s fine for those people to be our friends and sometimes they’re our family.
However, it’s important that when you’re building a business like this to be in an environment where $100K offers are no big deal. Be around people who are making transformational engagements who understand that you are self-employed and you have clients.
You need to have people around you in the broadest possible sense of team who inspire you, support you, and can lead you to bigger and better outcomes than you can achieve on your own. Do you have those kinds of people who can help you to be your best in your work and deliver what you need to deliver to your clients? That’s the broad sense of team that I want you to take a look for.
Driver #9: Leverage.If a team is the people who help us to expand and have capacity, then leverage is signature systems, tools and technology. First of all, you’ve heard people on my show talk about creating signature systems. You’ve heard me talk about the importance of having this, which is a codified version of the work that you do so that you’re not making it up on the fly.
Once you have a system and you pull it out the intuitive way that you’ve always done it. You pull it out of yourself and put it onto paper. Then you can follow it clearly, you can explain it clearly to your clients, and you can enlist others to do that work for you, or with you.
Sometimes that means delegating it to the client. Sometimes that means delegating it to other team members, training trainers, certification programs, all kinds of things. You can also pull that out of yourself using tools and technology to create e-learning that you can use for your clients, or other delivery systems.
Tools and technology can help you to make sure you’re consistently posting on social media because you can do that through tools. You can have technology like a CRM that helps you track leads. It helps you stay in touch through a subscriber base.
Think in terms of do I have a signature system? Do you have the tools and technology to make yourself more efficient and create capacity for yourself in the business? So how are you doing on that component and do you have these systems and tools available to you?
Driver #10: Mindset for Success. Last of all but by far not least is having a mindset for success. It would be easy for me to make every single podcast episode I do about mindset because it is so critical. Once you are at about $120,000 to $150,000 dollars in your business, you probably know pretty much everything you need to know in the business.
There’s going to be a few tactics here and there, like some of the things that I’ve talked about today that you’re going to pick up. But really the biggest determiner after that happens in your business is your mindset.
Do you believe it’s possible for you? Do you have limiting beliefs and are you working on them? Do you have optimism and resilience? What kind of mindset do you need to have in order to achieve what you want to achieve? Do you believe $2,000,000 is possible for you? Do you experience yourself as a growth-oriented person?
These are the things that those who really struggle, I’ll notice that they have a mindset and sometimes a small leftover belief from way way way back in childhood. They didn’t have certain things modeled for them, or they just never examined the belief before. They’re just like, I didn’t realize that this whole thing was controlling me.
Limiting beliefs can be: You have to work hard to get where you want to be. It’s really hard to make money in this business. There’s a glass ceiling for people like me. I never knew anybody who earned more than X amount of money. Those are limiting beliefs.
A mindset for success says: I can have anything I want in my business. It’s actually possible for me and I don’t have to work hard. I can work smart and I can surround myself with other people who do support me, they don’t envy me and tear me down. There are people out there just like me who want what I want. That’s the kind of thing that a mindset for success can help you with.
Those are the 10 drivers. I would love to hear how your business is doing relative to them, which of those do you feel like: I don’t do that at all, or my biggest opportunity area is strategic visibility, or I’ve got to get some transformational offers on the docket or else my business is going to be stuck doing one-offs?
I’d love for you to head on over to super and download the self-assessment for the 10 drivers. Get a copy of this for yourself and begin to internalize these are the ways to grow consulting business anywhere along the Path to $2 Million, or maybe even further.
I have clients who want to hit $30,000,000 to cash out and end up on an island someday. I energize all dreams that are in the highest good of you, your clients and all those concerned. So I’d love to hear your results and your takeaways, and I am wishing you a Profitable and Joyful Consulting Business.
