Building a consulting firm can be difficult. There are certain pitfalls to avoid when scaling or building your firm. In this episode, Francisco Gomez, the founder of Factum Global, gives us an inside look into building a consulting firm in 2024. He talks about a range of topics, like commanding the attention of high-ticket clients, strategic partnerships, fine-tuning your messaging and offering, and harnessing the power of R&D. These are some of his secrets to helping you build your consulting firm. Join us today in this impactful episode so you won’t miss Francisco’s wealth of experience.
In this episode featuring Francisco, uncover secrets to:
- Command the attention of high-ticket clients.
- Propel your pipeline growth through strategic partnerships.
- Fine-tune your messaging and offerings for an irresistible appeal to your target audience.
- Harness the power of R&D to gain profound insights into your clientele.
- Dodge common pitfalls in hiring while scaling your firm.
- Skyrocket your business with the strategic deployment of a COO.
Book your session call.
Check out Factum Global.
Connect with Francisco on LinkedIn.
—
Joining me on the show today is Francisco Gomez, who’s the Founder of Factum Global, an international consulting firm specializing in helping businesses expand globally. They offer services like global market research, strategy development, transformation and change management, new market solutions, legal and compliance support and strategic planning facilitation. As you can read from Francisco and honestly many other consultants we’ve had on the show, although they’ve seen success in their industry. They’re always looking for more predictable ways to grow their consulting firm. If this sounds like you, the consulting success team can help. They’re offering a free no-pressure growth session call. On the call, we’re going to dive deep into what makes your situation unique, have a real talk about your goals and web up a success plan that’s tailor-made for you.
We’re going to help you dodge those frustrating, costly, blunders and save you from the headache of trying to figure it all out on your own. Lastly, you’re going to get the ongoing support and accountability you need. Plus, join a buzzing community of successful consultants like you, because let’s be honest, growing a business by yourself can be pretty tough at times. To book your free growth session call, head over to ConsultingSuccess.com/Grow.
Let me tell you more about what you’re going to learn in this episode with Francisco. First is how to command the attention of high-ticket clients, how to propel your pipeline growth through strategic partnerships, how to fine-tune your messaging to appeal to your target audience. How to harness the power of R&D to gain insights into your clientele, how to dodge common pitfalls in hiring when scaling your firm and how to skyrocket your business with the strategic deployment of a COO, plus so much more. Here to share with you his insight and story is Francisco Gomez. Enjoy.
Francisco, welcome.
Thanks. It’s great being here.
I’m glad to have you on and I’m looking forward to this conversation. Let’s start off. How would you describe what Factum Global does?
In simple words, we help companies expand globally. What that means is when an organization is thinking about expanding into new horizons, we help them determine whether or not they should do it. Often clients come to us and say, “We’re thinking about it, but we don’t know if we should.” If they should do it, then we help them figure out how. That’s the strategy piece of what we do. Once they have a plan in place, we help them execute. Essentially from A to Z, we help organizations get into new markets around the world.
How do you define your ideal client? If you can select a dream client to work with, what would they look like in terms of size, geography, industry or any other factors that you use to identify who the ideal client is?
The Ideal Dream Client
I will tell you about that. Our ideal client is an organization that understands that they don’t know all the answers and that they’re willing to serve and explore other possibilities so that we can become a partner to them. In terms of what you’re asking, we tend to try to work with companies that serve small to medium size. That is the type of company that we target. However, anyone who would be in consulting, and I know you were in consulting, understands that doesn’t always end up being the case. We have several clients that are large companies, organizations that are looking for our help in different areas, but typically small to medium-sized companies, minimum serve $10 million in revenue so that they have the ability to do what we offer and somewhere all the way up to $800 million it serves where we see the sweet spot.
We are industry agnostic because of what we do. We do research, strategy and execution. Our services are very tailored to the needs of our clients. We move across different industries. However, we do see a lot of interest from the telecommunications industry, from FinTech and technology in general, which should not be surprising to you as a lot of the technology companies that are essentially customer-focused are globally in nature by what they do. We do a little bit of healthcare as well. Interestingly enough for maybe some of the people in your audience, we work a lot with associations. the nonprofit association sector is another vertical that we work very closely with.
