Transcripts
1. Trailer: Being an entrepreneur is one of the more fulfilling career paths you can take in life, in my opinion, the freedom, the control, the ownership, and making your living based almost solely on your own intuition and your own thinking. The challenge of doing that day in and day out. Few things are more rewarding. Hey, my name is John Morris from John Morris online.com. And many of my fondest memories growing up where my dad's T-shirt shop, designing t-shirts, cranking out orders, interacting with customers, my dad's employees. Entrepreneurship is in my DNA and today's class is about consulting. And consulting is in my experience, one of the simplest ways to get started running your own business. There's not a lot of overhead or upfront work to get started. And really any goal you've ever accomplished in your life, you can simply turn around and help others to do the same. So maybe it's helping others get in shape, starting a business, leveling up their Photoshop skills, you can easily take what you know and turn it into a consulting or coaching program. Now for this course, I've partnered with an enterprise consultant who's clients include Amazon, Google, nike, Office Depot, and many other Fortune 500 clients to help you build and launch a high-end consulting program. By the time you're done, you'll have your topic picked, your program built, and you'll be ready to make it live. So if you're ready, let's get started.
2. How to Run a Successful Consulting Program: Welcome to the kings and queens of consulting program. This is lesson number one, how to run a successful consulting program. I'm going to be giving you an introduction to the program in this lesson. So first off, you might be wondering, well, who the heck am I? If you don't know who I am? I am a former army instructor. I spent six years training tens of thousands of soldiers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. And in that experience, I constructed training programs from start to finish. So from in-class teaching all the way to the large field exercises that we did. And I ran the whole gamut of doing that from training to evaluating, et cetera. I taught on our observed self-defense convoy operations, personnel recovery, detainee operations, and a number of other tasks while I was doing that. And then I've leveraged that experience as a teacher to now have taught over 30000 students online on freelance and web development. So teachings kinda my thing. I've been a freelance web developer. I have taught some courses on those things as well, but teaching is really my thing, That is what I do. So in this course, one of the things that we see with consultants and why we wanted to create this course. I will talk about who the we is here in a second. You obviously know who I am. But we've seen three big problems when it comes to consultants. So the first thing is, is that they often consult people who have a major red flags, roadblocks that are going to keep them from having success no matter what the consultant does. And if you do that, you're setting yourself up to fail over and over and over again. And the example that I would give you is, let's say that you were consulting a marathon runner. You are teaching a marathon or they came to you and they said, hey, I want to learn how to get better at running marathons. I want to run when this specific race, and I want you to show me what to do. But that marathon runner had two broken legs. It wouldn't matter what you do. There's nothing. You're going to be able to teach that marathon runner that's going to allow them to be able to complete the marathon, even, even compete in the marathon because they have a roadblock, they have a red flag that essentially negates their qualification to be able to run a marathon. Now that might seem like an extreme, sort of silly example. But what we've seen with consultants is there are a lot of consultants who, that's how they operate their business. They take on clients. Oftentimes because initially you are a little bit desperate for clients and a lot of cases you're trying to get any client you can, but you take on clients who don't meet your qualifications. There's no way almost no way, no matter what you do as a consultant that you can help them to achieve the result that thereafter. So that's a huge red flag that we see with consultants that we want to address. Another one. Oftentimes the meetings that consultants do, their random, there's no real plan or program to it. And the big problem here is that clients lose interests. Oftentimes clients hire consultant because they're, they're results-driven. They're, they're looking to achieve some specific thing and they feel like the consultant can help them to do that. But if the consultant doesn't have a set finite plan for helping them achieve that, the client will usually quickly lose interests and they almost always end the program dissatisfied because they never got the result that they were after because there was no plan for them to do that. And it sort of goes back to the old adage. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So that's another big problem that we see with consultants and consulting programs, quote unquote. The last one then is a lot of times the consultants just don't have much experience. You don't really have any idea how to run and take control of a meeting. And what happens is that the default to the client, and I will tell you early on in my consulting career in consulting that I've done I did this. I am I'm a 100 percent guilty of this, and none of this is accusatory, but these are real issues. And you let the client take the lead. Well then the client will run you ragged and very little ever gets done in the meetings. And the example that I can use here, because it's very top of mind for me is my two-year-old daughter. When I wake up in the morning, if I just let my daughter go before I know it, she'll have the House and a complete tornado haven't pulled out all of her toys and things she's not supposed to get into, et cetera. And if I try to interject at that point, she'll get angry and upset because she's been running around the house, do on whatever she wanted for however long now, and she expects to be able to do that. Whereas if I wake up in the morning and I engage, you're immediately start playing with her, talking to her, et cetera. And I take the lead. She tends to follow and it doesn't create near as much of a mess. And it's actually a lot happier throughout the day. And so again, it's the same way with your clients. If you let them take control, they don't know what to do, they don't know how to achieve this goal. They wouldn't hire you if they did. And so they're just going to run you ragged all over the place while their insecurities and questions and this and that, you have to take control of the situation to avoid that. And so successful, a successful consulting program is three things. It's targeted towards a highly qualified group of people. It has a set program of instruction and it uses a proven meeting format to deliver results in those meetings. And so that's what I'm going to show you in this course. And by the way, as a side note, this works for both consulting and coaching. Now, I'm talking about consulting because I primarily deal with freelancers. And consulting is the neck next logical step for freelancers, however, you're a teacher, maybe an info publisher, and you want to add a coaching program to what you're doing. This works. You just targeting different people, okay. There's some nuance to that that I'm not necessarily going to get into in this particular course. But the setting up the program, figuring out who your ideal client is, all of the things that we're going to talk about. It's the same for both consulting and coaching. You're just talking to different people. That's really the only difference. So this works for both consulting and coaching. Now, in this program, I've partnered with a high-end consultant named Michael Phoenix to create this course. So just to tell you a little bit about him and just to, not to bury the lead or to let the cat out of the bag. I guess michael happens to be my brothers, so I have unique access to him. But just a little over a decade ago, Michael was working in an apparel factory, actually just a little bit down the road from where I live now. And it's sort of the typical story. Frustrated, miserable, broke, felt like he, he should be doing more. And so at my urging, he decided to make a leap of faith and he applied for a tech job at IBM. And in the years since he's risen to the top of the consulting world and is now a director of data and data management of 10 Fortune 500s fastest growing companies. He's sort of earned his stripes as a consultant himself and has consulted with companies like Amazon, Google, nike, Office Depot, Circle K. There's this whole long list that I could rattle off of large fortune 500 companies that he's consulted with all of the today's largest businesses that you would know, CSVs and other one on down the line. He's consulted with these huge companies. And he's now, as I mentioned, a director who hires, trains, and manages other consultants. So much of what you'll learn in this course is derived from his experience both as a consultant with these huge companies and now as a leader of consultants who's training and managing those people who are themselves working with high-end clients. So a plethora of experience when it comes to really high end Consulting, hi, high-intensity consulting that that he's given us access to and is going to share with us. And then my role is essentially to take a lot of that and coupled with my own experience and compile it into a training program that's patterned after the military training that I created an administered for the US Army. So taking my experience creating training programs, taking all of his knowledge, and funneling it into that so that by the end of this course, you'll have your program designed. You'll have your ideal clients identified, and you'll be ready to tackle meetings with confidence and be able to implement your program so that you feel confident offering your very own consulting or coaching program. And your certain that you can help others achieve results. And you can grow your consulting or coaching program. Or if you so choose, you can get hired at a high-end consulting firm like he did, and jump right into that enterprise consulting with those big clients and feel confident and ready to perform. The last thing that I wanna talk about here is if you're, if you're someone from my audience and you're a freelancer and you haven't necessarily thought about this idea of consulting. You might be wondering, well, why consult? And the answer is, and I talk about this. I've talked about this extensively in my ascension matrix course, which that course is essentially walking you through from step one all the way to Step 6 of your career and the steps that you should follow. Freelancing is one of them, but consulting is another one. And so consulting is the next logical step for you as a freelancer, because when you consult your no longer performing the work yourself, you're being paid to help others perform the work. So it's that first step where you're getting paid purely for your knowledge. You're not getting paid for what you do. You're getting paid for what you know. And it's a very direct method of knowledge vending, which is a term that I use. That again, it's very direct. You're getting paid for what you know, not what you do, which creates an extra level layer of leverage for you. And it also creates a better lifestyle because now you're getting paid to get on a meeting with a client and provide them with information, guide them through a process and help them to perform some sort of work. And when you're done, you're done. You don't have work that you have to do after that. You're not getting on a meeting, talking things through and then go and performing some work for them. You're just getting on a meeting with them. You're helping them to do it and then you're done. And so it creates a better lifestyle where you don't have this work constantly hanging over your head. All you have to do is jump on meetings and help client. And so it creates a better lifestyle and extra layer of leverage. It primes you for a leap into that next phase of your career, which is info publishing if you want to do that. And you're essentially getting paid to develop your methodology, which will become the foundation of your inflow publishing career. And info publishing is now a next step in creating leverage where you can get paid for someone buys your online course or takes your online course or some sort of program that you create. And you don't have to be there. You don't, you're not investing any time directly into it, only the time to create it. And so this primed you for that phase and creating that extra leverage. And then just sort of the bottom line with this. As a consultant, you will often just get paid more than you will as a freelancer, it sounds weird. It sounds strange. But on an hour, hour by hour basis, you will often get paid more because when you're at that consultant level, your expertise is more valued. And so people are willing to pay more for just getting access to you and your knowledge. So again, if you're a freelancer wondering why you might consider consulting and adding that as an add-on to your freelance services and eventually evolving towards that being the main thing that you do. These are some of the reasons why you would do that. So that's sort of an introduction to the course. That's what we're going to get into. So if you're ready to dive in, Let's get to it.
