Consulting Success with Michael Zipursky

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrap Business. This is Brad and today we're going to talk about consulting. I get a lot of questions all the time from some of my listeners because I don't often talk a lot about my own exact business model. I don't make a pitch to you to sell you anything typically. And, and I oftentimes simply work with companies, brands, influencers to not only consult them on their business, their brand strategy and their growth. Of course, sometimes I have been known to buy a company and make some acquisitions and do some other creative transactions. But I don't often talk too terribly deeply about the practice of consulting. And it has been an amazing business model for me ever since I sold my publishing business. About I think we're going on like six and a half years ago and I immediately realized I did not just want to go become a brand new startup business owner again because starting up a business is super hard, it takes a long time and I've got a lot of skills that I like to leverage and help other people grow their business. I like to be kind of that pivot point to where they can, they can leverage my knowledge and, and we can all get results a lot quicker. So for the past six years, that's where Costanzo Marketing Group was founded. And people pay me very handsomely to help create strategic roadmaps and tactical implementation plans for how they can grow their business. And I have learned a lot of this through trial, error, gut instincts, et cetera. I have taken courses, I've been coached, et cetera. But a lot of this has just been get out there, see if you can offer value and help people. And it has led to a tremendous business for me and I love it. And today I have got the founder of consultingsuccess.com on the call, Michael Zapersky. And Michael is, he's also the author of the Amazon best seller the Elite Consulting Mind. And he's advised organizations such as the Financial Times, Dow Jones, rbc, Omron and many more and helped them launch products into global markets as well as helping over 180 consultants from around the world and over 50 industries add six and seven figures to their annual revenues. And he's here to enlighten you guys and share some of the sizzling hot tips with me as well on how we can use some of the things that have worked for him and his clients to grow our own consulting businesses. So if you are, if you are a consultant now, if you sell your time and your advice for money, you don't want to pay super close attention. But if you are, and if you're, whether you have your own product, whether you're trying to get into business, whether you're working for a job and you're not really excited about, but you think that there may be a better way to create some consulting success for yourself, and this is also something you're going to want to pay really close attention to. And Michael and I are going to share kind of what's been working for us. So, Michael, welcome to the show. It's great to have you.

Hey, Brad, thanks so much. A real pleasure to be with you.

Absolutely. So you're up in Vancouver, you were saying earlier, right at the moment?

That's right.

Fantastic. Now, have you lived there most of your life or is that just somewhere somewhat recently?

So I call Vancouver home base, but in 2017, I was out of the country for about five months, most of it traveling with my wife and daughter. Love it. Yeah. You know, I'm able to work from anywhere as long as I have an Internet connection. Yeah. So that is nice. We spend quite a bit of time in Europe and in Japan and other places. But this year so far, we've trying to stay a little bit closer to home. And now that we're getting into a nice season, it's always nice to be here when the sun is out.

That's great. So prior to starting consultingsuccess.com and helping to show other people, you know, kind of how to get started and how to grow their business and scale it as a consultant, what, you know, what was your entry into the world of consulting? How did you get started?

So, yeah, really? I mean, there's no. I have no formal training as. As a consultant. We can call that. I learned from the school of hard knocks. I started my first consulting business now going on almost 19 years ago. And at that time it was in kind of web development design, helping clients in the early days of the Internet. And so we built that business. Things went very well with it. It was kind of. When I say we, I'm referring to my cousin Sam, who's still my business partner today. We've built and sold several Businesses over the years, but that was the first one. And from there we went on and create another business. It was called kanke culture. Kanke in Japanese means relationship. We're very big believers in the building of relationships. And especially if your clients are other businesses, larger organizations, the mindset of establishing a relationship is extremely important over the Internet marketing approach, which can be a little bit different. So that was what we did. I ended up going over to Japan, open up the branch office for that. We built that business. I came back to North America, started another consulting business called relogy Marketing, that again, standing for relationship strategy. You can probably see a theme here. But then that business was really focused on helping professional service firms, so law firms, other consulting firms, financial advisors, and so forth, to generate more leads throughout all of this. And around the time when I was heading from Japan back to North America, I thought, you know, why not start sharing my own experiences of what I was doing, you know, at the front lines, building consulting businesses, not only the things that were working, but also things that weren't working, in the hopes that others could benefit from my missteps as well as my successes. And that's kind of how consulting success was. Was born. There was no real monetization plan. It was just really about sharing of ideas. And it's taken off since then.

