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Episode #253
Dr. Benjamin Ritter

How To Design A Consulting Business & Lifestyle That You Love

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Summary

Starting up a consulting business is not the easiest thing to do. You need to find clients so that they can make those referrals. You need to market yourself online with legit testimonials to make yourself look professional. You also need a pricing strategy. Even more important is that you need to know what you’re selling.

Find a framework that works for your consulting business. Join Michael Zipursky as he talks to Dr. Benjamin Ritter about his consulting business, Live for Yourself Consulting. Learn how Dr. Ritter found his calling by teaching leaders to take back control of their lives. Discover why you need a framework for everything you do in your business. Finally, get some tips on how to market yourself online on LinkedIn. Tune in and start getting your consulting business off the ground today!

I’m very excited to have Dr. Benjamin Ritter joining us. Ben, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

I will take a quick moment to introduce you to those that aren’t familiar with you and your work. You are a leadership executive and career coach and consultant at your firm LFY Consulting. You help managers and executives gain control over their careers and businesses. You work with some well-known organizations as well like Amazon, Google, Pinterest, Yelp, and many others. I would like to get our conversation started here by going back in time. I believe you started your business around 2016 if I’m not mistaken. What were you doing before then? What was leading up to that time? What does your career path look like?

Thank you for that great introduction. It’s super helpful if you target some of these big companies initially in your consulting career just to say, “I have worked at these companies.” It has made a big difference in my buyers, other than the experience of working with them and the fact that you get on their referral lists and stuff.

That’s a different story in itself. Building that brand recognition, credibility, and who you want to work with. In 2015, I was working in healthcare. I was promoted to the executive team. I was moved from quality improvement to process improvements. My official title at that time was Group Systems Analyst. I was implementing best practices and creating programs to improve patient outcomes in the healthcare system.

I was promoted to work with the executive team as a manager of business operations. I completely changed what I was doing for work to be at that senior leadership level, and was pretty unhappy with what I was doing for my career. Up to that point, there were a lot of excuses but I was reactive instead of proactive and gave up in terms of being targeted with my search.

A lot of things happened to help me realize that I was pretty unhappy. At the same time, I knew a lot about personal development and defining who I was. I was able to sit back and say, “What are the things that I care about? What are the things that drive me? What are the things that I don’t like? What are the things that I want to work on in the future? What are my strengths? How can I bring those all together?” I didn’t get the answer just yet.

Anyone looking for clarity like, “I need to make a change,” you are not going to get this huge answer when you start asking questions but you are going to get evidence. You are going to get things to go do research on. What came from that research was I’m good at coaching. I love coaching. I love the development of people. There are these issues in the professional environment and with senior leadership that I want to help to correct. There are organizational changes I want to make. There are leadership changes I want to make, and then I also want to impact people.

If you're looking for clarity on what you're going to do in life, you're not going to get an answer. You're only going to get evidence. Click To Tweet

That led me to say, “I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do this. Let’s see what options are available to me.” The first option is to go to my corporation or go to the hospital system I’m a part of and say, “I’m part of this emerging leadership program. I’m working with the director of people. Can I work with him? Can I work in this area? Can it be 10% of my job or 20% of my job? Let’s start getting experience in it.” They said yes, lo and behold, as well as my boss did. About a month later, we got acquired for the second time and everything I was working on got stopped. Things were getting centralized. Most of the people I was working with got fired. They did not make the cut. There’s a little safety not being at the top, but being right below the top when somebody else comes in. I had to then say, “Now what?”

I looked for other jobs in the talent development space and that wasn’t happening because I had seven years of non-talent development experience and other experience in health policy. I thought to myself, I know how to build the business. I had a side business at the time coaching. It wasn’t super successful. It was a little bit of revenue. I have learned what works there and what doesn’t work there. I can build a brand but the problem is, I don’t want to just jump right in. I want to make sure that I’m building the right brand. At this point in my career, I’m literally going like, “That business didn’t work. That business wasn’t aligned with what I wanted to create in my life. It wasn’t aligned with my values.”

