How to Start a Consultancy Business

Welcome back, everybody. It is the next episode of Fix Your Business, and today we are going to be diving into Paul Truman's business, which is— well, you hark from a martial arts business. However, we're actually gonna be talking about a new consultancy which you're looking at setting up, which is incredibly exciting. So welcome to the show today, Paul.

Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure. Don't— you look scared. Don't worry, we'll be nice to you, Paul. Don't worry. Give me a bit of a rundown. What's the background behind Peak Performance? When did you set it up? How has that business grown so far?

So Peak Performance is just past its 13th anniversary. So started in martial arts and we— one of the instructors invited me to open up a school with him. I did. He ended up leaving the business and I've driven forward with it ever since. We've moved around the country, so now have 4 classes in different locations and we've been building up slowly but surely. I left my full-time job, I think it was 3 years, just over 3 years ago now, and started concentrating on this on a full-time basis. And obviously since the last few months, we've had to change what we're doing and change our focus.

Yeah, and I can imagine that must have hit you pretty hard. I mean, it's quite amazing you've managed to grow a business to 4 different locations in such a relatively short period of time. How before, sort of, I know obviously it's a nod to the crisis there, but pre-crisis, how did you feel business was going? It was going really, really well.

We'd had a good few months actually, so we'd really got things lined up properly coming out of the new year. We'd found the right offers that we could get people in. We'd always struggled to get adult martial artists coming in the door. We'd done really, really well growing the children's side of it and marketing correctly there, and that was working, but we were really struggling playing around with different ways of getting people, adults involved. But we suddenly found what was the right thing, what was the right tagline, the headline to actually get people to interact with our adverts and then come and start booking in. So we started January very, very well.

I think it's a sad thing where I think a lot of businesses did, and then obviously with what's happened, you know, things went sort of south. We're not going to be talking about the crisis now. What you've kind of alluded to though is the marketing side of the business, which sounds like you've done a really good job of kind of nailing down who your target market is and being able to attract them into the The various different— what would you call them— studios which you run. So give us a bit of an insight into what the change of direction looks like now for you.

Well, one of the biggest learning curves for me has been the marketing side of it. I've never been involved in it at all, so I was dabbling with it about 3 years ago when I was still working full-time, and I was just finding things were starting to sort of fall in place and the business was starting to grow, and therefore we made the call to go full-time doing it. And I'm trying to plug that gap. So since that gap, or certainly over the 13 years, I've had no knowledge, no knowledge, and then eventually I suddenly found some knowledge. I've been on some courses, I've invested in the right places and expanded my own knowledge. And over the last 3 years, we've managed to take it up, up, up, up, up and build the business really, really well. And the new job is to— the new project is to try and plug that gap for everybody else so they don't have to go on that long, expensive journey. So I've spent thousands of pounds on courses, thousands of pounds on training, videos, everything that you could possibly think of. And we're just trying to plug that gap so that small business can take something off the shelf and go, yep, that works for me. And it's only gonna cost them a small amount of money rather than the big amounts of money and years and years of training.

One of the things which you mentioned was obviously having a sort of a DIY element to it so people could buy a little bundle when they start up, and then eventually it kind of— the longer tail product is then sort of the more done-for-you type consultancy typical sort of consulting thing where you actually help them to build out, help your clients to build out their sort of marketing funnels. So talk us through a little bit more about that.

So the starting position, as you say, will be people will get a taster of what we're doing for free. They will then be offered a more detailed taster for a small fee of about £5. Then there will be a— we'll build out the model so there's more involved in there, they can get more, and that will be a monthly fee of £30 to £50 a month. There'll be another bit where it includes more training, more information. So we've already segmented what information, knowledge that I have that is worth more, and we will put that into the next pack. And then finally there will be a much bigger pack which will include potentially their setup and showing them how to set up Ads Manager, showing them how to optimize their profile, their page, their group, and that sort of thing. to really optimise it. And that, as you've written there, is about £500. And we can even bolt on web designers and that sort of thing. We've got those sort of people in the periphery.

