From Expert to Entrepreneur: The Skills That Actually Matter To Start a Consulting Business

We are live. Welcome to episode 116 of Black Belt Startup with Feras. Thank you for tuning in. What's new in the world of entrepreneurship? Learn to build and learn to sell. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. That idea was well articulated in the book I recently finished, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, and it reinforces several lessons that I've learned over more than 20 years of building businesses and working with entrepreneurs. And Naval knows a thing or two about entrepreneurship. He's the co-founder and chairman of AngelList and He also was an early-stage investor in companies like Uber, Twitter, and others. So he writes about philosophy. He writes about business. He writes about happiness. But this book, a few things stood out in this book that really caught my attention and resonated well with me, and I've experienced those. In my own journey building 7 businesses and growing one business to, to 8 figures. It was an analytics consulting company that we ended up selling to Dentsu, the global media giant. So on, in my own journey, uh, those 3 points made a huge difference, and I want to focus on those in today's session. I won't be giving a book summary or a Book Critique is a great book. I just again finished reading, but I want to focus on these 3 ideas. One is learning how to build and how to sell, especially for new consultants, professionals like you who are in corporate and they want to take the leap and they're not sure how, or you've already taken the leap, uh, but, but you're not sure what to do. You're struggling. And then you have a lot of choices in front of you. So learning how to build and learning how to sell, that's number one. The second point is making rational, optimistic moves. And the third point is choosing the hard actions that create an easier path over time. As the saying goes, hard choices lead to easy outcomes. Easy life, easy choices, hard life. So, so I'll talk about these 3 points today as it relates to consulting, as it relates to starting and growing a business. And again, these points closely connect with many lessons I've learned on my own journey. And I want to make this session practical to help you decide what to sell, to test an offer. Also, we'll go over finding clients, developing credibility, and knowing when you have enough evidence to take a bigger step or maybe to a pivot. So if you're with us here for the first time, thank you for joining. Or if you're listening to this later or watching this later, my name is Feras. I've built 7 businesses, mostly in consulting, And since I sold the last business, Enoor, my mission now is to help you, help entrepreneurs start, grow, scale their businesses to 6 figures, to 7 figures, and beyond. And I have a YouTube channel, @StartupWithFeras, Feras spelled like my first name, F-E-R-A-S, and also a website with a newsletter that we send out every Saturday. So I'm here to help you. Start and grow your business. If you have any questions that, that again, that are— you're faced with the challenges, issues along the journey. I know some of you have a lot of ideas. You're not sure which one to pick to build your business on. I know some of you have— don't have any ideas. So I have, I have actually a video on 26 ideas, successful ideas, great ideas for 2026. Check that video out. But also You might have started and now you're not sure how to sell. You're really anxious and maybe fearful of knocking on doors, of sending emails. Trust me, I've been through all of that. I was a VP at a tech startup making good money, having good life, and then I was faced with a devastating layoff back in 2003, and I went through all the phases of mourning, you know, the shock, the disbelief, the denial, all of that. And then, you know, I had a young family and I was the sole breadwinner at the time, so I had to start figuring things out when the job market was really, really dry and I couldn't land an interview, let alone a job offer. So So with a co-founder, a good friend of mine, we started that very first business selling websites to small business owners. That was cutting edge at the time. So if you're thinking of how to package AI and sell AI today, and that's sort of the hot thing, selling websites back in 2003 was the hot thing. So, but it was still hard. It was still hard, but we figured it out. It took us a while. We struggled. The first 2 years were brutal. Um, so anyone who tells you that you can become a millionaire in 2 months, in 3 months, you can follow this framework or whatever framework or that approach or that system or that operating system and you can get to $10,000 or, or some, some claim $100,000 a month, it is a gimmick. It is hype. It is a get-rich-quick scheme. Yes, you might get lucky and be able to do a $10,000 a month business for a month or two, but building a sustainable business, building a company that will grow and that will reflect your values, that will have an amazing culture, that'll be profitable, that will help you achieve financial independence and support your family and your community, all of that requires a lot of hard work. There's no way that you can do built a business, a profitable business, a sizable business, and spend 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week. It just doesn't work. I've been in Silicon Valley for almost 30 years, and I have not met a single person who has done well in business, in entrepreneurship, who worked— who did not work hard. So yes, my motto in life is work hard, play hard, and give back. There is time for— there's time, there are seasons where you can put a lot of time into the business and you want to take advantage of that season, and there are other seasons where you have to take care of family and other priorities in life, but in all of it, you always want to maintain those key and nurture those key relationships. Money and having a business is not everything in life, so there's a balance. It's very hard to maintain that balance. You have to kind of manage the imbalance. So these are my views on things. I'm a big believer in entrepreneurship. I want you to start to succeed. I want you to grow, but I want you to be aware that sometimes there are seasons where it's just not the right time for you to start a business. This is exactly what I posted today on LinkedIn. I have this breakdown. Black Belt Breakdown with Feras. Sometimes I roast an email that I get, or I speak with a founder and they're struggling, or I get an insight from, from someone else I spoke with, um, or a book I read, and I put those on, on Tuesdays on, on my LinkedIn profile. And also I post, I post on, on YouTube as well. So that's, that's about the channel. Uh, so no get-rich-quick schemes here, no hype. It's practical advice and tips from the trenches with tools, worksheets, all