Build a highly profitable Small consulting business
Starting and growing a small consulting firm is a chance for freedom and a route to generating high profits. Small consultancies are usually great at generating client value but less sure of the best practices in marketing, sales, operations, proposal writing or service development. This is what this programme helps you with.
The Challenge
The trouble is, whatever you did previously didn’t necessarily give you outstanding expertise in marketing, sales, and planning to maximise your business potential. Challenges such as getting noticed, beating bigger competition and pricing to maximise profits are not competences we are born with! Finding evidence-based, trustworthy expertise and advice on creating a profitable consulting business is difficult.
There are countless ‘gurus’ offering you the ‘secret to success’. Promising you that you can “SCALE TO 8 FIGURES!!” in a few months. Many of these gurus will urge you to spend a fortune on Facebook Ads, suggesting that you can sell high-value consulting to corporates through Facebook Messenger! Then there’s the promise of PASSIVE REVENUE – earning without having to lift a finger! If you’re not suspicious of such get-rich-quick schemes, you should be! In our collective 75 years’ experience, we’ve experienced that it’s not that easy. Most of these ‘gurus’ have never consulted professionally or successfully to mid- or large-sized corporates. Most of them confuse consulting and coaching. They think it’s all the same. It’s not! How can we be so sure? Because there are 3 of us! Two Professors of Consulting, who have grown several successful consulting firms, and one 25 year consulting industry veteran who is a leading authority on marketing for consultancies.
But before I introduce us, let’s explore what you should do to successfully start, run and grow a B2B consulting business.
The challenge for small consultancies
Growing your own consultancy is one of the toughest life decisions. You do it because you enjoy the freedom and variety of doing great work for your clients, on your terms. The freedom of not having a boss.
But delivering great work is only one of the five fundamental elements to building a great consultancy:
- Consistently attracting profitable clients
- Converting leads into great high margin engagements
- Running your firm efficiently, with low-costs yet high-value
- Creating and executing a strategy that maximises your chances of success
Small Consultancies
We’ve helped hundreds of owners and founders of small consultancies grow their size and profitability. Common challenges this programme helps with are:
Feast and famine
cycle
Your pipeline (and incoming revenue) drops off a cliff every few months because you have no consistent marketing system.
Pricing under scarcity pressure
As a result of too few opportunities, you price low because you need the work, but as a result you end up with a high workload and low profit margins.
Over-reliance on repeat business and referrals
Ultimately, this means you avoid marketing!
Trying to sell through proposals
Selling is done in the client consultation. The proposal simply documents what you’ve agreed. Too many solo consultants take an old-fasioned approach .
Ignoring technology
A lack of knowledge about how new platforms and technologies can improve client value and cut your operational costs.
Spinning your wheels
You spend all your time working ‘in’ your business, and having no time to work ‘on’ the business.
Sub-optimal services
Ever get the feeling that a higher priced niche is in the next lane. Without doing systematic market and competitor research you’ll never know.
Testimonials
A few words from our clients
The fact you’re reading this means that you already know things could be better. Prices can be increased, better clients can be found, profitable jobs can be confidently won, and running your business could be easier. However, getting to that point is not simple and success is not guaranteed. Improving your value is a little like a plane taking off: if you put significant effort into getting to a higher level, it is easier to stay there – change is the most difficult thing.
Building a successful consulting business takes hard work and also a little bit of luck. But there’s also a lot of wisdom from which you can learn. Experts who’ve been there before you. People who have studied what drives success. Who have evidenced what does and doesn’t work. It is from these people that you can shortcut your path to success, or at least make the journey a little less arduous.
About
The Mini-MBA in Independent Consulting. Not only have we grown successful consultancies ourselves, but we have also spent 15 years conducting award-winning researching into what leads to success in small consulting firms. Our methodology is not purely academic, however, and has been highly successful in both our own practices and with over two hundred of our clients.
Our research, experience, and advice has been distilled into what we call the Value Wheel. It is a systematic model to get attention, reduce pipeline uncertainty, increase profits, and set your consulting business on the path to success.
The Value Wheel has a central core, supported by 4 quadrants that cover the entire gamut of running a successful consulting business.
5 Steps which take place in the wheel
1. Core
In the CORE of the wheel you focus on building the right Mindset and Strategy for your business. Within Mindset we use principles from meditation, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to build the right framing and thinking which will drive success in all other areas, and competitor research to position your firm in a high-margin, high-growth niche.
2. Manage
In the MANAGE quadrant, you focus on best practices which help you run a tight ship with low-cost, low-effort principles. We show how you can add value to the firm itself by building better capabilities, networks, services, and information. These in turn allow you more time to charge more for better services.
3. Attract
In the ATTRACT quadrant we determine how to target the right prospects, roles, and engagements to increase revenues and profits. We help you identify the needs of your target buyers and generate messaging that will resonate. We show you how to build a marketing strategy which will develop visibility and respect in your target market.
4. Convert
The CONVERT quadrant gets prospects over the line to invest in your high-value consulting services. Here, we demonstrate more enjoyable and more successful ways to sell. In the Pricing segments we show that fixed pricing is usually a much more effective approach than day-rates or value pricing; and we help you to craft proposals that consistently win fantastic business.
5. Deliver
Finally, the DELIVER quadrant helps you execute better client projects at a lower cost. We first give you tools to clarify expectations and build stronger client relationships at the start of projects and then show you how to deliver better projects to clients. Finally, we help you learn and improve from each project to increase the value of what you deliver and thus the prices you can charge.
Excerpts from the course
Who we are
We are three experts on the consulting industry who have started and grown seven successful firms between us. Combined, we have nearly 70 years’ experience in consulting that we focus on helping other consulting business owners – like you – to successfully grow your firm and your profits.
FAQ
The programme is for people who have started, or about to start, their own small consultancy. The consultancy might be management, marketing, IT, or design. It is not suitable for accounting or law firms which have specific laws with which they must comply.
The programme is based around 17 hours of video which is ‘on-demand’ – you can watch it when you wish. Accompanying the programme are 5 playbooks which you fill out as you go along.
The videos are all presented by Prof. Joe O’Mahoney, Prof. Simon Haslam, and Martin J. Williams. Typically, there is a presentation led by the main expert and then a discussion between all three reflecting on their own practical experiences.
Other programmes suffer from one or more fatal flaws: most are simply showing you how to create a digital funnel and are purely about marketing. Others have been started by a person who has never run a consultancy and the advice they give is simply their opinion.
This programme is created and run by three seasoned veterans of the consulting industry with nearly 80 years’ experience between us. Moreover, it is also based on 15 years of award-winning research into the consulting industry by Prof. Joe O’Mahoney. It is not the opinion of one, or even three, consultants, but framed around what has worked for hundreds of others.
The materials are accessible within the programme content once purchased. You download the playbooks to complete (either on your PC or printed if you prefer) while you watch the videos online.
Completing the course results in a mini-MBA in Independent Consulting certificate.
No. It is suited to those who have their own independent consultancy.
Not unless it is a small consulting firm or you are thinking of leaving to forge your own path. If you are a consultant in a large consulting firm you don’t need to worry about much other than delivery.
Whilst there are international variations in the size of consulting markets, small consultancies face the same growth challenges the world over. This is especially true in W. Europe and N. America where 80% of consulting spend is generated. We have also had clients from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
We cannot guarantee that you will follow the advice in this programme so we cannot guarantee results. However, we can guarantee that if you keep doing what you always have done your company will not progress.
We advise our clients not to accept payment after delivery, especially when intellectual property is involved. We follow our own advice!
