Do you want to stay as a solo consultant, or do you want to bring others in? What are the risks in building your consulting firm? In this episode, Devon O’Rourke, the Founder and Managing Partner at Fluvio, provides some tips to build your consulting team by shifting from a solo to a firm model. Although hiring is challenging, consulting firms should learn to balance when to hire because you don’t want to bring consultants into your firm without any clients to offer them. Devon shows how persistence can help build your firm no matter the risk, as long as you push through the challenges. Tune in for more!
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I’m very excited to have and welcome Devon O’Rourke. Devon, welcome.
Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.
I’m looking forward to this conversation. For those who aren’t familiar with you and your work, you are the Founder and Managing Partner at Fluvio, a product marketing consulting firm that you started in 2020. You’ve worked with clients like Nasdaq, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, and a whole bunch of others. You previously held marketing roles at companies like Amazon and Etsy.
I’m excited to have you on and to dive into our conversation here because you’ve grown your consulting business pretty rapidly. You’ve accomplished a lot in a few years. That people can learn from your experiences of how you went about doing that, lessons learned, maybe things that you look back on going like, “We probably could have gotten a better result, not going the path that we had gone.” Let’s start off. Where did you get the idea for this company, for Fluvio?
I’ll start by saying like my mentality, I’d always worked for these large companies, Amazon, Etsy, and ESPN in the past and some other large ones. I never thought of myself as working in these large companies for a very long time. Always in the back of my head, I was thinking, “How can I go out on my own or join a young company and go smaller?”
While I was at Amazon, I was trying to hire for my team, I was a product marketer over there. I found it exceptionally challenging to find great senior product marketers who knew what they were doing. It was taking 6 to 9 months to find folks. At the same time, I was being recruited very heavily as I knew everyone else in product marketing was as well.
It’s one of those areas that has become well-established in the tech space, but it’s very hard to staff. It was a pretty basic supply-demand problem. I began to think, “If I’m having this much trouble at Amazon with our brand equity, it must be exceptionally challenging for younger companies that are maybe a little bit less known to find product marketers.” I started testing the idea. I’m happy to go through that whole process, which was a long one. That was the idea.
What you’ve hit on there is you identified a problem and like the classic entrepreneurial approach, you found a problem and thought, “Maybe I can solve this or solve it better than others have tried.” That’s a pretty ambitious one in the sense that here you saw a company like Amazon that has significant resources, still having challenges, attracting the talent that you were looking for people and experiencing people in a short period of time. What made you think that you could essentially build that bridge and create a solution where Amazon couldn’t?
I’m not picking on Amazon by any means. It’s an interesting example because it’s such a large company with people who would think almost infinite resources and you have the audacity to think that you can solve this where they can’t and but you’ve been able to. What told you at that moment, from a mindset perspective, “Maybe I can solve this?”
I have a lot of confidence in myself frankly. It starts there. I look back at my career and recognize that I did well, establishing product marketing and doing great work. I was betting on myself. I did always have the idea that I create a firm around this, “This is going to be a company. It’s not going to be me. I’m not going to be a solo consultant.” I’m happy to chat about the differences there that I’ve experienced. My intention always was I’m going to create a company around this, of which I will be the first person and I’ll have to prove the validity of this offering by virtue of my own hours.
I never wanted to end there. I created the company Fluvio while I was still at Amazon. Fluvio Marketing LLC is technically our legal name. I started testing the idea while I was still there and got a couple of very small projects. I’ll call them projects but not real large clients that would enable me to leave Amazon. I was cold emailing 200 people a week and finally had one big retainer-like client come through and say, “We want to take you on board for six months. We just acquired this company. We need you to plug in and do good product marketing work to figure out how we can sell this product better, how we can build a better roadmap, and what our customers care about.” I came in and did that work. I proved that it was valuable and then it has been growing it from then on.
What did that look like in terms of the emails and the outreach? You’re still working on Amazon. You’re sending 200 or whatever emails per week. What did the actual email look like? What was your pitch or your message?