that good stuff. I— my mission is to help you succeed. So let's get right into it. The first part, the first concept is learn to build and learn to sell. And I, I know some of you are trickling in, um, to the, to the live stream, so thank you for being here. If you have any questions, any comments, don't hesitate, leave me— leave it in the comment section. Um, whichever platform you're on, but you can go to, to whether you're on LinkedIn or Facebook or on Instagram or, or X. I'll get those. Sometimes the comments don't come my way right away, real time, with the software I'm using, so I go back and answer those later. But most of the time I get them real time and I answer them during the session. So again, feel free to to leave me a comment. And by the way, I know some of you have not made that decision to go public with your company, with your venture. You're still employed. You haven't told your significant other. Not a good idea. You want to get your significant other on board with these big decisions. But if it's something private you don't want to put out there in a comment on YouTube or on LinkedIn, I get it. You can email me. Email me at info@startupwithferas.com. Again, Feras spelled F-E-R-A-S. And I answer these emails. Actually, I look at all the emails that we get. Sometimes, sometimes these cold, cold pitches are awful. I get a kick out of them. Sometimes they're really great. I learn from them. So, so, but I do read all the emails from the community and I do answer them. So feel free again to leave me a comment. I'd love, I'd love you for you to leave the comment, um, publicly so, so that the community will benefit from from the comment and from my reply, but if it's private, you can email to me. So back to stepping on the mat here. Part 1, learning to build and sell. So when we say build, what does that mean for consultants? If you're speaking to maybe a software developer, a programmer, they're building software. But for you as a consultant, you have, you have 5, 10, 20 years of experience and you know HR, you know IT, you know process automation, you know event planning, you know how to land speakers amazing gigs, whatever your specialty is, you have that. Now you want to build an offer around it. Maybe you want to build a method for, uh, a better method, a better master app. You want to have a method for solving a problem. You want to do, you You want to turn that expertise that you have, that technical expertise, into something that clients understand and also a delivery process that will produce the outcomes that the client is expecting. So building in this case is turning— I have something here. I don't know, spider, something interesting. When it's hot out there, stuff comes in. All right, so back to this. So your expertise by itself, think of it as the boat. It gives you the vessel, and then you need the oars to the sales and marketing and the operations to move forward. So the expertise is the raw material, and, and, and then when you turn that into something that a lead, a person who has a problem that you can solve, when you turn what you have into something that people understand and purchase and use, that's when you have a business. So what I want you to, to do now for the next minute here is to answer these questions. Think about it. What can I currently do to solve a problem? What do I currently know that the market doesn't have a solution for? Now you can say, okay, if I'm a CPA, if I'm an HR consultant, if I'm a cybersecurity consultant, there are many others out there who do this, of course. But what makes you special? You know a specific industry very well, you have certain certifications, you are amazingly responsive, you are very good with people, and you are an active listener. Those things are what will make a consultant unique. And typically there are— there is demand for— I'd want part of your validation, idea validation, is to ensure there's demand for what you offer, of course. You don't want to be starting a business in a dying industry or something that is— you want to be in a position, you want to be in a business, in a vertical that is growing. There are a lot of things happening around us around AI, of course, and AI adoption, but look at specific segments or verticals in the market. So for example, Healthcare, elderly healthcare, one of the top areas where it will continue to grow because our society, we're getting older and people need help as they're getting older. So, so anything in that area is not trending down. So, so look, again, based on what you, what, what you know, based on what you do, based on the certifications that you have, based based on the years of experience you've had, based on the clients that you worked with in your current company or in previous, previous lives. So all of that, I want you to think about it, jot it down, the skills. And I have a spreadsheet, I'll make it, I'll add it to the description to help you map out all, all the skills, your hard skills, your soft skills, and also your network. All of that part of you building and turning the expertise into an offer. So, so that, uh, and then I go through this concept in detail in my Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business. If you go to my channel on YouTube, Ad Startup with Feras, you'll see that first video on, on, on starting a consulting business. And I, I go into the formula about problem, solution, paying, paying wallets. So, so, so I go and into that specific concept with a lot of detail in that video. But for now, what I want you to think about is think of packaging the offer and the process that you need to go through it, but I don't want you to struggle in— I don't want you to spend months struggling to come up with an idea, with an offer. So that's kind of learning how to build and learning how to sell is— there's a— you got to put a time limit around this because if you are a perfectionist or you're hesitating for whatever reason, you're not making progress. Reid Hoffman, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, he says, And he's talking about product companies, but it applies to businesses, consulting businesses as well. He says, if you're not ashamed of your first release of your first— of your product, then you've launched too soon. So especially for those of us who are perfectionists, you have to think about it this way. You want to be out there. You build excellence and you build confidence with reps. So, so if you are thinking about the offer that you— whatever is it that you want to sell, and you're not having conversations with other people, which now we're talking about the selling part, how to sell, then, then you're not sure. Then you're— then there's very little chance that you're on the right track. You want to put your idea out there. You want to put your thoughts out there, get— collect feedback. from the marketplace. Ask initially, start