Are you looking to scale your consulting business? This episode will deliver that to you! Today, Kenny Goldman, the co-founder and CEO of Kicksaw, discusses how consulting businesses can elevate their practice through the Fractional Services Model. Kenny also brings insights on strategically determining optimal time and innovative technology and systems. He delves into building and sustaining meaningful partnerships with large enterprises. From implementing strategies to reduce customer churn to prioritizing crafting exceptional experiences for clients, Kenny brings so much value to this episode. Tune the volume up and join Kenny and Michael today.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to:
- Elevate your practice to surpass the 6-figure mark.
- Strategically determine the optimal time to integrate technology and systems.
- Build and sustain meaningful partnerships with large enterprises.
- Implement strategies to reduce customer churn, particularly with key accounts.
- Prioritize crafting a consistently exceptional experience for all clients.
- Ensure your services are priced both competitively and sustainably.
Leave a review on Apple podcasts and get a free e-book. Email a picture of your review to claim your free e-book to [email protected].
Apply for the Clarity Coaching Program
—
Joining Michael on this episode is Kenny Goldman who is the CEO and Cofounder of Kicksaw, a fractional sales ops consulting practice that helps companies scale with Salesforce. His clients include big companies like AT&T, Typeform, Vidyard, and many more. Kenny emphasizes the difficulties around scaling a business and the challenges that come with going from 6 to 7 figures.
Having someone by your side to help you see things that you don’t is imperative if you’re looking to grow your consulting firm. If you want to work directly with the Consulting Success team and receive personalized coaching and support to optimize and grow your business marketing and revenue, visit ConsultingSuccess.com/Grow to learn more and apply.
Here’s a quick reminder. If you leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, you’re not only going to get a free eBook but you’re also going to enter a draw to win the Momentum course. All you have to do is send an email with evidence of the review over to [email protected]. Let me tell you a little bit more about what you’re going to learn in this episode.
The first is how to elevate your practice to surpass the six-figure mark, how to strategically determine the optimal time to integrate technology and systems, how to build and sustain meaningful partnerships with large enterprises, how to implement strategies to reduce customer churn, particularly with key accounts, how to prioritize crafting a consistently exceptional experience for all of your clients, and lastly, how to ensure your services are priced both competitively and sustainably. Here to share with you his story and insights is Kenny Goldman. Enjoy.
Kenny, welcome.
Thank you. I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Let’s start and have you explain what is Kicksaw.
There are so many ways that I can take the answer and dive into different paths but at the highest and most basic level, Kicksaw is a Salesforce consulting partner. We help companies with anything and everything for the most part that pertains to their Salesforce investment but doesn’t limit us to Salesforce, integrations, third-party systems, and so forth.
You cofounded a few businesses before Kicksaw. In 2018, you started Kicksaw. Why 2018? What was going on? What made you decide to start this specific consulting business?
It was very organic. There was no intent between my cofounder and me to take this to where it is now. We started working together in 2017. This is pretty unique. I cofounded Kicksaw with someone I had never met in person before. Kyle Morris is based out of Bend, Central Oregon. I’m in Toronto. We live in different countries. We had worked together because I was working at a company called Hired. I brought him on as a contractor consultant to help guide me and support me. We developed a good relationship and then he started to do freelancing. I joined him and worked for him for the better half of a year.
We got to a point where we were starting to see an influx of businesses, all of which were centered around a few AEs specifically out in San Francisco, California. That introduced us to the Salesforce path but even before then, there were two things that were happening that required us to form the business. One was we had clients saying, “My boss won’t let me sign a document with Kenny or Kyle. You need a company and insurance. We need something a little bit more tangible.”
Secondly, we went to make our first hire. They came back the next day and said, “My wife won’t let me quit a job to join two dudes freelancing. I need you to contribute to my 401(k). I need benefits and a website. I need to be able to tell my kids what I do. I need something.” We were starting to feel the pressures of being freelancers. We decided to incorporate the company, create Kicksaw, and go from there.
How far along were you at that point? You’re thinking about making that first hire. People both on the client side as well as prospective employees in the company are saying, “You need to be a little bit more legitimate.” Where were you revenue-wise? How far into this were you at that point?
