DIY, DWY, DFY: Which Consulting Path is Right For You?

Welcome to today's episode of Black Belt Startup with Feras. Thank you for tuning in. So what's new in the world of entrepreneurship? Think about this for a second: a business book, a strategy workshop, a fractional COO. 3 totally different things, right? But together, They explain the entire world of consulting. A business book, that's DIY, do it yourself. You give people the insights, the tools, the systems, and they implement on their own. A strategy workshop, that is DWY, do it— done with you. You're in the room, You're guiding discussion. You're making sure the team stays on track while they do the work. And a fractional COO, that is DFY, done for you. They step in, they run operations and execute the plan. So consulting works the exact same way. DIY, do it yourself. That's when You, the consultant, provide the client with the playbook, the tools, the systems. And then the WY, done with you, where you walk beside, beside the client as they are executing. And then the FY, done for you. You take care of it end to end. You carry the load. The most important piece of information you need to know is The lane you choose— the DIY lane, the DWY lane, the DFY lane— the lane you choose doesn't just decide how much you earn, it decides how much freedom you have, how heavy your workload feels and is, and the type of clients you'll end up attracting. And many consultants don't even realize what lane they're in. They sort of drift between all 3, confused why the money feels unpredictable. That's why I wanted to spend this episode on providing you with what each model is— DIY, DFY, DXY— and then the pros and cons, and then which lane you want to choose to get you to your goal. Maybe the short-term goal, and then which lanes you can actually cover for a long-term objective. Maybe you as a consultant, once you are established and once you have a team, you can offer different, different models. But we'll start with one at a time and show you how you spot the lane, how you own it, and learn how to shift into the lane that will get you to where you want to go. But before we dive in, a couple of administrative items. One, whether you're watching or listening live or tuning in later, I'd love to hear from you. Leave me a comment, send me a question, DM me on LinkedIn, whichever platform you're on, and let me know what business question you have, what issues you're facing, what struggles you're going through. And if it's something maybe you don't want to share publicly, feel free to email me. You can email me at feras@startupwithferas.com, or you can private message me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to help. A lot of people helped me along the way, and my mission— it's my mission to help others, to help entrepreneurs get back, to get into entrepreneurship, and also to start building and to scale and to grow their businesses to 7 and 8 figures as we have done with the companies that we started over the last 20 years or so. So that's number one. I'd love to hear from you whether you're listening in now live or you are listening in later. Leave me a comment. Send me a note. I'd love to know about what's going on in your world. And if you are having some wins, small or big, let me know. I'd love to also celebrate with you. share the good news with the community. Cool. In terms of— oh, the other administrative item is that we, we have these live streams, these episodes, every other Thursday. We start at 1 PM Pacific, 3 PM— sorry, 1 PM Pacific, 4 PM Eastern, and I cover a business topic related to entrepreneurship, and then I answer questions that we get from the community. So if you'd like your answer— your question answered Uh, either send it out of the way, ahead of the way, or join us live and, and ask your question. But I'll, one way or another, I'll make sure that I address it. So let's jump back in and break this down, because once you see these 3 lanes, once you see them clearly, you'll never look at your consulting business the same way again. Lane number 1, DIY, do-it-yourself. This is the business book lane. So you hand your clients your knowledge, your tools, your systems, your processes, your PDFs, your white papers, your checklist, and then they use them on their own. You're not involved with the client besides enabling that transaction to take place. Examples, maybe a $49 a $49 Instagram growth playbook PDF, or maybe a $99 checklist to help consultants brand or create their logos or their, their tagline, or maybe a $200 or $199 video course, online course. So those are just some examples. Again, the sky is the limit. You can package things in, in different ways. You can have a bundle of these checklists or processes that you've, you've set up for your, for your client. And, and this works in terms of what works for this model, works really well. It scales easily. You make it once and then you sell it forever or for its shelf life. Then it's, it's really also a great entry point for people who can't afford your services. Maybe you're a very established consultant and you're charging $250, $300 an hour or higher. And this is, this is the segment of, of the, of the clients you want to target, but, um, you can't get to them yet, maybe for a lot of reasons. So starting, starting off by offering something that people can buy