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Episode #264
Patrick Farran

Building A Meaningful Consulting Practice

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Summary

If you want to start up a meaningful consulting practice, you need to understand what drives people at a human level. Know your client’s motivation and know why you are being of service to them. Show up as your whole self and really try to add value to your clients. Understanding your full potential is key to meaningful practice. Join Michael Zipursky as he talks to the co-founder and CEO of the Ad Lucem Group, Patrick Farran about how he set up his own meaningful consultant practice. Learn what strategic partnership models you can use for your practice. Discover the true meaning of meaningfulness. And just start prioritizing your time on your business. Have a meaningful practice today!

In this episode, I’m very excited to have Patrick Farran join us. Patrick, welcome.

Thank you. It’s great to be here, Michael. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.

I’m very excited about this conversation. For those who aren’t familiar with you and your work, you are an executive coach and a management consultant. You are also a mentor to different startups and accelerator programs. You are the CEO and Cofounder at your own consulting firm called the Ad Lucem Group. You are a Senior Associate Director of Graduate Business Career Development at the University of Notre Dame. You work with MBAs at Notre Dame and so forth. You are also a coach in our Clarity program. In your free time, you perform community theater. You also train for all kinds of sports stuff like triathlons.

I’m an “amateur” triathlete with an emphasis on the word amateur.

I remember seeing a photo from one of the plays you were in that circulated within the Consulting Success Coaches group, and I was shocked. It was so professional, and it looked amazing. I was like, “I never knew that about Patrick, so it was good to see that.” Let’s get things started by going back in time a little bit. I believe 2017 you started your consulting firm. What made you decide to start that business? You also had a career in the corporate world before that. Can you take us back to 2017 or a little bit before? What was going on that spurred that transition for you to decide, “I’m going to start my consulting business?”

It goes back several years. I have been in corporate consulting for several years, and I have always wanted to have my own practice. In fact, I had started one early at one of my prior employers. When I got hired by a subsequent employer, they said, “You are going to need to take that shingle down for perceived conflict of interest.”

Seek to understand first before you try to sell. Click To Tweet

I took it down. The itch never went away. I did some real estate on the side to avoid that. I had my own practice in addition to my day job, but I never lost the desire to have my own consulting practice, so that stuck with me. Until about 2017, I’d gone back and gotten an executive PhD a number of years ago, and that was done in tandem. I’m a lifelong learner, and I wanted to, at this stage of my career, shift to having more autonomy in my practice and focusing on the impact that I could make. That’s the short answer. I’m certainly happy to go into further detail on any of that is helpful.

Let’s go back to that time you decide, “I’m going to make this official. I want that autonomy. I want to be in control of my life or lifestyle and serve clients and make an impact.” What’s the first thing that you did? How do you go out and get your first few clients when you launch back in the day?

I start with my existing network. I have built relationships over the years. I’m very involved in the nonprofit community of my community as well. Those are some of my earliest clients because I was into that ecosystem, so those were natural folks that had challenges on their plates and were challenges that I could help them solve. Those organic conversations early on were how I got my first set of clients in my own practice.

How did you know they had problems you could solve by working with clients in the Clarity program, especially those that might be a little bit earlier stage? You have this vast network. You have people that you know. You’ve typically spent quite a while building your experience and expertise, whether corporate or nonprofit. You have a pretty big asset in terms of people you know and figure out how you get in touch with these people. How did you go about identifying that there were people inside of your network that you could help?

In this particular instance, I know that a lot of the nonprofit boards are volunteers. They are often under-resourced, and so forth. I have worked on some nonprofit boards. I had done some nonprofit work and so forth. In fact, ironically, my very first client was a referral from my wife, who was on a board for a nonprofit.

CSP 264 | Meaningful Consulting Practice

 

She was coming home, bringing her problems to the dinner table, saying, “We have got to solve X, Y, and Z here.” I said, “I could help you guys with that.” That was the natural evolution in oftentimes reaching out to those folks. One of the things I did for my very first batch of clients was, on GivingTuesday, a number of years ago, I had gone out and researched all the local nonprofits and the community foundation in our local area here. I sent out a direct mailer.

An interesting aside is the fact that nonprofits aren’t my ideal clients, but I started with them because I had the relationships there and I have a heart for nonprofits. In this particular instance, I’d sent out a mailer and said, “We are looking to find five clients over the next year that we have space to do some pro bono work where I helped them source.” Grant funding was available through community foundations and so forth. I sent out this mailer to about 30 targeted organizations that had causes that were near and dear to our hearts. We got a good response rate that resulted in follow-up conversations to identify what their challenges were and whether we were a good fit for that. How could we help them? How could we identify funding? They helped us pay for the work we helped to provide that coming year.