What’s the real problem that they’re having when they come to you? What’s the challenge or the big opportunity that they’re excited about when they decide to engage with you?
Start with an assumption that something will resonate and test until it gets much attention. Click To TweetIt varies a lot. Typically, you can put it in buckets. One is a lack of capacity. We know what we want to do and what we need to, but we don’t have the manpower or we don’t know exactly how to do it. We know the what, but not the how or organizations that have no idea what they’re looking for. They need to grow. They’re trying to look for different ways in which they may be able to do that. They want to explore from scratch if going global is something that they should do.
When you go deeper into conversations with the clients, you can range from, “Help us open an office in X country,” to, “Can you please help us do a feasibility study on whether or not we should explore X, Y, and Z markets,” to, “We’ve already done all the research but we don’t have the strategy,” or, “We’ve done all that work. We’re ready to execute. Can you help us on the ground?” Anywhere in that spectrum, we’re going to find companies that are coming to us for different things. Typically, it’s a capacity issue or a lack of knowledge situation.
To give everybody a sense of the size, the scope of the company, how many team members, and employees, what is your average project value and annual revenue? Anything that you’re able to share?
We’re still a small business. We started operating in 2019. As you can imagine, the pandemic hit. In international business, that means a complete shutdown. We’ve been in business for a few years. We have a team of roughly under twenty people that includes our full-time staff, part-time employees and associate consultants. We’re a small company with under $5 million in revenue. Our models have been proven. We have clients now who have been with us from the very beginning and continue to renew.
An average contract size is probably in the neighborhood of $150,000. We have contracts that are much larger and smaller than that. Some people hire us to do facilitation services in $10,000 or $15,000 range. Other companies, our ideal clients have been with us for a long time and can spend anywhere between $150,000 to $300,000 a year with the company.
Let’s now go a little bit back in time. I know you shared it with me before wthe show that you are from Columbia originally. What were you doing before you started this company?
If you take me back all the way to Columbia, I was in the university back then in those days. In high school, I had done an exchange program in West Virginia, US. I built a lot of friends and those kinds of things. As I was going to college in Columbia, it was in those days that Columbia was not known for the right reasons. There was a lot of violence. There were things that were going on. My parents at the time wanted to ensure that I was okay. They convinced me to go back to the US. I transferred my credits and finished university at Marshall University in West Virginia.
One thing leads to the next. I got my first job. I was in healthcare initially and the idea was that I was going to go back to Columbia after I graduated. Here I am many years later. I started in healthcare. I worked there for about a year and a half and realized this was not for me, then I went into consulting doing organizational efficiency, and working with international clients. I started finding my way and that led me to pursue an MBA, which I did at the American University in Washington DC.
Subsequently, I joined the American Chemical Society, which is the largest scientific society in the world, a not-for-profit association. I had no idea about that organization or the industry, but my job there was to help the organization become global. it was an organization that for many years have been very focused on the US market and realized in order to serve its members and fulfill its mission needed to truly have a global presence and global footprint.
We started that process. I was with them for about ten years. I helped them become a truly global organization. One of the things that I found when I was doing this is that it was very difficult to get help. There was no firm that I could find that was similar to who we are right now. As a result, I was working with the big four consultant firms, Deloitte, KPMG and those types of organizations, with underground resources like marketing firms and law firms.
For any market that we were trying to enter, we were pursuing 4, 5, 6 different contracts with different organizations that were helping us do different things. I thought, “There’s got to be a better way to bring all this under one roof.” That will serve as an inspiration for Factum Global. What I was doing internally at that organization, we’re doing it for many other clients and helping make things easier for them.
When you had that idea you launched, how did you go about getting your first few clients?
That happened even before we launched.
Tell us that story.
I had a variety of people who had similar jobs to what I had. I was the director of global strategy and market development at ACS. I was talking to a lot of my counterparts both in the nonprofit sector and the for-profit sector. We were all facing similar challenges. It didn’t matter how large or how small these organizations were. ACS was at the time a $600 million organization, is now a lot larger than that. I was talking to people who had multibillion-dollar companies that were managing these things in multibillion-dollar companies, as well as smaller organizations of $5 million and $10 million.