So, and you had sort of various different packs, which sort of £30, £50 a month, up to £100 a month. And then, and then sort of they kind of eventually, you know, if they, if they're struggling to— it's one of those things, if they can't do it themselves, let's get Paul to do it. He's the expert. Kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I was thinking as we go through this, so I have— this is what the reason why I've drawn it this way is I have like, it's something called a product architecture model. So what you've got down here are your core products. So these are the things which you kind of really want as many people to get into these as you possibly can. Up at the top, you've got something called a breakthrough product. That's like your gateway drug into, you know, what Paul and his team do.

Yeah.

Over here, we have the taster session, which is— these are what I call the marketing assets. It's like, imagine this is going to end up looking a little bit like a house. So this is like your for sale board, which comes out, you know, where you're kind of running some ads, driving people through into that sort of taster session. I don't actually think it's really a breakthrough product because it really is just a marketing asset that Effectively, I'm guessing you're going to give away for free, is it? Just to try before you buy.

Yeah, that's right. Cool.

So we've got the marketing assets there. Now, another thing as well is you've got specific niches that you want to focus on. So I always put a protective roof over the head, which is where we go through a process of assessing. So I call it an assessment or a quiz or something like that, so that you can start to kind of, you know, you mentioned sort of hairdressers, you have personal trainers, you'll have those sort of, talking small bricks-and-mortar businesses basically, where people have to, you know, come in in person to see somebody to get a treatment or a haircut or whatever. But that doesn't mean that not every client for you is going to be perfect. So you really want to give away as many taster sessions, but in doing so, you want to be gathering as much information about them as possible to make sure that, you know, your core products and certainly your, this is what I call a follow-on product down the bottom, Awesome.

Here.

So you want to make sure that the right people are coming in at the top of your funnel because you don't want to get all the way down to the £500 a month program and find out that actually it doesn't work for them or it's not appropriate. So it's kind of like a filtering process. And then obviously, well, hopefully what gets spat out at the end is what we call— there's a bit more to it than this, but you end up with some, hopefully some very positive case studies for each of the different elements of the business. Because the beauty of it is, you mentioned my book Take Your Shot whilst we were offline. Um, you know, that's kind of like one of my marketing assets that just rolls out. I don't have to— I have to do very little with it, you know, in order to kind of market it. People can passively read it. But I've had people who've read the book, got everything which they needed, you know, their business has just taken off. They don't actually need me as a coach. And actually, in some cases, that they're the best clients, um, in many respects. So is that kind of a fair sort of representation of where the sort of the direction you're heading in with the various different packages?

Yes, that's perfect.

And how they all sort of link together.

Cool.

One of the things I wanted to talk to you about, so you mentioned about in terms of your, your goals was that magical mystical, you know, um, could we get this up to a million pound a year sort of plus business?

Yeah.

Um, and one of the things I was thinking And this, I don't know whether this will kind of make sense to you or not. If you get too many of these in, i.e., if 20,000 people buy products at £500, can you support 20,000 people?

No, we would be limited. The plan was always to limit that number all the time because obviously we can't support that.

Yeah. So that, in essence— so what would that number be? What have you said you're going to limit it to?

It would probably be about 500.

OK. So 500 times by 500 is— have I done the right maths there? I'm not sure that I have. I think I've got one too many noughts on there. We're not that far adrift then, because that's 250K, isn't it?

Yeah.

Is my maths working? Yeah, 4 zeros. There we go. 250K. OK. So we've still got to find— we're still short of £750K, which obviously if you were then— I mean, really, so you were talking about sort of these £5 bundles. Again, this is just like a bit of a reality check where we take all of the numbers and just kind of have a look at the capacity and things like that. And I know that obviously the money is going to be spread across £5 bundles, sort of £30 a month packages, and £500 a month packages. So, but imagine if it was all based on £5.

bundles.

This is where you've got to be really clear on exactly what— like clear on what numbers you're going to be pushing through your business. Okay? So I run another very simple sort of— I guess it's a sales funnel as such. Have you come across my 5 C's model?

Not off the top of my head, no.