3. Identify Your Ideal Client: Welcome back to the kings and queens of consulting, lesson number 2, identifying your ideal client. And we're gonna be talking about a funny lesson learned selling insurance. So let's go ahead and dive in. So let's talk about this funny lesson learned selling insurance. This actually wasn't me. This is my, my older brother who got into selling insurance and a lot of those financial services, it's sort of interesting. A lot of the financial services like insurance, financial advisors, those sorts of things. When someone becomes a new agent, they have a lot of really old school kind of low fi methods for getting those agents their first few clients and getting them started in the business. So they do things like flyers and billboards and door hangers and that sort of thing. And one of the things that they do is they have a door-to-door method where you will take a hanger might be a bag or it might just be a hanger. And you'll go around your neighborhood and maybe some surrounding neighborhoods where you live. And you will go up with the intention of putting this door hanger on the door. However, when they go up there, they'll knock on the door. And if someone's home, then they have a little pamphlet inside the bag or the, that's usually what the door hanger is composed of. And it talks about all the financial services that they offer, whether it's an insurance or the financial advice, et cetera. I've had a few when I lived back in Omaha, had a few that came to my door and did that exact thing. And so the idea is is that they're going door to door, and if nobody's home, they'll hang the door hanger and f naught. If someone is home any answers the door, then they'll talk to him. And it's a little like door-to-door sales, although a low pressure version where they're not actually trying to get someone to buy their insurance right there at the door. They're just getting their name out essentially. So anyway, when my first my brother first started doing this, if you knew my older brother, you would know. He's very aggressive and so he went into it. He used to play football, he was a football coach. And so he went into it with that mindset. And so he went into it essentially trying to sell people at the door on buying insurance like that was what he wanted to do. He wanted to get off to a fast, Fast Start. He wanted to be successful. He's really driven. And so he kinda took it overboard and was really trying to sell people at the door. And so he told me a story one time that kind of changed his perspective on the whole thing. So he went to this one house and he knocked on the door, and this guy answered the door. And if he had been paying attention, he wouldn't notice that the guy was kind of in work shirt. And the guy the guy had signs that that what was about to happen was going to was going to happen that if my brother are paying attention, he would have he would have noticed somebody was so driven. You know, he started he started talking to the guy and started going through his spiel about why, you know, buying his insurance and getting a lower price and protecting his family both. And he said the guy kept trying to interrupt him, but he wouldn't let the guy in erupt him because he he knew that if the guy interrupted him, that he was going to tell him No, he didn't want it and he was going to lose the sale so he wouldn't let him interrupt him. So he kept going through his spiel. The guy kept trying to interrupt them by about the fourth or fifth time. The guy stopped him and said, Dude, I don't even live here. I'm just fixing the plumbing. And my brother was like, oh, and it made him realize that he needed to sort of tone it down and back off and do a little bit more listening and a little bit less hard selling. And, but it illustrates the point though, at a basic level that identifying your ideal client is something that you need to do because you can give the most impassioned, brilliant marketing message out there. But if you're giving it to the wrong people, if you're giving it to people who don't need what you're offering, then it doesn't matter because they're just not going to be they're not going to be a good target for your consulting program. So this may be the advice that you've heard 1000 times, but it is important because you need a clear picture of who you're talking to, both when you do your marketing, but also as you build your program. So you can create a program that's actually going to help people get results because maybe more so than anything else. As a consultant, you are, you are directly handling someone's result when you're a freelancer. You're kinda doing it for them and you can take it out of their hands and you don't necessarily have to you don't necessarily have to worry so much about them. When you're creating a course. The most you can do when a course is provide the information, give them everything you have. But at the end of the day, it's sort of on them to take that information and run with it. So in those two cases, you're separated from it a little bit. It's not that you don't try and really give people though the ultimate end result, but you just separate it from a little bit. But when you're consulting, you're working directly with them or if you're coaching your working directly with them one on one. And so you're right there with them. And so if you can't get them that end result, it really sort of falls on you. And a big part of it of having that success and helping them to generate that success is making sure you're feeding the right people into the program in the first place. People that are actually qualified, people that don't have any major roadblock stopping them from achieving the ultimate end result that you're helping them to achieve. So I can give you another example. As I mentioned, I've been working with Michael Phoenix on this, who's a really high-end consultant and again worked with Amazon, Google, and all these other big companies. And one of the things about the service that they provide is they only, it's really only useful to companies with at least 30 to 40 retail locations because that's what the software that he consults around ultimately does. It helps them to manage leases and we're talking about millions and millions of dollars worth of payments for these really high-end companies for their retail locations. And what I mean by that is, let's take CVS for example, all of their locations, all of their stores that they have around the nation, around the world. All of those have payments associated with them, retail lease payments. And so they have to make those payments on schedule, on time to the right people, all of those things and this software helps them to do that. Well, again, it's only really useful to companies with at least 30 to 40 retail location. So he wouldn't even talk to accompany the head less than that. They just don't qualify and it's not because he's a snob or anything like that. It's for them, the pricing of the service and what the software does, and all of these other factors, the service just ultimately wouldn't make sense unless they have that many retail locations is not worth the investment to those clients. So by identifying who will be most likely to have success and working only with them, you dramatically increase the success rate of your program, which will help you create positive word of mouth. So the point here is that it's beneficial to them. So they're not getting into something that they're not going to get success from there, not paying for something that they're not going to get success from. But it's also good for you because now every person that comes through is qualified as really likely to have success. That's going to create a positive review, that's going to create word of mouth that's going to lead to a really high success rate that you can talk about. All of these beneficial things that are going to make it easier for you to get future consulting clients. So the two things work together to make a successful program and that is why identifying your ideal client is really, really important. One way to think about it is it's sort of like a casino, right? They set the odds in their favor so that over the long haul, they always win. Well, identifying clearly who your ideal client is, that's what it does for you. It stacks the odds in your favor. So you're bringing in people that are most likely to have success. You're not making it more difficult, difficult for yourself, then a has to be. And if you don't do it, the flip side, if you don't do it, you're just making everything else from running your program and working with clients to your sales and marketing. You're making all of that stuff harder. So that's essentially why you want to really focus in on this and do it. So with that said, let's talk about the how and there's really three steps to it. There's this qualifiers, There's qualifiers and their proof. And the ultimate end of this is to help you get a much clearer picture on who your ideal consulting client is. Who are the people that are most likely to have success from your program. So let's talk about disqualified. So what you wanna do is you want to imagine that you have someone sitting in front of you that you're going to coach or consult right there sitting right in front of you and your thinking about helping them to get that ultimate end result? Well, as you think about that, what are the things that almost feels like an insecurity that, that you start to think about that like, well, they need to make sure that they have this and they have this and they have this and they don't have this, et cetera. What would be the things that are potential roadblocks for that person having success within your program. So let me give you some examples. I worked early on, especially in my teaching career. I taught coders. And there were a few things that would come up. Simple things like not having a computer. You might be surprised, but there are a lot of people who are trying to take my coding courses and didn't have a computer. They're trying to watch him on a mobile phone or something like that. That's a real roadblock to having success. That's not a person that I would consult with because there's just too much in the way for them to have success. People, there'd be a lot of people who'd say I'm not very tech savvy for me. When someone said that to me, the ultimate thing that makes someone a coder is a bracing. The fact that their texts, Abby's embracing the fact that they're going to master technology. That's like a fundamental thing that has to be there. So when someone said that, that was really a disqualify or forming, or someone who I realized didn't have a persistent personality or gave up easy. Because again, one of the foundational things about being a good coder is that you're persistent, is that you take responsibility for the technology and you figure out a way to fix it no matter what. If you don't have that kind of personality, It's going to be hard for you to be successful as a coder. No matter the coding skills are the technologies or whatever. So those would be some things that were disk qualifiers for me. If I were running a coding consulting program, I wouldn't want to work with people that have these qualifiers because they're not going to have success with the program. If you were looking at business. If you had someone who values security more than freedom, for me, that would be a disc qualifier because business isn't necessarily about security, It's more about freedom. If someone were highly risk averse, then that would be, that would be someone that would probably have a hard time in business because they would be so terrified to take any sort of risks. And really business running your own business as a whole is taking a risk. So it just wouldn't work. Of course, if they didn't have any marketable skills, that would be a problem as well. You would need to go get those skills first before I could tend, teach you how to profit from those skills. If we were talking about health like diet and exercise, if someone was addicted to drugs or alcohol, me personally, if I were running a coaching program that wasn't about helping people with drugs or alcohol. Someone who is addicted to drugs or alcohol, I wouldn't want to work with them because that's going to derail everything that we're trying to do. They need to get over that first or if they had some sort of injury that prevents them from training or there's someone who gives up and quit easily, although those things would be disqualified. So again, you want to look for these kinds of things. Now the distinction I want to make here is you're not looking for the minimum qualifications they need to be accepted, which was, well, a lot of people do because they want a lot of people to join their consulting program. They want to make a bunch of money. And so they think, okay, let me only find the things that I absolutely have to mark as qualifiers. That's not what we're doing here. We want the maximum because we're trying to find the most ideal who's the perfect fit. So you want to try and find as many qualifiers as your, as you can. Okay, So the maximum amount of qualifiers are them highest bar that you can set to find the most ideal clients to figure out who is perfect. So again, it's not how I can lower the bar to let the most people in. It's how can I raise the bar to ensure that those who do get in, we'll have success. That's what it's about. Almost guaranteeing that if someone meets these qualifications, they will have success, just like the casino that sets the odds in their paper in their favor. So if that person was sitting in front of you and you started asking questions, what would be the things that would be red flags to you? And you just simply want to write those things down. If you want, you can create a spreadsheet. You can make one column disqualifies and you start writing all these things down. These are all the things that would disqualify someone from being able to be successful in my program. Okay, after that, then we flip over to the other side and talk about qualifiers. And here we simply take all the qualifiers that we just mentioned and that you just wrote down and we flip them to the positives. So instead of red flags, what signals would be green flags? And again, it's the greenest of green flags. We want that high bar. So again, if I were talking about coding, know someone who says I love technology, I've been messing with technology my whole life. I know It's what I wanna do with my life. That would be a qualifier or they have multiple computers there there there there into messing around with computers that have computers laying around. All of those things would be a qualifier. Or they're very persistent in pursuing problems and they take ownership, they take responsibility again, all qualifiers. Business, if freedom and control is their number one value and they tell you that they're not really concerned about security. They want freedom, they want control of their own destiny. They want something they can hand down to. They're good kids, all of those things. Those would be qualifiers. They're more than willing to take risks and their near mastery level of a particular skill that someone who if they were in that situation, that would be primed for a consulting