Generally, I was looking for companies that were trying to hire product marketing. I would go on LinkedIn and see that this company has two senior product marketing roles or a VP of product marketing open. I’ll reach out to what I would assume to be the buyer, which in most cases would be the CMO or the CPO of these companies. Sometimes the founder, if it’s small. It looks like you’re trying to staff product marketing. I know this is a challenge firsthand. I’ve built and led product marketing teams at companies like Amazon and Etsy.
I can come in and do that for you. I can set your foundation up for success. That was pretty much the pitch. It was using my background, leveraging some of the logos of the companies that I’ve worked at, and providing this alternative to staffing. That was the initial go-to-market. We’ve evolved over time and now we’re specializing and it’s not about me. I’ve tried to remove myself from a lot of our core messaging and positioning. That was the hook.
In the early days when you were sending, let’s say, 100 or so per week, how many replies or responses were you getting?
I would guess somewhere between like 2% to 4% responses of that. It was a numbers game. I kept at it and I would learn a little bit based on the responses. I did probably 2 or 3 small projects. Over time, I learned who the buyers were, the types of companies, and what’s our ideal customer profile in terms of company size. It evolved but it was very low outbounding for something like we’re building at the time, which is a brand-new solution that doesn’t exist. It’s not like I started this looking at other product marketing consulting companies rather I did a quick search for product marketing consulting and saw no one was doing this and I was like, “This is something I can create.” It required education. It wasn’t something that was on CPOs’ and CMOs’ minds at the time.
You still had the commitment and determination to move forward with this even when you’re getting such low response rates. Many people would look at that and go, “What I’m doing isn’t working. Maybe I need to stop.” What was telling you coming back to your mindset and your beliefs and who you are? Even when you were seeing very little response from sending 100 emails and doing that over weeks? What told you, “I need to keep doing this,” and not necessarily change to something completely different in terms of a tactic or an approach?
I saw that product marketing as a discipline was going to become more critical over time. I think of product marketing where familiar with the tech space where product management was many years ago. It’s this nascent role that’s more recently come to fruition. I was betting on the fact that was going to become an even more critical role. I was seeing it internally at Amazon, how we were staffing our team, and what recruiters were coming to me with in terms of opportunities.
The underlying bet wasn’t changing. I knew it would take time to break in. I also was betting once I get that first client that allowed me to leave Amazon to get enough of a runway for me to be comfortable, I knew I’d have former colleagues, managers, or people in my network that would organically come knocking on my door when they saw that this was a thing.
When you talk about the runway and feel free to share whatever you’re comfortable with, what did that look like for you? In terms of a percentage of your income? How did you think about from the financial perspective like, “What do I need before I can jump?”
It’s an independent risk tolerance question. Calculating it, in that six-month engagement, it was equivalent to probably 60% or 70% of my salary while I was at Amazon, not including some other factors like stock, compensation, and such, which you get at some of these larger tech companies. It was certainly risky, but to me not that risky. During those six months, I was getting paid a pretty decent amount. Worst case scenario, “I leave Amazon. I do this for six months. It doesn’t work out.” I could take it easy for a couple of months and I could look for another job where I knew the market at that point was strong. I would be able to get another job with no problem. Frankly, it didn’t feel that risky to me.
Now is May 2023. The world looks different than it did in 2020. In many ways, companies are now going through a lot of layoffs or changes. Would you still approach it in the same way if you were to start again if you were back in that same place or would you do anything differently?
During recessions, consulting does fairly well from an industry standpoint. Click To TweetI would change the positioning and messaging for our services, which is what I’ve done now. When I first started the business, I mentioned I looked for companies that were looking to hire. The problem back then was I need to staff a team. It needs to work well. I can’t find people in time. We’re launching a new product. We’re relaunching our platform. We’re changing our pricing strategy. We don’t have the people to do it. What am I going to do?
Enter Fluvio, “We’re a consulting company. We’re experts. Deploy us for six months. We’ll do that work and we’ll help you hire.” That message is no longer the message now because most of the companies that we’re working with or prospects in our pipeline don’t have a hiring budget for the year. The trigger for them to be interested in Fluvio is we don’t have a hiring budget and we can’t hire, but we still have these super-critical initiatives underway that the CEO cares about.
