How to Manage Projects Profitably (Step-by-Step for New Consultants)

We are live. Welcome to episode 105 of Black Belt Startup with Feras. Thank you for tuning in. What's new in the world of entrepreneurship? Well, most consultants spend a lot of time learning how to get clients. And that's important. You need sales to have a business. No sales, no revenue. No revenue, no business. I always say that. But what I've seen over 20+ years in consulting, in entrepreneurship, and after growing multiple businesses to 7 figures and one to 8 figures that we sold to Dentsu, the global media giant, I see a lot of problems Not just in sales, but also in delivering what consultants sell. So if you want to grow the business, if you want to have a sustainable consulting business, you have to focus on delivery. And this is what we're talking about today, because a lot of consultants end up— a lot of the problems in consulting show up after the deal is signed. Expectations aren't fully aligned and aren't fully defined, and execution becomes reactive instead of structured and proactive. And I'm going to fix that for you today. I'll be answering all your questions. I already have 20+ questions. And also, for those of you who are joining us live or listening in live or later, do add— do send me your questions, leave a comment if it's something very personal, you haven't told the world that you're about to launch your business and you don't want to share this publicly, you can email me at info@startupwithferas.com. I answer all the emails I get, and then Feras is spelled like my first name, F-E-R-A-S. So today, again, in addition to answering your questions, we will be— I'll be covering starting the project correctly, avoiding these critical early mistakes and then staying in control from day one. I'll break down the 5 phases of properly managing your consulting projects, including initiation or kickoff, planning, then we have execution, monitoring, and closure. But before we jump in, as I said earlier, if you have a specific question about delivering and servicing your clients, let me know. If you have a question about entrepreneurship in general, about getting started, about taking the leap, about marketing, about partnership, if you have questions about accounting or how to choose the right accountant or lawyer, do not hesitate to reach out, either commenting on LinkedIn, on YouTube, Instagram, on Facebook, wherever you are. And make sure you follow that channel on YouTube. I'm here to help. I've built these businesses. I've made a lot of mistakes. My job now, I'm on a mission to help you get to, get to where you want to go faster. It's not going to be easy, but it'll be much easier if you follow the framework, the systems, the worksheets, the templates that I'm sharing today and that I typically share across all the content that I share, that I have on YouTube, on LinkedIn, and also on other social media. So stay here, let's step on the mat, let's make this happen. Let's make sure you have happy clients, delighted clients who will help you build and grow a sustainable, profitable business. At the end of the day, it's going to come down to profitability and making sure you have not only you're taking home something that will help you achieve your dreams, but also building a sustainable business. So that's our focus today. All right. And before I jump into the 5 phases of project management, I want to do a quick recap on what I covered in the previous episode last week. It was about pre-sales, the issues that happen in the sales process that could actually make delivery really, really hard. And then also transitioning from sales to project management to delivery. So when it comes to delivering a project, if the scope is not very well defined, if the timelines and the milestones are not agreed upon early on, if dependencies on clients or on a client or on a third party, they're not articulated early on, and if in your mind you're thinking, I'll figure it out once I am starting, if that is the mindset, you will have serious issues in delivering your project to the client's satisfaction. And that, that mindset creates problems before you even start delivering. So what I want you to think about is things you want to do in the sales process that will help you deliver successfully. And I won't spend a lot of time on this topic today because I covered it in a complete I have tons of videos on sales in the playlist. You can check out the channel. I'll show specific ones after at the end of this session today, but I specifically covered— I had an ultimate guide on writing and developing winning proposals, and I walked viewers through the entire process from when you start a sales conversation to closing that deal. All the details that you want to have to include in the proposal, in your agreement, on how to specify dependencies, how to, how to identify and, and clarify the scope, how, um, how to price things, how to make sure that you get testimonials and reviews from the customer at the end of the project. So if you are struggling with with closing proposals and with getting deals, check out The Ultimate Guide to Writing Winning Proposals. I talk about all the things that you want to do in the sales process to prevent a very difficult delivery. So that's the number one, the first point that I covered in last week's episode. The other point, again, this is before we get into project management. The other point is on transitioning from a salesperson to a project manager. to now a delivery person. And that is very important when you have a team, when you're selling, for example, then you hand off the project to a project manager to deliver on your behalf. Or if you are the sole entrepreneur and you still wear all the hats, there still has to be, even if it's just you, there still has to be a way, there still has to be an internal handoff from sort of the sales mindset to the delivery mindset. And let me share with you this, um, this illustration here. Uh, give me one sec. I have it right here just so you see it visually. For those of you who are listening, I will, I will walk you through it as well. But if you look here, you'll see on the left-hand side the sales process where you have— you're just discovering the needs of the client, you're educating the client about your services, you're You write the proposal and negotiate price, timeline, what's included, what's not, and then you have a signed contract. So last— in last week's episodes, we talked about sales to delivery handoff. We talked about onboarding the client. All of that is really important because the minute you sign the contract, if you go quiet, if you don't go into what's going to happen next, what the client is going to expect, So that is what we covered last week. And then we go into the external kickoff and then all the phases of project management today. And then in an upcoming livestream, I'll be covering how to retain clients, how to— and also how to scale the business and how to establish operational excellence. All right? So that is on what we covered last week. And this really, I just want to highlight this again, this transition from sales to project management is critical. I know it's not just you. You just started a business. And what do you mean, Feras? What do you mean we should have an internal handoff? I want you to sit down and think about your mode of operation when you were selling. You were building trust because the buyer doesn't know you yet. You were building rapport. You were flexible. You were saying yes to this and yes to that. And you were just focused on winning that sale. that signed contract, which is great. That's the mindset you should have. And you're flying at 30,000 feet or maybe 10,000 feet. When it comes to delivery, you are on the ground. You've landed. You've landed the contract. So now you need structure. You need a mindset of structure, of clarity, of some control so you can manage to the— you can manage the client expectations. You can manage your own time. time and effort and third parties that you depend on to deliver that project. So if you don't consistently and consciously shift from the sales mode to the delivery mode, you will have more expectations that are not met and the client satisfaction gets harder and harder. And again, you fix that by, by creating these processes, this internal handoff where you sit down and, and you talk about, okay, here's what the client said they like. They said, do not email me, text me. That's something not, not in the contract, but you learned that in the sales process. So when it comes down to delivery, don't email that person because he told you, text me, I'm a busy man. If you— if they told you, I'd like to get Weekly progress reports. That's an expectation that you want to deliver to. If you understood in the sales process, as you got to know this person, that there's another decision maker involved, and I'll talk about later in a bit, then you want to make sure you get the buy-in from the other decision maker. So, so I have, I have a full video on, on, on this whole process, from pre-sales to the internal handoff to the onboarding to the Again, I'll point you to it at the end of the video, but you can check out, you can check out the YouTube channel and look for the Ultimate Guide to Delivery, the delivering, servicing your client without burning out. Okay. So a lot of details goes into this presales phase that I won't go into today, but I've covered some of it in last week's livestream. You can find it on the YouTube channel under the live section, and I've also covered a lot of details in the Covered the entire cycle, sort of from A to Z, to scaling and growing and, and building operational excellence. I covered that in the, the No Burnout Ultimate Guide to Delivering Your Service. All right, so that's enough on pre-sales and transitioning into project management. Let's now dive into the 5 phases of project management. And again, I want to show you I have another diagram here that I want to show you. Let me go there. So this is what we are— I just mentioned the pre-sales part of, of a life cycle, and then today we'll be talking about initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and then closure. I have satisfaction here, client satisfaction here under project management. It's debatable. I won't spend a lot of time on it today. It needs its own livestream, but definitely from kicking off the project, that initiation, to planning, to execution, to monitoring, and then closure. That is what we will dive into today. Okay, so the first one is— go back— initiation, or taking control early. All right, in a good way. So, so the kickoff not just a meeting. A lot of people think it's a kickoff, it's just, just a meeting. It's actually— think of it as your first act of leadership. This is where you align stakeholders. And when I mean stakeholders, some of you who are new to consulting and new to sales, you might not be aware of the fact that especially in a B2B, in a B2B environment you have more than one, one, more than one person making a decision, or at least contributing and influencing the decision of buying your services. So throughout the sales process, the sales process, you might have interacted with one point of contact. You might have had, you might have had an on-site meeting or a Zoom call with a couple other stakeholders, those who are impacted by the decision to hire you or those who have a need from you and they want to make sure that their needs will be met in your delivery. So in a B2B environment, you'll have multiple stakeholders. And one statement