and maybe at a reasonable price, they'll now— you'll have their email address, addresses. They'll be on your email list. You can do some follow-ups. You can offer, offer a free discovery call with them, but you have, you have them as a client on a, on a typically on a lower ticket item. And then with these assets that you develop, we talked about the book, we talked about templates, processes, uh, checklists, what have you. You are the one, you, you, it builds credibility. You're the one who is actually has built, you're the one with the guide that everyone is using. So, so these are some, some of the benefits. And then one last benefit is that it's really easy to test ideas quickly before you develop a $5,000 course. Maybe you do a $50, $49 course and see how, how that works, and then see if there's some traction and, and learn how to package and sell these courses. So that's— these are some of the really good points or great things on, on why this DIY model works really well. Now where it hurts, and what hurts, is that low price. Typically it's a low price item and you'll need hundreds or maybe thousands of people so that you can get some real income. Number 2, customers just may not take action just because they, they bought a book or a template or a white paper or even an online course in a PDF. They might just not act on it for whatever reason, and then you're not getting the success stories, you're not getting the testimonials. So that also won't help. Also, it's— you could easily get stuck into refining, tweaking the products, these checklists, these processes, these papers, instead of actually selling. A lot of us who come into entrepreneurship from a technical background We have very little experience in sales and marketing. You know, I had zero experience in sales when I started, when I was forced into entrepreneurship after this horrible layoff experience that I went through. It's easy for us to get in the sort of technical planning part of things and focusing on the product and not being out there selling and marketing and networking and listening to the market. So those are the things that could actually hurt this model, but again, there are a lot of benefits to it. Having it. And then what, what you need to know if you're going with a DIY approach is that you— these DIY products that you have that you package, they definitely, they are definitely a credibility builder. And, and, and I mean, especially if you publish a book, some of us have maybe experience to do so, but even I'm thinking of maybe small ebooks or a white paper or a group of, of assets that your clients can find useful. Right? Also, you can think of a DIY model, especially at a lower ticket, at a lower price, price point. It could be your lead magnet in this, in disguise, because people who are spending $99 or $49 and, and getting that playbook from you, they could be potentially leads, especially if you are nurturing them and you keep adding value and helping them out. Whether it's your LinkedIn posts or your other social media videos, or maybe on LinkedIn, or maybe just your email, whatever mechanism you have to connect with these leads and nurture them. And we talk about lead nurturing a lot. So if you're new to sales and you don't know what this lead nurturing concept is, check out the video I have from probably about a year and a half ago. Still very, very valid. Still very applicable. It's called The Ultimate Guide to sales funnels for consultants. So I talk about this idea of one thing to get the lead, but also to nurture the lead all the way to become a client. So again, someone might come to your business through a DIY asset, a playbook, a white paper, a list of processes or checklist, and get in with $49 or maybe $99, but tomorrow, next month, next quarter, might be a $5,000 a month client of yours. So, so think of DIY as a lead magnet for you as well. And then it's, it's a, it's a very, it's a perfect, and this is the last point on this before we go to the next one, it's a perfect entry lane if you want to prove your idea and, and you want to prove it fast without overcommitting a lot of time and resources. So that is DIY. Before we go into the next lane, the second lane, DWY, do it done with you. And that is again the workshop example I mentioned earlier. This is the, the, the where you, you don't leave the clients by themselves. You don't just give them assets and processes and systems and checklist, but also you don't do all the heavy heavy lifting by yourself either. So, so it's sort of in between the DIY and the done— between the do-it-yourself and done-for-you, you have this middle lane, DWI, done with you. And for those of us— for those of you who are with us here, if you have a question or a comment, I'd love to hear from you. Let me know, um, any, any challenges that you have if you are again running a consulting business and you've been just doing consulting and it's been taxing on you and you want to, you want to be able to scale maybe a specific set of processes that you've developed over working with clients. Again, love to hear from your, your experience and what's working, what's not working for you. The second lane, back to our D, uh, DWY, is to, uh, done with you. So examples, $1,000 a month group coaching program, right? That's one idea. A 6-week workshop on a series on guiding