So it's based on Google's Zero Moments of Truth, where they talk about 3 numbers, 70-10-2. And it was originally, they got those numbers, well, they tested a whole load of data, and this is what they came back with for consultants, software businesses, all sorts of different sort of service-based businesses. 70-10-2 is the magic number. But if you imagine like the old call center days when it was like 70 calls, 10 appointments, 2 sales. Okay, and actually I've tested these numbers across a multitude of different clients now, and more often than not— I mean, it's different for every— slightly different for every business, but these do kind of pretty much work out. And what I liken it to is, um, so you have the first C is content, second C is, um, conversations, uh, then you start off with your consultations. So that's like the sale, and sales actually is like sales fits in there. This is more of a marketing funnel. And then you have your conversion down at the bottom end of it. Conversion. There we go. If I could spell. And then finally, you have some loyal clients which get spat out the bottom. And they obviously refer in— not up there.

Whoops.

They refer prospects into the consultation phase. They're kind of pre-sold if you refer somebody, basically. That's what I'm saying. Now, you're going to obviously be driving ads into here to get people to like— these are kind of like, this is going to be your— whoops, your— where's it gone? So that's going to be your taster. That's going to be your bundle. And this is going to be one of your monthlies.

Okay?

Yep. So in order to get— and by the way, you're probably looking at this going, like working out, is this right? Is this not? Trust me, Google have got a gazillion bits of data. I didn't make these numbers up. A good conversion rate is like 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 in software, and especially how you're bundling up what you're doing. It'd be interesting to see what stats come back for getting people to move through your marketing funnel and getting booked into those monthlies. But imagine those 500 clients. Well, now, so we can— so we've got 500 there. We can multiply all of these by 250. So you've got to sell 2,500 bundles. And you've got to get, uh, oh God, Jesus, I can't even do the maths here. 35,000. So you've got to do 35,000 tasters to get 2,500 people to buy into a bundle at £5 to then sign up to one of your monthly packages, which could be a £30, £50, £100, or maybe even a £500. Make sense?

Yep.

So this is what I call just a very quick, like, business plans, we can throw them out the window because we're not going for investment necessarily. But this is just a very quick sense check to make sure that the numbers kind of stack up. Because one of the main things, and I wrote this down in my notes to start off with, was about data and validation. And is this all kind of making sense so far? Have you got any questions?

Yeah.

So I'm well aware that I'm kind of just throwing stuff at you at the moment. So the key thing though is about getting data and validation. I'm going to come back. I'm just going to switch the screen share off a second. So, um, so you— there's 2 things which you said to me as we were kind of in the pre-roll interview and, and as we've been chatting around pricing specifically. So one of the things you said, and this was in, in your current business, the martial arts business, was that there's not an appetite. People don't have the money. They're penny-pinching and You know, that they're trying to save money right now.

Yep.

That's true to a certain extent. Okay, there may be a few people out there who are penny-pinching, trying to save some money, a bit hard up. Maybe they've been either made redundant or furloughed or whatnot. Is it everybody?

No, no, I don't believe it's everybody. Yeah, I think the martial arts, the thing a lot of it is that they're not seeing the same value that they would normally get. They're not seeing me in person. And they're putting more value on that even though I'm doing online one-to-ones with them, which I'd never have done before.

Which baffles me because I spotted that on your website where you're doing the one-to-ones and I was like, for— am I allowed to say how much you're charging for that?

You can.

It was £57 a month, I think I spotted on your website or something round about that, including the one-to-one side of things, which again, if you were to run numbers on that, you can see why you're so busy and things aren't. So imagine this scenario, right? Where, um, because it— to me that feels like a bit of a discount almost because you've added so much extra value in there, but you haven't put the price up.

Yeah.

Um, and so what's happening is when, when you inject a discount into the marketplace, the idea behind that is it stimulates demand.

Yeah.

So at a time when effectively, like, I don't know anybody who's in business right now with the crisis who has ended up with more time to spend on their business. Most people have ended up with less time because we've got things like children that, you know, requires homeschooling and things like that. And so you imagine where you've got less capacity to deliver and you're effectively injecting a discount in, you're increasing demand. Like, the numbers economically— it's a really shit, like, you know, Economics 101 there, but the numbers just don't quite stack up.