program to show them how to take that skill and monetize it. And they'd be willing to take the risks. They'd be willing to deal with some, some less security in order to get there. If it were health, of course, being clean and sober, no injuries, they're fully capable falling the program and there's someone who's been trying and trying and trying and trying. They, they, they won't give up. They just need the right information and they need someone to help them through it. That would be an ideal client client for a health consulting program. Okay, So that's what we mean by qualifiers. You, what you really want is you want people who already have the ingredients for success. They needed. You just need someone to show them how to put it all together. Those are your ideal clients. And I'll say this, Stop trying to fix broken people. And I say this because I have this tendency in me coming from. The, the, the childhood that I grew up in, I grew up in a a tough upbringing, right? We didn't have a lot of money, we didn't have a lot of things. And so I have this affinity for people in that same situation. But the best thing that you can do for someone in that situation is to force them to meet your standards before they can take your program. Because if they take it when they're not ready, they're not going to have success. They're not going to get the result anyway, okay, so force them to meet your standards before they can take your program. That forces them to get proactive and take responsibility. And once they do that, then you can help them. So it's not that you never are going to help them. It's just they need to meet these qualifications first. And once they do, then you are willing to help them, but until then there's nothing you can do for them. And so you just want to figure out all of these green flags, all of these qualifiers, things that would make you excited to work with this person because you just know, man, they're perfect. They will have success with my program if they have these things. And again, write those down as well. If you do in a spreadsheet, make another column right, qualifiers, and write all of these down as well. All right, then the final thing that we're looking for is proof. And the way to think about this is if you had 30 people standing in front of you and you can only accept ten into your program, right? They all want it in, but you can only accept ten into your program. How would they prove to you that they're qualified? What evidence would you accept in order to figure out which ten you're going to let n. So for example, on this, when I built the small business owners Council membership site for Inc. Magazine, their criteria criteria was very strict, I believe was around 2000 dollar a year program. So it wasn't a cheap program. And you had to be the CEO of a company, and that company had to do at least $2 million a year in revenue. So that is a really high bar that you have to meet in order to be a part of that program. But because of that, the membership site was really successful. And the people got a ton from it by just being around other people who were as successful as they were. So that was the criteria, that was the proof that someone needed in order to be able to join that membership site. And so again, that proved to the, to the guy that was running it, that you are a real business and that you would add value to the group. So for each qualifier that we just listed out, then you just think of, well, how could they prove it to me? What what behaviors, what credentials, personality traits, what things would I look for if they were sitting in front of me? What questions would I ask them if they were sitting right in front of me to narrow down from 30 people down to ten people. And again, write those things down. You can create a third column and start writing them down. Okay, so that's the three things. Does qualifiers, qualifiers, and proof? This is the exercise. Go through this exercise. Really before you continue with this lesson, you really should go through and at least do a few. So you get an idea, you get a feel for what you're doing before you continue with the rest of this lesson because it really doesn't matter what you learn from here if you don't actually do the exercise. So assuming you've done that, what I want you to do then is step back and ask yourself, when you look at those qualifiers, when you look at those proof elements, when you look at the disk qualifiers, do you have a much clear idea of who your ideal client is? You have a much clearer picture of who it is that you can actually help. I think if you actually did the exercise would be very hard for you not to. And you can probably start to imagine all kinds of important things about them. Places they hang out online, offline and maybe magazines that are interested in Facebook pages. They might hang out on Twitter accounts or YouTube accounts that they might follow. Messaging and marketing and persuasion that they might find compelling. There's a lot of things that when you get clear on who your ideal client is, that you can start to get answers to you about how to market your program, how to construct your program, the things that they would need to learn and do in order to be successful. All kinds of things that you can learn that would help you to be more successful with your consulting program. That is the purpose of this exercise. That's what we're ultimately this lesson is about. So again, if you haven't done it, go back and do the exercise and then come back and take a step back and look at it and think, have a much clear picture. Do I have an idea of who this person is, what they actually look like? And do I have a lot better idea how to identify my ideal client if you do the exercise, I truly believe that you will.
4. Create Your Program: Welcome back to the kings and queens of consulting Lesson 3. Create your program, saving an Inc 5000 company from certain doom now doesn't fit in the title here, but it's one of the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies. So in this true story that I'm going to tell you and sort of illustrates what we're going to do here. So again, we're going back to our hero for the program, Michael Phoenix. And this essentially is about how he had to come in and save the day of the company that he worked with. So essentially what had happened is he started out when he was hired at IBM, he started working out with this software product called try Riga. And try Riga is a software product that helps you to do the retail lease management that, that the, the company helps their clients do. And so he started out actually working with IBM in this trie rigor product because it's try Riga is actually an IBM product and then they license it to other companies. And so he'd moved up there. And then he ended up working for a, another company that was sort of kind of high-end company for, for implementing this try Riga software with companies like Nike and Office Depot and all of these other companies. And so he moved over there and started working for this other company. I'm not going to name names here just to keep a little bit of his privacy and so forth. And he had worked on that team for for a long time in that team had everything sort of down pat. They were, they were a lot of the people that were on that team came from IBM. And they had done this before. They knew what they were doing and they really had their system and their process and how they delivered, which is the sort of the focus of this lesson. How they delivered their program, their process, their consulting service, and so they had everything really nail down. Well, then the company that he worked for essentially created its own little startup within the company. So they were still doing this one side where they were doing the try Riga implementation, but they decided to create their own software that did the same thing so that they could bring it in house. And of course, when you do that, the profit margins are off. We're going to be better. You're going to have more control over everything and so forth. You're not relying on this third party, but they had to create the software. So they created this own little, their own little startup within the company. And he was brought over from the try Riga team to this new startup. Well, it was a startup, so everything was a mess. I didn't really have a lot of processes in place, didn't have a lot of systems, didn't have the consulting program sort of laid out and the project management really nailed down. There just wasn't a lot of stability and there were a lot of really upset clients. And when he first moved over, he had to jump into several different projects with really big companies that were basically in disaster mode where they were about to lose clients because they just weren't making any progress, they weren't getting things done. And so he essentially came in, he had to save those projects and then meticulously, over the last several years, implement the systems, implement the processes. And that's how he was able to move from being sort of a frontline consultant to being a director because he helped to actually build the overall program and a lot of processes and systems that are in place on this new side of the startup, which is now several years into, into running and being a thing. And there's a lot more stable, has a lot more systems in place and a lot happier clients. And, but there was something, there is essentially a strategy. And that's really the point of what I'm talking about this. There were there were principals and there was a strategy that he learned when he was on at IBM. And in the try Riga side of things, he then took any applied over to the other side. So it wasn't like he was just coming up with things out of thin air. He already had a system that was in place and he took that and he adapted it to this other side of the company. And it's been a great success and has really helped the company to grow and get some stability on that side of things, obviously, never perfect. Still, still learning and growing, but again, has helped them to get out of disaster zone with clients and have a lot happier clients. And so essentially what I've done is I've, I've sat and I've picked his brain about everything that he learned in that he did in that really powerful Transition. And as you can imagine, you'd learn a ton through that. And you really learn what works and what doesn't when it comes to having a consulting program in place, especially one like this, which is a really high-end consulting, a product or a service wrapped around kind of a really unique software products. So I've taken the principles and strategies and adapted, adapted them to how you construct your own consulting program. And this is also something that as I learned this from him, I use to help me actually changed the way that I create courses. So the way that I'm creating courses right now, there's very course that you're in has changed dramatically from some of the first courses that I created. If you go back and look at those courses, you'll see it. And a lot of it is driven by what I learned from him, from picking his brain about this because I know, you know, if you're working with it doesn't matter what it is. If you're working with an Amazon, a Google, an Office Depot on Nike, all of these really huge companies. There's tons to be learned from somebody who has experienced working with those kinds of clients. It doesn't necessarily matter if it's a perfect fit. There's a lot of things that you can pull an adaptive. So I've constantly been trying to learn from the things that he goes through and like I said, I have unique access to him. So that's really what the strategy that I'm going to show you in this lesson behind this, how you construct a program here is based on n. The first big thing about it is that it's a finite process to achieve a specific end result. So for a lot of these clients that they work with at this company, work with, works with they might have some ongoing support for sure, some ongoing consulting with certain clients and so forth. But initially, there's a big initial end result that they're pushing towards is a big initial thing that they're helping them to do, which is to transition from the old software that they're using for managing this. Often it's multiple pieces of software and really outdated based off a really old technology into this new system. So there's a finite process to achieve a specific end result. And once they've done that, then there can be some ongoing support of that. But they don't just go right into o ongoing support and talking generally about Retail leases or whatever, that's not how it works. It's a very finite process to achieve a specific and results. So when you're constructing your program, you want to think of it like a six-week or an eight-week or a 12-month program, whatever it is, whatever makes sense for the consulting that you're doing, you want to have a finite timeline. That doesn't mean that you won't eventually do ongoing, ongoing consulting. I'll talk about that in an upcoming lesson. But initially you want to have some sort of finite process to a specific end result. That is more likely people can get their head around that and they're more likely to invest in it. And it's easier to market than just sort of ongoing, vague Consulting. Okay, so that's the very first thing that you wanna do when you're getting into consulting. Now, the way that we construct this, if you've taken my same course, creation course is very similar. I'll talk about why that is here in a minute. But it's essentially the macro, the micro and execution. That's essentially what your course is going to be composed of. So we're going to be talking about what that looks like. So the very first is the macro. And the macro, or the large steps to getting the end result. What are the really big steps overall in the process? We'll look at some examples here in a little bit, but it's just the large steps. So if you were, if you were teaching someone how to play basketball, right? One of the steps might be shooting the basketball. One of the steps might be dribbling, one might be playing defense, one might be rebounding. These are the big blocks, the obvious things. Now, you want it to be five to seven steps. At most. If you're getting into more steps than that, you're either breaking the steps down to small or you're taking on too big of a topic at once. And so you want to try to adjust that so you really in the five to seven step range at most, and you'll see why when we get into the micro, because we go beyond that, you're just going to create two too complex of a thing for someone to try and accomplishes and create too big of a course that someone's just never going to get through. So five to seven steps at most. And like I said, some examples. So if we were, we're talking about health. Health in general is probably a bit too big of a topic. You probably wanna do, a consulting just around diet or just around exercise or whatever. But let's say you were doing health. Some of your macro steps might be diet, exercise, sleep, and motivation. If you were doing started at starting a business, it might be identifying a product to sell, building a team, creating the product, marketing the product, creating back-end