with your warm network, right? People, people you know in the industry, especially those who have knowledge about, about what you're about to do. Because if you ask people who don't have that industry knowledge, most likely they'll be polite. They'll tell you, yeah, yeah, we encourage you, we support you, pursue your dream. That's not very helpful. That could be actually misleading. Those could be wrong signals, and wrong signals are worse than no signals because they lead you in the wrong way. And so, so, so If you have something and you're just not sure, then you have to use my other tool called 10+5, is to talk to 10 people, have real conversations about the idea, those who are likely to buy from you, or if they know someone they can connect you, your friends, your family, your network can connect you with people who are likely to have the problem that you are trying to solve. So this is on building, and I touched on selling. And you start selling by first not selling, by having conversations. Selling is all about relationships. It's all about establishing rapport, establishing trust. So as a new consultant, I mean, imagine you're at a networking. You say, "Hey, drop. I do X, whatever X." Hey, I'm I'm an amazing accountant. Look at all the certifications I have. I'm a CPA. I have. And hey, let's let's let me get your business. Like most of us will will kind of shy away from that. We'll distance ourselves from this person. They're too aggressive. They haven't established a basic. Foundational level of just human interaction, of trust. So same thing for you. If you're out there talking to people at networking events, emailing maybe your ex-boss, your ex-colleagues, your classmates, ex-classmates, all of that. If you're doing that, you're starting to collect signals from the marketplace. And also you're building that muscle of outreach. So as a founder, as a new consultant, as a maybe a struggling consultant, the one metric that I want you to have is the number of conversations you're having every week. Put a target, say 20, 10, even 5. But if you're not having these conversations, you're not building your funnel. And if there's nothing in this wider upper funnel, then it's not going to— nothing's going to trickle down for you to close a deal. So sales, as we talked about building the offer and learning how to deliver the offer, also sales deserves the same respect as delivery, as the technical expertise that you have. See, a consultant who can deliver but cannot sell will struggle. No sales, no revenue. No revenue, no business. A consultant who can sell but cannot deliver will eventually damage their reputation. And your reputation is like Warren Buffett said, is like fine china. It's expensive to get, but very easy to break. So as a consultant, building the offer, vetting the idea, Um, verifying, validating demand, that's all required. Then starting to have those conversations and starting to post online about your, your new venture, starting to interact with people in different ways online and offline, that will, will start getting you signals from the community. Uh, and then, and then you start to maybe refine your offer, refine the angle, refine your talking points, the way you describe your service. Refine your pricing potentially, and then you start with that awareness. You start to get people interested about what you offer, and they say, "Let's have a conversation," and then they start opening up about their issues, and then you come in and and demonstrate how you can be of help. So so all of that is learnable. I'm not saying this should make you happy and feel good. I want you to feel good about it because it's important. To be optimistic and to have some positive energy, and this is the second point here about taking rational optimistic risks, but before I get that, before I get there, I want to highlight that it's really important to know that vetting the idea, talking to people, networking, sending proposals, And getting rejections, all of these reps are important. They're critical. Without them, you can't, you can't have a business. So if your dream has been for many years to be your own boss, part of it is this suffering, this painful phase of learning how to do all of the above. And it's difficult. And again, I'll touch on this later on point number 3 about making these hard, hard choices. But that's just part of the journey. And I think we see these days, we see we're bombarded by messages on social media about how to get to $10,000 a month. Here's a formula to make $100,000 a month. And wait a second, I can barely sell a $2,000 project. And we get frustrated, we get, I don't know, maybe burnout. We, we, we start having this negative self-talk, and, and we have these voices and these whispers. That's not helpful. So, so don't compare. I want you to learn from others. I want you to learn frameworks and systems, and including mine. But what I want you to keep in mind, if you get one thing out of this video today, out of this session, is that you are You have to put in the time. You have to put in the reps, just like everything else in life— how to drive, how to ride the bike, how to swim, how to be— how you've become— have you— how you became a, a, a great CPA or accountant or HR consultant or, or process automation specialist. If you, you put in the reps. To get there, yes, with AI we can expedite certain things, we can streamline certain things, we can get very creative, we can automate certain processes. Yes to all of that. Use AI intelligently, all for that. But the main thing is that you, as a business owner, you have to do these reps. So if you, if you have that clear in your mind, then you won't be frustrated because you know that this is just part of the journey is that you are putting in the reps and you're starting to see improvements. Just like going to the gym, if you want to build up some muscles, it's not going to show over the span of a week or 2 or a month or 2. It does take persistent commitment to working out. Same thing in business, same timeless principles. All right, so not— I don't want to sound negative or discourage you from getting to where you want to go, but I want to be very realistic. And again, with the tips, with the advice, with the worksheets, with the templates I offer, I want to make the journey— I want you to reach your dreams faster and make the journey a little bit easier. It won't— the journey, the entrepreneurial journey is not easy, no matter what other people say. You can make it a bit easier by following the advice of people who have been to where you want to go. All right, so now before we move to the second part about the optimistic and the realistic risks that you should be taking as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, there's one thing I want you to do. I want you to complete this sentence. Let me put this on the screen here. All right, I help