Oh yeah, no, we are.

What you want to be doing is like, I remember when, when the last recession hit, so we were charging— this is going way back when, 2007, 2008— we were charging about £10 a month for support and hosting for our websites that we were selling. And everybody else immediately started discounting, like when the recession hit. It's a marketing-based business, so, you know, naturally everybody assumed that marketing was the first thing that they should be cutting. And I saw everybody dropping their prices. So I went completely the opposite way. We 5x'd our price. We went up to £50 a month for our lowest tier care plan. And yes, we lost 40% of our clients, but our revenue went up 2.5 times. Our support for the pain-in-the-ass clients went down 80%.

Yeah.

So again, when you start to kind of balance off, if you get the price right for those who really value what you're doing, you should, I mean, I'm not suggesting You don't want to be going out and trying to capitalize on it. We don't want to be taking advantage of people or be seen to be taking advantage of people. But one of my clients runs a martial arts business and their basic package is $97 a month and they haven't included in any extra one-to-one and all of their clients have stayed. So there's this notion about being able to articulate that value. And the key thing is the assumption.

Do you—

when you kind of said that, did you really believe that, or was it a— so when you said to me off sort of on the pre-roll, you said, oh, people are penny-pinching, did you really believe that?

Well, I believe it to some extent. I'm not sure that— I don't believe everyone should be. I think people with the martial arts business, they're not— they don't see the value necessarily in what we're doing offline— sorry, online. And they thought, well, then I'm not getting here and getting my personal service. And when we get people talking to us about leaving and they're not getting it, we were explaining to them, well, actually, we're giving you one-to-ones, which are £100 an hour normally. We're doing this for you, we're doing this for you, and we're adding up all the package and the extras that we've now thrown in, which is huge, just to try to keep them happy. And then they do sort of buy into what we're saying then.

Yeah, so that's kind of like the amazing set of features which you're offering, that's great, but you've got to be able to demonstrate to them the heaven if they do and the hell if they don't. So the hell if they don't buy your product or don't continue to buy your product is what impact is it going to have on their mental health? Is it going to impact their gradings when they come into the, you know, come to move up through the belting the belts and things like that. You know, there's all of those intangible things which they're not gonna— they're not gonna be— you've got to show them the hell if they leave, basically, as opposed to, well, hey, you're gonna get all this extra stuff.

Yeah.

And most people are happy to do the heaven if you, you know, the heaven if you stay. They're happy with that because, well, you'll get a ton of great value and you'll feel better and everything else. But too many people are afraid to go into the Hell if you don't. So if you leave, you know, imagine, you know, and this is about you obviously understanding like all of your clients and their needs as individuals and things like that. You'll probably find all the ones who are like, have already gone through a lot of the Belting grading systems, they've been law clients for ages, they've had no problem like, you know, buying into the online version of it. I can guarantee that it's mostly going to be a lot of the new people who haven't yet seen the benefits of it who are having an issue with— migrating to the online space.

Yeah.

But does that make sense? So my point here is really about— there's a bit of a— you've made a bit of an assumption about the marketplace, and there was also a little bit of belief behind it. Whether it was right or wrong, probably a discussion for another day. But if we take that clue for how you're treating this current business— so I was looking at this going, well, I was worried about kind of like the volume when you said million pound a year business. And then the reason why I went through the exercise with 7 to 10, 2, and the 5 C's and getting you just to have that quick reality check about, well, how many people do we need at each tier, basically? Because there was kind of an, I think, a bit of an assumption that you're kind of going in more of that entry level. You want it to be affordable for people.

Yeah.

And also the fact that there's a potential, and this is where I'm actually gonna hopefully add quite a lot of value to what you're doing, I hope I will be, that people won't get the value out of just having an online version only and not having your extra done-for-you service so that you can actually scale the software element of what you're doing. Okay, so take the £30 a month package. Well, actually, if you work it out, that's 3,000 clients paying you £30 a month.

month.