that I'll make throughout this episode is complexity dictates formality. The larger the deal is, the larger the company, the more complex the service is, the more of these elements will appear, will exist. So you'll have more stakeholders. According to some of the research that I've seen, it could be up to 10 stakeholders depending again on the company size and the complexity of the service. It could be 20 stakeholders. I've been in kickoff meetings where there are more than 20 people. When we sold to the government back when I was— I had Inor, the analytics, the leading analytics agency. We went to DC one time for a kickoff. I forgot which governmental agency at the time, and there was a room of 20+ people. They were all impacted by the decision of updating, upgrading the analytics system that we were supporting and implementing and training and helping these stakeholders get access to that data. So You might have interacted with one person throughout the sales process, maybe a couple people, and then you got to procurement, and then you got to get the contract signed, but then many people within the company are either impacted or they want to know how you will help them, their function, achieve the outcomes that were stated in the contract. So in the kickoff meeting, in initiating this project, you want to make sure you understand who will be in these meetings, their roles, their functions. And I have a template, I'll show that, I'll share that with you in a second. But you want in this meeting understand the roles, the needs, the wants of these stakeholders, and then confirm the scope that was agreed upon in the contract. This is a common issue when you If you're selling something that is delivered in 4 hours, that's one thing. But if you're selling something a bit more complex, if you're selling something that takes longer to deliver, typically there are rounds of negotiations, there are rounds of scope definition. I want to include this, and you say, okay, well, it's going to cost you more. Okay, remove it, add this, tweak it, customize it. So you might have had 2 or 3 or 4 versions of the contract, and some of those discussions might have been over email or on calls or maybe quick text message. You know, this person wants to add this to the scope and you said no, or you said yes. So in this kickoff process, you're confirming and reconfirming and retelling what actually ended up being part of the contract and the boundaries, meaning what is not included in this contract. And a lot of times you might be selling things in phases. So there's an initial audit. I'll go in and assess the systems, the processes, the data, the current situation. And that's an audit. That's phase 1. There's no implementation whatsoever. I'm just auditing. So that's good. That could be phase 1. And then— and that's going to take us a month— and then I will start implementing all the recommendations and I'll fix all the issues that my audit revealed. So some stakeholders might be thinking, you as a consultant, you're coming in and you're solving the problems right away. So in this kickoff meeting, you are again aligning the needs, the wants, the, the, the pain points for these stakeholders, and then you're confirming the scope, what's included, what's not included. You are also resetting any expectations that sort of happen over an email or over a phone call. You say, this is what we agreed to. And then also you're getting to know and meet these people and establish rapport. It could be over Zoom. In person is better always, but a lot of times based on geography, based on other factors, Your clients might not be in one location, so you end up doing things on Zoom, but you're establishing that rapport that is really important. You are a consultant, you are in the services business. It's important to establish those connections, those human connections, all right? So that is really important. That's what you want to iterate and build on. not reset expectations, but confirm expectations, because people forget. You and the client will forget things, and then different stakeholders have different assumptions, and then there could be internal factors. Like, no one told— let's say you're doing some, some online marketing work, you're doing some SEO work, and you need some basic code added to the website. No one told IT that you need to add some code on the website. Or it could be you're an accountant, you're in accounting, and need to get access to the financial system. No one told IT and security that you need that access, and they have a, they have a pretty— they have a backed-up process to get approval, and that could take 3 weeks for you to get access. So, so when you meet all these stakeholders, then you, you let them know what is expected, what is it that you need from them, and then you're not going to get started. That clock is not going to start ticking till you get access to the information that you need for you to deliver your service. So I'll show you, I have some questions that I got on initiating a project I want to get into. And the first question was, um, what should I include in a kickoff meeting? What What should I include in a kickoff meeting? Let me share with you this template that I have, and again, I'll include all these links to all these templates in the description on the YouTube channel. So feel free to go to at startup youtube.com at startup with Ferris, and then in the description of this of this live stream, you'll see the links to these templates. But let me walk you through it here quickly. If you do do do do yep. Here. So I have 2 templates you can use. This is a Google Doc. It's a checklist for you to use to prepare for the kickoff, planning for that kickoff meeting, what to do on site, what to ask your point of contact to prepare for you. If you're going to go and impress the CEO, the owner, the VP, and you want to have— you have this amazing presentation, the worst thing that could happen, you go there and there's no projector. There's no way for them project your, your, your slides on, on the screen. And trust me, it happened to me, and I had to go and squish myself in between 2 people trying to show them on my laptop screen. And I had that screen protector so you can't look at my screen from an angle. So I was like moving my computer this way to show them something I can't see, and I'm guessing what's on the slide and then moving the computer the other way. It was messy. So, uh, Simple things will help establish trust and help you come across as a professional. And these minor things that you might not have thought of could make the whole presentation go south really quickly. So there's a list of things here. I won't go over all the details, but again, make sure to download a copy of this template. It's a project kickoff checklist, what to do before the meeting, what to do during the meeting. All right, all good stuff here. And then I have this deck that potentially you can use, download, and you can create a better looking one. You can use tools like Stitch with Google, some of the AI tools you can use. What's the other one that I used recently that was really good? Um, Gamma— was it gamma.app? I believe so. So anyhow, I don't, I don't have any affiliations with any of these companies, but there's some amazing tools to create to create slides with today, including look at this, enhance this slide. This is now available from Gemini, from Google's AI system. But this is what you would put in an agenda for a kickoff. You would say, okay, team introductions, project overview, project objectives, project timeline, next steps, and Q&A. And you can do something like this where you can show yourself and your team, the stakeholders, let them introduce themselves, and you get information about who's involved from your From your point of contact during sales. Here's the overview of the project. Here are the objectives of the project. Here's an initial timeline based on what you know so far, and then the next steps. And this is really important— don't leave the client in the dark. Let them know what to expect from you as soon as that kickoff meeting is complete, is done, everybody's happy. Everyone is excited. So if you go and disappear for 2 weeks, not good. Let them know, unless that's part of the plan that you need 2 weeks to disappear so you can focus on the audit that you're doing, right? So just be very clear on what to do with next steps. So that is on those templates. Again, I'll have the links in the description. Feel free to go and get them. Um, now the questions. So the The next one, how do I handle stakeholders who were not in the sales process? I think I covered this already, but communication is really key. So in the sales process, and as you do more projects and as you do more sales, you'll start, you'll learn who will be impacted by your service. If you're an HR consultant, if you're an AI, let me use an AI automation an AI workflow improvement consultant, and you will be helping, let's say, a manufacturing company improve their processes from taking that bill of material, taking that contract, and taking the order all the way to delivering whatever it is, let's say a circuit board, right? They might have 20 processes. So start thinking who Who is impacted by this work? Who's doing things manually today that I need to speak with them? Who has access to documents that the customer is using today? So over time, you'll develop a pretty comprehensive list of the typical functions in a company that are impacted by your work, and then you can be proactive and tell your main point of contact that you will need access or you'll need information from these stakeholders. Again, the larger the company is, typically, typically, the more of these parties that you need to interact with and the more formality is required for you to access and get information. If you're working with a small business and a small business owner and you need access to their website, they'll probably give you their password to their hosting environment and say, hey, go, or their WordPress, Go and access it and make your own edits. Don't check with me. Show me, show me the changes after you make them live. That's what a small business owner who's not technical and they trust you, they'll give you access to things. If you're working with a Fortune 500, I can tell you for certain that it could take weeks to get something added to a website. I remember one time we worked for an international global brand in tech, and he did— we needed to add some code on the website to track data, and he said the home page of that company— I won't mention the brand— there's a whole team in charge of just the home page, and any changes to the home page required the review, the approval of a senior executive. So, so imagine the time that it takes for you to get things approved. And over time, you'll be proactive about asking the type of questions and educating your main point of contact on what to expect after the contract is signed and how to engage these stakeholders so that you align everybody according to the timeline that you put for this project. All right, so, and again, there also could be other reasons in terms of handling stakeholders. Like, there could be some internal politics. One team doesn't have time to deal with a new consultant, and they don't have time to meet with you and learn a new system. So, so you want to understand as much as you can from your main point of contact, who is sort of your internal champion to get this contract signed. People resist change. People don't have time, don't have bandwidth. They don't