Maybe $500,000 in rev, in and around that range with 6 to 10 clients. It was just Kyle and I. We have had a couple of freelancers here and there but one of those freelancers was someone we ended up bringing on full-time.
Is there anything about it that you would do differently? I love what you said. You didn’t have a website. You weren’t very formal. You didn’t have all the usual business plans, processes, and systems. You were out there selling and delivering not just with one client. Some people say, “I got up to $250,000 a year but I had 1 client. I had a job.” You had 5 to 10 clients with $500,000 in revenue but you still were missing a lot of the things that a typical consultant business owner would think that they need to have to even reach $500,000 in revenue. Looking back, is there anything that you would do differently about what you did? How do you feel about that?
I don’t think so. We went in with very low expectations and enjoyed what we loved to do. We made sufficient money that allowed us to do what we wanted to do but our desire to continue to grow this thing and organically continue to follow where it’s taking us is what brought us to where we are now. It wasn’t of a desire to turn this into a $10 million company at that time.
What went well and what I would make sure to continue to do next time around is we were very aligned on what our philosophies were, our beliefs, our values, and the type of organization we wanted to run, whether it was 2 people or 200 people. That’s what kept us going and allowed us to move at the pace we were moving at.
We always say, “Perfect is the enemy of good.” A lot of these processes and systems we didn’t have up and running. Nor would I recommend that you try to over-engineer a solution. We were on Excel sheets for a long time before we moved to things like QuickBooks, Salesforce, and other systems and project management tools. That got us very far and we were successful. Eventually, we started to formalize things, especially as we brought on people.
Why do you think you were so successful in getting to $500,000 without a lot of the things that people think you need to have? What led to that?
First and foremost is delivery because without delivering on the value that you’re communicating, it’s hard for you to retain clients and be able to maintain that revenue while you search for new revenue. If you’ve got a leaky faucet or bucket problem, then you’re consistently going to be refilling that bucket with new clients and it’s unsustainable. Eventually, you’re not going to be making it.
Delivery is important but why were they coming to you if you didn’t have necessarily a lot of these things that people think you need to have?
Our business is 100% inbound. Back then, our business was 100% inbound but coming from the small select clients that we had and making those asks, or they were leaving and joining another job landed us a couple of other clients. The second thing beyond delivering a high degree of quality is sales. My background is in sales. I love selling. I’m consistently selling.
We’re very mature and have sophisticated sales processes and motions. We treat them very seriously at Kicksaw. We track things appropriately. We have a process that we follow. That has been a key part of our success too. While we’re still inbound, we still take sales very seriously and go through that process with clients and try to deliver that amazing experience.
I’m going to make a little note there. I want to come back to have you share a little bit more about what that process looks like, the metrics that you track, and things of that nature. To zoom out for a moment, you’re a top Salesforce consulting partner. What does that mean?
It means different things to different people but one of the things that the Salesforce industry, specifically clients and Salesforce themselves, particularly like or look for in a partner is domain expertise. Salesforce looks for it because their clients look for it. If I’m a tech company and I’m expecting to build in concepts that pertain to SaaS like ARR metrics, booking, MRR, ECV, TCV, and net retention revenue, and I wanted to start tracking all these things and understand how they play in together, I’m going to look for a partner that can help guide me through that process and understand what I’m looking for so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel or learn on someone’s dime.
Domain expertise is key. Communicating that and conveying that in a sales call but also through collateral into Salesforce is extremely important. Like any other business, you have to have clientele. One of the things that we’re fortunate about is our network is primarily in the Bay Area. You have certain clients like TripActions back in the day. In my background, I came from Vidyard. They were a client. These are more well-known SaaS companies that were known entities in the market. When you show them and have social proof of what those companies are doing, most other earlier-stage tech companies want to replicate what they did. We can implement that same vision and capability.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Click To TweetYou talk about the importance of domain expertise and also having that social proof. Client examples and case studies support that. Your background has tech there. You’ve worked with SaaS companies like Vidyard. I know the domain expertise and what you are known for inside of the Salesforce ecosystem is not only tech. Tech is one of the areas but it’s also health and life sciences. Where does that come from? Was that there at the beginning? Is that something that evolved and developed after the initial tech focus?
