Eric Siu and Sujan Patel, founder of Single Grain, walk through starting a consulting business. Pick a niche, build a personal brand through blogging and YouTube, reach out directly on LinkedIn, and prove yourself with case studies and client results.
Hey, fun fact. I'm gonna tell you how 1, 2, 3 old partners of Single Grain actually have consulting businesses now. So Single Grain is the office that we're in right now. It is a consulting business. Soo Jin here is the original founder of Single Grain. So fun story, the both of us, and then there's also a third person, a third original partner that has a consulting thing going on right now. So we're gonna show you how to get started with consulting. After you watch this video, make sure to leave a comment. Let us know what you plan to do in terms of consulting, and let's get started. Sujan, if you can give us a little background on yourself and then talk to us about what consulting is.
Yeah, what's up everyone? I'm Sujan Patel. I started Single Grain and been doing consulting for the last 12 years or so. My background's in SEO marketing and I swore off consulting when, when selling the business to Eric. And 2 years later I was like, I got a client pinging me, I said no, and he just kept willing to pay me more and more. And I was like, okay, at some point I said yes. And that led to a lot more, and I realized just how good the consulting business and how much revenue you can actually generate and how quickly you can actually become a profitable and scalable business.
How does someone get started with consulting? You mentioned someone comes to you and then, you know, they're offering to pay, right? So I think we get to a certain point and then people are like looking to come to you, but like if you're starting from scratch, how do you even get started?
Let's talk about like how do you actually get people to come to you, because I think that's the most important part. It's building up the personal brand. I witnessed Neil Patel grow his personal brand. I was like sitting, you know, pretty much right next to him him in the case of like seeing him grow from nothing to an internet brand and personality into now a leader. But he covers pretty much every topic. So over the course of a decade, I saw him grow, and really I thought the bar to enter that was too hard, so I never started. And then all I did was just publish a couple blog posts and it got the ball rolling. So I think starting blogging, YouTube, whatever channel— like you can even do Instagram stories and do 10-second snippets on any topic. A guy named Justin Wu has gotten really, really popular just from doing that. You don't have to really be smart, you just have to have good ideas. The other thing is building up a referral network, right? So maybe you don't have a blog, you don't have a brand, but you do, you've maybe worked in the industry, you have coworkers, you have old coworkers. What I did when I first started consulting is I just pinged, I looked at my LinkedIn connections, I pinged the top 50 people that were most connected, and I was like, hey, it's been a long time, I'm starting a consulting business doing SEO, I'm leaving my day job, pretty scared but also excited. Really humble but also telling them what I was doing. And I said, I'm doing one thing very specific. I was like, I'm doing SEO consulting.
Mm-hmm.
And that actually ended up giving me about 4 or 5 different leads from big companies like Yahoo. And I just pinged the SEO manager at PayPal, and turns out he knew somebody at Yahoo that needed consulting for one of their small businesses. And I got a lot of subcontract work, which is another great avenue. So ping other agencies, ping bigger agencies, or Well-established companies, and that actually ended up giving me another source of leads.
Yep. So what I'm hearing, I guess, is niching down and also kind of doing some direct sales and reaching out to people, and then also starting to build your own brand, right? Whether it's YouTube or blogging.
Yeah, and actually one more thing around that, building your own brand is building credibility, right? So there's a brand to build up your leads, and then there's a brand of like, is this person credible at what they do? So my goal was like, whatever I can do to get some sort of credibility, trust, where people aren't asking, why should I pay you? Show me your results, right? And if I showed them my results, it wasn't some sort of local client or some small little smallpox type of thing where I didn't have to use my job as a part of my credibility. It's just taking on maybe doing free work, even just getting some credible brands that you can do work for and say, here's what you did. And the good thing about this, it doesn't actually have to be work you've done. At Web Profits, we do this now. We do these teardowns and case studies of large brands and how they actually build up. We did one on like koala.com. I think that's like a casper.com competitor in Australia. And we did one on a couple other like fintech companies. We were targeting fintech companies as potential prospects. We worked with a couple fintech companies over the last decade, but what we did was we created— We did a really big rundown on Cabbage.com, a billion-dollar startup, and then essentially a lot of other smaller startups or other fintech companies came to us because we did a very, very thorough company case study.
So there you have it. There's 4 different things that you can do to actually get started with consulting. Again, leave in the comments, let us know what you plan to do in terms of consulting. Don't forget to click the next video in this series. We're gonna talk about how to go from consulting to agency. So we're gonna tell you how to get to the next level.