insert type of client, your target audience, your ICP, ideal client profile. I help X solve the specific problem, solve Y, so they can achieve business results. So I have this on the screen for those of you who are just listening, not watching. Basically, there are 3 things you have to enter in the statement. I, you, help Insert the type of client. Solve insert the specific problem so the client can achieve insert business results. So write this down, repeat it, and and then if you're not clear, you can't say I help I help everyone become better. Let's say you're a leadership. consultant, better leaders. That's very, just very, very, very broad, very vanilla. So, so we say I help mid-level managers in mid-sized companies in healthcare. Now we are very, very specific. Okay. Um, you know, we've niched down a little bit. So that's, so again, assuming let's just, I'll walk you through this example. I'll walk through a couple of examples, but help a leadership consultant, a management consultant, an HR consultant. I help mid-level managers in mid-sized companies in the healthcare vertical solve— now insert the specific problem— deal with productivity issues or burnout with their employees or having awkward conversations and difficult conversations with their direct reports, or maybe they don't have enough empathy, or they don't— these managers don't help, they're struggling in helping their teams become more productive or grow and develop and learn. So again, you can specify the problems that you solve, And then so they can achieve, become stronger leaders, more effective leaders, you know, be very specific. So that is what you want to do. That's your homework if you haven't done it. And even if you started your business and you're struggling, you're not getting the traction, revisit this concept. Like I help X. Solve Y problem so they can achieve these results. And I remember when, when we started, when we were selling websites, and every time when we pivoted and started another business, this had to— it has to be clear. You might— you might— most likely you won't land on the right formula right away, but you start somewhere. So when we started, we said We'll start with small businesses because we were just too scared, too afraid to go to bigger companies and make ourselves look look bad and look awful, and that was too much too much to handle. So so we said the easiest thing is just to knock on doors, go door to door, go to restaurants, go through our friends and friends and friends can they connect us with business owners, small business owners, very small, like a a a small dental then a small dental office or a restaurant or a local artist, very, very small businesses. That's what we wanted to focus on at the time when we were building websites, and the same thing when we went into digital marketing, start to sell ads and search engine optimization services, and later when we sold analytics services, we were focusing on a specific type of audience, and then we said, we didn't say build websites, that was the wrong actually way to position our services because you always want to focus on the benefits to the client. So say I help small business owners present a professional look of their business or have a— like I build websites, that's technical, that's the feature, but the benefit of a website at the time was to look professional, attract online searchers at the time, right? And then they can achieve results so they can improve, they can get more leads, they can get more customers, right? So that was our promise to the clients at the time. So do that same exercise for yourself. And again, I have it on the screen. I help X type of clients solve Y problems so they can achieve specific business outcomes. Looks like we have a comment here. This is from Akhil. Thank you so much for joining, I appreciate it. Yeah, if you have any questions, any comments, please put it in the comment section. I'll be more than happy to answer it. All right, now what I want you to do, as I said, ask yourself this question, what you have on the screen here. And then now that's all defined, I want you to think about the area, the specific area that needs to be built. Remember that the title of this point here, this section, is learning how to build and learning how to sell. So if you come from a sales and marketing background and this stuff is natural to you— talking to people, reaching out to people, speaking with strangers about, about an idea, about a business— that's just natural to you, then most likely you need help on developing a delivery, the delivery muscle, right? Or maybe if you are technical and you've avoided sales and marketing like the plague, the plague, like now you have to figure something out in the sales and marketing area. You have to learn step by step how to overcome that challenge. So look, do an assessment on what areas, what area needs more development. Is it the, the packaging and the delivery of the service, or the sales and marketing part of the service? And the answer, the answer here should influence where you spend your time this week, next week, or the week after. And then the, the next 2 parts of this session today, I highlight some specific steps you can take to help you implement that. So now, now that we know, we know what's involved to learn What's involved to learn how to build and how to sell, we will go— I'll go into specific things you can do to get there. All right? So that leads me to my second point, which is taking rational optimistic risks or making rational optimistic moves. So Optimism is, I read this somewhere, is a double-edged sword, because sometimes if you're too positive, too optimistic about what you're doing, you can ignore all these signals that are coming to you from the marketplace, from your co-founder, from your employees, if you have employees, and you just feel good about it, and you keep doing it, and then, you know, you fall, and business the business fails. So, so, so, so it's important, I think, for, for, for entrepreneurs to have a level of optimism. And, and you have to believe that you can create value and earn the trust of the clients and build something that solves problems for them. So, so it's important to have a level of optimism. Now that optimism I think to keep it contained or to properly— to use the proper level of optimism, you need some discipline. This optimism needs discipline. And a rational optimistic move, by definition, should have less downside, should have some useful learning, and should have some meaningful upside. So I'll give you some examples. If you have a steady job today, you're happy with where you are, you're making good money, you're learning, you're, you're growing, you're about to get a promotion, things are going really well, that's great. But in the back of my mind— in the back of your mind, you've been wanting to be your own boss. You've been wanting to