It evolved. Salesforce’s HLS and splitting out industries is also relatively new. Health Cloud as a product only came on the market in 2016 or 2017. It was around the time we became a firm. It’s not like it’s a sophisticated product and it has been around for decades. Salesforce too is still figuring out health and life sciences.
When we started, we had this select group of clients that were specifically in the health tech space. That’s how we broke into our niche in Salesforce. We’re particularly good at tech and we have worked with these health tech companies that sell into different industries or different types of groups, whether it’s B2B or B2C, particularly offering health tech solutions. That’s how we broke into that.
Naturally, we started to get introduced into a med device company. They had an element of software but they also had hardware that they sold. We applied similar models, learned, and figured that out. That naturally transpired into working directly with providers like med spas or things like that but a lot of it was seeing what other people did in the past and what good looks like, and hiring people with that domain expertise to come into Kicksaw, teach us, and give us that skillset so that we can bring them to our clients as they were coming to us.
I was trying to bounce to that but we also struggled with saying no to some of those deals if we weren’t capable of doing it because it only takes one deal for something to go wrong and for Salesforce to hear about it to create a ripple effect internally. We wanted to be very mindful about making sure to take on the right deals early on, especially.
Talking about the partnership or the collaboration with Salesforce or how you’re positioned as one of the top partners there, what are some mistakes? People often make mistakes when they enter into partnerships, especially when they’re looking to work with larger organizations that have a lot of these dreams and beliefs of how wonderful things will be. I’m wondering. From your experience, are there any mistakes or lessons that you’ve learned in terms of the partnership either with Salesforce or a company that you would encourage people to avoid or at least be aware of?
Salesforce is a unique ecosystem. It’s very rewarding. There are a lot of opportunities as a partner but it’s unique in the sense that it’s a little bit more developed and reliant on partners than other ecosystems. You take a look at AWS, Microsoft, or even some smaller tech companies out there. They either provide their professional services, and there isn’t as much of a professional services market out there, or they don’t lean on partners and bring them into deals as frequently as Salesforce would.
It’s not a model that can be applied where if you’re a partner of SAP or things like that, you will find the same success in the Salesforce ecosystem. It is unique. A lot of it is building that brand loyalty and recognition across Salesforce. When I take a look at our business, we’ve got our clients, the ones that pay us and the ones that we’re beholden to doing great quality work for but I look at Salesforce as a client too. They’re a channel for us. They’re a client that we want to maintain relationships with, market to, and sell to as much as we do any other marketing initiatives. We’re marketing to Salesforce consistently to make sure that we’re top of mind and thought of across the entire organization.
How do you do that? Some people will be listening to this and going, “I also see an opportunity for us in our industry to partner with X organization software, vendor, or whatever it might be.” What are those best practices? In your case, how do you market to Salesforce, build that relationship, or sell to it? What have you identified as the best practices or things that you consistently do that deliver an impact or have an impact?
One of the first things that I did that many founders don’t do is go to the market and see what other people have done. You would be surprised at how often other people who have been in your shoes once upon a time are willing to give back or share with you tips, tricks, and feedback. I went out and saw other CEOs. Some of them are still actively in the Salesforce ecosystem and some of them have sold and are no longer here. I’ve asked them how they have done it. I got a lot of feedback. I was able to develop my perspective and thoughts based on how I viewed the market and my learnings.
I was able to take small nuggets of what they had said and apply them to our process. 1) “How do you level up quickly?” Go ask people who have done it before. 2) I was putting on my sales hat. I went to different AEs, RVPs, and AVPs, sat with them, and bought them coffee, or whatever it was. I went to the office, met with them, sat there for 30 minutes, and understood how they thought and what they cared about. Like any ICP, this customer profile has aspects that they care about and respective agendas as they should. AEs want to sell. They’re commissioned and compensated off selling licenses.
In case some people aren’t aware, Account Executives or AE is what you’re referring to.