How do we get this work done, while not increasing the overhead of adding employees? We’re becoming this more flexible option that can plug and play and usually is expensed differently and is more bearable. We’ve done research and have learned that during recessions consulting does fairly well. From an industry standpoint, consulting is broad as you know more than anyone. We feel pretty good about being this alternative solution to hiring and tackling some of these big problems.
Talk to me a little bit more about that shift in positioning. Regardless of what industry people are in or what stage they’re at in their consulting business and journey, you touched on saying, which is pretty dramatic. Going from a company having a very clear budget because they’re looking to hire to now saying, “We’re going to target companies that don’t have a budget for what we’re specifically selling.”
To me, that signals that you need to be much more strategic in the conversations that you have and how you position you are offering as not saying that is necessarily going to need the budget to fund, but rather my sense is you’re probably positioning around, “We’re ROI for you. We’re going to help you. This is a real investment.” For everybody here, talk to me a little bit more about how you position your outreach and conversations with buyers when they don’t necessarily even have a budget for you but you, but they end up seeing, “This makes sense for us to make that investment.” What does that look like from a framing conversation perspective?
Broadly, it’s challenging for our work to be attributed to ROI. That is an ongoing challenge that we’re always going to face. We focus on broad business KPIs of which we will not see our work come to fruition for potentially a year plus. For example, if we’re helping a company figure out what market to penetrate and what the messaging and positioning should be for their products, that might take six months to be implemented successfully. It will then take another six months depending on how long their sales cycles are to see if it’s working. That, in itself, ROI is a difficult conversation.
Mostly what we’re doing right now is a lot of inbound work. We are getting people coming to our website, filling out our forms, reaching out to me, and engaging with us on LinkedIn. They’re saying things like, “Our initiatives have moved away from growing client base and focusing on retaining our clients. We need to come in and have someone do win-loss analysis, understand how we can price more effectively, and understand how to cross-sell to other products.”
We come in and do that work versus before it was, “We need ten new product marketers and it’s pretty ambiguous, but we know that’s what you do. Come on board and do the work that those employees would do.” We need to have a very definitive set of projects or at least one major project that the CEO cares about in order for a budget to be allocated.
Would you say that shift in messaging is attributed to the shift in what kind of market conditions? When we keep going and whether we end into go deep into our session or whatever, but as the market or the environment changes, do you foresee that you would also change your message? Maybe there’s a rebound and now companies are hiring it a lot. Your message might then go back to that hiring side where there is a budget.
I think so. I would say two things. The way I try to operate the business is exceptionally nimble. We are small. There are ten of us. I want to be able to make quick iterative decisions. I talk about that a lot. Messaging and positioning are two of those. Our website is not static. Our outbound approach, although we’re not doing that much is going to change all the time.
I do anticipate us changing. I like the fact that we’ve been able to focus more on these high-impact projects and being this expert team that can be deployed to tackle these difficult go-to-market problems. I like that more than being this alternative to hiring. It gives us a little bit more of a premium focus. I would like to be leaning more into what we’re doing long term. Capturing new business as a means of being an alternative to hiring. I’ll take that too.
You talked about how you’re doing less outbound and much more of your marketing isn’t inbound. Walk me through. Here you are a team of ten. You’re well into seven figures per year in revenue. If we looked at your marketing as a book and there are chapters inside of it, how have those chapters changed in terms of the marketing that you’re doing from, let’s say, getting to $100,000, $500,000 or $1 million per year and now well into seven figures? What are some of the different chapters, key distinctions, or shifts that you’ve made along the path of improving your marketing, getting to the point where it is nowadays?
We’ve been pretty blessed with not having to do a lot of outbound work and that is going to be changing. We are going through testing, and doing our own outbound emails and calls. It is something we’ve never done before. We’ve tested here and there but now, we’re going after it. We’ve signed a platform. We’re deploying resourcing to do that.
The intention here is that I understand as we grow beyond where we are now, we do need to have a little bit more predictability. I need to know month to month, quarter to quarter how many prospect conversations we’re going to have, how many proposals are going to go out and back into what revenue will be. Historically, we haven’t been able to do that but we also haven’t had to do that because we’ve had much inbound interest.