start this thing called entrepreneurship for whatever reason. Maybe when you grew up, you were growing up— when maybe when you were growing up, you had people, models in your life. Maybe when you were growing up, you had role models in your life that were successful entrepreneurs, and that stayed with you subconsciously. Or maybe you've seen your ex-classmates or roommates or or people maybe in a previous life, some of your ex-colleagues, they've moved on in their own business and now they're doing really well. So you're doing well at work today, but in the back of your mind, you want to do this thing called entrepreneurship. So you quit your job without speaking to a single potential client. You have— You have 5 competing ideas. And you quit your job and you said, you know what, this is entrepreneurship. I'm there for the thrill. I'll go and, and, and do it and I'll, I'll be fine because I can work hard. Well, you've got a lot of things going for you, but you've taken an unnecessary risk, a huge risk, especially if you have a family to support and you have a lot of financial obligations. So my recommendation in this case, instead of taking this I would say it's not rational. It's probably more emotional and is maybe too optimistic. So instead of that, while you have a job, while you have the benefits, while you have the PTOs, while you have the 401, while you have your schedule, start taking an hour a night or maybe 30 minutes a day, 30-minute 30 minutes a night and, and maybe a few hours on the weekend, especially if you have a lot of obligations, personal obligations. Start to take a little bit of time to work on the business and work on it steadily. So that vetting process I talked about, and I have, I have a whole video on vetting your ideas. Uh, actually, let me just make sure here we don't have any comments. One second. Yeah, okay, we're good. Yeah, so, so, so take that time from work. Uh, sorry, no, you have obligation, obligation to your employer. Uh, taking— take some time from, from you, from your nights and maybe weekends to work on this idea. And if you're serious about it, just commit maybe half an hour a day, an hour a day if you can, 2 hours a day, that would be even better. So this way you build momentum. So before you quit your job, do as much as you can on all things that are prerequisites to starting a business. So vetting the idea, talking to people, thinking of pricing, putting together a draft business plan, potentially get some leads, potentially get a client. That will tax your time. That will be hard on you because you have a full-time job, you might have a family, might have other obligations, and you have now to think of this new business. But that's— that is a more rational way of dealing with entrepreneurship than quitting your job because of optimism, unlimited optimism, and also an emotional approach to things, or your boss just was a jerk that day, or you had a— you had an idiot of a client at work, and now you just said, you know what, I'm done with it, I'm going to quit and do my own thing. Unless there's some serious issues at work, like really, really serious issues like harassment or like some some, some, um, serious discrimination. I mean, there's— at some point you have to draw a line and you might have to pursue legal actions and whatnot. But assuming you— it's not, it's not something where, um, where it's, it's, it's just— I mean, if it's just, if it's just some, something that's inconvenient, it's one thing. But if it's something that's impacting You can't sleep. And, and, and it's, it's really awful. You have to balance that with having no salary and no PTO and no vacations and no, no more 401k contributions. So, so there's no right or wrong answer here, but I would say the optimal, the optimal approach is that you do some of that pre-planning. All that work on vetting the business and, and packaging the offer and everything else that I talk about in that Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business, you do that while you have a job. Now, if you were laid off, and it happens like it happened to me many years ago, then the one advantage you have— 2, actually. One is that you have time. You have all the time in the world. So you can still spend 3, 4, or 5 hours a day looking for a job if you're still not 100% sure that— if you're still not 100% sure that you want to pursue entrepreneurship, my recommendation is spend 4 or 5 hours a day looking for a job and then spend 4 or 5 hours a day vetting this idea and thinking about this new business that you want to start. So that is That's the rational optimistic risk. That is the rational optimistic move, is not to quit without preparation. It's not about— I mean, and so much— there's so many examples. You know, you can start a small pilot. You can build a beta website. You can have Instead of investing a whole lot of time in a fully functional website before you've done any validation, before you've spoken with 10, 15, 20 people, you're putting a lot of energy and a lot of time and effort and money if you're hiring people to do some of this work for you, and you haven't done the validation. So you can do small pilots. This is all while you have a job, or if you're getting laid off, in your time, in the half-day time that you have, that you've dedicated for this venture, you can do some of that evaluation, you can do some of that vetting, you can do some of that outreach. It does require discipline, it does require work, but without this work, without the discipline, it's going to be difficult to make any traction in entrepreneurship. So I want you to Just like I asked you to insert the audience, the audience you go after, the problem you solve, and the results that you anticipate providing to your customers when I talked about learning how to build and learning how to sell, in this part about making optimistic, realistic moves, I want you to answer these questions. And think about it. What assumptions are you currently making about the business? How could you test these assumptions and these ideas with less money and less time? And then this is critical now. What evidence would make you more confident? So that, that's really important because you take the leap and you're not prepared, the failure rate in business is really high— 90%, 95%, depending on what stat, what stats you look at. And I'm not saying I guarantee that if you follow all these steps you'll, you'll do well. No one can guarantee that. Success is not— is never guaranteed. But if you follow these steps, your chances, your likelihood of turning the expertise into a business, into a profitable business, are significantly higher. So, so pause the video if you're re— if you're listening to this or watching this later and answer these questions. I'm assuming everyone is going to love my AI workflow automation service. Everyone. The minute I hear everyone, Big question