They have their agenda. They want to sell and make money as any salesperson would. They also want to be ethical in the process. They do lean on partners to say, “What’s the right product and approach?” It’s things along those lines, upgrading, and whatnot. They’re relying on a partner to do that. Understand what AEs care about, how they operate, and their motivations. Each AE and team is slightly different. They’re going through separate challenges. Being able to tweak our approach and style to support them but understanding what they care about and considering that in the deals is super important in the Salesforce ecosystem.
When you first reached out to other companies and CEOs that also had more established partnerships with Salesforce and you were looking for the best practices to learn from their experience, were you contacting people who might view you as a competitor? Were you contacting people in different industries? Some people might say, “Why would somebody tell you what has worked for them? Wouldn’t there be some competitive issue there?” I want to try and speak to or potentially remove any of those limiting beliefs that people have. Who are you contacting? Walk us through that.
Both. I was contacting people who were not directly in the Salesforce ecosystem, just owners of consulting companies to see how they operated, how they found customers, and how they managed their team metrics and KPIs. I was reaching out to Salesforce consulting company CEOs, many of whom were very happy to engage and speak to me. There’s a misconception around, “They’re a competitor.”
The reality is there’s enough food, particularly in the Salesforce ecosystem, for everyone to eat. I don’t think anyone feels overly territorial about it because, at the end of the day, you can sell as much as you want. If you can’t deliver and do a good job, you’re not going to sustain very long in the Salesforce ecosystem. It’s big but it’s small enough that I can tell you about a lot of partners and experiences, positive and negative. It’s small enough that you hear these stories and word gets around.
It is a relatively tight-knit community but I’ve also had the opportunity to go to different Salesforce events. You meet the CEOs and get to know them. They’re great people too. I’ve developed relationships and friendships with some of them. I don’t talk to them regularly but once upon a time, we talk about things. Oftentimes they’re bigger than Kicksaw. They’re very open and willing. It has created this impact where I too want to be open and willing to other people to start their company and more than happy to give them feedback, suggestions, and tips from my experiences.
It’s amazing how open people will be and how much they will share with you if you ask them but it seems like so many people avoid even going on to make that ask. It’s a big opportunity for many. Some people might view aligning your business so closely with a large player, in this case, Salesforce, as a potential risk. How do you view that? Did you ever consider that? What are your thoughts on partnering and having such a big concentration or portion of your overall revenue profit coming directly from one company?
I don’t necessarily disagree with that approach. At the end of the day, it’s relying on one company. In my perspective, that’s the bet we’re making. It’s no different than some companies building their apps on Apple and things like that or how they track users’ activity on websites and changing factors to privacy. Everyone is reliant to some degree. Maybe we’re more so for Salesforce but the ecosystem has demonstrated growth and sustained growth. There’s a lot of activity out there. Relying and working with partners is an already-known concept. It’s not like I have to educate people. Frankly, there’s a lot of room for improvement and there’s a better way to do what many partners aren’t doing already out there.
For those factors, relatively speaking, it’s a safer bet. Despite some of the turmoil in their macroeconomic factors, there are still 4,000 Salesforce account executives and hundreds of thousands of customers spending billions of dollars on Salesforce consulting. For us to get to $50 million, $100 million, or $150 million, we’re barely even a drop in the bucket at that point. Those are the factors that I use to say, “We don’t need this thing to be growing 50% year-over-year for us to be able to grow 100% year-over-year and sustain and build a profitable company. The market is already there for us.”
You talked about sales. Even though all of your business or the vast majority is inbound, people are coming to you rather than you having to go outbound to them. You still focus a lot on the sales process and the pipeline. If you were to share a couple of things that stand out that you feel are most important, and they could be metrics that you track, or I don’t know if it’s your secret sauce but maybe it’s something that you do that you feel moves the needle, what would you share around the sales process with others?
What I focused very heavily on is articulating the competitive advantages or what makes us unique in the ecosystem. A lot of Salesforce consulting partners will focus on things like domain expertise or Salesforce expertise. Those things are very important but even before you get to that point, there are a lot of factors that are important. The way I think about this is Salesforce is a skill that has become somewhat commoditized. There are millions of people who are learning Salesforce every single year. This is circa early 2000s or late 2000s. People were learning HTML and CSS.