We all have the same issue. It’s too complex. There’s too much to do. You’re trying to enter 1, 2, 3 and 5 markets at once. You’re trying to understand how to do it. You’re trying to build partnerships and alliances. Not a single place where you could say, “I have a partner that’s going to help me do this.” Some will take you as far help you with the research. Others will help you with the strategy. You had to figure out how piecemeal serve your execution.
Understand what the customers are looking for and try to close those deals. Click To TweetTalking to a lot of those people, they motivated me to start this company and said, “If you did something like that and you can make it work, we’re going to be there because we need those types of services.” When Factum Global started operating at the end of 2019, we already had a couple of our first clients that we had signed and we hit the ground running.
That’s a great way to start. Let’s now fast forward to 2024. How are you generating leads? What are you doing to build the pipeline? What’s working well for you all right now to do that?
Building The Pipeline
I’m still learning. If I sat here and told you I have to figure it out, I’d be lying. Anyone who’s reading and has a magic bullet, please call me. We do that in a variety of ways. I like to be myself and our executives, try to be in as many venues as we can to speak about the topics that we know and share some of the information that we’re collecting from our clients and the knowledge that we have. We speak at conferences and events and those types of things too. We get our name out there. We have built a pretty interesting technology stack that helps us proactively reach out to clients and target the industries and the type of personas that we’re looking to go after.
At any given time as you and I are speaking, there are emails going out to people that we have identified as potential clients that are probably looking for the type of services that we have. We have alliances and partnerships with other types of organizations that work in the periphery of what we do that are not competitors. Accounting firms, law firms, employees of record organizations and other types of organizations that work internationally and provide any services.
Sometimes we subcontract some work with them when we’re helping our clients, but it’s also a source of leads for us. We may have a marketing firm that is working with a particular client and trying to build a campaign for a particular country and they realize they’re trying to enter a new place and they may send them our way. It’s like a strategy that has different channels but we’re still perfecting it as my biggest thing every day is to try to figure out how do we bring more. Everything started organically. We had a good 1, 1.5 or 2 years of consistent growth through or organic growth through referrals. We still get those referrals. Now we’ve gotten way beyond that in the few years. We’re proactively reaching out and having a lot of conversations that we were not having before.
Would you say that the email outreach that you’re doing is generating leads, opportunities and conversations or is it still the stage where that isn’t happening yet but it’s something that you’re working on?
It is generating leads and conversations. It’s already led to business. Several proposals are on the table with potential clients. It does work. It’s a constant refinement of messages. We start with an assumption that something is going to resonate and we test against something else, perhaps something that we weren’t thinking was as needed is what’s getting a lot of attention. We try to be able to move as fast as we can in responding to those needs.
Could you give an example? The reason I’m asking is I think a lot of people want to do something similar. They want to reach out to their ideal clients. They can identify them through different places, different services, on and so forth. The challenge is how do you get in front of an ideal client, somebody that maybe doesn’t know you that well yet or maybe doesn’t know you at all, and how you that in a way where the message will resonate with them? They don’t see you as necessarily a salesperson trying to sell. What lessons have you learned or has your team learned as you’ve gone through that process of developing these messages to get them to the point where you’re generating inquiries, appointments, meetings, proposals and business? What stands out for you?
Crafting Your Message
First technology aspect of things. I personally was not as informed as the types of different tools that are available out there I’ve been amazed by what some of these tools can do. We started adapting our processes and bringing in technology. Quickly, I realized how inefficient and ineffective we were before them in trying to talk to customers. There are tools out there that allow you to filter a search by size of company, industry and titles. In our case, we’re in international expansion, we like titles like head of international expansion or head of business development
Is this like a LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo or something like that or ZoomInfo?