That’s five years that I have to try to wipe clean from the internet and from the people that know me as that person. I said, “I don’t want to do that again. I want to make sure that I’m thoughtful in this process. If I can’t get a job working for a company right now in it, and I can’t work for my current company in this space, let’s go become credible. Let’s go exploring. Let’s get curious. Let’s see what I can find out about organizational leadership, coaching and professional development. That led me to go back and get my Doctorate in Organizational Leadership.

During my first year about halfway in, I realized where I wanted to take things. That’s when I created Live For Yourself Consulting on the back of a napkin on an airplane going to California to take another class. I was working full-time in Chicago and flying to LA to take classes every month. That’s when Live For Yourself Consulting was born. The messaging has changed a little bit over the years based on market and testing and stuff like that who’s attracted to it. That’s how Live For Yourself Consulting was born. That’s what I was doing at the time.

There are so many lessons and ideas you shared there to unpack. One is the idea that when you are making a change from where you are to where you want to be, you are not going to necessarily get instant clarity on exactly what you need to do. By starting, thinking, and defining what that direction looks like or what potential success looks like, that’s going to be already some progress. That’s great advice.

The other thing you mentioned is asking. You’re going to your bosses at that time and saying, “Here’s how I would like to do more of. Is there a way that I could do more of it?” A lot of people have that desire, but don’t act on it. I have also found in my career even going back twenty-plus years when I was in school and doing some studies that there are a lot of things I have pushed boundaries on or had changes inside of programs that the average person wouldn’t have even thought they could do.

I have seen this so many times in my life. It has played out in different aspects and areas of my life. When you ask for something, you’ll be surprised how often you get it or you get some. You need to ask. Don’t be afraid to ask. We talk about values. You said that you had this coaching business on the side as you are working in a corporate environment, but the values of that business weren’t aligned to where you wanted them to be. Can you talk a little bit more about what did that look like? What were the old values compared to the actual values or the direction you want to take them? It’s to help them maybe demonstrate to people that regardless of what you’ve done in the past, there’s always an opportunity to adjust or to get closer to where you want to go. I would love for you to paint that example of the before and after.

CSP 253 | Designing A Consulting Business

 

It’s a great summary. That’s probably one of your superpowers. I am distilling stories into bullet points that people can understand. Kudos in a lot of ways. That is a consultant’s or a coach’s unique trait. If you can do that, then there’s a lot of power in that. I’m a self-proclaimed values geek. I wrote a dissertation and did a research study on values. I believe that values are the key to fulfillment and job satisfaction.

It’s the conduit to understanding what success means for yourself. At the time, when I was coaching, I fell into that. As I said, I was very reactive instead of proactive in my career. When I was in undergrad, I wanted to be a professional soccer player. That didn’t work out. When you want to do something with your whole being and that doesn’t work out, you lose your self-identity. You have to learn how to craft who you are. You have to go exploring again. This theme of curiosity keeps playing out.

During that search for who I was, I dove into the personal professional development material and that industry space. For about 4 or 5 years, I studied it religiously. At the end of that, I was happy with who I was. I was very happy exploring life and living each and every single day. I was motivated to wake up, which is not the case when I lost soccer. Part of that was going out and putting myself in uncomfortable situations like going into a room and talking to people at random, high-fiving people on the street, or anything you could think of when it comes to testing yourself socially.

I was at a bar one night and someone realized what I was doing and says, “You need to meet my boss the next day.” I went to go meet him and he hired me to run his nationwide men’s program on teaching those skills to other people. I fell into it. After when you fall into something, you become, “This is great. I’m passionate about this, but then I didn’t like how he was operating his business. I still have things that I want to teach the world.” I wrote a book. I realize that no one would buy the books because they didn’t know who I was. I didn’t have a brand. That’s where the coaching business came from.

Fast forward five years, I had some success. I wrote for AskMen and Men’s Health. I had a podcast going top in the categories that we were a part of. I had some clients and events, but it was something that I fell into. I never wanted to craft a career around it. There was this, “This is working. I should invest more time and energy into it.” It ended up not being right for me. It wasn’t at all what I wanted to create for my professional career. If I sat back and said, “What do you want to do in five years? What do you want to do in two years?” It wasn’t that, but I was on autopilot and trying to make it work because I thought it should work.