mark. You can't sell to everyone. Be specific. Identify your audience. So that's number one. Then what evidence, what signal do I get? And I did a livestream, actually 2 livestreams a month ago or so, on asking the right questions. So if you go around and tell people, what do you think of this idea? Especially people who know you, people who love you. And there's a great book on this topic called The Mom Test. You go to your mom, you go to people who love you, most people are polite and they'll tell you, yeah, it sounds like a great idea, pursue your dream, go, go, you know, just do it. You want to ask people who are actually suffering from the problem that you're solving or you can solve. You want to ask people who not say, do you think you'll buy from me? That's future. Who knows about the future? Most people, including investors, including venture capitalists, they always make bets and decisions on companies, and only 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 20 or 1 out of 100 end up— end up— ends up making it. And, and very few make it and ends up— and very few end up making it big. So, so even those who are professionals, um, even those who are professional about predicting the, uh, the outcome of an idea, they, they don't, they don't, uh, they're not successful most of the time. So when you ask people, will you buy from me? Do you think this will be a good service? You're asking the wrong question, questions. So, so what I want you to do is to identify people who you want to serve and find ways, find where they are at a local meetup, at a virtual meetup, at a conference that's happening in your city or in near— nearby city. It could be a virtual conference. In person is always better if you can afford it, if it's near to you. It might be worth— it will be worth the sacrifice of you going in person because you hear from all kind of people, users, potential clients, suppliers, competitors. You'll see people talking about the industry trends, regulations, all of that stuff that that you will pick up from an in-person meeting. So find ways to interact with people so that you can collect evidence to validate your assumptions or come up with new assumptions. So that's really important. And that is the topic or the title of this section is taking rational optimistic risks or making rational optimistic moves. So it's not about guessing, not about spraying and praying as we used to do it, as you— as we used to say in digital marketing, things have to be targeted. So I'll walk you through an example. Again, for those of you who are live with us, if you have a question about today's topic or something else about a challenge you're having in your business today, do let me know. Or maybe if you have a win, a recent win, something that worked really well, worked out really well for you, Let me know. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to make sure that the community is benefiting from this. So let me walk you through another example, and then we'll go to the 3rd and last point on today's session, which is hard choices and easier life and easier business. So let's say I'll use an HR consultant as an example. So you are an HR, a corporate HR professional, manager, director, and you offer, as I said earlier, leadership training, and you focus on tech companies, for example, right? Tech companies, they're moving, growing fast, they hire a lot of people, they don't have HR infrastructure, they need a lot of help. So again, with this theme of optimistic, and, and realistic moves, right? That's, that's, that's really important. It's a balance there. It has to be— you want to have some optimism, but you also want to be rational. So, so the rational thing to do is— the reckless approach would be to resign, develop a large course library, spend months doing that. You hire a designer, you hire a developer, You produce this content, you have to learn how to do videos and record videos and produce the videos so that they're presentable. And you spend months preparing the business before you speak with buyers, just because you've had this ambition or this dream or this vision of offering online courses. So a reckless approach would be to do everything I just said. You resign and you focus so much on building your service, whatever you need to deliver your service. A more rational move would be to actually interview HR leaders, to interview managers, to interview founders, and then identify some trends or repeated problems, and then develop the content of the workshop. And instead of developing a large course on a large website. Start with something that is smaller, smaller with maybe start with smaller companies. This way you can, the sales cycle is likely to be shorter when you work with smaller companies and the feedback cycle will be quicker and then you can tweak, refine, potentially pivot if needed. So that is the difference between a reckless approach and a rational move is, is to go through this process and ask, and then, and then, and then see what evidence you'll get. Will buyers take the meeting based on your pitch, based on what you've shared with them? Do they recognize the problem? Will they pay to solve the problem? A lot of times people have problems, but they have very inexpensive Workarounds. So why would they pay you a lot of money to do to to do that for them, right? And then so will they pay will they pay to solve it? And then and then can you deliver like whatever the clients or the lead potential clients are telling you? Can you deliver a result that they value? So each step, each of these questions will give you better information. And then as you get better information, as you get better evidence, you commit more and more to the business. So, so you can pause the video and write down— after you hear the list here, write down a business decision or 2 that you're considering. And then, and then again, identify a useful test to get evidence Identify maybe the maximum amount of time or money that you're willing to risk, and then what would be that evidence that will help you commit more to the business? And some of this, you know, some of this might not be natural to you. It's okay, and you won't be perfect at it, but the more you do of this pre-planning, the more you you think of the business the way I described earlier, the better the outcome will be because these are timeless principles. These are timeless methods, approaches. Again, there's always an exception. There's always someone who gets— they want to start a business and they get their first client from their cousin Jimmy who loves them and they say, yeah, I'll hire you to do this for me. Yes, this could happen. But how do you get the second client? How will you get— excuse me— how will you get the third client? How will you make sure that you can deliver to those people who are expecting you to be professional, on time, with high quality, to