see the need for what you offer. So while one team or one point of contact might be super excited about, or even one executive might be super excited about you coming in and delivering the service that will impact the bottom line positively, other people in that same company could care less. So you have to understand those dynamics, which will happen over time. as you start to do the work with the client. All right, so that's the question. The next question is, again, for those of you who are live, feel free to add your comment, your question. I'll be more than happy to address them. What if the client already seems confused about scope? Assume there's confusion. So assume there's misunderstanding. Assume that you or the client forget. So that's why a formal internal handoff between you as a salesperson and you as a delivery person is important. So you track everything that happened in the sales process, and then that onboarding email you send, and you said, hey, here's what to expect from me. We signed the contract, we'll meet in 2 days, we'll have a kickoff meeting, here's the agenda of the kickoff. So, so you're managing that whole process. You're not leaving things to chances or to, to the customer being ready. You are, you are the consultant. You know the technical part of, of your, of your craft. You know your craft. That's why they hired you. But clients also expect you to manage this process unless you're selling something in a DIY type setting where you just provide access to systems and checklists and, and videos and education, educational material, then that's different. But if there's any type of ongoing communication, ongoing deliverables, interaction with the client. You want to set the expectations not just about when that service will be completed, but also about updates, communication about milestones, dependencies, all of that. You want to have a whole lot of clarity on this so that there are no confusion on anyone's part. So if the client seems confused, I'm telling you, assume that this can— assume there's confusion, assume there's misunderstanding, assume not everybody on the same page. So if you follow the process I just mentioned earlier about that client kickoff meeting and the agenda and the details that you want to cover, that will put everybody on the same page and it will make the whole project just be done a whole lot more smoothly. All right. The next question, we have 2 more, then we go to the next phase of project management. So should I document everything or keep it flexible? I mean, you want to be thorough and you want to use judgment. I get if you're selling something that is delivered in 2 weeks, you don't need to have daily meetings and daily updates. So maybe a quick end-of-week update for the client. Here's what I've done this week, here's what, here's what will happen next, and we'll wrap up the project. So that's one level of documentation, one level, maybe an email update could be sufficient. But if you're working on something that's complex, that is a 3 to 4 to 6 month, it's a 3 month project or it's a 6 month project, there has to be a whole lot more formality. And again, the more, the longer the time, the more complex the service is, the more stakeholders that are involved, the more formality, more documentation you want to have. And then people could be on vacation, people could be out of the office, people could have been multitasking while you're giving this amazing presentation about how, how, how you will impact their bottom line and save them money and all that good stuff. Some of the folks might not have been just listening to you. So documenting that, sharing an executive summary after the meeting is, is done, sharing a weekly update with the highlights, with the dependencies, with, you know, tagging people if you are waiting to hear from them on certain things. All of that is really, really important. All right. And the last question here before we go to the second phase, which is planning. So we're in the initiation phase. The last question here is, how long should a kickoff meeting be? It shouldn't take— I don't know, it could be 30 minutes, it could be 2 hours. So a lot of times the kickoff meeting could serve— could could serve 2 purposes. One is the introduction, the definition of the scope, all that good stuff we covered, but also it could be your opportunity to discover, to go through discovery and getting more details from the stakeholders. So I've done it in the past where you go and meet with the business owner. If it's a small business, you get everything you need, especially if you're prepared and you have a list of things that you need, access to systems, preferences, if you need their branding, you know, guidelines, whatever you need for your service to be delivered, have a list of that and go on. If you can get all of that in the kickoff meeting— sometimes you have to do separate discovery calls or meetings with all these other stakeholders, so that means the kickoff meeting could be just an introductory meeting. You set out The agenda as we discussed, and then you say, okay, in the next week or 2, I'll be scheduling those 5 follow-up discovery meetings, and then we do go and do the work. So the time will depend again on, on, on the complexity of the service. So that is it. So now let's go to the second phase, and let me share with you where we were right here. Oops. Go up. That's— I'm in the wrong file. Gotta go to another tab right here. So we covered, for those of you who are joining, just joining, we talked earlier about pre-sales, internal handoff, onboarding, all that good stuff you do ahead of project management. And I covered this in detail In last week's episode, so check out the channel, go to the live tab, and you'll see it. And then today we're talking about delivery, about project management, and then we just covered initiation. Now we go into the second phase of project management, and that is planning. Okay, so planning. Now with planning, let me make sure. Okay, good. With planning, the idea here is to prevent chaos before it starts. Of course. No, no project goes 100% according to plan. I think there was— yeah, there's a study by McKinsey and Company, 70% of projects don't accomplish their objectives. Kind of sad, really sad statistic. This is complex projects, big consulting agencies working with Fortune 500. But for you as a new consultant or as a consultant who's been around for a while but you're struggling with delivery, planning is going to be key. So, and you're not planning after you sign the contract. You should have a plan, a maybe a generic, a plan, a template that, that you put together and that you have talked or walked the client through it, and you included some aspects of that plan in your, in your contract. So this is not coming from scratch, that the plan— and I'll have an example, I have a template that you can leverage— but typically, if you have a template of what's going to happen in the various phases of the project, typically once you are working with a client and you meet these other stakeholders, they'll be changes to the plan. So remember, in sales, you're flying at 30,000 feet, at 10,000 feet, as you do more discovery and as you get to know more about the requirements, maybe you're at 1,000 feet now, but once you sign the contract, you're on the ground, and once you're on the ground, you start seeing things that you did not see when you're flying high. So now when you met with the customer, let's say you had a plan to do things in over an 8-week period, and then you go to meet, you go to the kickoff meeting, and then one of the key stakeholders is out on maternity leave, they won't be back, or paternity leave, and then they won't be back for 3 weeks, or they're out on just PTO, or they're out sick for a week, so that's going to put a dent in the plan, and you really can't start, and you cannot kick things off till This person is back working. So right there at the kickoff meeting, everything got pushed by a week or 2. So things will change, and sometimes you can do things in parallel. You say, I want to do all— dedicate one day to do all my intakes, all my discovery meetings, and collect all that information, and then it turns out that you have to do it over a span of a week or 2. So that will impact your delivery. I remember when we were doing analytics and if we were selling to an e-commerce company in the US, e-commerce is big around the holidays, especially for retail, so a lot of the companies, and the first time we did this we didn't know, but a lot of the times bigger companies will have a code freeze, like come, September, early October timeframe, they don't want to add any more code. They don't want to touch any of their digital properties, their mobile apps, their websites. They want to make sure everything is solid and ready for the traffic, for the high traffic and high volume of sales during the holiday season. So they don't want to risk any issue with the way people buy from them. So if you don't get your code in right before that code freeze, then, then you're just— you have to wait for the next quarter. You have to wait till January, right? So all these dependencies will come up during— most of them will come up during the sales process, but also some will come up during the discovery phase. And this is where you go and update that draft plan. So in your contract, what if you are sharing a snapshot of a project plan I always used to say sample. Now I would have a— not fine print, you want to make sure this is clear that this is a sample based on what we understand today, and then after the kickoff meeting, after the discovery, we'll come back with a more final plan to execute and deliver the service. Because again, things expand, scope expands, the client say, you know what, let's just do it in a couple phases instead of one big phase. So things come up and you can accommodate if it makes sense for you. So let me show you a sample project plan that you can again download. And all everything I share is either Google Doc or a Google Slide or a Google Worksheet. And you can go back here. And share this sample project plan. Again, don't over-engineer your plan. You can use this template, make sure it makes sense for your business, for your service. But you'll see here initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, closure. These are the 5 phases we're talking about today. And then here's what happens. Here's the owner of every, of every item, and then Expected start date, end date, status— we haven't started— and then any dependencies, and then any notes and any risks, right? And you can share this with a client, but you know, you can make this use your branded colors. This is obviously branded after our own branded colors with Startup with Feras, but make a copy of this and, and expand it, shrink it, really up to you. But my recommendation, do not over-engineer it. Keep it at a high level, and then you can have— if you're using some of the tools, Asana, Notion, others— you can do a lot of the sort of details, task or subtask, in a separate system. This will give a bird's-eye view of, of, of the project, and you can update it on a weekly basis so everybody has access to it and they see where things are in the project. Good. So now we go to the questions. About this, about planning. Let's see. All right, the first question is, how detailed should any— sorry, how detailed should my project plan be? I mean, some of us are very detail-oriented, so they'll add more details, but I would say listen to the client. Understand the client personality and likes