That gave a lot of good insights into the practice I took and adopted for our for-profit work. The ironic thing is a lot of folks that sit on these nonprofit boards are my ideal clients. They are in leadership positions within their companies. That work created a virtuous cycle for us. We are doing work that’s near and dear to our hearts. We are impacting the community in positive ways. We are learning how to refine our offers, messaging, and so forth. We are getting out there in front of other folks in the ecosystem who we can serve within their organization. It was a powerful early entree into our consulting work.

That’s a great example of getting out there, being clear on who you want to be in touch with, putting out an offer in front of them, and seeing good things coming from it. You started a few years ago with your consulting business leveraging your network. When you look at what’s working for you now in terms of how you are bringing in clients into Ad Lucem and how you are building a pipeline, what would you say is different now from back then, if at all, in terms of how you approach marketing and what’s working for you to continue building that pipeline?

The one thing that’s consistent is certainly the conversations and getting out there and helping folks. In both instances is about seeking to understand first versus trying to sell. Sometimes in my early corporate consulting career, we would go out. You felt this. We have the metrics on our back, the numbers we’re responsible for, and you sometimes are pushing to sell.

Good partnerships happen when there is a good alignment of values. Click To Tweet

Authentically approaching our client prospects and understanding what they are struggling with is common to all the clients we want to serve. Doing that well has authenticity for the work we want to do and how we want to interact and add value. That was consistent in terms of the practice. Some things that have evolved over the years are some of our messaging. As I alluded to, for instance, we still have a heart for nonprofits, but our messaging is more around for-profit organizations. We try to help values-driven leaders transform their whole selves as well as their organization. Some of our core offers are about doing large-scale transformation work and doing that for impact because these formal leaders in companies have the ability to impact these employees’ lives, their livelihoods, the mission, and the vision of their company.

Especially now in the world that we live in, there’s this whole mass of challenges that companies are trying to solve and serve their clients. It’s our goal not to be trite, but it’s to try and make the world a better place, and the best way that we know how to do that is through that impact. Our offers have evolved, as have some of our messaging, but that core denominator of seeking to understand where folks are at and what they are struggling with and then honing in on how we can help them work through those has been consistent throughout.

When you look at the trajectory of your business and the growth you’ve experienced over the years, is there anything that stands out for you in terms of, “We did this one thing, and this happened,” or there’s this one experience, event, or person? Were any of these slingshot moments that somehow propelled you forward significantly beyond where you may have expected? Does anything stand out over those last few years?

There are probably at least two areas that were important. The first one is the folks that we brought onto our team. I founded the company with one of my classmates in my executive PhD program, which had a similar core set of values. We have built out a team that has significant networks, is very actively involved, share similar values, and so forth. We all have other portfolios of work that we are involved with in other ecosystems.

There are a lot of synergies that come out in those various ecosystems and with our broader network and our team. That’s one area. Another thing that we did was enter into a strategic partnership with someone that had a larger audience than we did. That enabled us to get in front of their audience with some of our offers and our content. That helped us grow our database in terms of folks we can provide nurturing content and create additional value and exposure there. Those are probably two top-of-mind areas.

CSP 264 | Meaningful Consulting Practice

 

I’d love to dive into as much of those as we can. One thing that stood out for me that I wanted to ask you about is for those who are either considering growing, building, or even running their consulting business as part of a partnership or maybe they are already in a partnership. You’ve now been doing this for several years. What stands out to you as the benefits of having a partner? Maybe it’s like, “If you have a partner, these things can happen. Here’s what you should be looking at or prepared for. Make sure that you have this agreement in place.” What are some high-level, but in your mind, important points around having a partnership?

Number one is clearly having good values alignment in terms of values in general. The likability factor is significant. Being explicit about the roles we anticipate in each other within the organization and understanding that things will evolve. It’s not unlike a marriage. You enter into a relationship in that regard, and things change and shift. Being able to have good conversations, give good feedback, and so forth are important traits. That was one important piece of the equation there.

The other piece that was important to look at is thinking about the model of the organization because you can structure this in any number of different ways. Personally, I wanted to structure something where I didn’t have to worry at night, especially at the stage of my career of making payroll. I found folks I had strong relationships and friendships with. They were influencers and strong contributors in their own right. We formed alliances with some of our additional team members there. We have partnerships and an independent contractor relationship with some of the other team members.