people, you know, step by step. You have some material they read or maybe some assignment, then you meet and have these workshop— this workshop series and help them go through developing maybe a strategy or developing an an employee guidebook if you're an HR consultant, or maybe if you're an IT consultant, for example, you can come in and help the business develop a cybersecurity set of guidelines. So anywhere where you are working with a client and you're very engaged and they're very engaged and you are working with them side by side, they provide part of the puzzle, you provide other part of the puzzle. Also, another example is maybe a— excuse me— a mastermind or a membership community with live Q&A. So, so the community can go and read and consume the content that you have, and then you have weekly or biweekly or monthly live Q&A. So you are there for them. What works in this scenario in the D-W-Y, done with you? Clients feel supported. They get your eyes on, they get your eyes, your expert eyes on their work and you provide feedback. You can charge mid-tier, could be, I don't know, $500 a month, $3,000 a month, anywhere in between. Again, there are always exceptions to these models. Every time there's, you know, in education, in sharing, new concepts, a lot of times, you know, I like to have frameworks and systems. And a lot of times when you have these systems and frameworks, there are exceptions. So everything I mentioned here is probably applicable 80-90% of the time, but there are scenarios where the do-it, the done-for-you, or the done-with-you will fall outside of these norms. But in general, again, these are general things. If what you're doing doesn't seem to follow the process I'm describing here, let me know. I'd love to hear from you and see if there's something maybe to improve, to optimize, or potentially I'll learn something new from what— from, from your success. So in terms of what works for this model, you can charge mid-ticket, mid-price pricing point, as I mentioned. Also, it scales better than the done-for-you. Done-for-you, your very consumed in this implementation work. You won't have time to maybe scale the business as much. Obviously, you can scale with hiring, especially as you start to get profitable. But this one-to-many, um, this, this one-to-many delivery, the group calls I mentioned, or the community, or, or, or a mastermind type offer, this, um, This, this gives you a lot, a lot of opportunity to, to save on time. And also part of this, if especially if you're focused on having communities, just a side note here is that you are building a tribe. You are building, um, I don't want to say followers, people, peers, slash people who are learning from you, engaging in your community, supporting not just the growth of their own businesses, but they're supporting other members of the community. So if you're going with this approach where it's one-to-many, there's this aspect of you're creating an environment for people to cross-pollinate, to learn from, from each other. Now, what hurts in this model? It still takes your time because you're showing up weekly or monthly, or if you overcommit in terms of having access to you, that does take time. It adds up. Also, you can't really handle unlimited clients. If you have a template or if you have an online course and you want to sell this as DIY, Um, do it yourself. You can scale, you can sell 1,000 or 2,000, or you can sell, you know, 5,000, and that just scales. Like, you're not involved in the process. Every once in a while you want to tweak the asset, improve the asset that you're selling, but in general, this asset has a shelf life, and it— you can pretty much— every, every amount of— every dollar you get from selling that asset goes to the bottom line because you've already invested in building that asset and marketing that asset. So with this done with you, you can't scale the same way because your calendar at one point will cap your income. And then if you're not very structured and have some sort of process and a system, these live sessions, um, could just end up being, I don't know, therapy sessions. Could end up spiraling into like random Q&A about everything else. And then some members of the community might not be, might not be enthused, too enthused about one person dominating You know, the discussion. So you have to have a process, a structure to manage this engagement. Again, I, I'm focusing here on the community, sort of that one-to-many. I like this one-to-many approach to selling and delivering a service. It could scale pretty well, not unlimited scaling, but it could scale really well, and you, you might find it working really well for, for your business. Now, to summarize here, done with you. Is there to help you create leverage. You're no longer just selling, you know, hours. You're selling systems and support, and you're limiting the amount of time you have to put into it. You still have to put a lot of time in entrepreneurship. You still have to go and put time into sales and marketing and growing and managing your team and inspiring your team as well. But from a delivery perspective, there's that one-to-many component. The second point here is that if you're shifting from sort of a freelancer, a freelancer-type setting to you want to be a thought leader, you want to be well known in your space, this