Our marketing has been mainly focused on content on LinkedIn. I could do more here but I try to be fairly active there. Over time, we’ve also built up a pretty robust set of articles on our blog, which is on a resource section of our website, then we repurposed that content on our Fluvio Company on LinkedIn. That’s been great. If we look at SEO, we see we’ve continued to increase a quarter of a quarter, thanks to those articles. Our consultants are all tasked with generating at least one article a quarter. That’s a decent amount if everyone’s doing that once a quarter.
These are well-thought-through pieces based on work we’ve done. These are not garbage articles. They take time and are useful. I’ve made sure we’re deployed there, focusing a lot on content and then repurposing. Another thing that I’ve been focused on over there are partnerships, co-marketing through partnerships, and forming revenue-sharing agreements with companies that sit in our space but don’t do exactly what we do, whether they’re software businesses that are geared toward marketing or product market research companies. Folks like that have been helpful in engaging in communities that our audience also engages with.
I want to dig into that a little bit more. you talked about being active on LinkedIn. What does that look like for you? How often are you on the platform? How often are you posting and then what are you posting that that you’re finding is working for you?
I post probably only 2 or 3 times a week, which I know is not what I should be doing. I need to be doing more than that. I will do more than that but that’s what I’m doing. Our company page posts three times a week and it usually is highlighting articles that we’ve written or highlighting events that we’re speaking at or I’m speaking at, and panels that we’re on. We’ve done a webinar that didn’t do as well as we’d hoped. We’re postponing more webinars. That’s the content.
The focus is we want VPs of product marketing, CMOs, and CPOs to get insight from us. It’s never promotional. It’s all like, “Here’s a framework we use with a client to figure out what markets to pursue with their new product. Here’s a framework that we recommend companies use to build their sales narrative. Here are the people you need in the room in order to get alignment with product management and product marketing teams.” It’s meant to be very helpful and be something that isn’t calling attention to our services.
Are you simply publishing that content to your personal profile and then also to the company page and that’s it or are you doing anything to amplify it?
I’ve been writing articles on our blog and then also creating a second version on LinkedIn articles because I know that LinkedIn algorithm’s going to promote their article. That’s been very successful. We get a lot of views when I write an article on there. If we launch a new service, we’ve done that twice in the last six months. I’ll write up what it is, why we’re doing it, and why we’re excited about it. It’ll be both on our blog and LinkedIn. I’ll focus primarily on LinkedIn. I have it on the blog in case SEO will drive people there. I know that I’ll get 10X the impressions and far more engagement on LinkedIn than I will on our website.
Talk about the partnership side because this is an area that many consulting firms and even solo consultants don’t spend much time on. It’s ripe for opportunity. You mentioned software companies or others in the space. maybe walk through 1 or 2 examples if you can. I’m very interested in how you started that because people often have that hesitation in their mind, thinking, “Why would a company that I reach out to, who’s probably going to be bigger than we are, want to partner with us?” How does that work? How do you kind of think about it and what were the steps you took to achieve that?
Invest heavily in talent because that's our business. Companies will not hire you if you can't get and retain great people. Click To TweetIt started with a community. They do a lot of things, but there’s an organization called The Alliance. Their major community is called the Product Marketing Alliance. It’s the field we operate in. I have presented at their conferences even in the past when I was at Amazon. When I started Fluvio, I saw synergies between these things. There’s a community trying to build the credibility of the product marketing function. They’re hosting events, workshops, membership, and newsletters.
We’re also focused on that same discipline and our missions are the same, but our services are different. I reached out to them and we ended up forming a partnership there where companies they work with, whether it’s workshopping or through their memberships or events when they hear that someone might need help building product marketing and doing the work, then they’ll push them our way and we have a RevShared agreement there.
There’s a financial benefit to doing that. There’s also no downside. If we don’t do any business then no money’s exchanged, no harm, no foul. That proved to be successful in the early days of 2020. I say I because I’m the one at the company that does it, but as a company we’ve developed something like nine partnerships. We have a software platform that’s meant to manage go-to-market plans at tech companies whose users and buyers are our users and buyers.
