If you’re not reaching your business goals, or if you’re hitting them too easily, this episode is for you.
Today we’re going to talk about the one success strategy that most independent consultants are not even aware of. As a consultant, you’re good at helping clients solve problems and you’re usually knee-deep in projects and facing deadlines. And, in the meantime, it’s easy to overlook this one thing. You might be surprised when you hear what it is.
This is one of the foundational ingredients that you need to be able to grow and scale your business. Listen in to learn more.
In this episode, I’ll reveal to you
[03:58] The one success strategy most independent consultants miss
[05:53] The impact of the missing strategy
[12:12] The simple process you need to implement to leverage this strategy on a daily basis
If you want more help figuring out how to implement these concepts in your business, and ultimately how to double your revenue without working more then I invite you to apply for a strategy call with me where we’ll dive into your business and get really clear on your goals and challenges and determine an action plan for you so that you can create the business impact, income, and flexibility that you desire. To get on my calendar, please visit www.consultmelisa.com.
RESOURCES I SHARED IN THE EPISODE
- Click here to download the 7 MISTAKES THAT ARE FEEDING YOUR CONSULTING FEAST OR FAMINE CYCLE
- Click here for more details on the Double Method Coaching for Independent Consultants and/or to schedule a revenue optimization call with Melisa
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Click here to download the 27 WAYS TO LAND YOUR NEXT CONSULTING CLIENT
- Click here to download my CHECKLIST FOR BUILDING YOUR CONSULTING PIPELINE IN 26 MINUTES A DAY
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
**note: This is an automated transcript, so please ignore spelling errors and grammar mistakes*
00:02
Welcome to the Grow Your Independent Consulting Business podcast. I’m Melisa Liberman, a fellow IC and business coach. On this podcast, I teach you to become a consistently booked independent consultant without becoming a pushy salesperson or working 24/7. If I can do it, you can too. Listen on to find out how. Welcome back to the podcast we’re on episode 24. And today we’re going to talk about the one success strategy that most independent consultants miss. And by Miss, I mean not even anywhere near your awareness. So I want to dive into that topic today because it’s really important, and one of the foundational ingredients to you being able to grow and scale your business and stay in business. But before we do that, I just thought I would share a short follow-up on my kindergartener I told you last week or the week before that, my youngest son is starting kindergartener. Yes, I’m an older mom. But anyway, not the point. The point is, that he started kindergarten had that great day and made a friend that he didn’t think he would make. And a couple of days later, he comes home and says, I was asking him about the friend and who we played with. And he said, Oh, Julian isn’t my friend anymore. He found a better one.
01:29
And he just said, it so matters of factly like, oh, yeah, Julian just found someone better than me. And it didn’t bother him or faze him at all. And I just had to share that story with you. Because I think for so many of us like as we get older, we lose that thick skin. We start making it mean something about ourselves that we’re, you know, something’s wrong with us. For example, if we get a no in a sales process, we start wondering, Oh, am I cut out for this? Am I made for this? Will I ever sign another client again? Maybe I should go back to corporate like all of those things start festering in our brain. What if we could just be like that kindergartener? Oh, Julian found another friend who’s better than me. I guess I’ll just find the next friend, right. So innocent in so many ways, not tainted by society and all the things yet, this kindergartener, so hopefully that might give you a different way to look at next time when you’re when you don’t land a deal when you get a No when you’re rejected in business. Just think about it, like my kindergartener, and go find yourself another friend. All right, don’t make it mean anything about you. Okay, with that story, let’s dive in now to the number one reason that you’re not reaching your business goals yet. Or if you are hitting your business goals, so maybe you are reaching them, while you’re not exceeding them. It all ties into the one success strategy that most consultants miss. And I want to make sure that you don’t. So we’ve been working on the last several episodes, I’ve been walking you through my double method, the method that I teach my clients to double their business revenue without working more. And so today, we’re working on the B, which is be the business owner. That’s the one success strategy that most consultants miss. I’ll dive into the nuances of this, because you might be thinking, Well, I’m not missing that, Melisa. But I want to share with you that you might not be thinking about it in a way that is the most effective, and ultimately, you’re missing out on it. So if you haven’t yet caught episodes, 2122 23, which were the first few parts of the double method, you can go back and listen to those. They’re entirely independent. So no need to stop this episode. If you haven’t listened to them yet. Listen to this one, and then go back. All right. Okay, so today, we’re talking again, about that one success strategy that most independent consultants miss. So we’re going to talk about what that is, which I’ve already given you a hint, the impact of the missing strategy, and then I’m going to share with you a really easy process, that you ensure that you’re leveraging this strategy every day. Alright, so let’s talk first about what is