We use Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other tools like Azel. There are a number of other tools that we have assembled and they’re integrated with each other with our CRM. We use HubSpot for it. You can go in that, do your filters, identify and get lists that are somewhat decent and start testing your messages. The first one is the technology. Secondly, don’t fall in love with your messages. We all think we know exactly what our customers want. What we’ve learned is we have to test different things. I like to talk to my team about the Nike or a clothing company analogy where if you’re on your social media, you start seeing things from them. Maybe they start with tennis shoes and they see it doesn’t work and then they try to sell you a T-shirt and maybe it doesn’t work.
Finally, they go to a sweater and that’s what you were looking for and they cut your attention. Similarly, for us, as a consultant firm, we have different services that we offer. There are people out there who perhaps are looking for research, others may be looking for facilitation services for strategy, and others may be trying to enter the Middle East or North Africa. Unless they read exactly what they’re looking for, it’s more noise.
One of the things that we’ve learned is to try very different messages with language that is specific to the things that we offer, to see how people react to it and that we can see how many people are looking for service A versus service B. That has been very successful to us. Finally, I would say that consistency. It took a long time and you asked the question I’m sure because you’re probably very familiar with this, it doesn’t happen overnight. These campaigns take time. People will see your messages 4, 5, 6 or 7 times before they click on it or before you get your attention.
If you figure this is not working and you stop, then it’s never going to work. You got to be consistent with it. Those are some of the main lessons that we’ve learned through this process. As I told you, we’re still learning. We’re trying to refine it. We’re trying to figure out what’s working and respond to the needs of our customers as we learn through those tools.
Who’s running all this inside the organization? Is it one person or more? What is the people’s power behind this to get this running? Is it a full-time position of one person or more or what does that look like?
It is a full-time position that drives through the technology and helps us do the work that we described. It’s an all-hands-on-deck when it comes to meeting with potential customers, exploring opportunities and closing deals. Me and our chief operating officer are having dinner or meetings and every executive in the organization is having these meetings to try to understand what their customers are looking for and try to close those deals. I think business development is everybody’s responsibility.
A CEO's number one job is business development and trying to figure out how to bring new clients but keep the old ones happy to continue to hire us for more work. Click To TweetTry and summarize that a little bit and tell me if this is right or maybe I’m off the mark here. You and other executives inside the company are having meetings all the time. You’re looking for what people are talking about. You’re sharing that information with with the team internally, but there’s one person inside the company whose full-time job is pushing the button, sending the emails, updating the copy, doing whatever’s necessary to essentially generate the initial conversations and you or somebody else in the team would actually go and have those conversations. Is that correct?
That is correct. That person is helping us have better meetings because essentially he is understanding and pre-qualifying those leads and turning them into qualified leads that then we come in to have conversations with and try to turn into an opportunity. A real opportunity is at the time when they say, “Give me a proposal.” We come in to try to get to the point where they ask for a proposal and try to close those deals, but there is someone whose only job is to generate leads for us, push those buttons, send those emails, learn from the data so that this person is on a regular basis analyzing data, talking to us, letting us know what they think there is working, not working and testing against what’s working to try to make it work even better.
That’s an internal person on the team or is it external?
It’s internal. We have a full-time employee that does this. That person is supported by an external consultant who is an expert on this. When we need that person to take it to the next level, run into issues or when this person has questions, it has an additional resource that she can go to for technical questions to see what’s the latest with technology, I mean those types of things. We are creating an ecosystem where this person is fully supported by all of us but by this external expert who can serve as a mentor to her as she grows her expertise and helps us develop all these things.
You mentioned that you have 16, 18, or somewhere under 20 people, which includes full-time and then some part-time or contractors. For those who are working towards growing as well to those levels or even if they’re at a similar level and they’re looking to go beyond, I’m wondering if there’s anything that you always have top of mind as you think about hiring that the decision around how much money to spend or when to invest in bringing a new person on and tying that to ROI or is there any calculation, formula, mindset or decision making approach that you use to decide when it makes sense to hire or when it makes sense to hold off?
To Hire Or To Hold Off
It is not a perfect science and like with everything else you’re learning every day. I’ve learned the hard way a couple of times.
What does that mean when you say you’ve learned the hard way?