and dislikes. If the client is very detail-oriented, so go and add more details. If the client is not, don't include as many, right? Now, if it's all— also, if it's only you selling and delivering, you know exactly what's going to happen. You're just building the business and you, you're building your processes. Everything is here, or everything is being built You're building the airplane as you're flying, as we say here in Silicon Valley. So, so maybe you don't need as, as much detail, but if you have a, a part-time project manager who's helping you out and you have a third party doing something, um, maybe behind the scene developing something that you include in your deliverable, it's really important. It's critical to at least have a detailed project plan, a detailed enough project plan that these other parties involved in the delivery, so they're aware of their role, they're aware of their deliverables, when they should have this stuff ready. So it helps you internally to plan things out, or let's say if it's just you, but you have 3 clients at the same time. So you've done a great job, an amazing job selling, and now you're delivering. So make sure that you have these project plans detailed for each client, and you make sure that you don't have the same deliverable or 3 deliverables due the same exact day, and there's just— there's no way that you can deliver all this, all that amount, that amount of work on the same day. So, so it's important to track it down. If you want to use a Google Sheet that's fine. If you want to use one of these systems out there, Asana, Notion, that's great too. But the idea is start simple, add complexity as, as you are developing and improving your, um, your, your planning and your execution. But don't start with something with like 50 steps and, and then it's hard to track. It's It's hard to keep track of things that you'll have to update it. So start simple and then grow it over time. Question number 2, what tools should I use to track projects? I mentioned Asana, ClickUp, Notion. Start with Google Sheets. If you've used Microsoft Project before and you're— you like to use the Microsoft Team and, and that, that ecosystem, that's fine too. It really doesn't matter. I would say A Google Sheet is more than sufficient initially. Over time, you want something that is more sophisticated. There's just a number of things. A lot of times you're using maybe a CRM that might have some project planning elements or using a system that might have some planning tools. So depending on the service that you're offering, there could be some industry-specific tools. So look for those as well. All right, the next question: how do I estimate timelines accurately? A very good question. If you're just starting out, you haven't sold anything, you haven't delivered any project— projects on your own, that's going to be difficult. But as a consultant, my assumption is that you've done this work before. You have some skills, you have knowledge, you have expertise, so you can go back to similar projects that you delivered when you were part of corporate, but when you were not on your own, and break down the things that took place and how long they took. Now you might have been only responsible for one part of it when you were in corporate, and now you're responsible for everything, including sales, including things you want to do after the project is complete. So do your own— I don't want to say guessing, but just list things out based on your own experience. Of course, talk to others. I'm big— I'm a big proponent of networking and meeting peers and people in adjacent industries, learning from them, learning the gotchas, learning what customers are expecting. That's really important. Talking to competitors. A lot of people share information. A lot of people— a lot of people are— most people are professional and friendly. They'll share with you some things. Some, you know, some, some won't, but, but being out there understanding the market and the players in the market, that's one thing. And of course you can use AI today to, to come up with a project plan, but I want you to do your own thinking first. And just from your own experience, what typically happens, and then the issues that usually— that the issues that come up and dependencies and, and everything that will impact the deliverable. Do that on your own. Then you can feed that into AI and then ask it, give it a lot of context about the customer, about the contract, about the size of the customer, all of that, and then have it come back to you with an updated plan. So that would be my approach to estimating the timelines accurately and always, always, always add some buffer time and add, add dependencies, whether it's a client dependency, meaning you cannot do the work, you cannot move to the next step till the client provides, and, and remove that dependencies. And also any third-party dependencies, whether it's an example, you have to get access to the hosting environment if you're doing things with websites, or you have to get access to the performance review system and you don't have an email and IT, you don't have a company email, so there's no way for you to come in. So they might have to give you a temporary email address, or they might have to schedule time to give you access to those systems. So all of that impacts the timelines. But as you do few— after you do a few projects, you'll figure out all of these things, um, how long specific tasks take The dependencies, what what what orders, what order certain tasks should be listed. You know, in your project plan, all of that you'll develop and improve over time. But initially, document what you've done in the past. Run it across AI with AI. Get an updated document. Don't pass this blindly to the client. Please, please, please. Review it, make sure it makes sense. Human in the loop, as they say with AI, and and then deliver to the client. Now, in terms of clients pushing back, that's that's the last question in this section before we go to execution. So what if the client pushes back? Clients don't do that, right? Well, are they pushing back in sales, in the sales process? If the client is pushing back in the sales process, you have to evaluate, and then you're committing to delivering within a specific time frame. Then you committed to that in sales, make sure you can deliver. Do not overcommit. You want to undercommit and overdeliver. That's how you get delighted clients. That's, that's how you get referrals. That's how you get more business. And the clients, you know, some people like to negotiate and they like to— or they might have a specific time or date or, or a specific activity they want to have the service completed before. As I mentioned, if you're adding code on e-commerce websites for big companies, you want to look for that code freeze window and avoid— you want to have all your deliverables done before that. Or if your client, let's say, provide marketing services, event planning services, and a client wants to have an event at a specific time, and there's some marketing, pre-event marketing, post-event marketing, all of that, these are specific dates. So, so the client will push back. You can't do the marketing for an event a week or a month after the event, right? So, so if the client is pushing back, take that input, look at your schedule, look at what you can do, be very creative. I want you to be very aggressive in saying yes, but make sure you can deliver. There's a difference between, okay, I'll work a couple nights, I'll work on the weekend, I'll make it up, I'll get someone. But if you're dependent on others, make sure they're on board with these commitments when you're agreeing to an aggressive timeline. If it's just you, okay, I can do it, no problem. But if you are depending on others and you agree to a specific timeline, it's critical, it's essential that you get the buy-in from these other people, including your business partner if you have one, a contractor, someone who supports supports you in that delivery process. So, so that's really important. And, and also it depends on how hungry you are for the business. If it takes you 2 weeks to do something and the client wants it in 1 week, do you say yes or do you say no? If you say no, they might go elsewhere. So every time you negotiate, there's a risk of you not winning that negotiation. So there's a balance. Initially, I want you, especially if you're just starting out, I want you to be very hungry. I want you to be very aggressive in saying yes, yes, yes. Over time, that same mindset of saying yes, yes, yes will drive your business to the ground. So be careful with my advice here. I'm saying initially, if you don't have sales, if you don't have clients, I want you to say yes, yes, yes. Profitability is not even secondary, is not even on the list. I want you to get— build that muscle of selling of delivering, of getting delighted clients because they will buy more from you and you need that revenue. They will refer you to others. They'll give you a testimonial. They'll give you a case study. All these assets will help you get the traction that a lot of consultants struggle in getting. So that's one approach. Now later when you're very profitable, and someone says, hey, I want this done in 1 week, and you know it takes 3 weeks, you can be more choosy. You can say, no, we'll give— we can do it in 2 and a half weeks, but we cannot do it in 1 week, because you just, you don't need that sales at that point. But early on, I would say within reason, be aggressive, say yes, find ways to, to get the job done and win that contract and make that client happy. That's really important. All right, we have, uh, someone says hi. This is Bridge Watch Diaries. Hello, thank you for joining. If you have any questions about entrepreneurship— today we're talking about project management, delivering what you are selling or what you are about to sell. So we've covered initiation, we've covered planning, now we're moving on to execution. So if you have any questions, Bridgewatch Diaries, let me know. I'll be more than happy to answer them. So let's just— to make sure for those of you who are just joining, so to know where we are in the process, let me go right here. And we are We covered initiation, we covered planning, and then now we are talking about the third phase of project management and servicing and delivering to your client execution. All right, execution. So let's do that. So you've kicked off the project, you updated the plan, everyone is excited. So what happens now? The one thing I don't want you to do is to go quiet. I don't want you to go work behind the scenes for 3 weeks and then come back with this big reveal. Okay, I'm done. That is risky. That will not help the client trusting you. So I want you to be showing progress if you can, depending on, on your— the type of service you offer. At the same time, if you can't show, or if you can't show progress because of the nature of the business or the service you offer, at least have some sort of follow-up updates. Don't disappear for 3 weeks and come back with this big reveal. Share what you're working on. If at all possible, you can have a small win early on, it is— you're exceeding expectations. The client— you're telling, you're telling the client in the sales process, in the kickoff, that you'll be done in 3 weeks, and they have this amazing audit or this amazing website or this amazing pitch that maybe they're helping you develop, whatever the service is. If you can do— show a small win create this moment early on, the level of satisfaction and