Salesforce is a unique ecosystem. It's rewarding. It's developed and reliant on partners and other ecosystems. Click To TweetWe go to places like CodePen or CTOs from CodePen and learn how to write HTML and CSS over the course of a month. Nowadays, the same thing has happened with Salesforce. You can go on many different sites, learn how to use Salesforce, get certified, go through Trailhead, or whatever it may be. Those factors while still very important and critical to the deal don’t necessarily differentiate you from the other twenty firms that have similar skillset or expertise. For us, it’s focusing on, “Where is there unnecessary friction in the market? What are people not doing? How do we address those friction elements?” I’ll give you a couple of examples.
The first is how we approach actively selling in the ecosystem. The way most SIs go to market is they will hire account executives. Those account executives will sit with Salesforce account executives and co-sell the deal. The problem with that is neither of those members is technical. When a client says, “How do I solve this problem? How have you solved this problem in the past? Here’s our unique scenario or why we’re a special snowflake,” knowing that call can scope out the level of complexity or the magnitude.
They have to play broken telephone and the partner has to bring in a solution architect into the deal to scope things out, a pre-sales architect, or whatever it might be. We have tried to reduce the friction there and cut that time by introducing a solution engineer as our salesperson. We don’t have account executives. We have solution engineers. Solution engineers typically come from in-house or the delivery side where they can still speak about the business capabilities and help co-sell but they’re also technical enough to be able to understand the dynamics of the deal and be able to size it up relatively quickly after a 30-minute or 1 hour-long call.
That allows us to approach the deal with the right level of precaution or urgency depending on what we know about it. It allows us to produce statements of work a lot sooner because we don’t have to play broken telephone or get multiple people in it. It allows us to create a valuable impact on that first call and speak to the needs of a client immediately.
You’ve identified something that a lot of firms are not doing. You’re making that process more efficient, effective, and valuable for everybody involved. To play the devil’s advocate, let’s say that these other firms go, “That’s a great idea. We should do that too. We’re going to get somebody technical involved in the sales process.” How do you then think about that? How do you respond to that if that advantage shifts because that becomes the status quo where technical people are involved in the sales process?
I think about it as much as it’s less about any one thing you do and more about the entire experience. I heard this from one of my mentors. To me, what makes Kicksaw unique is we consider the product to be the experience. Every interaction that someone has with Kicksaw, every person, every engagement, every email, every document that we produce, or every call that we have contributes to the experience.
We think about the entire experience being the Kicksaw product. I’ve seen this firsthand. Most companies don’t consider it that way. As long as we continue to focus on making everything great throughout the entire experience, our customers, our prospects, and Salesforce will start to see that through over and over again. It’s not one particular thing but how we do everything at Kicksaw that over time will continue to beat up the competition.
Speaking about everything, one thing that has been impacting probably everybody in the world in one form or another has been higher inflation. I’m wondering. Has this impacted your business in any way? How are things as opposed to at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023?
The macroeconomic factors have impacted Kicksaw. There’s no question about it. Spending is down. People aren’t buying software as much as they have been. An important consideration and thought that I’ve always had with Kicksaw is I care about optionality. We have been able to maintain and keep our costs down and extremely lean. That has allowed us to be a sustainable and profitable organization despite this being a relatively slow year and spending has gone down drastically.
We have still been profitable every single month in 2023. That has given us the optionality to be aggressive, attack the market differently, think differently, and not feel like we need to address things from a place of urgency or scarcity but focus on what’s going to drive the benefit of Kicksaw, our clients, and our employees long term. We try to make sure that we’re always in control. While things haven’t been great, how do we take advantage of the system?
How many people are at Kicksaw?
We’re about 75.
Have you had to make adjustments in terms of the number of people, headcount, and so forth given budgets being pulled back from clients and the overall environment? My question is this. What could you offer specifically? Are there any examples of what you’ve done to be able to maintain profitability given the challenges in the marketplace and the economy overall?