products, those would all be steps in starting and running a business. And like I said earlier, this is usually the obvious. There's not really any secret here. The big thing that I've noticed is that with a lot of courses and even like YouTube content, so forth, they really stay at the macro step level. They stay here and they just kinda give you maybe some information about each step or maybe a little process for each step, but they don't go much more than that. And so again, when I've, a lot, when I was talking about my same course creation course, but even here, a lot of courses, a lot of consulting programs don't necessarily have a ton of depth to them. And so we want to create depth in our program by going beyond the macro. Okay? And so that's where we're going to get into the micro. And so it's really simple for each macro step, outline the individual steps to accomplish that macro step. So if we were talking, going back to health, one of the macro steps was diet. Well, it might be for diet. You might say no sugar grains. Eat a meat-based diet, drink plenty of water, and eat 2000 calories or less. Those would be sort of the second tier of the hierarchy, the micro steps for that macro step. Or if you're marketing a product again, that was one of the macro steps for starting and running a business. So part of that might be identifying your ideal customer or client, figure out where they hang out online and then run ads on those platforms. I'm keeping this real simple. So that you get the idea. But again, those are the micro steps within the macro step. Again, these are also usually obvious, but they can include proprietary methods. And this is where you can get into things that other people might not. This is where you can make your consulting program unique because let's say you're talking about marketing a product. Well, maybe you're really good at Facebook ads. So when it comes to marketing the product, you might dig deep in on Facebook ads where someone else, they might not be as good at that they might be better at writing sales copy. So you can dig real deep on to they could dig real deep into writing sales copy. You both would have consulting programs about starting a business, but they would be different because of your unique and individual strengths. That's a good thing. You want those unique strengths to drive your consulting program because that means you're going to become known for those things. And people will take your consulting program to warn that specific thing from you. Okay? And then again, it can also include proprietary methods. Maybe you have a unique Facebook's Ads method or an SEO strategy, or maybe, you know, you've got muscle confusion like P9 dx had for, for exercise. Again, all of those things can come into play to help make this unique. But usually it's going to be fairly obvious what most of the steps are. And again, you're going to want to confine this to five to seven micro steps per macro steps. So if you step back and look at that, if you have five macro steps and each one of those has five micro steps, that's a minimum of 25 steps that someone's going to have to get through in order to accomplish the task. A maximum of 49 or 50 steps that they're going to have to get to in order to accomplish the task. Well, that's a lot I mean, that's not nothing. Okay. That's a lot of things to get through. If you were doing one of those tasks per week, that would be a 25 week consulting program. That's a two-year consulting program or a six month consulting program. Sorry. So that's a that's a long consulting program. So it's not nothing. And that's why you don't want to go beyond the five to seven macro steps and five to 67 micro steps. Okay, so this is sort of starting to organize and layout, right? All we're doing right now is organizing and laying out our program. And I'm going to walk you through a real clear example of this here in a second, but I just want to get through this information. Then finally, you have to get to the actual execution. And so this is assuming that you're going to have weekly meetings at one hour in length. That's pretty common for consulting and coaching programs. You just tie the micro step to each consulting meeting. So in this meeting, we're gonna do this micro step in this meeting were needed, this micro step in this meeting, we're going to do this micro step. Or you might do two of those micro steps or three of those Microsoft's, whatever makes sense, you're just tying them to each meeting, what you think you can get done in that one hour time period. So week 1, we'll accomplish this week to accomplish this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And just remember, you'll be walking them through doing each step on the meeting. You're not freelancing, you're not doing it for them. You are walking them through doing it. Okay. So you're essentially leading them by the hand through the process to achieve their end result. This is why you see a lot of coaching programs oriented around fitness. Because I can build a website for you. I can't get in shape for you. So the person that's trying to get in shape has to do it themselves. And so a coaching program works perfectly around that. But you don't have to do that. You can have a consulting program around building a website or building a membership site or creating a course or whatever it is. You can have a consulting program around that. You're just essentially having them do it instead of you doing it for them. So this is an action focused approach and it is really the best method in my opinion, like I said, it's not you're just providing ongoing sessions where you answer questions or whatever, you know, to try and to do that right off the back can be really difficult. It's not that you can't get there, but starting out that way can be really difficult to do. Couple of things to keep in mind when you're doing this. You'll have less time than you think. So you want to keep the steps per meeting small enough so that you can actually get them done. Because it's critical that every single meeting, they should take one complete step or one more step toward their goal. That's how you're going to keep them happy as keeping them making forward progress towards the goal that they're after. When you first do this, you may have to adjust that a little bit. You may think you can get more done than you can, or you may get more done than what you thought you could, et cetera. Like it could go either way. You just need to get into a couple of meetings with a plan. And then as you execute, you'd be able to adjust that. Maybe you need to do a little bit less this week, a little bit more of that week, or maybe you need to break it into a few more steps or whatever it is. You need to figure that out. But every meeting they should complete the entire task in the meeting so that they feel a sense of accomplishment. Again, that's how they're going to stay happy. All right, so once you've kind of gone through all this and sort of laid out, you want to write all this down and you really want to map it out into a handbook as much as possible. And you're going to include any sort of nodes, tips, insights, everything that you want to make sure and cover. During each meeting, you want to go into a meeting knowing exactly what you're going to help them do, having all the information at your disposal and say handbook that you need to help them execute on that so that every meeting you go into, There's no question you're going to get done the task that's assigned to that meeting again so that they're happy. And you just include in this handbook everything that you need in order to be able to do that. And I actually pick this up way back in the day, probably close to 20 years ago when I worked at pelo windows, which was a window and door factory. And they had a consultant. I was a manager there and they had a consultant come in and talk to us managers. Well, they paid that consultant $15 thousand for three hours of his time. And he we had a little short little session with him where he talked to us and then we went around the factory and we got to ask questions and we would look at things and he talked to us and all of this stuff. We went went around and did all this and we spent three hours with this guy. And that's what he did. He had this thick handbook that he had with him. And whenever something would come up that he wasn't quite sure on or, you know, he made it maybe need more information on. He'd opened up the handbook and he flipped through it and he would have his answer in that book. Now that might sound simple, but a guy who's getting paid 5000 dollars an hour for consulting. And I actually, I learned a ton from the guy. Actually, one of the things that I learned from him is that he talked about having a script. So when you have certain things that you need to, to convey or certain things that come up all the time when you're managing people. He talked about having scripts for those things that you would write down, you'd write out beforehand. You would sort of memorize those scripts and then you would you would use those scripts at your disposal whenever you needed to have a conversation with someone. And his whole thing was about creating really process-oriented management instead of just winging from the hip and having to have managers that came in with a bunch of talent. He was about systematizing it and turning it into a process. And you could teach people who maybe didn't have the natural talent, how to be good managers by giving them, them the scripts. I was one of the things that he talked about. And I've used that actually a lot throughout my life, not necessarily for management, but when it comes to these courses that I create or talking to people, et cetera. I've used that quite a bit throughout my career when I was heavily, when I was in sales as well. And so anyway, I learned a ton from the guy and a guy who's getting paid $5 thousand an hour, maybe I should pay attention and humble myself a little bit and learn from him. So again, this is he just had this handbook that he carried around with him and, you know, if you need to look, sum up, you looked it up and then give the answer and it was usually really good answer and that was it. And he was never caught off guard. He never had to worry about, you know, what, someone who was going to ask him or whatever he had that book there that he always could reference if he needed to. For you, it's a roadmap for war delivery, right? It's a roadmap for you to walk through Azure for all of your meetings. So you know exactly what's happening. You know what's happening in this meeting, you will happen in the next meeting. You know what happened in the previous meeting. You just have it all laid out. You don't have to get you don't go in trying to figure out what you're gonna do with these meetings. You go in knowing exactly what you're gonna do. And it's also a place to collect lessons learned so that your consultancy and your coaching grows in value over time. All of these notes, all of these lessons, all of these ways of saying things to clients that have impact and actually help them to understand. You can write all of this stuff down and collected. And that will grow the value of your consultancy or your coaching program over time. In a way, the other coaches, consultants can't compete with all that stuff is really unique to you and the clients that you've worked with. So someone can't just come in and swipe that. Okay. So they could they could have your exact outline of what you do and they still wouldn't have the same consulting program is you wouldn't still wouldn't have the same value as yours because you're collecting all of this stuff over time. And just remember, ultimately it's not about you showing off how smart you are. It's about getting them the end result. That's what matters in everything, sort of a catch-all in everything. If you focus on them. And and the the how you answer questions that come up is will it help them or not, you're ultimately going to be in a good place. So that's really diving into the nuts and bolts of creating a program. I want to take you over to document. You're going to get this document with the course, but I want to take you over to a document that's going to help you start laying out your consulting program and kinda take everything that we've learned here and put a little bit of meat to it. So let's hop over to that document. Okay. So here is the document's really just a sample consulting program. I've kept this really, really simple. I didn't want to have too much whiz bang to it. You could of course pretty this up if you wanted to. But it essentially what I want to show you is taking everything that we talked about, the macro and micro on the execution and showing you how to actually lay that out. So I just created a simple document here. It's got a table and you could do this in a spreadsheet if you wanted. But the big things are, okay. We're going to lay out our weeks and week one. Each one of these is a macro step, okay, so this is based around the idea if I were, if I were consulting with someone on building a membership site, which is what I do as a freelancer, I've done for years and years and years. If I were going to create a consultancy around that, then these are kind of the macro steps that I would lay out. This isn't everything. I kept it simple, but this is sort of how I might lay it out. So week 1, installing and configuring WordPress week to installing and configuring the plugins and themes. Week 3, designing the site week for adding the content. Week 5, building the sales page, and week 6, launching it. And so those are the macro steps. Those weeks are those six things. Those are the macro steps. So that's what you would lay out first. So you would come in here and you just lay all of these out week one, week two, week three, week four, et cetera. For however long of a coaching program, your or consulting program it's going to be for you. And then under each one of those macro steps, you're going to come in and lay out the micro steps. So we might need to purchase domain name, and I might need to purchase hosting, install WordPress using the built-in tool on the hosting site, setup permalink. There's a number of other things that I would probably include under here. But these are all of the micro steps for installing and configuring a WordPress. And then you'll see over here I have little sort of insights about things that I would want to make sure and conveyed to them or tell to them or whatever. So maybe recommending Google domains because I personally like how easy it is to use or using, suggesting the use of WordPress, manage hosting. Be sure to use a secure admin username. So don't just use admin as the admin username and have a good password, etc. I might talk about that. Setting up the permanent inks and setting them to post name and why you do that? I would have notes probably about why we do that. So if they ask, Well, why are we doing it that way, I have the answer. All of these things you can put over here in this insight section. Now, again, this is a little, I've crammed this. I put this into a Word document so that I can give it to you. I might actually do this in an Excel spreadsheet to give myself a little more space. But you can again just do this