I love it. So most of the. Most of the consulting you've been doing has been primarily on like, marketing, growth, et cetera, because, like, there's all types of consulting out there, right? You can be a consultant on really anything that somebody needs help on. But your specialty particular has been on marketing, branding, customer acquisition, etc.

Yeah, exactly.

Cool. Yeah, same here.

Lead generation. And I mean, you know, back in the day, there was a bit more focus on, let's say, strategy or brand strategy and design, because that was one of our businesses. We did a lot in that area. But we have clients as consultants now that we work with who are literally in every kind of industry that you can imagine. The only distinction that I'll make is that we only work with what we call expert consultants. So these are people that are serving other businesses or established organizations. We don't work with life coaches or spiritual healers or others that are serving the B2C market.

Perfect. Okay, so let's talk about some of.

The.

Like your sweet spot. When you're working with a company, obviously there's really small companies doing, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars a year who are, you know, just getting started. But then there's companies doing millions or tens of millions of dollars and even higher per year. Did you have a sweet spot of the type of consulting clients that you worked with as far as the size of the business goes?

Yeah, it's a great question. So in my earlier days when I was running a more formal consulting business, so over the last 18 years, I've built several of them. Most of our clients, the majority of my time was spent working with billion dollar organizations. So if we say Panasonic or Dow Jones, Financial Times, Royal Bank, a whole bunch of others that people may not have heard of because they're very kind of B2B players, but if you're in that space, you would certainly know them. So that was a lot of my kind of upbringing in the consulting work.

With smaller companies because A, I know a lot of them and I get access to a lot of them and I know I can do a couple things and really move the needle. But at the same time, a lot of times smaller companies are much more price sensitive. They don't have as big a budget. And I've worked with some much bigger companies and billionaires and people like this, and it's a lot more fun when a company's got a bigger budget, even though sometimes it takes them longer to make decisions. But what are some other. A few other ways that you suggest landing these bigger contracts.

So number one, you gotta get very clear on who your ideal client actually is. Just saying that you wanna find a bigger client, right, Is not gonna be the most effective approach to get really clear. I mean, specifically what industry are you targeting, what company? And then within that company, who is the decision maker that you need to get in front of, right? That is gonna have the budget and the authority to be able to say yes to you. Then the next step that you want to take is make sure that your messaging is going to resonate with them, right? Understanding what is the problem that they have right now, what is on their mind, what will compel them to take action? A lot of consultants make the mistake of just trying to kind of lead with what we call inputs, right? It's like, this is what I do. But buyers don't care about what you do, they care about what they get. Exactly. Right? So they care about the output. So figuring out what is the output, the outcome, the value, the result that the buyer wants is really important because it allows you then to create the right messaging. Then once you have that, now you can start to actually reach out to them, right? And there's many different ways to do this. LinkedIn is one. But you can get lists. There's different approaches to this, but the main thing is you need to become visible. Right. The challenge for most consultants isn't that they lack skill, it's that they are not on the radar of their ideal clients. And so, right from like an Air Force perspective or a military perspective, you want to fly under the radar. Well, in consulting, you want to do the exact opposite. You want to get on the radar of everyone that you possibly can. And so in terms of who are your ideal clients? So you want to figure out who they are and then actually take steps to get in front of them in the most direct, efficient and effective way possible. For some, that might be speaking, for others, it might be doing through LinkedIn. For others, it might be a slightly different approach, but you want to get in front of those people and you want to start to build a relationship with them. If we talk about LinkedIn as one example, you can target them very specifically. You can connect with them, you can then start to build a relationship with, on LinkedIn, with them through some conversation and then from there take it offline in terms of conversation or an in person meeting. And mixing into all of that, it's not just about the focus on making a sale or having a conversation. You definitely also want to be thinking about how you can position yourself as a real authority and expert. And so that might be by providing some kind of materials or valuable information that your ideal client will really appreciate, help you to establish your credibility and your authority. So that going into the conversation and even helping you to get the conversation, that's going to really improve your chances of being able to move things forward a lot faster.