There are a bunch of things but one of the biggest things that we did was we made sure to maintain our books and records and had finance at a relatively early size and stage of the company. For instance, I track my budget every single week. From a very early period at Kicksaw, we were very meticulous about every dollar, how we spent it, how we earned it, projections, and forward-looking things, and always being conservative with our estimates. We were always saying, “We’re going to collect less, spend more, and make less.” Every month, we ended up making more, spending less, and collecting more.
We were always above our estimates but we were projected to be lower. That made sure that we had the right discipline every single month around the decisions that we made. We tried not to overspend, overhire, and things along those lines but come at it from a frugal standpoint. That was a key element to how we’re able to ensure that we’re building for long-term success and stability, not from a place of scarcity. Having finance contribution and visibility is super key early on.
How do you approach pricing at Kicksaw? Are you using hourly fees or a project-based rate? What is the approach that you take to pricing? What do you think about setting your fees and pricing?
We have a couple of models at Kicksaw. We have our fractional consulting model, which consists of two elements, a monthly fixed fee and time and material on top of it. The reason why we do that is most consulting firms will estimate their proposal based on taking the building work, take 10% of that, and apply it to project management. I’m of a very different belief there. Project management needs to be embedded in every single call. We need to be working with our clients on not just project management but strategic guidance on project management. It’s being able to understand their goals and expectations and layer that into the timeline and costs associated with things.
If you have a project manager joining every fourth call, it’s hard to maintain that consistency but also gather all the information appropriately. That’s what happens with clients. Project managers will join every third or fourth call because that’s how they have been allocated. You get to the 80% of the project timeline but you’ve used 120% of the budget, and something is not working well. That’s why so many projects fail. That monthly fixed fee allows us to ensure that the consultant is involved at every stage on every single call.
The other belief is that all of the admin hands-on keyboard work is time and material. It’s the addition of those two elements that contribute to our fractional model. The reason why it’s time and material is because I can guarantee that in the past 24 years of Salesforce existing, there has never been a single project out there where 100% of the requirements have been defined upfront. It doesn’t exist.
It’s saying, “I want to build a house,” and assuming that the blueprint you designed, every nook and cranny, and every aspect of it stays completely. It doesn’t happen. Stuff happens throughout the build phase. We want to be flexible and nimble enough to anticipate and move in that direction. If we scope out a project very concisely, from day one, we’re already going to be misaligned with the client because requirements will naturally inevitably change.
To summarize that a little bit, you have a fixed monthly fee or a recurring retainer type of fee that is there for the duration of the engagement. On top of that, you have time, materials, and additional stuff that comes in that you don’t know necessarily how much of that you’re going to need. That secondary amount will change potentially every month depending on the involvement of your team and time spent.
It’s correlated to the monthly fee. We have three tiers of the monthly fee and that dictates how much time we can build. There are anomalies to that. It’s almost a little bit like a conveyor belt. We can only move so much at the top of that downstream. You can only create so many of the widgets. From a PM and solution architect standpoint, if we can only gather so many requirements in a week and create so many user stories, we can only complete so many of those user stories. They’re commensurate with one another.
Sometimes clients may hit us and say, “We have written all these requirements. We need more admins than PMs,” at which point, we will make sure to adjust accordingly but oftentimes, clients have less preparation and have done less business discovery or analysis. They need us to come in, refine and tweak all these things, and contribute to a lot of the work that many partners don’t do.
Align the incentives of our consulting team with that of our clients. Click To TweetTake this as an example. This is hypothetical. If your monthly fee was $15,000 a month, are the time and materials or that secondary element might be up to $5,000 additional per month? It’s a total of up to $20,000 but it may only end up being in one month $3,000. You would only bill a client $18,000 as opposed to $20,000.
That’s generally correct. There’s flexibility with that and they can dictate the T&M portion.
That’s helpful because I’m imagining some people going, “How do you then reassure clients that they’re not going to get some crazy bill that they can prepare for?” You’re giving them an understanding of what the top might be. You’re not going to generally go over that but if they don’t use all of the secondary part of it, then they won’t pay.
The goal is to try to align the incentives of our consulting team with that of our clients. The typical consultant at a normal Salesforce SI or Systems Integrator is that they’re almost entirely compensated or commissioned for the variable components of utilization. The problem with utilization first and foremost is clients don’t give a shit about utilization, hard stop. It doesn’t matter to them.