will help because you're starting to build a community around you. You start to think of one-to-many. You start to have some profitability that is not tied, and some revenue and profitability not tied to that number of hours you're spending. So it does give you that, that launch pad for you to move from selling hours to, to, to be a thought leader. And then you can, you can package that done with you very creatively with maybe have hybrid programs, part video course, part maybe live coaching. As I said, you can have cohorts, you can have Hot seat coaching. You can come up with very creative ways to, uh, to, to package done with you. And I think it's, it's, it's— you still, you know, you still get paid well, uh, but you're not carrying the whole load on behalf of the client. So that is the second model, the middle lane, done with you. The third one is D-F-Y, done for you. So before we go into there. Let me make sure if you have any questions or comments, feel free to. All right, I'd love to know if you just joined us. Um, here we, we've covered 2 models so far. We've covered the DIY where you have systems, uh, products, digital products, potentially it could be physical, physical products where you enable the client to do everything on their own. You provide the knowledge, the systems, the tools, the checklist, and the playbook for your clients to do the work on their own. So that's one model. The second model was done with you. So you're involved. You're running, for example, a strategy workshop. You're facilitating the discussion. We're pointing out how to develop an effective strategy, but the client with you developing their own strategy, and you're helping them out. And the third model now is DFY, done for you. So that's lane 3. Again, for those of you who joined, who just joined us, let me know if— what model has worked for you, what model hasn't worked. Um, and if you have a question that is unrelated to today's topic but it's around business, uh, feel free to, um, hang around till the end of the episode. I'll be more than happy to also field those questions. Now, the 3rd model, done for you, DFY. This is the fractional COO example I mentioned earlier where you bring someone in and they, they every— they do everything, they handle everything. They, they just pay and, and they take care of the work for you. So examples from a consulting perspective, think of $5,000, a $5,000 a month retainer for content for content production, X number of videos, X number of posts, X, you know, X number of emails, that whole thing, the strategy and, and delivery of, of, of, and content production and content curation, all of that in for $5,000 a month. Another one would be is you sell, you update, enhance, upgrade websites. It could be a $10,000 gig, you know, per website. If it's e-commerce, it's $15,000. It could be also If someone is now spending a lot of money on ads, on Meta ads or Google ads— will we have ChatGPT ads at one point? I don't think so. Uh, but, uh, the idea here is you go in and let's say they're spending— I don't know, they're spending $20,000 a month on ads. You come in and you manage their ads for them, you improve the performance of those campaigns that they're running, and you charge, let's say, 15%. 15% of $20,000, that's $3,000 a month of managing that company, your client's paid ads. So that would be— and, and basically, of course, in all these models you have to learn about the client's business, you have to understand what's going on, their pain points, you have to understand that the, the, the persona of, of your client's client— that is required across all the models. Um, otherwise, why would someone buy from you if you don't Understand their struggles and what they're trying to accomplish. So with that, once you have that discovery session with the client, in the case of running a company's paid ads, paid ad campaign, you will do all the work. So that's done for you. You're doing all the work on behalf of you for your client. And in terms of what works for this model, it's the fastest way to cash. You can land a single done-for-you client and cover your expenses and have some extra. Typically it's a high-ticket, a higher-ticket item, and you don't need as many clients. So if you have— if you, you know, in the first example of DIY, DIY, we talked about you might need 100 clients to, to make $10,000 because you are selling things at $99. So So you need 100 of them to make $10,000. In this case, if you sell a project for $10,000, that's just one client, one project. So, so that is, that is something to keep in mind. Also, um, a lot of clients just love this where they bring in a consultant, they give— they, they share with them their requirements and, and what they want to achieve, and then the consultant, yourself, your comp— the competent consultant comes in and takes care of all the work. So that's— these were all the great parts of this model. Now what hurts is heavy workload. Like once you have these projects, you're spending all your time to deliver and work on focus on this one client. Not bad, especially if you've sold it at a decent price, you have good margins, you're making money. Nothing wrong with this model at all, but you are focused on delivering this work. Potentially, if you take on 2, 3 clients and it's a heavy load for each one of them, then