delightment and delight and appreciation sort of goes high really quickly because they're not expecting this and you're helping them with something right away. You're exceeding their expectations right off the bat. So I'll give you an example. We were working with a consultant who helps us get speaking engagements, so they pitch on our behalf. And in the contract, we agreed on one pitch to a specific audience. In the kickoff meeting and later in the discovery meeting when they were gathering information about the topics we want to talk about and all that good stuff, they said, You know what? I like what you're doing and I will include, no charge, no extra charge, I'll include a second pitch. I said, are you serious? That's not in the script. He said, yeah, yeah, we'll be more than happy. Our process is efficient and we can, for a specific period of time, we'll do 2 pitches for you. The agreement said one pitch to a specific audience. They took on an additional amount of work to pitch in an adjacent industry. And that's great, that's amazing. So they were super delighted with that vendor, and then assuming they deliver on their results now, um, we will be more than happy to recommend them to others and give them a case study and a testimonial. So depending on, on, on your side, if you build websites for customers, it might take you 4 weeks to have a draft of the website, or maybe that the design. But can you like share a sample landing page with the new colors and with the new fancy stuff that you're developing for them? You can do that maybe within the first week and get some immediate feedback. Can you share with them, if you're like in the data business or maybe in the process automation business, maybe share with them a quick process improvement that they can apply right away I mean, that's just unexpected, and you then psychologically, these clients are already impressed, and they're thinking highly of you, and then if later, if the project is a bit off track, or things are delayed, or you happen to get sick and things are impacted, they'll be more willing to, they'll have more tolerance for these issues, and they'll be more accommodating and more understanding. So to the extent that you can execute the plan, you should, of course. But then if you can also share some early wins with the client, that goes— that just not to reestablish, but strengthen the trust and the sense of professionalism and how good of a consultant you are in their minds, and that's really important. All right, jumping to the questions I got on this section, on the plan, on the execution section, a phase of the project management. So how often should I update the client? You know, it depends. So if the service is really elaborate, takes 3 months to deliver, I would say weekly updates are important. If it's something you can do in a week, Maybe a midweek update. Here's where we are. I'll be done by Friday. That might be sufficient. So, so, um, it's important, I think, to— my recommendation would be to be clear on that in the sales process, in your contract, that you will get a weekly update from me on this day. And, and then you set expectation. If you say you'll get— excuse me— biweekly— if you say you get biweekly updates from me, then biweekly. Um, if you send executive reports because it's a bigger company and then your main point of contact wants to take that and share it with their, with their executives, make sure you, you add time to your project and also in your price that you are developing executive summaries. So depending on the client, but I would be very clear on what you offer. You offer that proactively, and then if the client in the sales process sets different expectations or tell you they'd rather have another cadence for your updates, then accommodate if it makes sense, negotiate that and put it in the contract and then deliver to it. So we have, uh, have a comment here, a question says website digital marketing has become a very crowded space as of late. Are there any things that you would recommend to help differentiate? Uh, good question, especially, I mean, with AI now. I, I know people can do things very quickly. Funny you mentioned the website. I'll just share this if, if you're new to the channel. When we started, my very first business was in the website space. That was in 2003. So it took us— we sold our very first project, the very first client was, was a restaurant, a Greek restaurant called Athena Grill, still still thriving here in Santa Clara. So we sold it for $1,400. It took me 3 months— my, my business partner and I, it took us 3 months to deliver a 4-page website. No e-commerce, nothing. We didn't know what we were doing. It took forever to get pictures from the client. So guess what? On my next proposal, I said client to provide pictures, high-quality pictures, otherwise there'll be delays. But, but Back to your question, I mean, digital marketing has become a very crowded space. I would say I'm big on niching down. So if you offer— you say I offer website, website and digital marketing for everyone, that, that's one, one proposition. But if you have done, let's say, let's say you've done work for dentists, you've developed 5 websites for dentists, right? Start niching down. You understand what dentists want. You understand what should be on a, on a dentist website. You understand how to integrate with their appointment setting system, right? So to the extent that you can focus on maybe a specific domain— dentist, healthcare, finance— you specific— you, you focus on a specific client size because big companies have different needs than smaller companies. So you become a known consult You— so you become a known consultant in that domain, in that space. So, so to the extent that you can niche down, um, your offer, um, I think you should. And I cover this with a lot of detail actually in my other video. Uh, I'll show you here. It's called The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business. Let me just go there for a second, show you this. I think it's a long video. A lot of these ultimate guides that I produce are not a 10-minute video. They're a 40, 50, an hour video. But if you go to the videos on the channel and go to this one right here, it's been very highly well received by the community. Right here, this one here, The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business in This Year, in 2026. It does— I do cover all the details that you want to do to differentiate, including understanding your target audience, specifying your offer, niching down. I think that's really important. And then digital marketing is vast. Are you focusing on paid ads, Facebook, Meta, Facebook or Meta ads, or Amazon or Google Ads? If you're doing, if you used to do search engine optimization, yes, it's very crowded, but there was work for a lot of people. We did this for a while, and now with AI and with AEO, answer engine optimization, or GEO, whatever the latest approach is, but you can definitely be ahead of the curve if you start to experiment with how AI is now, replacing some of the search volume and some of the results where people get answers and then there are obviously sources to those answers, so you can be ahead of the curve if you are experimenting with AI as it relates to SEO. So yes, I think it is a crowded space, but you have to differentiate. You have to be very focused on the target audience. If you're selling to everyone, you're selling to no one. And a lot of us, when we start, we're thinking maybe we have this scarcity mindset subconsciously, um, and, and, and, or we think that I, I wanna— I want, I want to conquer the world, I want to sell to everyone. Actually, you're doing yourself a disservice. I would say focus on a, on a subset of, of, of, of companies or, or, or demographic, and then in a specific vertical, specific company size, specific service. Once you are very well known, very established, you have solid, solid revenue from, from that niching approach, and then you can expand gradually and do other things. So that would be, um, that would be my, my recommendation there. All right, so the next question here, back— we're still in the execution phase of project management. How do I handle scope creep during execution? So scope creep is that you were hired to draw a circle this size, now the client wants it this size, or you're hired to develop an IT audit and an IT cybersecurity systems and processes and protect the company's assets, and you thought the client had 10 computers and 10 individuals, and now you learn that they have 50, right? So things come up after you sign the contract that are not included in your contract, they're not included in your mind, but then the client expects them. So the best way to handle scope creep— there are 2 ways. One is in the sales process and go back to the Ultimate Guide to Winning Proposals, another long video, an hour and 4 minutes on that. I think I go over every mistake I made over the years. Now I've done over 2,000 proposals, delivered over 600 projects from small business, small businesses to mid-sized businesses to Fortune 500 to Fortune 50. So my team and I have seen it all. I put everything I learned in that ultimate guide. So, and that again, it's not something you, you, I think, watch casually. You can, you can download the templates, the worksheets I have, and then you can implement that in your workflow right away. So, so that's handling the scope creep. You do a lot of that in the sales process by having a clear proposal on what's included, what's not included. Now, let's say things come up after the contract is signed, after you had the kickoff meeting, and then they, can you add this? Can you add that? Oh, our CEO likes this, right? Let's say you do graphic design and logo design, and you created 3 concepts that's in the contract, and then you said in the contract you'll produce 3 concepts and you allow 2 iterations on the concept that they want to go with. And now they're asking for a 3rd iteration. Now my recommendation— so the 3rd iteration would be a scope creep, that's an addition to the scope. My recommendation early on for you, if you're just starting out, do the 3rd iteration, do the 4th iteration, bend over backward to make sure the client is happy. That's really important because initially you gotta have these super delighted clients. They will— they'll make or break your business. So, so initially say yes to scope creep. If you keep saying yes to scope creeps, over time you run out of business. So, so again, you have to watch the— you have to listen to the advice and apply it where it makes sense. So initially, okay with 10%, 20% more, that's okay, make the client happy. But at some point you want to have some boundaries and you want to tell the client Hey, in the contract we discussed, we negotiated, we landed on 2 iterations. You're asking for a 3rd one, no problem, I want to keep you happy, but a 4th one is just going to be above and beyond. So again, say it professionally, not in a confrontational way, but explain to the client that at the end of the day you're a business owner and you have to protect your margins. All right, we have another comment here. Hi from Ansh Sharma, thank you for joining. If you have a question about project management, about delivering to a client, that's what we're covering today. And then if you have something else on entrepreneurship, go ahead and, and put your question. I'll be more than happy to answer it as well. Last question here before we go to the next phase, which is monitoring. So how do I balance quality versus speed? How do I balance quality