Number two is utilization is not a good metric to define client success, meaning if I want this project completed, and my biggest challenges are oftentimes in non-billing intensive work like training, change management, adoption, or things like that, as a consultant, I’m not incentivized to invest in a lot of that effort because it’s not high billable work.
We don’t want to incentivize our team on utilization. Frankly, we don’t track utilization because we think it’s a poor determinator of client success. You get into things like Thanksgiving over the US holiday. People are out that week. You’re not going to hit the utilization target. It’s a bad metric to determine If the client is happy or not. It’s an internal metric but it’s how a lot of companies operate their machine and what they use to determine success for engagements.
I want to thank you for coming on and sharing. We will make sure that people can learn more about you, Kicksaw, and all the work that you do. Before we wrap up, here are a couple of final questions. You have your cofounder and a team of 75 people. You’re growing. You also have a young child. Share with me 1 or 2 things that you do on a consistent basis to maintain your focus and high level of productivity or any habits that are part of your life that you feel make an impact.
Have people who you can talk to. I would not be where I am without the right advisor, mentorship, and guidance. These are people who have been there and done that who can support you, help you, answer questions, and give you direction. Similarly, I’ve helped them with things. That has been a huge factor in any successes I’ve had.
Clear communication with my wife, which is around expectations around work, timing, how things operate, knowing what she expects, what I expect, what works, and what doesn’t work. Those things are important in maintaining a strong personal family life. It’s key to success at work. 3) Sleep. I don’t compromise on sleep. I make sure to get my 7 to 8 hours every single night and prioritize that accordingly. 4) I do have a coach that I’ve started to work with. That has given me the environment to speak openly about things without any judgment or concern about confidentiality.
As a CEO, I sometimes don’t always get the opportunity to talk through things. I have mentors and advisors but I also don’t want to eat up a ton of their time and engage with them. It’s not always where I get to talk to them about certain topics. The coach has given me the opportunity to invest in understanding how I think, talking about things openly, and thinking through things versus bottling them up or keeping them inside.
My final question for you is this. Is there a book that you have either read or listened to, fiction or nonfiction, that you enjoyed and you think others might too?
There are a few books I’m opening up. I started to use an app called Headway, which condenses the learnings of a book into small snippets. I’m on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s a solid book. That has been great. I’ve enjoyed that book so far. That’s what comes to mind. I’m trying to balance business-related content when I’m not working. Fiction is a nice relief. Getting my mind off things has been great.
What are you reading fiction-wise?
I’ve got 3 or 4 books that I’m going through.
What genre?
Drama, mystery, and things like that. Some comedic relief gets embedded in there. Those types of books that I can read before bed for half an hour take my mind off things. I can’t think of work. It gets me tired. Those have been great.
Thanks again so much for coming on. I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, Kicksaw, and everything that you are doing. Where’s the one place they should go to find out more?
Honestly, Kicksaw.com has got everything and all our content. You can sign up for our newsletter. You can hit me up on Drift there. I do respond to it. I try to centralize everything there. I don’t do much on social media because I try to push everything through Kicksaw.com. Everything is over there.
That’s good stuff. Thanks so much, Kenny.
Thank you, Michael. I appreciate it.
There you have it for this episode between Kenny and Michael. If you enjoyed this, then as always, be sure to head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and review. If you do so, as a reminder, we’re going to send you a free eBook. All you have to do is send evidence to [email protected] to claim your free eBook and enter a draw to win the Momentum course. If that’s too much work, you can always share this episode with a friend or colleague you feel like would truly enjoy this episode.
As a reminder, if you want to work directly with the Consulting Success team to receive personalized coaching and support to help you optimize and grow your consulting business marketing and revenue, visit ConsultingSuccess.com/Grow to learn more and apply. That’s the end of the line for us. Thank you so much for reading. We’re going to be back with another one. Until next time.
Important Links
- Kicksaw
- Salesforce
- ConsultingSuccess.com/Grow
- Momentum
- [email protected]
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://www.consultingsuccess.com/podcast