be also competitive in your pricing? Because your cousin Jimmy loves you and he might be okay with you delivering at your own pace. He knows that you're just starting out and they're there to support you. So keep that in mind. and think of ways to collect evidence and then make better and more rational decisions. Still have optimism. I want you to be optimistic about entrepreneurship, about life in general. It's more fun that way, but you want to guide, you want to have some discipline with that optimism and taking those rational moves and those rational decisions will help you get there. So that was part 2. Part 3 is hard choices, easier business. A broader perspective here, hard choices, easier life, or hard choices, easy life. And that has— that's something that I've been saying for many years, and my children are sick and tired of me saying that to them. So hopefully it'll stick. But that's just how things are. It's hard. I don't think it's not even realistic that you don't put that time, you don't go through difficult things, and then you achieve amazing results in sports, in hobbies, at work, in a relationship, and also in entrepreneurship. And again, this principle has direct relevance to consulting. And the hard choices Typically, for those who haven't had their own business before, the hard choices usually arrive very early, sometimes in choosing a business partner. Do I go solo? Do I go with a business partner? And by the way, I have a full live stream on that. It's one of the most consequential decisions you'll make in business. which, you know, if you want to go solo or go with a founder, co-founder, or, and if you decided to go with a co-founder, is this the right co-founder to go with? So that's one hard choice to make early on. Then choosing the right level of niching down, choosing a narrower marketer, a market, sorry, choosing a narrower market might feel restrictive. That's a hard choice. Start, start these sales conversations while we have this anxious brain. Our primal brain is telling us not to do that because fear of objection, fear of looking awful, feel fear of stumbling, fear of you name it. So, so these are hard choices. that tomorrow I will go to this networking event at the local chamber or the BNI or the industry conference, and I will make— I will have 10 conversations. That is a hard decision for those of us who haven't done this before. I had to really, really muster a whole lot of courage To go to these events initially when when I was starting my first business, my my business partner was more the operational type, the back office. He was the one who would be doing delivery, and I was the one who's supposed to be out there talking to people. Initially, we did it together just just so that we encourage each other to step into the facility, into the door, into the establishment, and knock on the door and and speak with the with the with the. With the owner, so that was just part of it. So if you're going solo, hopefully I'm here. I got your back. I have all the tools and all the templates and the things you can use to make that that interaction with business owners easier. But it's still hard. I get it. So so so so that's a hard choice. When someone does meet with you and does listen to you and they're interested and they said. Sure, send me some additional information. So now you have to follow up, and then they go, they go silent and they ghost you. So following up can feel awkward, and, and all these— you'll hear all these whispers and, and this negative self-talk. Oh, you're annoying them. They think I'm needy. They think I'm desperate. All these thoughts. No, my friend, you have to follow up. And it is hard because you have to have a system to track when you went and met someone, when, what is it that they're looking for, you had a follow-up, and then after the follow-up, you decided to do more follow-ups and you're sending them, you're being a good consultant, you're sending them something of value in every follow-up, an industry report or something about their competitors or some improvement they can leverage right away. So that takes time. That's hard work. These are hard choices. And by the way, I'm a big fan of companies using CRMs. We use CRMs. We've used Salesforce. We were a Salesforce partner at one point. In one of my businesses now, we are a Salesforce partner. So we use HubSpot. So it doesn't matter, but find a good entry-level CRM and use it initially. Yeah. If you don't have any leads yet, you don't need it. You can use my DIY CRM. It's a Google Worksheet that you can leverage and use right away, and I'll put a link to it in the description. But that is hard work for you to sit down and documenting what is it that you want to do next week and what is it that you want to follow up with and whom to follow up with. And then when it comes to pricing, Charging enough can create anxiety. You might be tempted to charge a whole lot less than what the project is worth and the value that you're adding to the client. I get it. I struggled with pricing. I still struggle with pricing. Pricing initially, you understand the different pricing models, but later it becomes an art. So, so, so, and I have a whole The Ultimate Guide to, to on pricing for consultants. I'll include the link in the, in the description as well. So charging the right amount of money for the right client is also difficult. It's a hard choice. Saying no to a very poor fit client can be painful initially. Again, I'm not a fan of being very choosy initially, very picky. Get whatever business you can get initially for the first few clients because you need the reps, you need to deliver, you need to— Yeah. You need to get those testimonials, you need to make those clients very happy so they can be a reference for you, or they can refer you to others. Over time, saying no to revenue is very difficult, so that's just part of it, you have to make those hard choices, having a conversation, a difficult and an awkward conversation with your first employee if they're not performing, or maybe with your co-founder or co-founders, you're not aligned. You're putting a lot of time, they're not. You're putting in money, they're not. They're supposed to do— they're supposed to be doing X, and they're— they continue to just sit down and visualize the, the 5-year plan and the future, and they're not really thinking about reality and how to, how to make rent for this, for this month. So, so you— it's, it's a hard choice to have these difficult conversations. All of that is You know, if you avoid these decisions and many, many others, then you're creating a larger problem for yourself in the future. So if you have a broad offer, not a specific offer, the broad offer becomes difficult to explain. If you have weak or no sales activities, you'll have an empty pipeline. Again, no sales, no revenue, no revenue, no business. If you're lowering