When I look at how to look at my full-time, the whole spectrum of my career. The multiple income streams like everything that I was doing with my time. I realized that nothing aligned with what I wanted to create. When I said that I wasn’t living in alignment with my values, I was doing certain things that hinted at them.

My number one value is health. Mental, spiritual, emotional and physical, all aspects of health, but it wasn’t in the category that I cared most about, which was your professional environment. What do you choose to do for your career? If you look at my background, your professional identity was destroyed when you lost soccer. You have these terrible experiences working in healthcare as an executive. You were investing in a coaching business that wasn’t truly where you wanted to spend your time.”

Be curious and explore. Learn how to craft who you are. Click To Tweet

During a recession out of grad school for two and a half years, you received four different job offers. You signed on the dotted line and they canceled the jobs the next day. There are all these huge moments that highlighted the importance of this category or this section of health for me personally, and so I was operating in the wrong area.

I was still living true to my value, but there was some dissonance. I was dissatisfied other than how I was perceiving the world. I was able to look at those values again to redefine them for what they meant for me personally, and what I wanted to create in the world and look forward to instead of just reacting to the situations around me. I hope that adds a little bit more context.

How did you feel when you were considering that decision? I’m asking from the perspective of you had invested a lot into where you already were. You had developed assets. You had created visibility in the marketplace for who you were, but that wasn’t what you wanted long-term. Was that a hard decision to say, “I’m going to scrap what I have been working so hard on all these years to go a different direction? There may be some overlap that I can build on top. It’s not 100% from scratch, but it’s a different direction.” How did you feel? Was that a liberating feeling? Was that a scary feeling? Walk us through what was going on in your mind as you were in that place making that decision.

Whenever you are in that place making that decision, it’s tough and scary. It’s not fun. It doesn’t feel good because you are like, “I spent all this time and all this energy building up to this point and I don’t want this to be the point that I keep building and investing.” At least with the business, that was a little bit easier because I could say I learned all these things about creating a coaching company. Those skills have been priceless like using Photoshop or understanding how to launch, edit, and create podcasts. All those products how to coach, how to build a business, how to market, and how do I create an ideal client? All these things are priceless.

I could apply them and build a business quicker than I did previously. The hardest part about that was changing my brand. People knew who I was and had to try to figure out how to destroy all the information, but the career piece is scarier. You are looking ahead of you and you are like, “Three years, maybe four of this degree,” and then I’m pivoting into a whole another industry. All of these skills that I learned potentially aren’t going to be able to build on my career capital moving forward. That in itself is a lot scarier. If you stop for a second, anywhere that you are at because if anyone’s contemplating a change like this, it can feel overwhelming. Rewind 3, 5 or 10 years and say, “Does that seem it was that long ago? Did I know that I was going to end up here five years ago?”

Most of the time you are going to say, “It went a lot quicker than I thought it was, and I had no idea I was going to end up where I am now.” If that’s the case, why not choose where you want to go? Time is going to pass either way. Do you want time to pass in a way that you choose your time or do you want time to pass in a way that you’ve accepted, and you’ve decided that it was going to be enough? Are you going to end up being contented because you can’t imagine dedicating other time and energy to it?

The same thing can go with working out. Are you not going to go to the gym because you aren’t going to see results for 16 weeks, or maybe 1 or 2 years? Are you not going to go study a language because you are not fluent tomorrow? Any change that you want to make in your life is going to take an investment. Is that change worth it to you? It doesn’t matter what happened in the past.

CSP 253 | Designing A Consulting Business

 

It’s a great perspective and will hopefully resonate and give everyone some sign to think about in some aspect of their life whether personal or professional. I want to fast forward a little bit. You had now this experience of building your business on the side. It didn’t go the way that you’d want it, but things were starting to come together. You apply that to your new business. How did you go about getting your first clients for the new business, LFY Consulting, when you launch that? Where do those first clients come from?