this missing strategy for most independent consultants? Again, I’ve already told you it’s thinking like a business owner. But what does this mean? It means that you see yourself as the consultant. First and foremost, you’re the person delivering to the client. You’re the one in the client meetings, you’re the one creating the deliverables. You might be managing a sub or two, but at the end of the day, you see yourself as that consultant. And you either forget and or neglect the fact that you are both the business owner, kind of the boss And the employee in your business and really purposefully differentiating between the two. I know for sure I made this mistake early on in my independent consulting career, I never thought of myself as a business owner. I just thought of myself as someone who was working on her own, doing project work. helping startups scale, to be honest, it never dawned on me that I owned a business. Looking back on it now, you know, I’m a business coach, it’s really funny to see that. But at the time, it just literally never dawned on me to think about what I was doing as a business. I see so many other independent consultants falling into that same trap that I did. And you might be too most likely. And so let’s talk about the impact if you’re doing this, what is the impact of not thinking like a business owner? Well, at the end of the day, you’re not prioritizing working on your business, or not even your, in your thought process to even work on your business. What does it mean to work on your business? Talking about things like business development, purposeful business development, not taking whatever projects come to you
06:20
talking about looking at your financials? All of us, right? We’re so used to getting a salary, and having a consistent paycheck. Now we’re like, well, we should just get paid regularly as a consultant. versus taking a step back and saying, What are my financials? What is my financial plan for this business? What is my reserve, for example, when and if I’m in between projects, if I saved for taxes, like all of those bigger picture items, is what it would look like to think about your business as a business owner. The other key one is big picture planning. Did you sit down? Have you sat down and really figured out what your big picture is? What is your revenue goal this year? What’s your profit goal? What do you want this to look like in three to five years? What time are you taking off proactively, not just like squeezing it in when you can, looking at your business as a business can make all of the difference in terms of the type of revenue that you generate, and the amount of time off that you have, even if you are working on your business. So you’re not someone like I was that just completely missed the point. For a long time, maybe you actually do realize you have a business, and you work on it. But when you’re not thinking like a business owner, you’re not as effective because you’re coming at it from you wearing your employee hat in your business versus the business owner or CEO hat. And oftentimes, what that ends up doing is equate to you having shorter-term thinking versus longer-term and strategic thinking. So let me give you an example of what I mean by that. Like, let’s just say your current project you’re working on is coming to an end. If you were thinking about this with your employee head-on, you have to be thinking, Okay, what’s the easiest, fastest way for me to land the next project? I don’t want to have a gap in my income. Whereas if you’re the CEO and the business owner of your business, and you’re thinking that way, you most likely are thinking about what type of repeatable process can I set up to feed me lucrative potential projects, maybe it makes sense for me to take a couple of weeks off so that I can pursue this bigger project versus just taking whatever comes to me right away. Like you’re thinking about this from the bigger picture, right? Another example, let’s say you were offered a lower hourly rate type project. As an employee, you’re thinking most likely I better take this project, it’s been offered, it’s a bird in the hand, I don’t know when the next one will come. Versus as a business owner, you’re thinking that this short-term compromise is going to cost me in the long run, because I’m not going to be available for the higher value work. You might decide I’m not going to take this because I know that I am capable of making so much more money and making so much more impact that this doesn’t make sense. Or you might ask yourself, how could I accept this lower-paying role? And lamda higher quality project? Such a different perspective, right? And you can see that the net impact of you not thinking like a business owner ends up creating gaps in your revenue Baker gaps in your revenue, you might have a steadier paycheck, but you’re not making as much money in the long run in the bigger picture in the grand scheme of things over the course of six or 12 months. You ended up weakening your value propositions and you underearn as a result of this, this is so important. This isn’t just kind of mindset hocus pocus here. This is really, really important that you’re really purposefully putting on your business owner hat and thinking in this way more often than your, you know, got the employee hat doing the work. So let me give you a few more examples of what it looks like to think like a business owner. So some examples of what you would be thinking and solving for when you have that business owner. mindset on is that revenue is not constant like a paycheck is it ebbs and flows, you would also be thinking, I’ve got control over the revenue I bring in, it’s not decided by others, like HR or some, you know, annual comp review, you would be thinking, I can decide my schedule, and it doesn’t have to be a 40 to 70 Hour Workweek. As a business owner, you