I love that. Very, very solid advice. Have there been ways that you've gotten on people's radar that have been more effective for you than others? Obviously, I think speaking is fantastic way to do it.

Yeah. You know, and I really do like this question because there's a big belief in the marketplace and this is my observation that there's one best way to do things, and I'm a really big believer that is actually not the case. Right. I really believe that. And again, my observation is that depending on your current situation and a lot of different variables, there may be a different strategy that is more effective for you as opposed to others. Like, I was just speaking with a well known sales expert who for them, like speaking, I mean, this guy is a road warrior. He just gets out and he speaks. He doesn't have to do anything else, he does other things. But for him, speaking is what Generates the vast majority of his business. And so he can just continue doing that and it's working really well for him. For someone else, speaking is not going to be the best route because maybe they have family obligations or it just like, it scares them like crazy and there's other things they could do. So for us at consulting success, one thing that has worked really well has been content. Right. We've been playing the long term game for quite a bit of time now. Been about nine years. We've put out a lot of valuable information to help consultants to grow their business. That in turn helps us to get a lot of people coming to our website to get those free resources. But for others, like, you know, that's the content game, that's the inbound game. And inbound can work. But the flip side of that is outbound. And outbound, you can typically see results much faster because content, right. Inbound takes more time to create ahead of time. And then you land the conversation. You have someone reaching out to you. But with outbound, you can actually start to connect with people and have conversations much faster because you don't need to take the time to create as much content. The challenge on the outbound side is a bit outside. Outbound side is that when you do that, the prospect is typically a little bit colder. And so it takes a bit more time. And you need to invest more time in the relationship to be able to move them further down, to want to have a conversation, to really have a meaningful conversation with you.

Right, okay, fantastic. What about. And you can speak to, I guess, your experience on this. But when it came to, you know, when it comes to consulting, there's. There's various degrees of consulting. There's giving advice and then there's advice plus implementation. And then there's sometimes just implementation. Right. So if somebody, somebody may already know what they want. I need somebody to run. I mean, it could be as simple and tactical as I need somebody to run Facebook ads. Like you're a Facebook advertising consultant, they know what they want. You kind of come in and you just kind of do it. More of a service vendor, in my opinion, than a true consultant per se. When you were running your business, were you doing or take me through like some of the typical things, like how, how much implementation of the things were you doing versus just giving them the strategy? And it may have changed over time. I know mine has.

Yeah, it definitely changed over time. I mean, starting off in the early days of my career as a consultant and building consulting businesses, it was very much focused on implementation. And I think that's really important and a good place for most people to go if they're new to it because you get to learn firsthand, you get to really develop your skill set. If you already have a real clear skill set, your expertise is there, then you're able to provide higher level advice. But if you've never actually done what you're suggesting that people do. Right. Like that's probably not a good approach to take. So that's where implementation can help. But you know, my career, as I did a bit more implementation, then it was very high, like strategic level advice. And then we built models where there would be certain things would be high level strategic advice, others would be implementation or others would be kind of advisory. So advising and overseeing teams implementing on our recommendations.

Okay. When you were doing on fees. So I see you mentioned here and this is something I told like I adopted a long time ago and I told, I told myself clients and colleagues and other people who sell by the hour. In some cases that's okay, but in most cases I discourage people from billing hourly. And I'd love to hear some more of your thoughts on that as well as kind of going into some of the.