When you are building something or investing time to create something, you are doing anything else. There’s balance in your life. The fact that I was going to school for three years and building a business on the side and I was working full time in another capacity. I was bartending. That led to new relationships. That led to my partner whom I’m still with. That led to so many experiences and travel. You can create priceless moments while you are building other things. It’s not like life is on pause.

The first clients came from in-person events and from my second network. A lot of times people say, “Look at your first network for clients,” and it’s usually not your first network. It’s usually their network. It’s about getting your first network to know what your brand is. When I was building my business, I was like, “This looks good on a napkin. What does it look like in real life?” It’s because it’s a coaching business, it was systems and pillars and stuff, I went out and found clients that would work for me for free.

I had three test clients for a three-month program. During those three months, I was building my messaging and getting out there, but more so testing things out with these clients. These clients became testimonials and referrals. Once I knew what worked and what didn’t work, I was able to speak to the program in a way that I have done it. When you are working with someone, even if it is for free, when you are talking to someone about your business, you can say, “My client or with this client,” because these are people you are working with you. You are able to even feel more confident about what you are discussing.

Were these people that you had a relationship with already before you offered your program?

Yes. In my network. People that I was close to, people that needed coaching, and people that resonated with and trusted me. You can go into a Facebook group or an external environment that you may be a member of or a partner of and offer your services. There are people that will say yes. There are issues with that if you don’t know them because if people aren’t invested, they are not going to show up in the same way for a free program as they would for a paid program. This isn’t about them. It’s about you learning and building your business and the foundation from it.

You provide this experience for these free people. They went through a three-month program. They saw results. There are a lot of learnings and experiences for you that you could take from that. What were the steps to take those experiences and that work to now go out and get referrals? Did the three people go like, “This was great. We want to introduce you to five different people” or did you ask them? What is some proactive strategic approach that you used to get your next paying clients from those free clients?

Any change you want to make in your life is going to take an investment from you. Click To Tweet

Capture testimonials. Have them write testimonials. Prior to them starting a free program say, “At the end of this program, I expect you to write a testimonial if it made a difference in your life. I expect you to publish that online with a Google business page. I expect you to share this with 3 to 5 people that you know and to provide me with their information too if they are interested.”

You are very clear upfront before even engaging. You’re like, “I’m going to provide you a lot of value for free, but in return, if you feel that it was valuable, here’s what I would love for you to do.”

Even clients that I work with that are paid, I ask them for a testimonial at the end. I ask them a series of questions. I ask them to publish it on Google. I ask them for referrals because you would imagine that someone who had a great experience with something would go share it with other people. That is not the case. No one generally thinks about referring people to your business. I have had clients that have doubled or tripled their income and changed their life and gotten their dream jobs. It’s no one. I have never met one person that has automatically referred someone to me because they thought about it. It’s more so that I have asked them and then it’s referred to me.

Is that still the engine of your leads and conversations sales even to this day? Is there anything that you are doing differently now than you were doing back then?

Up until the world shut down, I was building my business from in-person events in that community. I had a series of events that I would host once or twice a month. One was they were speakers. One was more of a connecting a mastermind type of group with a networking component built in. I thought that was the way that I was going to keep sustaining my business.

There were some referrals, but most of it was still outbound. When the world shut down, it probably was the best thing that happened to me because I realized I didn’t need my in-person community. I doubled down on LinkedIn. I made sure that my SEO was up-to-date on Google and on LinkedIn itself. I started doing a ton of LinkedIn outreach, and then I also transitioned to virtual events.

Now, the majority of my clients come from LinkedIn, Google inbound, and referrals. I would say 30% now comes from events. Now, my outbound has decreased significantly too. Something else I started doing as well as I found services that were related to what I do. I signed up to be a contractor for them. Their value has led to a ton of online reviews and increased my SEO as well, so people may see me on that site, but then use me and leverage me through my other services too.

CSP 253 | Designing A Consulting Business

 

On the using of services of others that are not direct competitors, can you give me an example when you say you use somebody else’s services? What does that look like?