We’ve hired a couple of people at different times that perhaps we didn’t need to hire and could have handled in a different way. We could have done a 1099 agreement and it increases your costs because one of the things that we take pride in is that even though we’re a small organization, we want to provide as many benefits as we can to our employees. We want to provide a wonderful environment to work, but also tangible benefits. That costs money. We cannot afford to have people on the bench. That’s not something we can do. If there isn’t enough work, we’re not 1 of the big 4 that can have a number of people waiting there for the next project. They need to be utilizing and be working. One of the things that we’re doing is we’re looking for people who are okay getting their hands dirty in other areas.
You were hired to do A, B and C, but if we have a need here and there, we expect you to please give a hand. We all do it. I do it. Anyone in the organization has got to do it because we don’t have enough size yet to be able to have people dedicated to each function. We all do a little bit of everything here and that’s helped us quite a lot. When we’re hiring, we’re looking for people who want to grow, learn things in different areas and not specifically on what they do. we want to make sure that we truly need those people when we hire them.
We try to rely also on contractors. What helps us is that we can get a high caliber of people that we could otherwise not afford as a direct hire. We’ve been very lucky to bring in people who are highly experienced in the things that they do that add value because they know industries that perhaps others don’t know or areas of the business on what we do that are very specialized on parts of what they do, etc. They come in gladly under 1099 because they are seniors and they’re not looking to get employment. They want business themselves.
Since we’re very international, for those who may not be familiar with 1099, a contractor as opposed to a full-time person is what we’re talking about.
That’s a good point because I’m talking to you like we’re here in the US. We have contractors in parts of the world and they’re not 1099, they’re similar structures.
With that all in mind, I’m wondering, as you hire contractors, is there a place where you tend to go to find these people? Are you using any marketplaces like Catalant or something else like that? Are you tapping into a job posting on LinkedIn or sending emails out to your database? How do you approach finding those people, especially when they’re contractors?
There are two types of contractors that we’re using. There is the very senior contractor that comes to work for us and those come through our networks and asking people that we know in the industries that we want to find them or with the skillset that we’re looking for, etc. We rarely publish those types of positions. We literally go through our networks until we find what we’re looking for. There are contractors that we have in supporting roles. There’s a platform called Handshake that allows you to post jobs that end up getting in front of X number of universities. You have to essentially put your company profile and the universities accept you or reject you to recruit to their students. We have relationships with a handful of universities and we post positions through those channels. We put them on LinkedIn and get resumes to try to figure out who has the skillsets that we’re looking for.
It depends on the type of person that you’re going after. The more senior the person, the less we rely on those types of things the more we rely on networks. If there are things there’s specific like marketing, research support or things like that that are more operational in nature, then yes we post those positions. We go through some of those things. We tend to support a couple of universities that we’re very engaged with. We have an agreement with American University where I graduated my MBA where we’re almost on a semester basis, we are bringing groups of MBAs and undergrads that are doing projects for us. That serves as well for us to see talent. We’ve hired a couple of people through that mechanism because they’re doing projects for us. It’s like a six-month interview and then we take them through the process.
It sounds like a great opportunity and channel there. I imagine that for you over the last few years and as you’ve been hiring more and more, your role and where you spend your time have likely changed. The usual path is that a founder like yourself would start off early days doing a lot of the delivery, being very, very involved in the actual delivery of the work and client engagements, some communication. As you’re hiring people, there are probably some changes. I’m wondering, for you, if that’s been the case. What does that look like? If you think about your typical weekly schedule or your overall pie of time, how you break up that pie in terms of how much time do you spend on different activities?
I’m still trying to break out of that cycle. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I’m still doing consulting. I’m still engaged in many of the engagements, especially with clients that are long-term clients. As I was telling you, we have clients that are multi-year clients no. We’re very deeply involved with them and I tend to be involved with those types of clients. Over time, I wish I could spend less time consulting and more time directing or looking from higher up, providing advice, answering questions and coaching my team as they do that. We’re getting there. It’s in some areas and hopefully, we’ll get there at some point, but I’m still doing both. We’ve been doing that. I’m spending a lot of time on business development.