Now when we work with clients, we can say, “We utilize this software product to do some of our work.” We can expose them to that product and then, say, “This might be something you guys might want to use.” If they do, then we’ll introduce that company and we’ll get revenue opportunity through that and vice versa.
As this product is deployed in dozens of tech companies, a lot of the time, it’s obvious that those teams are understaffed and the software platform that they’re working with will learn that and say, “You might want to work with a consulting partner.” It’s a light commitment. My strategy has been, “Let’s try to partner with a lot of companies that sit around our ecosystem but don’t step on any toes. If business comes from that, great. If not, not a big deal.” Worst case, at least we’re building connections and a broader audience.
Do each of the partnerships that you’ve now created all have a RevShare component to them? It sounds like a lot do.
I try to. All, but two, and then there are some other benefits to those. Mostly that’s the structure that we try about.
What’s your thinking on that? Oftentimes, some people will want a RevShare. Others don’t care about it, especially if it’s like, “We’ll send people to you. You send people to us,” but the RevShare feels like there’s a bit more maybe incentive or commitment. I’m wondering how you feel about that.
There’s more commitment to it. I feel like our services will be pushed more specifically if they have any sales team. Generally, I want to form these partnerships with someone in the C-Suite and then I say, “Get me in front of your sales team.” I’ll go through an overview of our services. I’ll highlight signals that you should be looking out for that are good fits for us. It becomes another product that they can sell and make money off of. If they didn’t have that incentive, I would be concerned that it wouldn’t motivate them to introduce us.
Looking back on the different partnerships that you’ve established to this point, how deep or how important was it for you to establish a strong relationship with each of these people? Was it pretty light? I don’t mean that in a negative way, that you were able to introduce yourself, few conversations, and hatched an agreement, or were these months or years of deep conversations getting into know with people personally? What did that journey look like?
In all of the partnerships we have, I have very good relationships generally with the founder and CEO. These are sometimes smaller companies. That takes a year in some cases and in others, it’ll be super quick, but I don’t want them to be transactional. All of these partnerships, I’ll generally meet with these folks and connect with them pretty regularly, even to share ideas. There are some under-the-hood benefits of having this group of advisors and trusted folks who if we have challenges, I can ping them and see if, “Are they seeing those same things and we can learn together?” I’ve built the business around that. I have a lot of relationships in the industry we focus on and it’s been critical.
You’re at about ten people. I’m interested in what the hiring path for you has looked like. Go back to when you were still working at Amazon. You’re validating this idea, then all of a sudden, it hits you of a longer-term or at least larger-size client, and engagement comes on. From there fast forward to now, a few or so years into the business. What are the different hires that you’ve made to get to the ten people you know in terms of where you’re at?
It started me, but I always mentioned that I wanted to build a company. I seeded the idea that I had others in my network early on with my first client. I was working technically three days a week for this client. I was going into their office at the time. A month in, COVID happened and it shut down. I was going into their office and I mentioned to the CMO, who was my core contact that if you need resourcing here, I highlighted an area that they needed more resourcing. I was doing a little bit there, but it was never enough to drive the needle forward. I said, “I have folks in my network, just so you know.”
He did come to me a couple of weeks later. “You mentioned that you have some others that might be able to join. Let me know what that looks like.” I created a form on my website called the Fluvio Consultant Network. These are independent consultants where people that want to do independent consulting could sign up.
I would meet with them and have their background. I could come and bring them in if an opportunity arose. That did happen. During that first engagement, they said, “We like your idea for building out this area of the business sales marketing,” which they did not have. I said, “I’m doing core product marketing work and I’ll do a little bit of this sales collateral development, but you need a sales marketing department. Companies have that.”
The CMO came to me and said, “That’s a great idea. Do you have two people that can prove that this is something we should invest in?” I found two contractors. It was in the middle of COVID. There was some decent talent that was laid off quickly right before this crazy rebound happened. I pulled these two folks in to be contractors. At the time, I had no idea what it meant to hire. All the complexities felt overwhelming. The contract is super easy. I brought these two in. I contracted them with the company and with our client for five days a week. They were full-time with the company and I took something like a 30% margin on that.