versus speed? Good question. So in martial arts, we say slow is smooth and smooth is fast. So you want to do the right thing. You want to do— you want to deliver high quality, at least to the level of quality you promise in your proposal. That's really important. And initially, if you're just starting out, things will be clunky. Things will take longer. You haven't done it before. All of that is under you know understandable. But that's you. That's your learning. Instead of you, instead of taking, instead of taking twenty hours to do something, it took you thirty-five hours. Now no one knew that. Juan didn't know that, but you absorbed it because you were learning. You did something; it didn't work out. You have to do it again. That, that's just the nature of it. So it does require, I think, to deliver quality and speed, it does require reps, it does require experience. And then over time, you can be super efficient with that. And you can, of course, use tech and AI to streamline things that take, take long. You can, you can leverage tools and systems. And I have a whole, whole— I have articles on this and videos on that, but in terms of— you got to focus on quality. You have to deliver to the level of quality that you promised in your contract. That's really important. And then in terms of speed, it does come with time. It does come with practice. And over time, potentially you can outsource some of the work to others. So you can manage maybe 4 or 5 clients and you have a couple of part-timers helping you in the background or contractors, and you can be super, super efficient that way. All right, the next phase. Going back to our chart here, our illustration. And again, I'll— those templates I shared earlier, I will share in the description if you joined us later. Um, I covered a number of spreadsheets and templates and resources to help with, with with project management, I'll share those in the description. I'll have— they're all Google Docs or Google Slides or Google Worksheets, and you can make your own copy. So, so far under project management, we talked about initiation, planning, execution, and now monitoring. All right, so what is monitoring? It's basically staying in control because There'll be issues throughout the project lifecycle, but projects rarely fail suddenly. They kind of drift very slowly. So, so in monitoring, you want to step away from sort of being hands-on and, and executing, and you want to look at the progress, actual versus planned. I told the customer I'll have this phase 1 of the deliverable on Friday. It's Wednesday and I'm running behind. Okay, now you're tracking progress. And then I need to do something tonight, on Thursday, to make sure I meet that deadline. Uh, you've, uh, you know, you want— you, you, as you're meeting with a client, as you are understanding their systems, some dependencies come up, some potential risk to budget, to timeline. to the quality of the deliverable. So those things will come up not just because of something wrong you've done or your team has done, but also once you have exposure to the client and their environment. Remember, in sales, you were flying at 30,000 feet, maybe 10,000 feet, and then when you are now working on— when you're in project management, when Once you have that contract signed and you're executing, you're on the ground. So things will come up that you did not anticipate. So monitoring, paying close attention to the project, and maintaining communication— that's really, really important. It's identifying, seeing, sensing these issues, and then you as a consultant, as the expert, you come up with a way to address these hurdles, these issues. these risks that just came up, and then you communicate them to the client. So don't just send an email on a Friday afternoon and say, hey, we are running into this issue. Oh my God, what do I do? No. If that can wait till Monday, maybe don't send it on Friday night, but if it's time-sensitive, urgent, go ahead and send it whenever. But the idea is be proactive, mention this in the project status call if you have weekly calls, or if, if a project update over email, mention the things that just came up and then your plan to address them, especially if it's something on your part. You're depending on someone else to do this work and they're sick or they're behind, they're delayed, they disappeared. It happens. So come back to the client and let them know That's— here's what's going on. I will catch up on Tuesday instead of Friday, and then that, that will not impact the overall project plan. So be proactive about it, own it, and show the client what you're doing about it so that you are, uh, you are, you are keeping their, their project, um, top of mind. You're not just letting things slide. And I think it's important to establish rapport with your main point of contact. Like, some of that trust and rapport were established in the sales process. They bought, they bought from you not just because you're an expert. People also— people buy from people they like too. They like your approach. They, they— you, you convince them enough to trust you with their reputation within the company because they chose you. So you've established some rapport And you can always ask them for feedback, especially if they're not involved in the delivery. A lot of times you sell to someone and then they hand off the project to someone else for them to be your delivery point of contact. So I would say it's a good habit to throughout, especially in the early phases of the project where the potential of misaligned expectations is high, ask for feedback, whether it's over email, on a call, the person who's maybe approved you in and introduced you to the team, because when people are not happy, they might not mention something to you, they'll mention it to the person who signed the agreement, right? They say, hey, this vendor is behind, this vendor is not providing updates, this vendor is difficult to work with. So if you established rapport with the main point of contact in the sales process, have them, and they are your internal champion, Have a line of communication with them to get feedback and react to that feedback quickly. Don't let issue drag. Don't let issues drag. It's just not good for you, for your reputation within that organization. So that is on monitoring. So we have one more phase, closure, and then we wrap it up for today. But before I go there, we have questions that came my way. on monitoring. How do I— how do I, uh, wait, hold on, where's that question? Right here. How do I track progress without overcomplicating things? I mean, I don't know, don't, don't overcomplicate things. So, so I think, as I said this a number of times on this, on this live stream, complexity dictates formality. So Don't over-engineer progress reports. You don't have to have a 5-page progress report that, that will take you 4 hours to fill and complete and proofread and all that. No, keep, keep things— I say start with something that conveys the message you want to convey. It's all about addressing the needs of the client, the needs, the wants, the desires of the client, understanding their sensitivities. Again, we talked about it earlier. If they're detail-oriented, maybe you want to add more details. If they're not, maybe not. So, so, um, show the client a template. Say, say, here's my standard template that I've used. Um, is that— will that meet your needs, or do you want me to change it for you? All right, this all goes on underlining the customer. Now I do have actually a template. Let me, let me go back and show you a template that I'll include in, in our description here on the YouTube channel. Uh, it is— I thought I did a project. Oh, maybe not. Here, let me see. I thought I did. I do have, I do have a template for, um, for project update. Let me see. I can't seem to find it now, but, but I will, I will find it and I'll include it. I do have one for, for a standard report, a progress report. So let me just— I thought I had it open. Uh, now I can't find it, but that's okay. I will share it with you, um, in the description. So please go ahead and check it after, after the live stream. Sorry about that. Okay. So, so, but basically executive summary. Here's what happened this week. Here, here are the goals for next week. Here are some issues we found. We need your help with this. That's, that's a specific template, but I will share that with you, um, after the live stream. Okay, so I have a question here. It's in all caps. It's hard to read in all caps. Uh, I'm an M&A data analyst. India, and I want to sell my services in recurring model to small business owners which can afford the full-time, but I don't know whom to target and how much to charge for it. Okay, so yeah, just a big favor if you just don't type in all caps, it's really hard to read. Uh, so you're an M&A data analyst and you want to sell? Yeah, so I mean, obviously Um, people who want to sell, sell their businesses need your help because you can help in that due diligence, due diligence process. So I would, I would examine, take a look at your experience, take a look at the types of clients you worked with, take a look at the industries you worked with. All of that, those will help you differentiate. So you don't want to target anyone. You want to target people, customers who want to sell. You want to target customers who want to sell, but they are in a specific industry, specific company size. It's, it's one M&A, and I've gone through M&As. It's one thing to sell a half a million dollar company, and then it's another thing to sell an 8-figure company. Right, so where, where, where do you shine? Where is— where do you have years of experience at that vertical, at that specific market? So, so the more I would say, again, back to what I said earlier about niching down, and you, you have to check out the, the consulting guide, um, the Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business in 2026, that video on my channel, not, not a live stream, go to the video tab, you'll see, scroll back to, I think it was about in August of 2025 when I— no, yeah, um, yes. Anyhow, you'll find that video. Scroll down maybe the first 15 or so videos, you'll see that, uh, 51-minute video on all the steps you need to take to, to, to specify your offer. Excuse me, I had to sneeze. So So I would say, define, you gotta define the offer, you gotta package what part of due diligence, what part of data analysis you do, do you look at the financials only, do you look at other data? That's your offer, and then your target audience, and then the outreach, you have to do outreach on LinkedIn, you can identify founders who are, been around, let's say, like you can search on LinkedIn, You can use the LinkedIn Navigator or other tools, Apollo or Instantly, and find people. Let's say a founder has been in business for 20+ years. I would think they are closer to your target market, target audience than someone who just started. Someone who just started isn't likely to be selling, right? Or someone who's been around for a couple of years isn't likely to be selling. So those are things that will help you find your clients. All right, so back to the questions here before we go to the closure phase of project management. We talked about tracking this without overcomplicating. Let's see, what's another question here? How do I handle delays professionally? I talked about this a few times already, but basically document whether it's something on your end. Let the client know that there will be delays proactively, and, and at the same time, in the same breath, your plan to