your prices and you're attracting some customers, some you're getting some some clients, but they're very demanding, and and and and you keep doing this for a long time, then you'll burn out. So you'll burn out for sure. So so you know loose boundaries create all kind of issues. So if the client is negotiating on price and they want more. Huge scope creep, and they wanted aggressive timelines. These are, these are serious, serious things each on their own, but if they're combined in one project, it's going to be the project from hell. So, so you have to be careful. Again, initially I might sound like I'm contradicting, contradicting myself, but no, initially it doesn't matter. Just get the sale. The first few clients, get the sale, go through whatever it takes. To make the client happy. Even if you don't make a penny on this project, it's still worth it because now you've practiced. You practice selling, sending a proposal, negotiating, closing a deal, feeling great about yourself that you've sold something, right? And then you suffer through implementation, and then that's behind you. You can then be more choosy as you have more revenue. So, so, so the easier choice Often, often transfers the difficulty into the future. So if you don't put some boundaries around the project just to get the deal— I get it, I understand, I've done this, and at times it was important because I needed the revenue, but I did that consciously, willingly. I, I knew, I knew what's about to hit us, and I told my business partner because he was in charge of implementation and I was charge of selling, I said, hey, we need to have the revenue, we have payroll coming up, so we're biting here more than we can chew, but we have to do it, and he understands, and then, you know, he'd give me a lot of hard time about it in the future, and then we'll laugh about it because we had to do what we had to do. So making these easier choices now, It's going to make the situation really difficult into the future. So let's pause here, and again, I want you to think about it for your own business and jot down, jot down. Maybe give one or two of these and tackle them this week. And if you're not sure how to tackle them, just let me know. Let me know in the comments. I'll I'll help you get there. So what difficult action? Have you been postponing? What have you been postponing? You're not contacting former colleagues, you're not asking for introductions. It could be that you're not publishing a perspective on things in your industry. You have a very broad offer. I'm gonna beat this one to death already. Um, you're, you're struggling with, with increasing your prices just a little bit. You're not doing any follow-ups on your proposals, or you maybe you do one email and that's it. It takes, it takes anywhere from 7, 8 to 13+ follow-ups depending on, on which stats you read, including some on HubSpot and from my own experience. The larger the client, the more time it's going to take for the sales process and the sales cycle, and the more follow-ups that will be required. And then Another question you can ask yourself: What difficult conversations am I postponing? And then with that, if you pick one of those, whether it's in in terms of you're in this phase of thinking of taking the leap and formulating the vision for the business, or if you've started and you're not sure about the offer or the price or the follow-up. Find an area where you are procrastinating or, or just not sure what to do and put concrete examples on what to do to address this one area. And once you get that going within a couple weeks, then you can move on to the next challenge that is facing the business and tackle it. So, so, so that is it for today. I do want to share with you, um, a couple things on the channel. As a reference, you might find those videos useful. But we talked about 3, 3 main ideas here. One is learning how to build and learning how to sell. And the second one was on making rational, optimistic moves or taking rational, optimistic risks. And then number 3 was on Hard choices lead to easy life. Easy choices lead to difficult life. So if you make a lot of easy choices today, you're just pushing or postponing the pain and the suffering till later. So deal with it today to the extent that you can and make progress in your business. So for those of you who are watching, you can see— let me just go here. Here, right there. Where am I? Where am I? Right here. Yeah. And I'll show you. So on the YouTube channel, there are a few videos I want to highlight here. Um, one we published recently on, on me auditing 50 sales calls and then the 4 mistakes that I saw people do and they're struggling in closing deals. They're getting the client, they're getting the, they're getting the lead, they're getting the conversation, they're pitching, but they're losing deals because of these, I don't wanna say silly, but these serious mistakes that they're making on these sales calls without even knowing this, so check out this video. Also, if you're having issues in vetting your idea, we talked a lot about vetting today, I have this 10-point test to launch with certainty and how to vet your idea. If you're new to sales, which is the case for many, many new founders, 68% or so, don't have any sales or very little sales and marketing experience. So check out this selling, sort of B2B Sales 101. A lot of great tips on how to sell to small businesses and also how to sell to the enterprise. And then if you're looking for ideas in 2026, check this one, check out this video, 26 Profitable Business Ideas for 2026. And then a couple more here. One is, this is a long one. This is an hour and 4 minutes on everything you need to close more proposals. I went from closing 1 in 20, a 5% close rate, to 33% over time. That didn't happen overnight. It took us years to get there. But by the time we sold that 8-figure business, we were closing 1 out of every 3 clients we were getting. And then I have this, The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business. It's also a long video. As you can tell, I like these ultimate guides where I go deep on a specific topic. And here, this is a 51-minute video on, on all the steps you need to do to start a consulting business with all the tools, the templates, and everything you need to start smart and strong. So that is it for today. Again, thank you. Thank you to all of you who have been, have been here with me live. listening or watching. And for those who are watching or listening later, if you're liking this content, if you're benefiting, benefiting from this content, hit the like button, subscribe, share this video with others, and let me know. I, I'm here to help you. Let me know if you have any questions, any comments, any challenges. Um, I'll be more than happy to help. And of course, share your wins. I love to hear about your wins, small or big. All right, see you next time.