Yep. Which is, you know, there's 6 million businesses in the UK right now. I bet a lot of them are very small bricks-and-mortar businesses that could do with your help and the sort of templates that you're going to be creating for your clients. So here's where I think it might get interesting for you. And I said I might mention this piece of software to you. I've been optimizing my YouTube channel and I've been using a little program called vidIQ. Okay, so vidIQ basically is a Chrome plugin that teaches you through a process of like, you know, just going through and optimizing video by video by video, how to, how to choose your keywords, how to put the right words into the title, how to kind of format your description so it gets found by Google, how to tag the videos, and numerous different sort of data points and things like that. And What's really interesting, so it costs £50 a month when you get up to the sort of, if you want the boost version, which really you do need the boost version to get the most out of it. But one of the things they did incredibly well was they don't have any kind of done-for-you, we'll optimize your videos for you option, which actually I would pay for because I'm time poor. But I have a bit of, I'm not loaded, but I have the money. I could afford to pay something to have them optimize it. But their attitude is, we believe you can do all of this yourself with the right tools. So they've built this like incredible like academy on the backend of vidIQ. Their YouTube channel, for obvious reasons, is just packed full of, you know, every video they've put up there, you can learn something and apply it to your next video. And the results kind of speak for themselves. I'm not gonna be a CutiePie or whatever his name is just yet.

PewDiePie.

with millions of subscribers, but my subscriber base all of a sudden has doubled. My views have gone up overnight. I'm making money out of my YouTube channel, which is something which I thought, you know, I've never really put any time or effort into it, but I'm making money from it. But that's without having a done-for-you option. So I'm wondering for you whether you could just smash the £30 a month option because there is so much value in there, but then focus rather than like spending time building your done-for-you business With those however many hundreds of clients— where's it gone? 500 clients on that done-for-you product. You could just build one e-learning platform and your own YouTube channel which teaches them everything they need to know.

Okay.

And give it away as a gift because it builds the value of the £30 a month, the £50 a month, and £100 a month packages which you want to put in there. The other thing as well, so you kind of made an assumption that £500 is kind of the ceiling for what people might pay.

Well, we valued the product based on what we're gonna be giving, time spent, etc., and we actually valued it at £1,000. And we're— but to get us going, we think £500 so that we can get some testimonials. That's the whole sort of the structure we're doing is for the slow build and that we would gain feedback every time we do something. So we've started off with just having the group and giving out some free advice. We started giving out some of the information, we're drip feeding it out to see what sort of impact we have.

Great.

I mean, it's building slowly and they'll be the same across. Once we get the packages out, we'll release them a little bit and see what the response is so we can make sure that we're maximizing what we're doing. So as you've written on the top there, getting validation about what we're doing.

Yeah. So I'm going to talk— come on, because I'm talking about specifically validation around pricing here. We'll come on to that in a second. You are taking kind of the lean approach where you're kind of gradually improving over time and getting that feedback and making it better and things like that, which is 100% what I recommend. In fact, again, I mentioned a book offline which was The Lean Startup by a guy called Eric Ries, and it is brilliant for that whole sort of product launch process. The time and materials, you mentioned you kind of did a rough calculation that came out at £1,000. Well, you've already discounted it down to £500.

Yeah.

And that— so you're kind of saying that actually our time is worth half what it was immediately?

This is just for to get the demand. So the idea was that we start off with low, we go in with some upsells, we tell them that it's worth the £1,000, but we're going to— as you're the first X customers, you'll be getting it for £500. And then once we've started peaking out, so it might be with— if we go for— if we go for that £500, we would have maybe the first 100 would be £500, and then after that it would start ramping up to about £4,000.