The contractors that you brought in at that time, were they specifying what their fees would be for that work or did you have that conversation with them first, then you took it to the client? How did that work in terms of the structure?
I put together a recommendation to the client and said, “If you want to build it, we need two people. This is what that’ll look like. This is what the estimated cost will be. Are you cool with that? That’ll be a second SOW.” They said, “That’s great. Go find the people.” I went. I did some recruiting. I was able to 3 or 4 that I liked. I then put together another presentation. The client said, “Here are the 3 and 4. Here are the pros and cons. Here are their costs,” based on my conversations with them, what I think they will cost. I was transparent about the margin that I’d take too, which is understood.
You showed, “Here’s the cost, essentially charge you or you’re going to pay, but I’ll be taking 30% above that.”
I didn’t explicitly have that in the presentation, but I articulated that. I said, “This is what it will cost by a second SOW with Flavio,” and that’s because I’m taking 30% of what I’m paying them. I did that. We agreed on these people. I recruited them, brought them in, contracted them through Fluvio, created a second SOW with the company, and added them to my work then as we got to the end of that SOW, I wanted to begin to hire.
I went to one of them and said, “I’d like to bring you on board.” He was employee number one and he’s still with us. He’s awesome. That worked out nicely. That was the easiest way for me to ramp into hiring. We’ve done some contract work after that. Once I was able to bring someone on full-time as a W-2, I then created company benefits for 401(K), health, and dental. Now my strategy has been hiring full-time and giving quickly going into all these benefits because I know that that’s our business. I’ve invested very heavily in talent because that’s our business. If I’m not able to get and retain great people, then companies aren’t going to want to hire us.
Have all your hires at this point, the ten or so people now, are they all product marketing people that are going to work or do you have anybody that’s working? There’s no business manager?
Not yet. We’re probably at the point where I should be thinking more strategically about that. To date, we’re hiring everyone who’s billable. I’m no longer in any client work. I got to a point where it made the most sense for me to focus on the strategy for Fluvio, hiring, building services, selling the business, and all of that. There was enough time there where it made sense for me to focus there.
Try to create champions across the industry so you have dozens of people interested when you need to hire. Click To TweetHopefully, we’ll see what happens with the markets. Every month it’s changing. I do think the next evolution of the company will be, “What are the other roles that we can hire for?” One of those might be an SDR. “How do we outbound effectively that so I’m not doing all of this work?” We have an accounting firm, a bookkeeper, and all of that. Probably, I will continue to outsource that, but I do think we’re at an inflection point in the company and then, it will begin hiring non-consultants.
I’d love to know what was going through your mind when you had the contractors and you’re taking a 30% margin. You decide, “I want to change everybody to a W-2. I want full-time employees.” What was the financial impact on the business of doing that, going from a 30% margin on whatever people are billing to whatever it is now?
For most people, the hesitation in going from a contractor to a full-time employee is you’re making a “much bigger” commitment. You’re taking on having to pay a lot more upfront. Walk me through how you rationalized that, how you planned it, and then what did the financial impact look like of going from the 30% margin with the contractors to now having people as full-time?
We’ve evolved the structure of the team and the work we do with clients to make up that margin. Instead of having a consultant be full-time with one client, I’ve created another level in the company. We have two principals. Principals are much more senior. They are meant to replace me in engagements. They’re leading it from a strategy standpoint and building executive-level relationships. They’re meant to drive renewals and steer the ship.
Consultants are tactical in doing the work and they’re strategists as well. We hire talented senior folks, but that’s the structure and that means that we’re able to take in more business and allocate consultants across two accounts now. We’ve tried to make up for that and we’ve successfully made up for that. From a margin business standpoint, that’s the model and I made it up, but it’s worked well.
The commitment stuff is still there. We are committing a significant amount of capital every month to our employees. As a consulting company, it’s hard to plan more than for us at least 3 or 6 months out. This is going back to my mentality where I do, ultimately, have a decent amount of confidence in myself, which is now translated into confidence in the business. I’m making this bet that will continue to see growth and fill the plates of our teams, but it’s not for everyone.
