How To Become A Business Process Consultant

How much revenue has gone into your Cloud Connect business?

For the consulting, right from March 2021 to April 2023, we've had a half a million dollars in revenue.

Hello, it's David Jennings here and I'm so excited. We've got Rob, one of our systemologists, on this particular call. He's the owner of a company called Cloud Connect and I'll get Rob to introduce himself in a moment. He can tell you a little bit more about what he does. But I think I wanted to open by publicly thanking Rob for all of the great work that he does as a systemologist. He really, truly, deeply cares for business owners and their struggles that they go through. I've seen it firsthand as we've worked on shared clients and some of the client stories that he shares inside our community. And he just wants the best for business owners and he's embraced systemology wholeheartedly and the impact that he's having, which you'll learn about in a moment, is quite significant, both with business business owners and then also within our community as well. So I couldn't be more proud to call him a systemologist. And I wanted to say firstly, a big thank you to you, Rob, for all the great work that you do. And with that I'll, yeah, I'll hand over to you and maybe to start, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, Cloud Connect. And yeah, we'd love to learn a little bit more about your story as how you've become a business process consultant.

Definitely. So thanks for having me, Dave. So I started a company called CloudConnect back in 1998. And back then I was that door to door computer fix it guy. And I eventually evolved into seeing businesses and then working with them and then fixing their computers. I was the guy under the desk putting servers in, doing work, all the kind of crazy desktop support, that kind of thing. And so fast forward 25 years and that became my life. So we had a group of cars and technicians and covering Sydney and the Wollongong area. So this whole we covered probably 100km of radius around us, supporting businesses around that area. And it got to a point around 2018, I suddenly started going, IT support is an hourly business. How do, how much we charge per hour, how many hours a day can you work, how many technicians can you hire to be running around doing all that? And I got to a point where I was like, I'm done. It's highly stressful. My phone is ringing 247 with help. Help. What are we doing? If I could get a dollar for every time I said just try rebooting, then would be a millionaire by now. But that's not the case. So in 2018, I sold that business and it freed up my time. But what we kept was the subscription model. So all the clients that we were setting up and doing all of the IT support, we were also partnered with Google and Microsoft and other companies that were the subscription model where we signed them up and we just basically crabbed the credit card details and they signed up licenses and it became this passive income that I thought, I'm going to make that my core business. And so I sold the IT business. I. I became a subscription SaaS model business. And I realized that I freed up about 80% of my time during the week. And I'm like, now what I do, I love meeting with people, I love working with different varieties of industries and business. I want to become like a business mentor or a coach or something. So at that point, I just didn't know what the process looked like. But I knew that I wanted to consult and I knew that I just wanted to work with other business owners. That was my goal.

Yeah, those early days of your consulting business, because after you sold that service part off, where you're going out, getting underneath the tables and things like that, and then you went to the subscription model, it still had a little bit of a consultant way about it. I know you would meet with clients, find out a lot about their challenges, and then recommend a tech stack or have a look at what they're doing and say, ah, we can improve the way that we're doing things. Love to maybe learn a little bit about that side of the consulting business. And yeah, maybe what some of the challenges were with that business.

Yeah, so when I would meet with a business owner, I started to say things like, let's not talk about computers and fixing computers and doing all that. Let's talk about what are you currently using for your tech tools. So we have your office suite and your accounting and your CRMs and your project management tool. And I've never really thought about where were they tracking their systems, where are they putting systems? Because it never really became part of my language. But they were lacking CRMs, they were lacking a proper office suite or something like that. So I became the this systems mentor to help them through. But at the same time, it can only go for so long. Oh, I recommend this for a CRM or I recommend this for an office suite. And they're like, thanks, good.

We'll do that.

Then I'm like, okay, how do we create some longevity? How do we create a. Build a relationship that's not around that dopamine fix? Because that was. That felt great. But what about the teaching someone how to do something so it lasts a lifetime? And that was the gap in my. That was the challenge I had, was how do we create something that they would appreciate? The learnings and experience that I have and the skill set that I have around tech, but around also their systems and their tools and they're using. But how do we make that? So they go, thank you for that. And I actually want to pay for that service ongoing, because what you do is magnificent and we're really helping us. But it only lasted maybe three months and then it was kind of like moving on. So that was the challenge I had, is how do we find the right tools in place where we can actually go deeper into their business?

Yeah, one thing, and it makes it a little bit of a challenge, is even just the terminology with systems. And we talk about systems, which sometimes can be interchangeable with software, and people are thinking about software systems, whereas I know when we talk about systems, oftentimes we're talking about process, like the step by step how something is done. Because it sounds like you previously or you still do with Cloud Connect, you're like cloud consultant who helps businesses think about their software tech stack. And then the piece that we're thinking about adding in here to really address that, that need that you saw is to bridge the gap. Once you have the software selected, how do we make sure that you're using it? And what is the process for ensuring certain things are done to standard? I don't know if there's anything that you want to speak to for that, because I bet you would get that all the time with people getting confused about what does he mean by systems.

Yeah. So the way that I word it, when I'm meeting with a client, let's say they lack certain tools. So the first thing I do is let's just do a review of what they're currently using, make recommendations on what were those five core tools would be, and then implement that, start bringing that into the system. And yes, we've partnered with many companies, we're an affiliate with hundreds. That's not really the point. It's what fits their business and what best suits them. So they're saving time and money and being more productive. That's the outset. That's the relationship I'm building. Once we establish those tools and we implement those tools, and they're using those tools. Now. The question is, how do we record? How are you using those tools into a process that we can capture and put into something like System Hub, for example?

Yeah.

So let's record what you're doing, but before we can even start recording what we're doing, let's just make sure.