however it makes sense for you. But you just want to put in whatever notes, whatever insights you, you wanna make sure and cover for each one of these steps. But these are the micro steps for the overall macro step of installing and configuring WordPress. Then we come down here too weak to install and configure plugins and themes. So will the membership plug software that I use is wishlist member and then, uh, use Elementor and this custom CSS and JS plug-in custom post types plugin. So we would install all of those and then set up the levels in which this member configure the payment provider, the auto responder set up the custom post types if necessary. And I have all of these little notes so that you know, for Elementor, recommend getting pro for this plugin. Explain why we're installing it, what it's used for, It's used for like Facebook pixels and that sort of thing. The JavaScript code that you often get asked to put into your website. That's why it's called that one. Talk about pass-through levels, which is a concept and one product, one level concept, etc. All of these notes of things that I wanted to make sure and cover and talk about as we're going through all of the steps. So I have it all at my disposal. There's no Oh, I have to remember. There's no guessing. There's nothing. It's all laid out and designed beforehand. And then we have this note section so that as I go through oh, I got asked this question. No one's ever asked me before. And so then I can afterwards, you know, maybe I answered good in in, in, in the meeting. Maybe I don't, but afterwards I can think about em, so okay. Here's what I would say. If someone asks me that next time. And that moves from notes over into insights. So you constantly collecting those things and then putting them over into the insights so that you have them in again, you're building the value of your consultancy. And so again, when you build your program, you just go through like this, Week 1, you know, lay out all the macro steps. And then for each macro step, lay out all of these micro steps at any notes, anything that you might want to cover that you know beforehand. Before you ever have a consulting client, you write down things you might want to make sure I'm talking about. I'm sure you have things like that, especially if you've been freelancing on this particular topic for a while, you probably have a lot of experience with it. And so you have a lot of insights that you can share, right? All those things down and like you're consulting is essentially done for you. Write your programs, laid out all of what you're gonna say and what you're going to cover and what you're gonna do is all laid out. There's no guesswork. And you can go into your meetings confident because you know what's going to happen. It's all pre plant. And so you just lay out your entire program like this and I'll just say this. This is one of the reasons why I recommend if you're a freelancer, you do consulting before you go into info publishing and my ascension matrix course, I talked about that, about how consulting is the next logical step before going into info publishing in a lot of people skip that step. And the reason why is when you're a freelancer and you do something on your own, you, you have your own little system and you know a lot more about the topic and there's a lot of things that you take for granted. So if you go straight from that into just trying to two and put it together, like an online course, some sort of information product. There's a lot that you're going to miss in terms of what the client experience actually is. Whereas if you consult and you are actually sitting there helping someone walking through the same process that you do as a freelancer, you're helping walking, walk through the, walk them through that as a consultant. Now you're gonna get the questions. Now you're going to see the points where they get confused. You're gonna get the insecurities that might come up and all of these different things. I mean, there there's people out there when it comes to WordPress that are terrified to update their plugins. So you might say, well, you know, just make sure you update your plugins once a week or once a month or whatever it is, right? Or whenever the updates come up, you might say that and it's like no big deal to you. That's just a thing like just update your plugins. But for them they're terrified to do it because they don't maybe they don't understand backup, so they don't know that they have backups or whatever the reasons are, you wouldn't know that unless you consulted with them or somehow knew that. Okay. So again, consulting helps you to get all of that and you can collect that in your insights. And now when you go to create an information product, you have a lot more value that you can bring because you've worked with clients one-on-one and you know all of that stuff and you can give them tips on how to deal with all of these things that you might not have ever known if you hadn't worked with them one-on-one and a consulting capacity. So again, that's why you wanna do the consulting before going into an information product. But if you look at this, you are now set up perfectly once you've done this a little bit and you've got your, you've got some expertise on it and you've gone through a few clients with it. You could easily turn this into an online course as well. And that helps you kinda bop right over into being an info, information publisher, which is a whole nother level of leverage. So this is about running a really good consulting program. It's also about methodically building your career so that you can take steps and you can offer a freelance service, a consulting service, and an information product as a part of your product line. And you're just going to make more money as a result of that. So anyway, this is a look at a sample consulting program. You will get this, you'll be able to download this with the course as well so you can take a look at it. But the thing to do after this lesson is to sit down now and plan out your consulting program and lay it all out and get it defined so that you're ready and confident to go into the meetings knowing exactly what you're gonna do and how you're going to do it.
5. Run Your Meetings: Welcome back to the kings and queens of consulting less than number for running your consulting meetings. And I'm going to be covering a template that I made for a seven figure membership owner. Particularly this was how they on-boarded part of how they on-boarded new members, particularly for some of their coaching programs and their software program. So I'm going to be going through that template that I made for them and showing you what it is and how they used it in there, seven figure business and how you can use it for your consulting program. So as I mentioned, this was a template that I made for that figure membership for high-end coaching and software clients. One of the first things that you want. One of the first principles behind this before we get into the actual process is this idea of one meeting, one task. Now, you may be thinking, well, we just did a lesson where you went through the macro and the micro and execution. We talked about maybe doing multiple tasks per meeting. And that's absolutely true. You may do multiple tasks, but you want those all to be sort of organized around kind of a central idea. So buying, for example, buying a domain name and hosting those things. So sort of go together, installing WordPress and getting that initially stalled. Kinda. It orients around the idea of just getting a website up and live. So you really want to try to oriented around some main idea for each meeting so that you can stay focused and you can stay on task. There's a lot of advantage to, advantages to this. One of the main ones is just your own sanity. When you go into a meeting, you know what needs to be accomplished. There's not like five things that you're trying to do. You're really just trying to accomplish one main, main tasks that may have a few steps to it, but you're just focused on that one thing you know exactly what you need to do and it's something really simple. It's not as overwhelming tasks that you need to get done. It also helps with distractions and clients trying to derail meetings and so forth. Because you've oriented the meeting around this one task. If they tried to talk about something else or something way down the line, you can bring it back to what you're focused on for that day and say, Hey, we're going to cover that in Week 5. But right now we just need to get the site installed and we need to get this done or we need to do this part of the process. And it allows you to keep things, things focused because if you've ever worked with clients like this, you'll know they'll start to ask you all sorts of questions and bringing all of these things that can derail a meeting. And it ultimately hurts them because now you're not getting anything done. You're spending the whole meeting asking all of these questions that you're already going to address weeks from now, or you already have a plan for or are just simply irrelevant because you're not able to control the meeting and keep them on task. So this is a really important part of it. It sounds simple, but it's really important. And the more you narrow the task that you have per meeting, then the more that you're able to keep control of those meetings. And like I said, so again, the reasons for this control forward momentum. You also want a sense of accomplishment so that every meaning you're accomplishing something. You're not getting halfway through something. You're not just talking about doing things. You're not just answering questions, you are actually accomplishing something and making a step forward in their business. Every single meeting. And because they want to feel like they're in good hands, they want to feel like you know what you're doing and that you can lead them to the promised land. And by keeping control, by keeping forward momentum, by creating that sense of accomplishment and every meaning they're going to start to trust you more. And they're going to start to let you lead them more and more as the coaching and consulting program goes on. If you don't do this, if they don't feel like they're in good hands, then they're going to wigged out on you, right? They're going to start derailing meetings. They're going to start kind of freaking out a little bit and make a mess. And ultimately what that's going to lead to as them leaving the program or them not getting out of the program what they hoped, or maybe they do, but they just don't feel like they have as good of a hat, as good of an experience and the leave you a bad review or they'll talk negatively about you, et cetera. So ultimately it's, the control is about you. It benefits you and your business, but it also benefits them. And it's really for the health of the consulting or coaching program. Okay, so that's the idea behind this. Now we're going to walk through the process of how you actually do this. So the very first step is then answering questions. So when they first, when you first jump on the call, The very first thing that you should do is ask them what questions they have since your last meeting and you really want to get this out of the way. Otherwise, they're just going to derail your meetings with those questions because if they do have questions and concerns, that's what's going to be top of mind for them. And they're going to find ways to steer the conversation and derail the conversation back to what they want to talk about. Because in their mind they're like, well, I'm paying you, you should be answering my questions instead of just trying to do what you wanna do. And so they'll always try to bring things back to the questions that they have. So for you, you just need to get it out of the way, get it all the way, have a little, you know, 510 even if it needs to be 15 minutes at the beginning of the call. Just answer questions and you get them all out of the way so that you can focus on what matters to you, which is the task for that day, and which is creating that for forward momentum like we talked about. So again, just start the meeting by, by asking questions. If you don't keep them the momentum moving forward as we've talked about then as, as I said, they're gonna get discouraged. They'll make a mess and you're going to run into a bunch of issues. Once you answer one question, you really want to be persistent about this. After you've inserted question, don't just okay. I got a question now the way I'm going to move on. No. What else? What's your next question? What's your next question? What's your next question? And keep doing it until all of the questions are thoroughly exhausted. And only after they say, Hey, I don't have anything else, you've answered everything, I can't think of anything, et cetera. Then do you move into the action items for the day because you've completely de-clutter their brain of all the things that could derail the meeting for that particular day. If you don't know an answer to a question, that's fine. Just say, hey, great question. I don't have an answer for you right now, but I will find that out and I'll get you the answer in the next meeting. Now the first few times you do that, right? They may be a little antsy because they haven't worked with you. They don't know if you're actually going to follow through on what you say. They don't know if you're the type of person who does what they say they're gonna do. So they might be a little antsy. So you need to be sure that if you say that you actually answered in the next meeting, otherwise that's going to undermine your credibility and the trust that they have in you. And when you say that next time, they're not going to believe you. Okay. So you need to make sure and follow up on those things. But that's how you handle it. And you say, Hey, I don't I don't know the answer. Right now. I can do a little bit of research or I know I know this part but I don't have a full answer. Let me do a little research and I'll get back to you and I'll answer to the next meeting and then make sure you answered in the next meeting. And that's what you use as part of what you use those notes for that we covered in the last lesson, you can write down any questions that you need to answer, any homework that you have before the next meeting to make sure that you do it. So again, this is a really good way to just kinda get all the clutter out of the way. Start from a clean slate, get all the questions out of the way. And what you'll find is if you follow this process, you'll find that with each meeting, you're getting less and less questions at the beginning of the meeting because you're you're answering them, getting them all out of the way. They know that they're going to get ample opportunity to ask questions. And they're starting to feel the forward momentum because you're actually getting stuff done. And they'll just calm down a little bit. And then they either won't have near as many questions or concerns, et cetera. Okay. So that's the first step. Get those questions out of the way. Next is the when of the day. Okay, So this is simply step or steps from the program that you created in the last lesson. So we mapped all of that out. You should have that all