recover, your plan to make it up. Okay? That's on you if the delays are caused by you or one of your team members, and things happen, and most people are reasonable. They understand. Now, if it's something on the client's side, again, documentation, whether it was in the proposal, whether it was in the handoff, in the internal, external, sorry, external kickoff, you document what you want from the client. And if you're not getting access to these things that are required for you to deliver your service, just point that out in your weekly email that you send to the client, the progress report. Or if it's— you're not doing progress reports, you're having weekly meetings, mention it on the call and then summarize the call. And AI could summarize the call for you review it, and then send it to the customer, say we are still waiting on you to deliver this before we can proceed. So that's really important. You are— you have to manage this process. You have to be proactive about spotting these issues and then letting the client know. Uh, the last question here before we go to the 5th and final phase: how do I manage difficult clients? Bend over backward, make them happy initially. Initially, that's really important. If it's a difficult client, what they're asking you for more things, they're asking you, they're negotiating hard, they're maybe unreasonable in their request. Initially, bite the bullet. If it's your first client or your second client or your third client, make them happy because if you make a difficult client happy, now you have the secret sauce to make everyone else super delighted. And super delighted clients will get you more business. You retain them, you upsell them, you cross-sell them. Yeah, you retain them, you upsell them, you cross-sell them, and then they refer you to others and they sing your praises to their friends, and you get more business that way. Word of mouth is a thing, especially for small businesses. So, so initially Deal with it. Okay, now if they're very unreasonable, if they're abusive, if they— you know, there's a line, of course, beyond reasonable reasonableness. So so of course you want to be professional. If they're shouting, you don't have to shout back. Do not shout back, but you can control your anger and and say, "This is what we agreed to. This is what I'm doing. What else you want me to do?" So try to try to be very objective. Sometimes. You have a subordinate, like let's say you sold your service to a VP and then you have a manager under this VP who's really difficult to work with. So at times you might have to go and escalate. I would say deal with that person who is being difficult and understand why is it that they're difficult. Did they have a bad day at home? Did they just have a car accident? Is their child sick? And, and they can't concentrate. It could be that they're lazy and they're trying to— they're trying not to do the work. Okay, hopefully that's not a very common situation, but you run into these. So, so you have to deal with people. People issues require patience, and you're the consultant, you're the vendor. I would say bite the bullet initially and, and make those clients happy, but over time, as you become As you get more revenue, as you become more profitable, you can be more choosy. You can be more firm. But initially, you want to bend a little bit, just like the bamboo tree. It bends a lot but doesn't break, and then it bounces back. So, and you want to really— you want to— and you understand why is it that person is difficult. It could be that something that you promised you're not delivering on. You did not manage the expectations. You did not understand their sensitivities. You do not understand their preferences. So those are really important for you. And then every, every one of those situations where you are dealing with a difficult client, you're learning from that experience. It's not failure, it's not on you. Just learn from that so that you can avoid it, avoid it in the future. You can provide more clarity about expectations in your next proposal. Right? So you can update your templates, your processes to better manage these situations. All right. Let's see. We have. I have another comment here, Farid. Hey, welcome back to the live stream. Thank you for being here. Let's see what's the question. What if client replies to you using AI generated? Text, is that a red flag? Interesting question. Um, I mean, a lot of people are using AI, vendors and clients. Um, a lot— some people are starting to use agents to look and process some of their emails. So if it's a quick casual email is one thing, they're just being efficient. Maybe they're testing out some, some new feature in Gemini, I don't know. But if it's something You're sending a formal, let's say progress report and you've identified the goals for next week and then there's something very sensitive that you need the client to do, to accomplish and you get this casual email back, say thank you so much, Fareed, for delivering this amazing report, we'll check back with you next week. You might want to maybe phone the customer, you might want to message them on LinkedIn, Tell them, hey, there's something really sensitive that has to— something that's time sensitive that has to be resolved, otherwise we will be back on hold. So I think we will see more of this, and AI, as we all know, is not perfect, so you'll be the human in the loop in this case, and you have to raise the flag with the customer. Yeah, that's how I would deal with it. I mean, I do get a lot of, We got an email today, yesterday actually, from, funny, from a vendor that we're using, but they might have automated something with LinkedIn and email sequencing, and I got an email, someone pitching me the service that I've already bought from that vendor. So I think they're using some automation. So these things happen. I mean, I kind of, I kind of They're an amazing vendor. They're doing well. They're doing good work for us. So I'm okay. And next time I speak with them on the phone, I'll let them know. But these things happen. But I think, yeah, especially if there's something important, something that's time sensitive, something that you want them to do and they're not doing, I would definitely find ways to communicate maybe over LinkedIn or call them. Or if you have a weekly call with them, bring it up on that call and say, great, I'm so happy you are automating and you're using AI and you are You are being more efficient. It just please note that AI is missing these things, and I'd make sure please you know read my emails when I send them. So something like that, right? Good. So the last section of or the last phase of closure, and again for those of you who maybe join us a bit later, let me just go back and share with you what we have covered to this point. And right here. So again, last week's live stream I talked about pre-sales, things you got to do in pre-sales to make sure the delivery, the project management of your service, it all goes smoothly. Today we are diving deep into project management. So we talked about the first phase, initiation, then planning, then execution, then monitoring, and then we're talking about closure. I did mention earlier satisfaction In the main video, The Ultimate Guide to Service Delivery Without Burning Out, I did include satisfaction as a phase of project management, although for the purposes of livestream— a livestream and answering questions, I will dedicate a separate livestream for client satisfaction and also about landing deals and expanding. And also I'll have another livestream on scaling with systematizing, with tech and AI, and also On the art, the science of art of delegation. So those will be upcoming live streams. But for now, I want to wrap up today's call live stream with closure, and that's really important. It's not just, hey, I delivered my system or my service and we're done. There's a whole lot more. You're leaving a lot of money on the table if if you if you're thinking that way. Let's see we have some new. Comment. Let me see if it's related to the previous feed. Let's see. Uh, let me— yeah, let me, uh, let me get back to the comments. Let me just finish this, this concept first. So, so, so closure. You deliver the service. I don't want you to read that delivery like a finish line. Yes, you've completed the work and you send the final documentation and the client said thank you. That's great, but before you move on, project closure in sort of standard project management is not about finishing the work. In a pure project management perspective, yes, you've done the work, but as a business owner, as a consultant, I want you to make sure 2 things happen. One is that You have a project retrospective. You have a— we used to call it postmortem, uh, a, an evaluation of, of the project. You sit down, even it's just you, sit down. What went well? What did not go as well? Ask why 5 times, right? If you have vendors who were part of this delivery, if you have part-timers, contractors, include them in that session. It might cost you an hour of everyone's time or half an hour, but going through this formal process of evaluating everything that happened with this one client— and ideally, if you can get feedback from the client through a form or just on a call, get feedback from them and include that feedback in this post— and I'll show you templates for that in a second— this postmortem or project retrospective or project evaluation, that is gold because If you've done things well, you want to maintain doing these things, and you want to maintain what led to doing these things. And then if things did not go as well, there were glitches in communication and delivery and scoping in whatever aspect of, of, of the delivery, then this is the time while it's fresh in your mind, you want to document what happened. And as I always say, You want to be hard on the issue, easy on the people. So don't go and scream at a vendor because they messed up. You can be professional about it. You don't have to do business with them in the future, but if they are a long-term partner of yours, address the issue with them, identify what happened so that you can fix it, fix that glitch for the next deliverable, right? So that's one part of closure is doing your own internal internal assessment. So let me show you, let me show you this template that I have right here. So it's the whole process. If you've— if you haven't done one of those project retrospectives, I won't go into it today, but you can download it. Pretty self-explanatory. You can go here And you put, you basically prepare for that meeting, set up a time, and put an agenda. Here's a sample agenda, and the topics you want to discuss, and what went well, the challenges. Nobody wants to talk about the challenges. You want to, as a founder, as a consultant, as a business owner, you want to have an environment of transparency. So that's why I said earlier, be hard on the issue, soft on people. You want people to open up and tell you because people are shy or they don't want to hurt your feelings. They might not tell you that what you sold was so ambiguous, it was very hard for them to deliver what you sold. I know my business partner early on when he was delivering and I was selling, I always got that feedback till we figured out a nice balance between what to keep at a high level and what to but to provide a lot of granularity, you know, too. So talk about the challenges, any process and workflow analysis that could improve the next deliverable, lessons learned, all that, and then specific action plans, what to do with the proposal