Every success story went through ups and downs. People fail many times before they succeed. Click To TweetAs CEOs, our number one job is business development and trying to figure out how to not only bring new clients but keep the ones that we have happy so that they continue to hire us for more work. I spend a lot of time coaching my team and understanding what’s going on with our finances or marketing and with our business development efforts from the behind-the-scenes. One day is not the same as the other. If you think of that pie that you asked me, it depends on if I have a whole lot of deliverables with a client, I’m spending more time doing consulting that I’m doing wrong in the company, but I try to spend at least 60% of my time in the company versus consulting. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t work.
You’re saying that it depends on the week or the month, but in general, if you had to assign what percentage of your time right now on average you’re spending consulting versus business development versus call it leadership company stuff, how do you maybe look at those three buckets and what percentage would they be?
I’d probably spend 35% on consulting, 20% on the leadership of the company, etc., and the rest is business development. I try to spend as many hours of my time on something that is going to bring more business to the organization if I can do that in other ways and fantastic building relationships, etc., but if you ask me the ideal scenario, that portion of the pie would be bigger and bigger. I am very lucky and extremely lucky to have an amazing chief operating officer. He’s taken a lot of that responsibility of running the day-to-day of the organization away from me. He’s supervising all the different areas of the company. We talk on a daily basis, 2, 3, 4 times, but he’s doing it and he’s taking all this away from me, which has allowed me to do the things that I’m talking about and focus more on business development as well.
You mentioned that the average project value might be about $150,000 and it can go up significantly from there. You mentioned that you have some projects or work more maybe in facilitation that might be $10,000 or $15,000. How do you think about that? You have only a certain amount of capacity inside of the company. I wonder why take on the $10,000 or $15,000 work when you have other work that’s $150,000 or significantly more? What’s the strategy or the decision around taking on that lower-valued work it’s because to some that might seem isn’t a distraction from filling your calendar, your capacity with low-value work that potentially could be a much larger project. What do you think about that?
It all comes down to the level of effort. What we’re trying to do is diversify our sources of revenue and those larger contracts, $75,000, $100,000 or anything above that have a much larger cycle for decision making. The clients are thinking about whether it is you or another competitor and they’re asking a lot of questions. They’re reviewing the proposal and were adjusting it. When we start the work, it’s usually at least six months or something that we’re going to be investing into an engagement like that. We are trying to think about these in terms like a pyramid where at the top of that pyramid we have those types of contracts in our sweet spot, which is consulting and advising, but we add a lot of value in other ways.
For example, I was telling you about facilitation. That to us is like making bread. It’s like a repetitive process that we understand very well and it takes about a day of preparation, a day of facilitation, and you are done. It’s cashflow for the organization. It allows you to this smaller cycles get money in the bank faster. We do trainings. It’s the same thing. The training’s already packaged. We know how to deliver the training. We know exactly how we do it. We tweak it depending on our audiences and those types of things. It doesn’t require a whole lot of preparation, thinking and work. It can be executed fast.
If you get into a deal where you’re selling training, it’s all delivery pretty much. You can cash in and contribute towards your bottom line. That’s how we think about it. If it was a pyramid at the bottom of this pyramid, we have all these different things that add to that. Most importantly is that those smaller services could be an entry point for bigger contracts. We don’t think short term. You could be facilitating a strategy session, you are learning all about an organization and then you realize, “You need this and that. You’re missing research. You don’t understand what’s happening here. You have an opportunity there. We can help you figure that out.”
Those entry points can potentially lead to other types of things. I’ll give you an example. I did a facilitation thing. I did it myself because this was a person from my own personal network. They asked me to do it. I went. I did the facilitation thing. This is for a board of directors. Fast forward 3 months and 1 of the members of that board of director who is an executive of its own company, called me to explore an opportunity to do some work for them for this other company. He was in this company’s board, but he works for another company. It led to more business. I think the smaller dollar amount things are not to be ignored. They can be an entry point. You can look at them as business development. They also move the cashflow.