I think you can, because the thing is, by the time somebody's gone through your taster pack, you've assessed them properly, you've seen whether you can get them good results or not, they've bought the bundle, they bought a monthly package, They've been through all of the touchpoints that you need to get them onto what we call a high-ticket program. And even £1,000 still isn't high-ticket. I'll be honest, if somebody can afford £500 for your product and it sounds bloody amazing, they can afford £1,000. And the reason for that is, and this is something which, it does seem to crop up sort of fairly frequently now on these Fix Your Business series, but it's about being able to, you need to become a master at working out the return on investment your clients will get through working with you and your consultancy. So what I mean by that is, for example, somebody who's just setting up a new hairdresser, a hairdressing salon or something like that, who has goals themselves to maybe get to £50K a year or something like that in the first year. Well, if you're just— what you're saying is, well, for £1,000, we can kind of— it's like a jackpot machine.

Yeah.

For a grand, we can get you £50K.

Yeah.

So it's kind of a no-brainer, especially if they've already gone through those first few products. You've built their trust up. They should have got some results, I would hope, through the £30 a month package or the £50 a month package. At which point, when they kind of turn around and say, we've got some results, but we've not optimized it, we need your help to optimize it, the £1,000 seems like a no-brainer to me.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

And also, so going back to this, we talked about your goal being a million. If you go in at £1,000, your first 500 people get it at £1,000, you've just, you've just got to like halfway to your goal like twice as quick. Yeah, because that £250K all of a sudden becomes £500K. Okay, £500K, an extra zero in there. £500K. Makes sense?

Yeah.

So think about, think about the time, energy, and effort it would take to, you know, would you not rather put in the same time, energy, and effort? Because you won't have to put much more in to get people sold at 1,000 as you would 500, but to hit your goal twice as quickly.

Yeah.

And it's probably, but probably to make it relevant, it's probably the same as what you teach your students at the martial arts academy. If you, if you only come to one class a week, you're gonna struggle to get your brown belt. But if you come 2 or 3 times a week, we can get you to your brown belt in 8 months.

Yeah.

Or however long it takes. I don't know how long it takes.

Yeah, I got you.

Yep. So it's a common mistake with sort of consulting-based businesses and software businesses to sort of put out offers and discounts to, on sort of the backend product, but actually it ends up being more destructive than anything else. And what I'd also say is like, if you, if you go out and you're pitching this at £500 and you never pitch it Or you wait for 500 people to come aboard before you pitch it at $1,000, you've got no validation as to whether people are willing to pay $1,000 or not.

Yeah. That's true.

So what I would be doing is I would actually be testing, and this is hard by the way, and I've probably, if any of your clients are watching this, this might give the game away, but I would actually recommend testing multiple different price points. through this early validation phase and just starting to garner the feedback. And part of the reason for that is, you know, I talk about the 70/10 too. So imagine if we've got, you know, we go and pitch it to 20 people and we want 4 people to say yes to something in order to validate it, to agree. I can guarantee you the first 16 people will say no. It will be the last 4 out of the 20 who will say yes to it because human beings are unpredictable. We like to think when we design business plans it's predictable and linear. But it's really not in practice. You know, you're dealing with human beings who are volatile and difficult and different in all sorts of different ways. And they're very much like buses. You'll have a dearth of people who say, oh no, that's too expensive, but you'll start to believe them. And it's actually, you've got to go out at volume and pitch at volume in order to get the volume of data back that says, yes, actually we're on track with our 25% conversion rate of people at £1,000. Cool. We can roll with £1,000. If we go and pitch it to 20 people and actually only one comes back and says yes and the other 19 are categorical in the fact that £1,000 is too expensive, we validate it. We've said no, £1,000 is too expensive. That doesn't meet our data. Let's now drop it down and try £800. Let's try £600. Or conversely, if our close rate is too high, so if we're closing more than 1 in 3, we're too cheap.

Yeah.

So as you start going to market with this at £500 and it's like boom, yes, yes, yes, everybody's saying yes. You've got to increment that price quick because otherwise you'll just kill, destroy your capacity. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, it makes good sense.

That's kind of what I was referring to around sort of the validation of pricing and that will— when you're talking about kind of the cheaper pack, the £5 bundle and the £30 a month, doesn't really matter so much. When you start to hit volume, it will matter and a small increase, say from your baseline from £30 to £40 or £30 to £50, for example, That might have an inference, but you'll already have a warm audience at that point with people getting value. For this consulting gig, that— and because it's— the key thing is because it's time and material based, that will have the biggest impact on capacity.