template, what to do with the project delivery template, what to do with the progress report. All of that is really, really important. And if you can't get people to come to the meeting because of whatever reason, Send these questions in a survey and then get that input in whichever way you can. But it's really important to pause and make sure you have this timely process to capture the feedback from everyone who's involved. Okay, so that's the first thing under closure. The second thing is I don't want you to leave any money on the table. So if you've made— if you've bent over backward to, to make the client happy, that's a plus. They shook your hand and they say thank you, that's a plus. In your engagement, as you got to know the client, as you got to know their environment, as you built trust and now had access or had access to the system Are there other issues that you can address? Are there other problems you can solve? So if you offer 3 services and if that first contract was for one of them, are there opportunities for you to sell the 2 other services? Is there some sort of— can I retain this client and have an ongoing service monitoring? And, um, if, if you provide design, design updates could be like once a month. If you provide content marketing, there's an initial setting up of the different social media channels, there's maybe ongoing content production and managing that whole process. If you do IT quarterly audits, so can I— they liked you, they valued what you've done, they've benefited from your service, clients that is, they are more likely to engage with you now if you identify other problems that you can solve. So, so this is something that you don't want to be pitching when, when you're delivering a project, but you should be very attentive. You should be listening for signals, looking for signals, listening to things you hear from the client— pain points, issues. And if these issues or these problems and fixes for these problems and solutions for these problems are in your wheelhouse, do not hesitate to start mentioning this to the client. Not again, not during delivery. That's in bad form. But as you get closer to the finish line, you can start dropping hints with the clients, with your main point of contact, like, hey, I see those issues, and by the way, we also can help you once we're done with this client. So think of ways to offer your services to the client. And the second part of the second point is, if the type of service you offer is sort of one and done, you're not done yet. Can you— can the client refer you to their peers, to their friends, to people they know in the industry? Can they, can they write a testimonial for you? Can they maybe be part of a case study? So all of that, these are amazing assets. A 5-star review on, on an online portal, a testimonial on maybe your own website, a case study that you can use with others. Those are invaluable assets. Like a case study kind of sits at the top of the marketing pyramid. If you go to another client, especially if it's the same vertical, especially if it's a known logo, and you tell future leads that I've solved these kind of problems for this client and here's a case study and here's someone you can call and learn about how well I solved this problem for them, I mean, this is gold, right? So I don't want you to close the project and think it's done. I want you to get the testimonial, collect the check, get the testimonial, get the case study, uh, get the referrals, ask for the referrals. And again, I have, I have an asset on how to do all of that. It's actually an article on the website. So you can go on the startupaffairs.com website and just search for case studies. There's a nice article that shows you exactly how to ask for that and how to develop a case study with a template that you can use All right, so that's it. We covered all the 5 phases today, from initiating to planning to executing to monitoring to closure. And closure, I don't like that name. That's sort of a typical project management name, but it's really the, the end of one chapter. Hopefully is also the opening and the start of a second chapter, a third chapter, a few chapters, and when the book is done, there's another book, right? So, so keep that in mind as you are working with us. Thank you, Feras. clients. So I have a few questions here, and then I have some comments. Let me get the live comments first. Let's see. Um, so I'm there with 3 years work experience. I want to target small biz with 5 to 10 employees, and then individuals I'm targeting to make 10 grand. Getting 5 to 10 clients, I'm thinking small. Well, this is from On Sharma, like, I don't know if you're targeting small or not, but, but I mean, I like what you said. You have 3 years of experience, so you've done this data analysis for M&A. That's great. You want to target small businesses, 5 to 10 employees. So it seems that you have experience with that client size, which is good. And then the $10 grand, I think you know the industry more than I do. So is that like, when you are— what, with the experience that you have, 3 years of experience, how much were these projects sold? If they were sold for $20,000 and you can sell for $10,000, that could be a differentiator. So in terms of getting 5 to 10 clients, I would focus first on getting one client, especially if you're doing this on the side, making sure there's no non-compete and all that good stuff in place with your employer, but get that first client and you have to do a lot of outreach. It might take you, especially a decision like this, a decision to sell a business is a big decision. You're not a broker, you are supporting that process. And I think bigger customers will have established brokers or financial analysts, and typically those will bring their own team members. So potentially you can go after clients, direct clients who want to sell that business, but you can also pitch your services as a contractor, as a consultant, to companies like brokers and to advisors who are looking for someone to do this work for them, so you can be a subcontractor to a company, maybe a bigger company, that might be one approach, but I would focus on getting that very first client and start with your network and with the people you've worked with in the past, people who know you. Again, if you look at that Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business, I talk a lot about, I covered that in detail. Let's see, we have another. Let's see, Fareed. Yes, if let's see, let me put it here on screen. If you charge a client one K a month, a retainer for one K a month, but solution the solution you provide or built to an e-commerce website brings him less than the one K profit. Is there something you can do now to retain that client since he is in the loss? So so basically you're you're charging a thousand dollars a month. And the client is bringing in a whole lot less than that. Are they— well, do they have other channels to selling? For example, they have a shop, a retail, they sell wholesale. So if the overall profit for the business is less than $1,000, that, that's sort of problematic. But if they're making money elsewhere and they're just starting with the e-commerce website and they're just new to e-commerce and you educate them why it's important for them to invest in e-commerce and make sure the site loads properly and it's updated and all the good things that you know about e-commerce websites, so it's one thing. If they already have money, they're profitable, $1K a month might not be an issue at all, but it has to be, it has to serve, there has to be an objective, like you are doing a $1K a month retainer, is it to do some basic SEO, some marketing, updating the website, that has to be serving an objective, right? So, so if there's profit elsewhere, I think there's no issue at all. You just have to show them that we are in this build stage. We are building your presence online. You're building this website. It takes time. And, and show them a roadmap and understand why is it that they're, they're not making money. Is it that they're selling very low? Is it that nobody's buying? Is the issue like you're not getting the traffic? Or is it that You're getting the traffic, but nobody's buying. So maybe you do, you know, I said bend over backward initially, maybe go outside the scope of your engagement today and see, understand, analyze, be a business partner and analyze why is it that they're not making money with this website and then provide some recommendations to help them out with that. So, uh, here, I think this is the last comment and then we'll wrap it up. Uh, I've worked on million-dollar projects in company with other 50 people in team. Yeah, so, so, uh, I'm Sharma here. Like, this is all great. So this adds to your credibility. Uh, so if you are building your like LinkedIn presence or a website, you can add all these projects. Obviously you might have some confidentiality agreements in place and you're not supposed to mention the client names. If you can describe, if you can put the logos of the clients you worked on or you helped sell, that's great. If you can't, you can still list the type of business. Let's say a $2 million company in Chicago, 5 to 10 people, you know, 5 people, help them with due diligence and we help them expedite their closing the project. There were no issues in closing because we did an amazing job with due diligence, right? I'm making this stuff up. So use that to your advantage in terms of the experience that you have. You want to highlight the work you've done even for someone else, and then because that's the experience that you have, you might not be able, because of confidentiality and all that good stuff, you might not be able to share everything, but you can share the types of problems you've solved, the types of issues you've addressed, the markets you were in, all that will help you in terms of your pitch. Alright, so wrapping up here, I want to just show you one more thing here, for those of you who didn't get a chance, yeah, I didn't cover this one, there was a question about tools to use for project management, for task management, for communication tools. So I have this article on the Startup with Feras website where just search for essential software for consultants. Um, I have pros and cons and, and barriers and costs just on the, on the pricing for these, for these tools. It's of the date of the article when it was published, so pricing, check, check the most recent pricing with the vendors themselves, but it's a pretty good article, thorough article. With different types of technologies that you might want to use as a consultant. So check that out and also check out that YouTube channel. If you're liking this content, if you're finding this content helpful, make sure you subscribe, make sure you like the video, and then share it with others who might be in need. And I did just, as I said earlier, I have this 44-minute video on the No Burnout Playbook for Successful Consulting. I I go over the entire arc of delivering from pre-sales all the way to maintaining and growing customers, and then the operational excellence and how to scale and how to systemize, and then you look at last week's video, I went deep on the pre-sales aspect of delivery. So with that, I think we are good to go today. Let's see if we have any last— Thanks. You are most welcome. Glad you're finding this content helpful, and thank you for coming back. I know you attend these live streams, but feel free to reach out if you have any other questions. All right, thank you all so much, and see you next time.