You’re hitting on some important points. It’s almost like a discovery offer. It gives people a little taste of what it’s like to work with you, build the trust and get the familiarity. That can learn lead to significantly larger projects, especially because usually the first project is the hardest one to sell. The first sale always the hardest one. Once you get your foot in the door, even with something smaller, it makes it easier to turn into something much larger. That’s great.
We’re going to wrap up here, but I wanted to ask you about how do you deal with challenges? Here’s the context. I think every leader, every founder, co-founder of a business gets punched in the stomach at times. Something happens. Initially, it doesn’t feel like a great thing yet here you are, you’re still here, you’re still going and the company’s growing. My guess is that you’ve probably been punched in the stomach once or twice before. You’ve had some challenges and experiences.
I wonder for you over the years of building this business, I know it’s not that long yet, but you’ve gone through some interesting times with a pandemic and everything else. How do you respond to challenges when that situation happens where something catches you off guard, there’s a really big disappointment, maybe you lose a client or just something, whatever it might be? Is there a mindset that you bring forward that you feel is really critical to allowing you to continue moving forward?
Success Mindet
From the very beginning I knew this was going to be a rollercoaster. You hear it every time. If you’re into soccer, football, for the rest of the world, Lionel Messi is the best example of a 35-year-old overnight success. Everybody is like, “How successful you are.” It wasn’t overnight. This guy had been training his entire life and practicing his entire life, and the same can be said of Michael Jordan and everybody else. Every success story out there that we think would happen overnight went through up and downs. People fail many times before they succeed. Have I been punched in the stomach many times? I told you about that pandemic. Think about it.
We have been operating for six months and the pandemic hit. Our clients put everything on hold for almost a year. Some of them even longer than that, potential clients that we had in our pipeline said, “It’s not the right time. Let’s see what happens here.” I had to make a decision, “Am I going to take this as a, ‘You tried, but this happened and is out of your control,’ and shut down and stop or are you going to keep pushing?” I made that decision, “This is going to end. This cannot last forever. I’m going to take this as an opportunity to bring the right people around me and try to figure out how to get this done.” I am lucky. We have an amazing advisory board. These are outstanding people. Everyone in that board is way better than me. I can rely on them to ask questions to put the problems in front of them and say, “We’re facing this situation. Have you been here before? What do we do? Do you know anyone who can help us?”
Our mindset is that we know that the problems are going to come. We know that the issues are going to be there, but if we are surrounded by people that can help us figure those things out, we know we’re going to be able to solve those issues and come out stronger. That’s the mindset. I’m very lucky. It’s not only the advisory board, the team that we have built, I spoke about my chief operating officer already once. He’s amazing. The team that we have built, everyone who comes into the organization, if they don’t click with that mindset and that personality to call somehow that the culture that we’ve been trying to build, they’re not going to last very long because it’s a startup mentality that we have to have on a daily basis. We have to be resilient. It’s not easy. I didn’t have all this gray when I started and it’s getting up there.
That’s what entrepreneurship is all about. What makes successful entrepreneurs successful is they can bounce back. They don’t let the challenges or the roadblocks stop them. It might slow them down, it might knock them down, but they get back up clearly that’s the path you’re on. I want to thank you much for coming on, sharing a bit of your story and and journey with us. If people can learn more about you, your company, everything you have going on, where should they go? What’s the website or one place they should go do that?
The website is www.FactumGlobal.com. Everything you need is right there. We’re on LinkedIn, we’re on Twitter now X, but truly find us on the website or LinkedIn. That’s probably where you’re going to find the most information. Thanks for having me. This is exciting when you get to talk a little bit about your journey. I’ve visited a few of your episodes and learned so much from other entrepreneurs. I think we have a lot to learn from each other. Our company is very young. I’m not here to teach in any way. I am learning every day and I’m getting those punches almost on a weekly basis. I’m very happy to be here. Thanks for having me. It’s been very enjoyable.
Thanks.
Important Links
- Factum Global
- ConsultingSuccess.com/Grow
- LinkedIn – Factum Global
- Twitter – Factum Global
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!https://www.consultingsuccess.com/podcast