This was because I was bored. I was in a silo. As you probably know, as a solopreneur, you have your clients and community but it’s limiting. You don’t know what’s going on outside of yourself. It’s good for you to spend some time looking at people that are competitors, but also in parallel businesses. For example, leadership and career coaching. A parallel business for me would be something like The Muse. The Muse is an online website that does resumes, LinkedIn profiles, cover letters, job interviews, or leadership coaching. They do some services in relationship to me, but they are more of a compilation of other coaches. They just have more websites.

I was able to join them and learn about their processes and learn their training materials. See how they are managing and marketing, and then be a part of their system on a minuscule scale to then also leverage my profile or bio, get more inbound clients, people that know about me that they can refer me out, and also get more reviews with them and builds up my online presence too. It was like you are leveraging this organization that has a huge following. It already has done the work for you in terms of being able to promote your business. There are a couple of other examples that have been pretty helpful and are super worthwhile.

What I’m hearing you share there is this idea of tapping into an ecosystem or tapping into a platform that your ideal clients are already likely part of or they go to get information. Rather than you having to spend a whole bunch of money on advertising or do a ton of direct outreach to ideal clients, which I do want to talk about in a moment in terms of what you did there. Here’s already a platform or a place where your ideal clients are going to get information. By you being part of that platform, you now start to get some inquiries or people are talking about you or you become much more visible, correct?

One hundred percent. You going to take that same strategy and apply it to podcasts and blogs. You are getting in front of the people that are your target client.

You mentioned also LinkedIn outreach, and that you were doing more of that before. You are doing less of that now. Can you walk through what you do there? Did you reach out to people that you thought could be ideal clients and say, “I can help you with leveling up your career?” Oftentimes, that comes across as being very salesy to people and they are hesitant to respond to people that are reaching out directly to them. What did you feel worked best for you there or any mistakes that you learned that you would suggest other people avoid?

Three biggest mistakes I see people make on LinkedIn when they are doing outbound sales. First, their profile is in alignment with what they are trying to sell. Second, the message is too long. Third, the message is a sales pitch. What you need to do initially is make sure that your brand identity on LinkedIn is consistent with what you are selling, and aligns with what people are looking for or thinking about when there are issues.

Go outside of yourself. Look at people that are competitors, but also parallel businesses. Click To Tweet

My LinkedIn profile now, because of SEO or the keywords that I have put in there, as well as the number of followers that I now have, which is about 24,000 almost because I spend a lot of time connecting with people on LinkedIn. It puts me up there in the search. If someone types in a career coach or leadership coach, at least that’s what they tell me when I asked them how they found me. When someone goes to my page, they see a message from me. My headline which is what they see is, “Get unstuck. Unlock your professional superpowers and create a career you love.”

Executive leadership and career coaching are some other pieces. They know what I sell. They know what I’m there for. I don’t need to put that in my message. I don’t need to put that in my connection request. If they accept my connection request because you could go connect with people. I literally can go hit connect with people that are in my target area, senior managers, directors, VPs or CEOs. Some industry-specific if I want to search and do some outbound there, but I do like to put a little bit of a message that’s pretty general. I will even read you exactly what I send.

If someone accepts this, a percentage of those people are interested in what I’m selling. It’s my job to make sure that I follow up to give them the opportunity to allow me to sell to them if they accept the message. No one that wants what you are selling is probably going to reply to you. I would say a small percentage on the first connection request on LinkedIn.

They will probably reply to the first message. They might reply to a second message. I don’t appreciate the 3,4 or 5 messages. To be honest, I don’t think that is significant. I want to also share with you the fact that I will follow up with anyone that looks at my profile. I will also look at anyone that follows me with a message that’s something as simple as, “I saw that you checked out my profile. Was there anything specific that caught your eye?” That has led to a significant amount of business.

Share with us what your first or second messages are to people.

I have changed it a couple of times. One of them that I use is A/B testing. What I’m testing right now is, “If you are interested in the topics of leadership and career development, it’s great to connect and introduce one another.” That’s it. If someone accepts that, then I know that they are interested in those topics, or they may be accepted me for no reason or that they saw my headline and they wanted to connect. A lot of people will say, “You should need to target and pinpoint your message in terms of who you are reaching out to, what their background is and all that jazz.” There you go because it takes more time, energy and effort. It’s also not going to significantly increase your response rates.