Visibility is pretty light revenue, but it’s pretty certain on expenses. As I’ve grown the business, I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me and want to get into consulting. They start talking through how I founded the company and I’ve told them that my intention has always been to build a company. That’s why I’m doing this. I’m passionate about it. If your intention is to do product marketing consulting work and you want flexibility, then you might want to be an individual independent consultant because you’re going to make good money if you do it right and you’re going to have the flexibility and you’re not going to have the expenses that we have.
You take more risks, but there’s, I often find, a lot more reward as well once you get through some of the challenge along the way. To this point in the business, you’ve accomplished a lot in a pretty short period of time. Congratulations to you and your team. What’s been one of the biggest challenges to this point in the business that’s impacted you inside the business or maybe even personally as part of trying to climb that ladder?
Predictability into revenue is and will always be a challenge. We’re trying to figure out how to bring more predictability in. I talk about that outbound motion. The other angle is, how do you plan for how many clients will renew? In our business, we’re not going to be this perpetual team that exists and works with a client. We come in for very specific reasons. We’re a little bit more premium. We come, get the work done, and we’re gone.
Ideally, we come back for things here and there, but it’s very difficult to look even when we’re doing good work. That doesn’t translate to renewals. Most of the time, clients’ intention is for a set period of time. Planning renewals and matching that up against what we’ll see organically come into our pipeline is very challenging. The hiring piece is also challenging because we’re bootstrapped. We’re funded through revenue.
I can’t afford to go out there and hire two people unless I know that there’s a new business for them to work. I also can’t afford to say yes to new business and not have consultants sitting on the bench. It’s a constant balance of, “When do we need to hire? How quickly? It can happen in a day can mean that we have to hire someone in a week.”
What are you doing with that chicken-and-egg situation? What have you found is the best approach or what’s working for you to make sure that you can still take on more clients and work have to know having the confidence that you can bring the people in but not commit to people until you have that? What’s been working for you?
I’m always very open to networking. I’m meeting with people that are interested in what we’re doing and have said like, “Are you hiring?” I’ll meet with them. I’ll say, “We’re not, but that can change in a second. Why don’t we spend some time? I would like to hear more about you and what you’re looking for and I’ll tell you all about our company.” I’m trying to create these champions across the industry we work in. When we do hire and I open a rec, I know I’m going to have maybe a dozen people that are immediately interested because I’ve already had an ongoing dialogue with them.
I feel pretty confident in our ability to get good candidates very quickly because of that long-term work. The other thing is because we have consultants and pod structure with 1 or 2 consultants underneath each principle, there are instances where consultants are on one account and that’s totally fine. I want everyone to be on two and we’ll operate at capacity and ideal margins, but it’s okay if that’s not the case. We can flex up and down versus some consultant companies that have every consultant full-time with a client. We don’t have that. It’s very rare that a consultant is sitting there with no client. In fact, I don’t think it’s ever happened. A consultant sitting with no clients generally has the ability to flex up and down.
The point that you made is we often refer to clients in terms of building your bench of talent. Make sure that you always have people around you so that optionality or the opportunity to say yes to something good when it comes your way and not have to go, “I don’t even know if I can handle that.” It’s a very forward-looking, long-term mindset in terms of preparation and giving yourself that chance. That’s fantastic you guys are doing that.
Before wrapping up here, I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, Fluvio, and everything you guys have going on. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing a bit of your story. There is so much more that we could talk about here that people would be interested in learning about, but we’ve covered some good ground here initially. Where should people go to learn more about you and Fluvio?
If you want to learn more about the company in Fluvio, go to FluvioMarketing.com. If you want to learn more about what I care about, I am trying to be more active. Devon O’Rourke on LinkedIn is my go-to. Certainly, connect with me there. I’m very open to networking. At this point, I commit a lot of my time. That’s beneficial to me and also to the people that I meet with. Feel free to reach out to me.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
Important Links
- Fluvio Marketing
- Fluvio Consultant Network
- Fluvio Company on LinkedIn
- Product Marketing Alliance
- Devon O’Rourke on LinkedIn
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