would be thinking, that the time I spend doesn’t have to directly correlate to the money I make. As a business owner, you would be asking yourself questions like how do I want my business to look now? And in three years and in five years? And how do I best maneuver it that way? You would be asking how do I productize what I’m doing and streamline it, make it more repeatable what I deliver, right? Those are business owner-level thoughts and questions that you would be asking yourself, versus the ones that come naturally, which are those employee-level thoughts. That’s what we’re used to having, even if you were in a leadership role in corporate, a lot of times we’re in the weeds, right? rolling up our sleeves, dealing with personnel issues, dealing with execution issues, those types of things come naturally to you. And that’s what you do as a consultant a lot of times, what might not come as naturally to you is that you’re the CEO, and the CFO, and the CEO, you’re all the C’s in your business. And thinking as if you had that business owner hat on that C suite add-on is what helps you avoid those impacts I just described to you. So let me give you a quick process that you can use to ensure that you’re leveraging this think like a business owner strategy every single day. The first thing that I want to point out too, is it doesn’t happen naturally. Again, I just described to you, that our day-to-day is our brain just kind of defaults into firefighting mode, right? Doesn’t by default wonder, you know, what do I want my business to look like in five years? Or I wonder if I should say no to this project? Because it’s going to end up costing me upside in the long run, whatever that is, that doesn’t happen naturally. And so what the quick strategy is for you to get into this thing like a business owner perspective, mindset is that you’re purposefully setting aside time every day to think about your business to work on your business. And whenever something comes up, like deciding about what project to take, or should I take this client or that project or not purposefully asking yourself as the business owner, what is my answer to this? Not as the employee who wants to, you know, maintain his util his or her utilization. But as the business owner? How would I be thinking about this right now? So you’re purposefully setting aside time every day, to think about your business to work on your business? And whenever any question comes up or decision needs to be made, you’re always looking at it purposefully from that business owner perspective, versus the employee perspective. And what that ultimately does is create a way of being that’s what I was trying to think of a way of being for yourself, where you, you know, you’re automatically and more by default thinking of yourself as the business owner. So you’re just building up that muscle it’s called be do have, you have to be the business owner first before you end up having that business, and the thought processes that a business owner automatically has. So don’t wait for anyone to give you permission for this purposefully make it part of your day and of your decision-making strategies. And that’s going to help you with this critical success factor for you in the success of your independent consulting business. Alright, so your takeaway for today, I’ll just give you a question for you to work on. What are your top two opportunities right now that you can use to step up as a business owner in your independent consulting business? Where right now you might be delegating it to that employee, the employee version of you right? Or avoiding it altogether? What are those top two opportunities that you can say, I will step into the business owner role in my company, my company have one and think about it, whatever that thing is, as a business owner, make a decision like a business owner, treat the process like a business owner, whatever it is. So find yourself one or two of those opportunities, and CO put this information that this philosophy, this strategy that I gave you today into place, it’s so important for your long term success and longevity. Okay, I created a really impactful checklist and I want you to go download it. So you’ve got some supplemental material that goes along with what we talked about today. It’s called the seven mistakes that are feeding your consulting feast or famine cycle. And it’s an actionable checklist with quick videos are like five minutes each, that will help you to implement this concept of thinking like a business owner, and the other six mistakes that are creating more of a feast or famine cycle in your business. So go download that we’ll put the link in the show notes. And then if you want more help figuring out how to implement these concepts in your business, and ultimately how to double your revenue without working more then apply for a strategy call with me, we’ll put the link to that it’s consultingmelisa.com. We’ll dive into your business on that call and get really clear on your goals and challenges. And determine an action plan for you so that you can create the business impact and income and flexibility that you desire. So that’s what I have for you today. Go think like a business owner.
16:46
And I’ll talk with you again next week. Thanks for joining me this week on the Grow Your Independent Consulting Business podcast. If you liked today’s episode, I have three quick next steps for you. First, click Subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to make sure you don’t miss future episodes. Next, leave me a review in your podcast app so other independent consultants can find a benefit and finally put the ideas from today’s episode into action. Head over to Melisaliberman.com for the show notes and more resources to help you grow your consulting practice from your first few projects into a full-fledged business. See you next week.