What about when people do accept the connection request, how do you follow up after that? What does that message look like?

CSP 253 | Designing A Consulting Business

 

It’s something like, “Thanks for connecting.” I usually do not say thanks but, “It’s great to connect. What was it about my background that interested you most?” Something as simple as, “It’s great to connect. Would you be interested in a short introductory phone call to get to know one another?” If someone wants a phone call with you, now you can add an extra screen if you want like qualifying questions such as, “What topics do you want to cover?”

Make sure that you are not getting someone that wants to waste your time, but if someone accepts a call with me because of my profile and because of the initial message, then they are going to want something. Sometimes, especially within my field of professional development, they don’t want to type it out to you. They want to talk.

What results have you seen by doing that? How many calls? How many businesses do that generate that’s going to give us a sense of the success of that approach?

If anyone is expecting 90% of the people that they message to want to buy from them, then they are in for a surprise. It is 100% about quantity. If someone gets on a sales call with me that I know they are pre-qualified. They are interested in leadership and career coaching. They have defined this prior to getting on the call. They filled out a form with me, then my close rate is a little over 40%. It’s like 44%.

If someone says that they want to connect with me, it’s my job prior to that call to see what they are interested in and what topics they want to cover. That actual message of what topics they want to cover prior to jumping on a call is important because if I don’t, then you get people that are looking to connect and build relationships, and that’s not where I’m at with my business. That’s not where I want to spend my time. Sending out connection requests, I would probably say 20% to 30% because I am a little bit more specific. I’m not just connecting. There’s a bit about leadership and career development, so people probably don’t accept based on the fact that they think I’m going to try to sell them.

You also mentioned that you are doing less outreach now than you were before. Why are you doing less of that? Are you working not as much or you do not need or your focus has shifted?

I don’t need to. I have done enough work with my business to create referrals. I have built enough relationships with organizations that they are able to reimburse their leaders to work with me. I get my SEOs a lot better. People are finding me. I’m getting a lot more LinkedIn inbound, LinkedIn service requests, Google inbound as well, and email list conversions. There’s not as much need to do the outbound at the moment.

Make sure your brand identity on LinkedIn is consistent with what you're selling and aligns with what people are looking for. Click To Tweet

I also wanted to ask you about your framework. You have the three Cs of self-leadership, clarity, confidence and control. You can talk through what those are and maybe a moment. Before doing that, I’m interested in terms of we are big believers in having frameworks and bringing those into the business, both for your benefit of being able to explain what it is that you do with confidence, but also from a sales perspective. What has been your experience like developing that framework and how have you found it to help or not help you in different aspects of your business?

Frameworks are great because it’s easy for you to understand what you are selling. It’s easy for you to explain what you are going to take a client through and what they are going to expect. It gives you talking points to even go on podcasts or speak at events. Without a framework, it’s hard for someone to believe in you as a consultant. It’s also a way for you to create a unique value proposition.

My initial framework was live life intentions, values and expectations. Hence Live For Yourself Consulting or LFY Consulting. Through my work, I have realized that there were individuals that were good at making progress and they were superstars. I said, “What’s going on with them?” I was able to pinpoint three main traits, clarity, competence and control. It relates to my initial system, but it’s a little bit deeper and more understandable to my target market.

At the same time, it’s the three Cs of self-leadership, which I talk on self-leadership. I work with leaders. There’s this evolution of, “Who has Ben worked with? Ben, knows who he worked with. Ben knows who wants to purchase from him. Ben knows what he wants to sell. Ben knows what successful and what people need and what they resonate with.”

When I first started my business, “Take back control of your life,” was my tagline. Take back control of your career. You realize what resonates with people, and then you make adjustments to create a career that you love. For the past couple of years, you unlocked the door to what brings me the most clients, what people resonate with the most, and what keywords are they using when I’m talking to them on sales calls. I’m happy to go into the system but I know that was a topic in itself.