mapped out. You should have a little handbook of all of the things that you're going to go through in your coaching program. From step one to step back a 150, whatever it is, you should have all of those mapped out. So each one of those is essentially your wind for the day. Now, the first time through when you do this, you may have to guess a little bit about what you think you can get done in each meeting. So that's part of adjusting your coaching program or your consulting program. On the fly is you kind of figuring out what all you can get done in one particular meeting. So you may have to do that. Keep in mind that the questions might take a lot of time. They might take more time than what you think. So you likely won't have as much time as you imagine it, especially at first. So your impetus will be your, your, your thought will be to those first few meetings, try to cram in as much as you can to get as much done as you possibly can. And that's a good thought, but you just have to understand. You might not be able to do that because they might have a ton of questions. So you just need to kinda get a feel for that. And as you do this more with more and more client to kinda get it nailed down. And that's ultimately what you what you wanna do. You don't want to be afraid to just on the fly the first time through, right? If you say it's a six-week coaching program and you get into, and you realize it needs to be an eight-week coaching program, that's fine. Don't be afraid to adjust on the fly the first time through. But you do want to nail it down as quick as possible so that you know the game plan going in with every client. And very quickly you get to a point where you've got it all nailed down, you've got it all planned out. You know how to execute on it, you know exactly what to do. And at that point you're just running through consulting these clients. And it's not this big, dramatic, sort of fear inducing thing for you. And that's where you can really start to dig in. And now, you know, you can deliver, you know, you can help these clients. Now you can start to be aggressive about how you market it. And you're really confident when you talk to people about it because you know, you can execute. So that's the point you want to get to. And you do that by just working with clients and being really disciplined in the beginning about paying attention to the process and really working on the process right at first and getting it nailed down to where you've got it down pat and you can just you can just run through it like it's nothing. Okay. After that, then we want to go back into questions. So once you've got the wind for the day over, and inevitably, when that action item is complete. I ask them again if they have questions because they're going to things are going to come up as you go through that process that they're now going to have questions or concerns about. So you want to address those things as soon as you're done with that, that helps keep you from having all of those questions at the beginning of the next meeting. So we're doing all of this to cut down ultimately over time on the amount of questions we get so that we can focus more on the action items that creates more forward momentum, that puts you more in control that you, more you leading. And that overall just benefits you and them in the program. And you never want to leave a client thinking that they didn't get an opportunity to to address everything that they wanted to. So you give them multiple opportunities to ask questions, express concerns, because otherwise it's going to leave, lead a, leave a bad taste in their mouth. And the more that you press them for questions, the more that you put them on their heels and keep control, which leads to more trust, more belief, and more loyalty. And that's kind of loyalty that will continue past your consulting. That's how you create a, a customer for life or a client for life. Because they go through the coaching program or the consulting program. And it wasn't just that they got the end result. But you took complete control and they realize that you were the authority on this particular topic. And they really just kinda begin to default to what you think. And that's going to, that's going to create a situation. Well there they'll basically buy everything from you. Information, products, services, coaching, consulting programs, whatever it is. They'll take it all from you because they just believe in you so much. That's how you do it. It's not just enough to know what you're talking about and, and help them get a result. It's the way in which you do it. And if you have complete control from start to finish, and it's obvious to them that they, that you are the authority, you are the expert on this topic from the moment that your first meeting starts to the very last meeting that you have, that's going to create that kind of deep trust, loyalty that you, that you get in a business relationship, okay, this isn't the same thing as making friends and that sort of thing. But in a business relationship, it comes down to really trust and authority and loyalty. And you never want to forget that all of this, this may sound cynical to you. But all of this is just a constant power struggle, okay? It's constantly you and the client jockeying for who's in control, who has the power in the situation. And again, if you let the client take control, if you give them the power, they don't know what they're doing. So they wouldn't be in your consulting or coaching program if they did. So if they take control, it's going to turn into a mess. Because then all of their insecurities are going to come up. All of their misconceptions, erroneous beliefs. All of these things are going to come to the surface and now you have to wade through all of that. But if you keep control from start to finish, you never have to deal with those things maybe a little bit at the beginning. But you don't deal with those things near as much and they learn to just trust you. And all of that stuff just sort of subsides and they get the result and they realize all that stuff was BS. Okay? So you just have to remember every moment of every meeting. It's a constant power struggle. That doesn't mean it's not fun. That doesn't mean that it's overwhelming to where you can't do it. But you just have to remember that you always want to keep control and these are the ways that you can do that. Okay? After you have that second round of questions, then you want to go into the coming up. So you want to preview what you're going to do in the next meeting. So this is kind of your hook for the next meeting because frankly, one of the problems with coaching and consulting programs is simply getting people to show up to the meetings, even they may have paid for the program. We still have to get them to show up to the meetings. And okay, maybe they pay for the program and they don't go through all the meanings. And it's like, Oh, well they still paid me. But if they don't get the end result, then they don't leave you, they don't leave you a positive review. They don't talk nicely about you to their friends. You don't have success stories that you can share with other people. You don't have all of the elements that are going to help you then market it to other people. So every client that comes through is an opportunity for you to create a marketing material that's going to help you more easily get more people into your program, which is what you want, right? So it's not good enough to just be like, Oh, well they paid me. Who cares if they show up or not? You really need these people to show up and you need them to get the result. So the coming up as your preview at your hook for the next meeting. This keeps them anticipating the meetings, which gives them that keeps them excited and it increases satisfaction. This is actually a psychological thing. If you just get some sort of benefit or some sort of surprise was 0 anticipation, you just kinda get it. There's a nuance there about whether something's a surprise or not. But let's just say you're, you're, you're expecting it and you get it. And there's very little time between those two things. It doesn't create a ton of satisfaction because it was sort of You just got it immediately. However, if you are made to anticipate. That same benefit. People tend to get more satisfaction expressed more satisfaction from that. So it's a psychological thing that if you can get them anticipating the next meeting, when you get to the next meeting and actually pay it off, they'll feel more satisfaction as a result of that. And that's going to keep them excited. And that's going to keep them liking your program, wanting to continue through it, saying nice things about you, all of that stuff. So you want to, you want to cover the next meeting, but you also want to provide larger context. And so this is again, a way that you can continue to create anticipation, not just for the next meeting, but the meetings after that as well. And so you don't just say well, in the next meeting, this meeting we installed WordPress. The next meeting we're going to install themes and plug-ins. And that's it. You wanna say, Hey, you next meeting wherein install themes and plug-ins, that's going to get all of the basic setup done. So now we can move into designing the site and adding the content and will be really close to launch at that point once we get all those things done. So you provide that larger context of how the meeting coming up is going to fit into the overall picture. So you're constantly hooking each meeting to the end result, creating anticipation for what's coming down the road. And you're just constantly building that with every meaning that you have. So again, it creates that anticipation. It also is you literally leading them. And so that puts you in the power position, that puts you in the driver seat, and that you have to lead in order for them to follow. You can't just expect them to follow if you're not doing things, to actually lead them. And by previewing what's coming, that is, you literally leading them. You also wanna make sure that you focus on the big picture here. So you don't need to get into the weeds of every little thing that you're gonna do. You're right, you don't need to say OK, next meeting, we're going to install Elementor. We're going to install wishlist. Remember we're going to set up the levels and wishlist number. We're going to, you know, you don't have to go into all of that detail. That would be a mistake. You just need to kinda keep it big picture and say, Hey, next we're going to install some of the plug-ins, the big ones like wishlist member and Elementor and some of these other ones. And then we're going to configure the big ones. And i'll I'll talk a little bit about what the other ones or four and we'll just kinda get all of that setup. So the site is installed, it's set up, it's ready to go. Now we can move into design, okay, So you focus on the big picture. You don't want to get into the weeds of every little thing that you're gonna do. Here. You want to take macro, not micro. So you laid out the macro steps when you're previewing the next meeting, you really want to stick to the macro. You can kinda mentioned the micro things, but you're not going to mention every single one. You're not going to go into detail about each one. You just want to kind of keep it big picture, okay, so that's the coming up. Again. You want to do this with every single meeting to create that anticipation and to lead your clients into that next meeting. The final step then here is homework. So you want to try to always have homework for them at the end of each meeting so it can be researched this decide that you want something to keep them moving as the saying goes, idle hands or the devil's workshop. If you don't give them something to do between meetings, they're going to start to dream up stuff to do on their own. They might start messing around. I experienced this with freelance clients where I would consult with them and help them build websites. Between the times when we would meet, they would do all sorts of stuff on the website that just messed everything up. And I'd spend half the time in the meetings having to go back and just fix everything that they messed up. So I learned that you have to give them homework, you have to give them something to do. Because the reality of it is a lot most people procrastinate. And so they'll procrastinate on the homework that you give them. But that will keep their mind thinking about how I got to get that done. Oh, I gotta get that done. Oh, I got it. Now their mind is focused on the thing that you gave them. Not all of these good idea ferries that they can dream up. So you just want to give them something that they can deal with. And the people that aren't, don't procrastinate the people that you give them homework in the next day they say homework's done. Those people tend not to be people who dream stuff up also. So it works both ways. No matter what sort of personality type you're working with. It still works because those people tend to just do the homework, they're done and they're going to think about other stuff and they're not the people dreaming things up between meetings. As I said, it keeps a good idea for ferry from striking and keeps them on their heels. You're always in control of the situation. And if you remember, when you were in high school or grade school, you know how your teacher would give you homework every night? Well, what did, what did you constantly think about? You might have went home and started playing video games, but in the back of your mind, you always remember how I gotta, I gotta do my homework, I gotta, I gotta do my homework. And then, you know, maybe you didn't do it until that are like me and didn't do your homework till the morning. That morning at school, you'd get to school early and do your homework, procrastinating on it. But it kept you constantly thinking about that homework that you had to do that particular subject. Now they didn't do it for for that reason. But you could use probably experienced that. Where were something that was in the back your mind that just kinda kept your attention even when you were doing other things. That's the idea here. I just want to keep their mind preoccupied with something. So that's really the process. Like I said, this is the exact same process that I I made for a client of mine that runs a seven figure membership. I gave it to them for some of their high-end coaching and their high-end software product. I mean, people paying hundreds of dollars every single month for the software product, even more than that for the coaching program. And this was kind of the initial meeting that they would have with clients. This was the template that they they used for those programs. So it's not something that's just made up out of nowhere. This has been used, it's been proven at a high-end level for consulting and coaching and it works really, really well. They really had a lot of success with it and really kept clients happy and really improve their onboarding process, which wasn't great before I made this for them. So anyway, that's, that is the, the technique, that's the template. Use this in your your meetings to keep control, keep things on track and keep your clients happy.