Yeah, okay.

Makes sense. So hopefully that's given you— I think we're already at time. I can't believe that's actually gone super quick and I've barely let you talk, so apologies.

That's all right.

But hopefully, hopefully you've kind of found that helpful. And I was just gonna have a quick look to see if we've had any questions actually come in as well. A few people have come on board and said— what have we got? Oh yeah, somebody's just said, I remember you sharing about 70-10-2, very interesting and very practical. So use 70-10-2 as a benchmark to test the different points of your marketing funnel. Now you can implement that straight away even with the small numbers you've got at the moment. I would start to position because you could probably start delivering even now that £500 package straight away. So put something together, pitch it, build a few of them out now to see how it goes.

We've fleshed— yeah, we're fleshing it out. I'm a bit worried about going straight to the £500. I was all having that there. I was literally trying to build out one bit, then the next bit, then next bit. So it's all there ready.

You want to be able— you don't want to fill your funnel up and then have that stumbling block of not knowing that you can't deliver it.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah. So it's worthwhile. You want to test each— each of them are independent products. You want to test each product like now and get that feedback and see if it generates the results that you expect. And, and how I would position it. So this, this is the key to it. So, and the reason why I said somebody will buy a £1,000— if they were going to buy a £500 product, they'll buy a £1,000 product anyway. And there's 2 things you can do to help people out with this. So One is to potentially offer sort of either payment plans or guarantees. Now, you can't guarantee the results because part of it is going to be based on what they've got to do.

Yeah.

But what we do is we— the guarantee which you offer is based on perceived value. So take my book. This is a shameless plug, but take my book, right? You've got a copy of it. If you were to walk into I was about to say Wetherspoons. What's the bookshop called? Waterstones. Wetherspoons is the pub. If you walk into Waterstones or Smith's or go to Amazon, how much would you pay for a paperback book?

£5 to £10.

Yeah, so let's say it's £10, right? It might be on a special offer at Fiverr, but let's say it's £10. It cost me £1.82 to get a copy of this printed off. Okay? And then to distribute it, right? So your perceived value of the book is actually 5 times the value of what it cost me to print it. Okay?

Yeah.

So people's perceived value is always much higher. So this is why the guarantees are based on perceived value. So what you say to somebody is when they're— if they're starting to have price objections over say a £1,000 product, you can say something along the lines of, well, actually, if you invest in this product, And you, you know, and you do everything that we ask you to do, we'll obviously take care of everything from our end. If we don't get the results or you don't feel that you've got the value out of this that we promised you, we'll just hit the refund key. It's actually very hard for people to say no. Now the reason why people don't offer money-back guarantees typically in the consulting world and coaching world is because they have— they lack the confidence in their ability to deliver. So you've first got to get to that point. That's why I'm saying test the product now so you get to that point where you're confident in your ability to deliver and get results. That will help you through, you know, building up your confidence in the sales process and start to add in those extra sort of, you know, confidence boosters. Basically, you want people to be confident you can deliver results.

Yeah. Yeah, cool. That's good.

Makes sense?

Yeah, absolutely.

Have you got any questions for me? I'm aware that I just did a Gatling gun sort of download on you.

No, I've made lots of notes and taken lots in.

Awesome. Well, what I'll do, Paul, is I will send you a copy of the notes. If you can translate them, then good luck, but I'll send you a copy of my notes so you've got those diagrams as well. Obviously, this is going to be going up onto YouTube after this recording, a little bit later on this week, but it sounds like you found that helpful. I think if anybody else is watching this and they'd like to get stuck in and have me fix their business, you can email me robin@fearless.biz. We'll also put a link through to Paul just in case there's anybody out there who is thinking about sort of tapping Paul up in terms of that marketing product which he's putting out there. So we'll make sure that we share your— I've tagged you into the post on Facebook anyway, but we'll make sure we share that. But thank you very much, Paul. It's been a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed it.

Yeah, thanks. It's been good. Thank you very much for your help.