It was. I respect your time and I have a few other questions. I want to get your feedback. We can direct people to your website and learn more about the framework in detail. One thing that you mentioned throughout a couple of different times. How you’ve been open to the evolution of your business or making changes in your business? Changing the brand or the focus. Changing your framework, your tagline, or things of that nature. How have your service offerings changed if any at all? Any adjustments to the structure, the model or pricing strategy. Walk us through any lessons you’ve learned about your services and how you deliver them since it’s you. You are the business. What does that look like?

What’s great about just being me is that I can change my prices and packages tomorrow, and no one’s going to know unless they are referral. It’s not fun when I have to tell all clients prior to referrals, “Please do not discuss pricing because pricing has changed based on demand and availability.” You are getting a better deal. Everything changes over time. What is more important is what you want to sell.

Do not discuss pricing with your clients because it changes all the time. Instead, discuss what you want to sell. Click To Tweet

What do you mean by that?

People are going to ask for what they think they want, as well as people are not going to know exactly what they want. They are going to be looking at you to explain to them or to guide them towards the service offering that will be best for them. If you try to serve everyone and be flexible to everyone, they are going to lose trust in your service offering.

Having a name for that package or having pricing that you can say confidently, no matter what the client wants, you are the expert and you explain why it’s important. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with these high-powered executives. They hear weekly coaching and they’re like, “Weekly coaching. What?” I say, “Weekly coaching.” A lot of other programs think they can get to the outcomes they want with bi-weekly or monthly coaching. I need at least three months of consistent weekly coaching sessions for us to build a foundation to be able to effectively reach our goals.

I’m not going to be flexible there. If you work with me for three months, we can talk about bi-weekly or monthly. I know what I want to sell. I know the price I want to sell it at. I know why I want to do that. When someone tries to push back on that, you as a consultant can’t bend or shouldn’t bend because then it makes you seem like you are not as much of an expert.

Why three months? Why not month by month, 6 or 12 months? Where do you arrive at the three-month number from?

I have run programs where I have said I’m selecting three-year-long clients because I wanted to work with someone for a year-long program, and I have done that and I have enjoyed it. Now I do have longer-term clients that have stayed on that do sign up for 6 and 12 months. I know what problems most of my clients face and who I sell to and what my messaging attracts. I know that I can solve that within twelve sessions.

I have tried six sessions. I have tried shorter sessions. I have done the ad hoc. I have done the 1, 4, 6 and 10 sessions. I found what I want to sell the most in what leads to the outcomes that my clients need. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t know this right off the bat. I do 100% go behind the idea of selling packages and not sessions. I don’t go by the hours to do a total of program costs. That works for what I sell.

Sell packages, not sessions. Click To Tweet

What I have sold, how I have sold it, and how I have worked with clients have changed significantly. That’s going to change for anyone on this call, which is why it’s also important to start consulting or start coaching if you are not yet. I learned very quickly that there are certain clients that will do the exercises that I assigned. There are certain clients that are going to be overwhelmed by how I wanted to initially work with clients. I have stepped back a little bit with the amount of work that I will require from clients based on seeing what people are able to do, willing to do, or what they are scared of. It was a constant evolution a year ago. How those changes in the future also will depend on what the demand is in the market.

How have you thought about your pricing? It is you. You are the one working 1-on-1 with your clients. You are not thinking about hours, but if you are not working, you are not generating revenue because you don’t have anything passive, digital products or things of that nature inside. Other team members are delivering this work. How have you arrived at your pricing strategy? Are there any mistakes you’ve made in the past or any realizations that you’ve had where you feel like, “I’m in a good place right now with my pricing?”

You never want to work with someone where you think you are giving them a good deal. If you underprice yourself, you will start resenting the client and not performing it the way that you need to. If someone turns your contract down because of pricing, it’s too expensive. Putting aside the idea that they didn’t see the value in it which wasn’t too expensive. They didn’t see the value to make the decision. If they turn you down because you are too expensive, at least to them, they are now going away with the idea that “Ben is expensive.” That is a lot better than, “Ben is cheap.” It’s a lot better than you working with them and starting to not try to judge them or project at that.