6. Ongoing Consulting: Welcome back to the kings and queens of consulting, lesson number five. And we're going to talk about ongoing consulting and how to turn your clients that you get for your consulting or coaching program into lifelong customers and clients of yours and how to transition from the limited time consulting that we recommend that you start off with into a potentially long-term consulting relationship. So that's what we're going to get two in this lesson. Now, as I've mentioned, this is actually what most people tried to do from day one and it doesn't usually work because the clients are going to be ansi at the start. As I mentioned there, they don't know you, they don't trust you. And if you don't have a plan and a specific end result that you're going to help them achieve, then they just don't have a lot of reason to continue to talk with you week after week, month after month after month. And you really have to go overboard in overwhelming them with value in those meetings. And so just can just put a lot of stress and strain on you. So again, this is why we don't recommend that you start off this way. They, they, they're often paying a bunch of money and to be consulting with you and they want to see that forward momentum. They want to see something tangible. And that's why the limited time, the six-week, the eight-week, the six month, 12 month, whatever it is, program works really well. There's a specific goal, a specific set of steps. They're going through a process. And once they get so far into it, and they're seeing real results that they're going to want to finish it. However, after you've helped them to achieve a major goal like this, now they're going to trust you if you do it the way that I've laid out here in this program, they're going to trust you. And there will be some people who want to keep working with you, who want to keep talking with you. They want to go beyond the goal that they just achieved and start doing other things. And so ongoing consulting then make sense in that situation. And that's how you should pitch it to them. Hey, this isn't for everybody. But some of my clients like to keep meeting and fine tuning and growing, et cetera. It's up to you, but if you want to do that, I do offer ongoing consulting and you can maybe do it at a different rate, whatever, however you want to set it up. That makes sense. But you can offer that ongoing consulting. So if you step back and look at the big picture from you as a business, in the beginning we're setting up there's limited time coaching program. And you may think, well, I'd really like to have these people like signed up to me forever. And so you thinking that that's not what you're gonna do, but you actually are. You're just doing it. You're not trying to get married right off the bat, right? You're going on a few dates. First, you're helping them get through a major goal, achieve a major result, and then you can start talking about going steady and maybe eventually getting married. So that's the idea here. And ultimately, you are leading into a long-term relationship. You're just doing it in a way that's more likely to actually have success. So that's the idea here. Now, our advice is, you still want to have preplanned ideas of where to go next for these clients. Okay. You don't just want to wing it from meeting to meeting because in the end, progress will always matter. So I would recommend that once you lay out your initial six week, eight week program, that you start to think about your ongoing consulting that you could do. And you start to think about other things, other programs that you could create, because there's likely no if you teach someone how to nail their diet down in health when it comes to their health, right? That's one part of the bigger picture. You now could go and transition, transition into taking them through an exercise program. Or you could go into more in-depth type consulting where you're actually looking at their numbers, specifically tracking their gains, their weight, and you're, you're adjusting a program on the fly and you kinda get into a detail like that, you could take that approach to it. It just depends on what the topic is. But ultimately, I recommend that you have ideas for where they could go next after they achieve that initial goal. And you maybe has some options for them about, Hey, we just built your membership site. We got your membership site launched now do you want to talk about how to create some online courses or do on talk about how to do Facebook ads or do you want to talk about creating a YouTube channel, or you want to talk about doing email marketing. Or if there's all of these things or if you're doing social media, Hey, we got your social media account all up and you're posting, everything's going good over on Instagram. Now, do you wanna talk about Twitter or now do you want to talk about YouTube? Again, whatever it is, you just want to have something there, some pre-planned ideas of where they can go next. So you're always leaving. Now this works best if you're consulting on a topic where you are always learning and advancing. So now what happens is, is you're just ultimately sharing what you learn along the way. So you're always pushing and you're always learning new things. So you never have to worry about running out of topics or ideas, cuz you can share every new insight, every new lesson learned that you learn from what you're doing with your clients. And that's going to have value to them. Also, you can pull insights and lessons from the things that you learn with other clients. Your access to others in the same industry is valuable to your clients. I do this all the time with my freelance clients. I'll talk about when I was working on the ink magazine project, when I was working on Project or that project or whatever, I'll pull the lessons learned from those clients over into other clients. And that gives me a constant sort of gives me constant things to talk about, constant things to teach, teach them and constant things for us to continually go over. So again, it works best if you're consulting on a topic where you're always learning and advancing yourself. Now, a couple of things here. You know, you may want to consider offering this via an annual payment in addition to a monthly payment. Because right after you helped them achieve some sort of big goal, they're going to be primed to take you up on a discounted annual continuation of what they just did there going to be feeling a little bit of euphoria from having achieved that goal there. You know, if you've done it the way that I've showed you, they're going to really feel good. They're going to feel happy with you. And if they're considering continuing on with you, offering them a yearly package or an annual payment at a discounted price, that's going to be pretty compelling to them. It also gives you some time and some breathing room to help them see increased results after they've achieved a major goal like that because diminishing returns start to work against you a little bit. They've already accomplished something really big. Now beyond that, What more can they accomplish? This is going to feel as big as that. Maybe not, maybe not there isn't something or maybe it's going to take longer for that something to be accomplished. And so that diminishing returns, those diminishing returns can work against you. So you can create, create a little bit of space by offering them an annual payment at a discounted price through everything. But especially here. Ultimately what you wanna do is work on deepening the relationship and the membership site space. A client that I worked with, they coined the phrase, they come for the content, they stay for the community. And the idea was with membership sites, What's your similar in a way because people are paying paying a monthly fee or an annual fee to stay a member, they're paying an ongoing fee to stay a member. So there's a similar paradigm there. The idea behind that is people will join because they want the content, they want the results, they want the information. They want to achieve the goal. That's why they join. You have to understand that. But long term, the reason they'll stay a member of your membership site or a client of your consulting or coaching program for a year, two years, three years, ten years. The reason I'll do that is because of the relationships that they form. And so the long-term retention. What, what, what really creates that is about creating real relationships with people actually getting to know them. So you could do things like trying to visit them in person. Now, if that makes sense for what you do or learning about their family, their life, their history, their hobbies, being interested in them as a human being, getting to know them as a human being and letting them get to know you as a human being and creating a real personal relationship where you feel more like friends than you do business associates. There's always a little bit of that layer there. But the more you can deepen that relationship, the better. And these are people who can potentially become lifelong patrons for you. There are people that can fund your life essentially for a lifetime. If you do it right, if you really work on those relationships and if you think about it, that's a big investment from their side. Now they're getting something in return. They're getting information and knowledge from you. But it's still a big investment to kind of put all of your face and one person like that. So return the favor by investing in them. And remember that they come for the content that comes from the result. But they will stay for the community, they will stay for the relationship. And so you want to constantly can you went to constantly kind of tried to cultivate that as best you can.
7. Marketing Your Consulting Program: Welcome back to the kings and queens of consulting, lesson number 6, marketing your consulting programming. I'm going to show you my exact method. I'm actually going to show you two over two other methods that I've used as well that are very effective. So before we get into that though, I do want to make sure I point out this isn't a marketing course, right? I'd, I'd, I'd not going to spend a ton of time talking about marketing in this program. It's more about how to construct the program, how to build a really high-quality program. Because at the end of the day, that's what's going to matter. Marketing in this context isn't nearly as important because once you have this success stories, the marketing becomes kind of easy, especially with the methods that I'm going to show you. So not a marketing course, but I do want to give you some tips for getting clients to sign up because that's going to matter. And like I said, it's really all about success stories. You have to understand that that is the foundation of your consulting program. And so, and it's a lot like freelancing when you're first getting started. If you have to do a free, few consulting programs are taking on a few consulting clients for free. And with friends or family or maybe existing clients if you already have that built up or at a reduced rate than do it because you really need to build your portfolio, quote unquote, at first with your consulting program. That's what ultimately matters. That's what's going to determine this. The success of your program is what's going to determine how well you're able to market it. That's why we spent so much time on constructing that program. So again, I would approach it a lot like freelancing. Now, one tip or maybe one caveat here. If you're already a freelancer, if you already have system setup for getting new clients, if you're already taking on new clients and you have that all built up and you're freelancing full-time. Consulting can be a really simple just add on for you. It can, it can allow you to tap into markets that maybe you're not right now. And the way that I would look at it is to view your freelancing as your top end service. So maybe you're charging 2000 or 5000 or 10000 or 20000 or whatever it is for your freelance services, that's your top end. Then you can do consulting and that's, you're doing it for them. So that makes sense. Consulting can then be kind of your, your mid-range sort of product or your mid range offer where, you know, maybe your offering an eight-week coaching program for 500 bucks or whatever it is or a $1000 or it's, it's somewhere lower than what your full freelancing program is. So if someone still wants to work with you, but can't afford your full freelancing service. Can't afford that high-end service that you have. A mid-range thing where they can still work with you pretty close on one-on-one, but they're going to have to do the work. You're just going to consult them and help them to do it. And then beyond that, really we haven't talked about that much here. And this is more what I go into in my same course, creation course. But you can then offer an online course as sort of your low-end option for people who can't afford either the top two, they can still get access to the information. They have to put it all together themselves. They have to do it themselves. But you can offer them a course for 50 or a 100 or a 150 or 200 bucks that they can take double show them how to do it. And of course, you can feed all of those things into each other. We'll talk about a marketing method here in a second that will help you to do that. But that allows you to create a full range of products or full range of services and products that you can offer to clients that hit all of the different tiers, all of the different market segments that you might have, high-end, mid-range, and low end. So you're consulting program. The point I'm getting at is the consulting program would fit in that mid-range. And the reason consulting, I actually think, is sort of a next step for freelancers, and I prefer it more is because you're just sitting down with a client, you're doing a meeting and then you're done. So it really frees up a lot of your free time where you're not having to do work behind the scenes for a client. You get on do a meeting, and that's it. And oftentimes, the hourly rates on consulting can actually work out better in your favor, even though you're getting more for freelancing, you're spending more time doing it. And with consulting, you just you're spending the time that you're sitting there in a meeting with a client, maybe you're getting an equivalent of 200 or 500 or whatever it is, dollars per hour because you're not spending nearly as much time working on the project. So again, just some context of how you can use these things in conjunction with each other and where you're consulting program fits