Business Flightpath

Episode 84 of The Accepted Authority Podcast has just dropped. In many consulting firms, operational processes are more complex than they need to be. Rather than offering a wide range of services to potential clients in order to achieve higher revenues, in my experience, operating with a focused specialization is what achieves greater simplicity in running the business, greater operating efficiencies, lower operational costs and greater profits. The fact that it also created differentiation from competitors and attracts more qualified clients is an added bonus that should not be ignored. In this episode, I detail why having a focused specialization should be the strategy employed by your consultancy firm and use a specific example of where I have applied this strategy with one of my clients and how it significantly increased their sales and profits, while reducing complexity in their business at the same time. Check links in the first comment to listen on your favourite platform.

Episode 83 of The Accepted Authority Podcast has just dropped. Many consultancy firms do a lot of activities in their marketing with the aim of attracting their target market. But do these activities actually attract? A lot of the activities I see consultancy firms engaging in don't get the results the owners of those firms are looking for. They don't attract. Instead of doing things to try to attract more clients, I believe more owners of consultancy firms should be focusing first on making their firm more attractive to the target market. Many firms are not attractive, therefore whatever activities they try to attract their target market will fail. What does it take to be attractive to your target market? In this episode, I reveal the three essential elements of making your consultancy firm so attractive to your target market that you will have prospects lining up at your (virtual) door hoping you will take them on as clients. Check the first comment for links to listen on your favourite platform.

Only a few days now until the Sell Your Service With POWER and AUTHORITY webinar. In this 45 minute webinar I will cover: - why most propects treat you like a servant instead of a trusted authority - how to overcome the trust barrier in sales meetings and set yourself up for easier and more profitable sales - how to presell your services by effective relationship building so that your prospects come to sales meetings already wanting to buy - how to make your competitors irrelevant and to command premium prices from your client engagements - and much more. Register now at https://lnkd.in/garFHB4J

Many owners of consultancy firms don't really know where to start when it comes to client acquisition that does not rely on referrals or networking for incoming leads. In this video, I share how to get started and what you need to do to be successful in connecting with ideal clients.

Episode 82 of The Accepted Authority Podcast has just dropped. One of the most common scenarios that consultancy firms experience is what I call the sales roller coaster. That is where the firm goes from being busy with client delivery work for a while, maybe a month or two, and then goes through a subsequent period of having not enough work and needing to find new clients or projects. The main reason this occurs is that when the firm is experiencing a shortage of work, the focus shifts to finding more work. However, the activities involved in finding new clients or projects are labour intensive and typically not the favourite type of work that consultants enjoy. It does get results though, which means that when the need arises, these activities, typically networking oriented, are the fall back strategy that consultants use. But when they succeed in generating new work, the focus shifts to getting the work done and happily, the networking activities are dropped in favour of doing the client delivery work that is either more enjoyable or more likely to generate more income in the short term. This common approach is what keeps growth for the firm limited and commonly, even though over the months, sales results are up and down like a roller coaster ride, the annual results somehow tend to be about the same as the last few years. Growth hits a plateau that seems the limit to how high the firm can go. The only way to break through this plateau and avoid the sales roller coaster syndrome is to develop a consistent marketing outreach system that operates continuously in the background without requiring the time and involvement of the consultants who are focused on client delivery work. If you only ever operate with a short term focus and continue to create the roller coaster ride by continually shifting focus to marketing or delivery when the need arises, nothing will change. In this podcast episode, I reveal how to change the roller coaster scenario and avoid the ups and downs in work loads and short term revenue, by building a system that provides consistency and predictability in client acquisition and provides the platform for growth beyond the revenue plateau you may be experiencing. Check the first comment for links to listen on your favourite platform.

The reliance on referrals, in fact, the over reliance on referrals, actually gives us very limited control in how we grow our practice. We can't scale a practice with any degree of confidence unless we can confidently know how we can acquire new clients. And we need to be able to acquire new clients consistently and predictably in order to be able to plan for growth and plan for scaling our practice. Therefore, we need to come up with a systematic approach to acquiring profitable new clients. Now, how do we create a systematic client acquisition process? The first step is to connect with your ideal target market. And I want you to see that as a step and a stage in itself. Many of us, when we are looking at marketing and acquiring clients, want to go too quickly from connection to conversion, and that is definitely where we want to end up. But we want to give due regard to the step of making connection. And that's where many consulting firms fall short. Because there is no system to create connections on a consistent, even daily basis. In my upcoming web training event, I'm going to be discussing how to create consistent connection with your ideal clients. See the link to register for the event in the comments below.

5 Big Mistakes That Most Consultancy Business Owners Are Making Right Now During a coaching session last week, one of my clients provided me with a piece of feedback that got a lot of nods and a few rueful chuckles from the others on the same call. This client said “You know Greg, when I read the material that you put up that talks about what business owners do wrong, I wonder if you can read minds! Either that, or I have a mad compulsion to sweep the office for bugs.” It’s not the first time that feedback has been offered up – I’ve heard variations it from other clients in the past, but the reaction is always the same. The others laugh ruefully, and nod. And really, that’s part of the tragedy of professional services businesses. They offer very different services to very different clients, across a very diverse range of industries. And yet, when I scrape all that away and look at how those very diverse businesses function behind the scenes, I find the same stories (and the same mistakes that go with them) over and over again. The normal situation for a consultancy business owner is that they run a business that is totally dependant on them. They are right in the centre of the business, very little (if anything) happens without them, and as the business grows, the demand on them increases and becomes absolute. They are trapped within their business, and it can often seem like it owns them, not the other way around. The result is that many business owners tell me they don’t want to grow. Because if where they are now is that painful, why would they want more of that pain, however much increased revenue it brings in? That’s where the focus needs to change. Consultancy businesses need a new normal. But before we can get to that new normal, we need to determine exactly what’s not working now. I’ve distilled it into 5 typical mistakes: 1. Having a short term focus 2. Reactive marketing 3. Ineffective delegation 4. Lack of control 5. Doing it all yourself Let me know in the comments if you would like me to send you a free report on how to avoid those mistakes.

Episode 80 of The Accepted Authority Podcast has just dropped. I believe there is actually a lot of confusion about the importance of branding and what branding actually is for many owners of consultancy firms. In this episode, I reveal my take on what branding really is and how we can waste a lot of time and money when we get this wrong. In my experience, many consultants go about branding the wrong way, in a way that is ineffective and potentially harmful to the business. When you go about it the right way, you create connection by being more relevant to your target market. When you use an authority positioning strategy to create your brand, your target market creates your brand for you, which creates much more demand for your services than when you try to do it yourself. See links in the first comment to listen on your favourite platform.