It’s better to price higher than lower. My pricing model is, what do I feel I’m worth? What do I feel this is worth? Then move that up another 20% or 30%, and then based on demand. Our people are saying yes to this. I have three people in a row say yes to this, then increase my price. Do people say yes to this or do people will say no to this? It doesn’t always mean you are too expensive. It could mean that you are not selling it appropriately or you are not targeting the right people.

When you think about it because it is just you in terms of having a greater impact or being able to scale your impact or grow revenue and profits further, is there anything that you’ve considered or tried to accomplish?

There are times when I’m busy and times when I feel good. It’s not like I’m sitting here being like, “I can’t service everyone that I need to service.” I also have another revenue stream which is organizational leadership, which is internal corporate work, which we haven’t talked about. That’s talent and performance development, engagement, and all that stuff. That would be something that I use to increase revenue, which is developing another income stream with corporate clients. I was always looking to increase the percentage of the pie that I came from. It was an additional sale that I could keep providing to leaders. It’s like any consultant, do you have something that you can offer your clients other than your initial service offering? Do you like to sell? It was always 20% maybe of what I sold. Right now, I’m on a major project, so it’s 50%.

A couple of quick questions for you before wrapping up. I know you are very active. One of your main values is health. I’m interested in terms of what you feel contributes to your performance, your productivity, to your focus the most. Are there 1 or 2 habits that you are doing on a daily basis?

There are things that I know that work and things that don’t work, and everyone needs to find those out. Of all the things that you’ve done with your consulting business, what is the 20% that has led to clients? Which is my main goal. What is the 20% that leads to clients and then does that? We didn’t talk about this but on LinkedIn, there are services that you can use to help you with your LinkedIn outreach and virtual events. Those are the two things that crush it for me. I make sure that I’m doing them every month. What keeps me focused? It’s knowing the things that I do that lead to a specific outcome. That’s what keeps me focused.

In terms of routine, I workout every day. I do hot yoga every Sunday. I play soccer on Saturdays in terms of health. I take my supplements and my gut drink. Every time I wake up, I read for fifteen minutes, when I’m up in the morning. There are certain things that I do to balance for myself that energize me, and then things I do for the business that I need to do. I have a spreadsheet. I don’t always use it, but I use it when I’m not getting the outcomes that I need. Things can go on autopilot when you are getting the outcomes that you need. When things are not going right, take a step back. Go back to basics.

Great advice. It’s so interesting with marketing. People are often looking for something new to try and to do, but if you have something that is already working for you, you should be doing more of that before you look to add something on top of that. Last question here for you before wrapping up. Over the last few months or so, what book have you either read or listened to that you would recommend? It could be fiction or nonfiction. Anything that stands out to you.

I finished Four Thousand Weeks. I highly recommend it. It’s by Oliver Burkeman. There’s a book I read right before that called Do Nothing. It’s along the same lines of how we think about work. Four Thousand Weeks is much more about how we think about time and our perception of it, and how that perception motivates our actions and influences our emotions on a daily basis. Having recommend that for anyone running their own business.

I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, your framework, your work, and everything you have going on. Where’s the best place for them to go?

Check me out at LiveForYourselfConsulting.com. Make sure you connect with me on LinkedIn. Let me know that you heard me here, Dr. Benjamin Ritter. I think I’m the only one but that’s where I’m most active.

Ben, thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me.

 

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About Dr. Benjamin Ritter

CSP 253 | Designing A Consulting BusinessDr. Benjamin Ritter, is a leadership and career coach, Talent Development Executive, values geek, international speaker, podcaster, author, mentor, and passionate about guiding leaders in finding, creating, and sustaining a career they love.

With over 10 years of experience working with clients from companies such as Amazon, Coursera, Doordash, Google, Fiserv, Northwestern, Pinterest, and Yelp, Ben understands how to navigate any career path you decide you want to travel.

From empowering professionals to get unstuck, to guiding senior leadership on how to stand out from the competition, develop executive presence, and feel confident in being a leader, Ben is an expert in his field and will guide you toward truly living for yourself at work and in life.

Ben received his Doctorate in Organizational Leadership with a focus on value congruence and job satisfaction and earned an MBA in entrepreneurial management, and an MPH in health policy administration.

 

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