in. Now, following on from that then, as I mentioned, having those different tiers of products can really work well together because a consulting program, you consulting offer can work great as an upsell and you can offer it as an add-on to your existing freelance services. Or you can add, add it as a, an upsell to an information products. So if you do create an online course, whenever someone buys that, then you can offer them an upsell where they can become a part of your coaching program or your consulting program at a reduced price, you to do like a onetime offer you've probably seen before where they can get it at a reduced price or something like that. Because these are people you know, are interested in the topic and they're willing to spend money on it because they're already doing that. So really all you have to do is try to give them an offer that they can't refuse. So again, that's how those thing can work in conjunction and add on to your freelance services and upsell for your information product. Your freelance services can be an upsell to your consulting program, et cetera. You can work different ways of marketing those together as upsells and add ons and so forth. So again, that's a really great way to do it. In fact, is exactly how I'll be offering my high-end coaching program that I'm working on at the moment, it will become really the premier upsell on all of my courses. So whenever I promote a new online course, my high-end coaching program will be the first upsell that someone will see after purchasing one of my courses. And so I'll constantly putting that coaching program in front of people. And so this is exactly how I'm going to be marketing it. I'm even considering selling my courses at a significantly discounted price to bring more people through the funnel and then introduce them to that could that coaching program. So if I did that, I haven't decided if I'm going to, but if I did that, the coaching program would really become the main thing I'm actually selling the courses would, courses would just be more of getting people into the funnel and being a filtering mechanism. But the coaching program would be the thing that I'm actually focused on selling the most. So again, this is a decided fully if I'm going to go with a discounted courses. So I'm not sure if I'm gonna do that part, but I do know that my coaching program will be the first upsell for every course that I do once I get everything constructed and so forth. And it's just the reason I'm doing it is because it's a very powerful way to sell a continuity offer like this. So again, that's, that's what I'm going to be doing. Now, another method that I've seen, I haven't used as one as much, but I've seen a lot of social media influences use this to Ru, really devastating effect. And it's really just testimonial driven social media. So you start by targeting and identity. And I hope this isn't controversial. It might be, but I see a lot of people doing this and this is just what they do. So I'm just sort of laying down the facts of the matter here. I don't have necessarily opinion on it either way. I just know it works really well. So some examples of an identity might be women entrepreneurs, it might be male fitness coaches, it might be black-owned business owners. You're sort of appealing to some sort of identity that, that you resonate with, right? So often, people who appeal to women entrepreneurs are women entrepreneurs that are appealing to an identity that they are, that they fit with, that they resonate with. Okay? So you start with that. You target some sort of identity that, that fits with you and your own experience, et cetera. And then you take volunteers to test your consulting program. So you let people in either free or you let them in at a really low price, maybe 20 bucks or something like that. But you only take a limited number of people. So you have sort of like a test group of 10 or 20 people, whatever you wanna do, take volunteers to test the program. And then you bend over backwards to get them positive results. You take all the feedback that you learned through that, all the lessons learned and you use that to improve the program. And ultimately what you're after two things. You want to help all these people get the results. So you get the success stories, you get the testimonials from them. And then you also want to use it as a way to refine your program before you actually market it out to the public. What that does is it gives you the success stories going back to the beginning, like success stories or the thing you need, it gives you a group of success stories. I'll also gives you a little bit of attention because when you take the volunteers to test the program, a lot of people are going to be interested in that, especially if you're doing it for free. So you're gonna get a lot of interest around that. And you're gonna get a lot of people who applied and wanted to be a part of the program and didn't get in. And those are going to be primed people when you now come back and show how you got positive results. Those are going to be some of your first clients that are going to go through your consulting programs. So again, it just works really well especial, especially on social media where this kind of thing, positivity and freebies and this sort of thing. It tends to play well on social media. And then once you have that, you just post the testimonials and results to your social media and you start building a following that way. So you really are highlighting, not you. You're highlighting the people that you've worked with in the success that they've had. And that becomes a really easy way to get attention on social media, but to start getting people into your program. And then every new person that comes in, You tell you talk about their story on social media and it just sort of feeds itself. And once you get this going, you'll start getting people in to your program on a regular basis. And you'll be taking those success stories, bringing them back to social media, which will lead to more tension, more people in your program, more success stories, and it all just sort of feeds itself. And again, I've watched people, especially on Instagram do this too devastating effect. Really grow their coaching and consulting programs based off this primarily. And it's a really simple way to do it. So that's another method that you can use. Finally, I want to leave you with what I call the YouTube two-step. So this is one that I've primarily used. I've talked about this in my same course, creation course. So if you took that, you're familiar with this, but I don't want to assume that you've taken that course. I'm going to cover it here. Again, this is a method that I really haven't shared up until that, that same course creation course. And it's still the really the primary way that I sell my courses because it is so effective. So essentially what you do is you create a value packed content video and you put it on YouTube. And you're really focusing on just cramming this thing with value, putting as much into it as you can. You're not, you're not trying to hold back because you can give away the farm. You're not ultimately going to be selling an information product. You're going to be selling a consulting service where the value is you actually working with them one-on-one. So you can really give away the farm. You can give away all your best stuff. In this video, you can really go overboard with it because you are trying to get, have this video sort of take off on its own. You're trying to have it have organic reach on its own and not rely solely on advertising. If you can get a video that does that, then you can run ads to it to get traction and to sort of juice it and make it grow even bigger. Now, as an example of this, I probably shouldn't say the name of the YouTube channel, but there's a YouTube channel in the WordPress space that's very popular. The guy who runs it has become very well known over the last probably two to three years in the WordPress space. He's really a big name in the space now kind of, in a way, sort of influences the direction of the WordPress space fairly heavily because he's such a popular WordPress YouTuber and has, as a result, now created several very successful software products for WordPress on top of that. And I happen to know from a client of mine who's friends with him, sort of the back story to how he got started. And this is essentially what he did when he got on YouTube. He focused on making really good videos. And then he ran ads for targeted keywords for his videos to get some of his initial views and some of his initial followers. Views on YouTube, views through Google ads right now are really cheap. You can pay, you know, as low as I've paid as always to sense of view for certain videos, certain keywords over on YouTube. I've never really paid more than like $0.05 of you for views over on YouTube whenever an ad that's very, very cheap to get someone because of view counts as it's not just someone who watches that 5 second clip. You actually have to stay on and watch at least 30 seconds of a video for it to count as a view in the ad program. So you're getting someone to watch more than just those, what they have to, you're getting sort of a legitimate view and you can see the stats on how much of the video they watch and so forth. And a good video. We'll get most of that video watched by a lot of people paying, you know, 23, $0.04 of you for that. So you can get thousands of views for 20 bucks, 30 bucks, something like that. And so if you're running a high-end consulting program where you might be offering this program for 500 or a 1000 or $1500, whatever it is paying, you know, $0.02 of view is nothing. So again, it's a really cost-effective way to get traction. So you can run ads to the V0 to get traction. You've got if you have absolutely no following over there, creating really good content pack video that will then sort of take off on its own. You'll start getting subscribers, you'll start getting more traction in the algorithm, et cetera. And then you, in Google ads, you create an audience of people who have watched that video, just that video. Now you can target all views. I believe we can target 25 percent, 50 percent people have watched at least 25 percent, 50 percent of the video, et cetera. You can sort of shake that out. I would suggest making multiple audiences actually. So people, So any view, people who've watched at least 25 percent people have watched these 50, 75, etc, target all of those. Create audiences for all of those and see what your numbers look like. See how many people are actually watching that much of a particular video. And then you create a direct sales video for your consulting program and you run that ad, you use that video was an ad and you run it only to this audience. Are these audiences. So only people who watched the initial video are going to see that ad. So you're not trying to market your consulting program to cold leads to people who know nothing about you. Your marketing it to people who have watched a video that you created, that you just crammed with value. And if you're targeting people who watched at least 50 percent of it, well now you know that they've watched a significant portion of that. So they now have a good understanding of who you are and the value that you bring. It's a much more compelling way to, to advertise. Or you're not having to try to sell cold leads, you're warming them up first with a content video. I've done this for my course. I made hundreds of thousands and Korsakoff's doing this. I've done this for years. I still do it to this day. A little bit different way. I am more focused on building my mailing list at this point. So I use it for lead generation, still works great for that. But again, it's just a really effective way to, to market anything. But especially your consulting program. Yeah, you have to pay a little bit. You have to spend some money on it. But what you get for what you pay, it's really out of whack right now. I don't think it's going to stay like this forever. Maybe it will because there's so many, so many views available over on YouTube because so many people spend so much time on YouTube. So maybe that's why it is this way. I don't really know for sure. But two to $0.03 for a review, that That's a really, that's a really good price. So you can use those numbers to turn a positive ROI pretty easily if you have a high-end product like this. So that's the YouTube to step and that's several different marketing methods that I know. Obviously not the end-all be-all of marketing things, not everything that I could talk to you about, but some of the easier ones that you can use to get going if you have absolutely no audience, if you have absolutely no following, you're not selling freelance services right now. You don't have anything. You're starting from complete scratch. You can use all of these methods still in order to get going. And of course, if you do have an audience, if you do have freelance services you're offering, you do have a website or YouTube channel or an Instagram or whatever. You're already in a good spot and you can just add this to what you're already doing to get your freelance clients. So they go, that's marketing your program. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you next time.
8. Next Steps: I'm honest there's no more. So online.com, so little housekeeping to finish up this course. If you haven't yet, be sure to head on over to the class area. There is a class section for some, some steps for you to walk through for this course. So be sure to head over in that it's under the discussion in Projects tab that you'll see on the course. Also, if you head over to my profile, be sure to give me a follow on my profile here so you'll be notified when I release new courses. And I also have an ongoing sort of weekly podcast style course called Let's Talk freelance. So if you would like to have sort of access to ongoing training regarding freelancing and online business and so forth. Be sure to check out that. Let's talk freelance course as well. And finally, I do have a daily tips newsletter on my website at John Morris online.com. If you head over there, you can sign up to that mailing list. You will also be put into my own, my very own mobile app, or you'll get access to over 78 hours of free content at the time of this recording related to freelance and so forth as well. So if you're interested in that, BD sure to check that out as well. Again, that's John Morris online.com. All right. Thank you for taking the class. If you enjoyed it, I appreciate you for You. Leave me a review and we'll see you in the next course.
John Morris, I help freelancers get clients.