potentially you could burn out. And if you don't have systems, processes, you don't bring— you onboard maybe contractors or people to help you, then it will be— time would become a bottleneck. And then you might be very excited about closing these 3 deals, but then when it comes time to delivery, you know, you might not be used to spending 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and this might be problematic. So, so keep that in mind. And then another important point here is that business can— it's risky. Business can feel fragile if maybe 1, 2 clients leave. If you have 4 or 5 clients and then 1 or 2 of them leave, then you have to obviously find ways to bring that revenue from new sales. And, and, and we go into this cycle of feast and famine. It's very common in consulting where you're, you're very, very busy, you have a— you have 2 clients at the same time, and you're raking in amazing, amazing revenue and, and, and profit margin, but then the next month it's dry. So, so we've— I've covered this in, in other topics, in other videos, but the idea here is that if you are focused on this model, be aware of these areas that hurt so that you avoid them. Now, to summarize this done-for-you, done-for-you is, it's like oxygen for new consultants. It's the fastest way to prove you're valuable, and it helps you with cash flow. That's really important in terms of revenue. We talk a lot about cash flow in other videos. I think I talked about it in, in The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business. It's one thing to sell, Cash flow is something else completely. So, so check out that video to learn more about, about maintaining good cash flow. And then the other thing is with these larger, larger projects, and you're engaged with the client for a longer time, and there are a lot of opportunities obviously to impress them and solve the problem that— the problems that they have. And at the end of the project, you can potentially develop a case study with their approval You can make it generic if they're not approving to have their logo on that case study, and then you can obviously get reviews, testimonials, all of that will help you establish more credibility in the market, so that's good. And I think if you want to look at these models, these 3 lanes, right, you can potentially use, start off with one of them or what's working well for you today, And then have, as you're growing, either pivot to another lane, switch to another lane, or have more than one lane. So you can start with DIY, provide templates and playbooks, and then start to do some of that done with you. And then you can do it, you know, move to a DFY over time. If you have a team of 5, 6, 7 people, you can have these different I would say revenue streams, um, where each, each model is— each business model is bringing in a specific type of revenue and a specific type of client. And maybe those who, who come in with that $49 a month playbook, they move to engage with you in your community, and later they, they, they become one of maybe your top clients. Uh, in, in, in, on, on this large project done-for-you scale. So, so again, you have to really evaluate what's working, what's not working for you. If you're stuck, you're not sure, or if you're, if you're, if you're just about to start a consulting business and you're not sure which model to use, again, feel free to comment here on whichever channel you're, you're listening to or viewing from, or email me at feras@ at startupwithferas.com, or feel free to message me on LinkedIn. I do respond to all the messages personally. Sometimes it's a bit busy, it might take me a couple days, but I always make it— make sure that I get people— I get back to people who come for, for help, for guidance, because a lot of people helped me along the way and I like to always pay it forward. So, so that's what I want to cover today. Um, I'd love to hear from you. Which model you are using today or maybe planning on using, uh, and I'd love to know what's working and what's not. Um, it's always fascinating to see entrepreneurs, you know, they have the grit, they have the determination, they, they have the creativity, and they go out and, and sometimes they're hit with reality, but they figure things out. And that's what I love to hear, how you figure things out. And again, if you're stuck, don't hesitate to reach out, leave me a comment. I'll be more than happy answer. And if you are finding this content, uh, useful, I'd love for you to— whichever platform you're on— to— if you're on YouTube, click the like button, share this video with those who could benefit, and also subscribe to the channel because we produce, I think, great content. And you can connect with me on LinkedIn as you see on the screen, but I would love for you to subscribe to the channel here on YouTube or follow us on— follow me on other platforms, and don't hesitate to reach out. And if you'd like to get my weekly Black Belt Startup newsletter, you can go to startupaffairs.com and click on the newsletter and sign up. You get it every Saturday with strategies, tips on how to build a sustainable business, a profitable business, and scale it. And if you're really into it, I can help you scale to 7 and 8 figures as we've done, as I've done in my previous companies. Thank you for joining, and we'll see you next time.