We present ourselves externally to the organization as one united front. It’s opening the hood up for folks here that that’s certainly one model that has worked well for us, and it has helped us to have fun with it. When we have been able to make some decisions, especially going through the pandemic where we are playing the long game and not have to worry about making these cuts or so forth, but we make these long-term strategic decisions, that’s been enjoyable, meaningful, and significant for us.

Has there been anything that has been concerning or a challenge to deal with in terms of team members that are not full-time, where you create these alliances, or if their structures were more like an independent contractor? Do you see any downsides to that? That might make you consider, and not necessarily that you would because, as you said, you don’t want to have to think about payroll. In your situation, you want to be very light and nimble. Are there some challenges that come with sticking to that model only?

When working with contractors, know that there are going to be other competing time demands that you don't have a direct influence on. Click To Tweet

One of the things to be aware of if you entertain a model like that is the fact that there are going to be other competing time demands that you don’t have a direct influence on. Unlike my corporate career, I was in a more matrix organization where the consultants I worked with were on multiple projects, so I had to navigate across that. It requires very careful project management, communication, oversight, and at the end of the day, flexibility. You can plan for all those things in the world, and then something happens, whether it’s life or another client project, and suddenly, someone’s availability may not be what you originally anticipated.

The contingency planning requirements around that are particularly important in that model. They are important in general, but certainly that model. I also have other contingency options in terms of talent options. If we have a problem such as more work than we can handle and there are things that we can do in terms of delaying starts, there are some additional folks in my network that I could bring on for surge work and so forth. I have been very explicit about building out what those contingencies would look like so we know where the trap doors are if we need to pull that. That’s a problem we seek to have and welcome having that challenge.

That’s such a great point to me. You’ve made a whole bunch here that resonate with me. Getting values right in a partnership is something that Sam and I talk about very often. I remember walking to the office and listening to a podcast, and it made me think like, “You spend so much time running your business, doing your job, or whatever it might be. Why not choose to do that with people that you love and that you care about?” I was like, “That’s such an amazing thing that we have been able to build over these different businesses that we have run together over the years. The fact that you can do it with people that you enjoy being with is so important.”

You were talking about partnerships being interesting. I love how you did the scenario planning. This is a thing that more consulting should be done. COVID was a big wake-up call for many people. If you were delivering from stages like you are speaking, that’s how you are generating a lot of your revenue to wake up one day and go like, “I can’t do that anymore. If I hadn’t taken the time before that to think through, what would happen if I can’t physically be in the same room?”

It’s a great wake-up call hopefully for everybody joining us now to think about what could go wrong in your business with the people that you are relying on. What are the points that you are relying on? How can you put a backup plan in place so if that breaks? Maybe you don’t have the answer right away. Maybe it still takes time to get the right person to the right place or get the right system, but at least like you thought about it.

CSP 264 | Meaningful Consulting Practice

 

You can be a lot more proactive than reactive. That was a fantastic idea. You talked about the strategic partnership, which also was a bit of a springboard. I don’t know what you can share about it, but anything that you can share? I’d love to give a bit more color and context to that. What did that strategic partnership look like? What were or are the benefits, as others may have not yet necessarily considered? It may be a great opportunity to introduce what that world of strategic partnerships can be like.

In terms of looking at partnerships, the values alignment is an important piece of that. Also, understanding who are the ideal clients that are in both of those folks’ spheres and if they overlap well. Make sure those pieces are there. Is there co-opetition? Is there an opportunity to mutually benefit one another in such a way that more offer can enhance their offers and vice versa? Those are important elements that come top of mind. From a tactical perspective, similar to the partnership messaging is thinking about, “How are we going to work together? What are the core expectations with one another? How are we getting some of the pragmatic things about? How are we going to work out fees, referrals, and all of those housekeeping things to be explicit on or are important?”

One of the coaches I have worked with, what they are saying was, “Business moves at the speed of relationships.” I’m borrowing from that mantra. You’ve got folks that have built audiences that are going to benefit from your offers. If you can find those that can accelerate your exposure and your learning curve and so forth. Why would you try and do it on your own when those opportunities exist? I would add that into the mix of looking for target clients where that makes sense. Looking for strategic target partners can be powerful as well.

Can we define for a moment or explore what a strategic partner looks like? There are a lot of different shapes and sizes they can come in. Are any specific ones you worked with that you feel are good in terms of like, “Find a software company that provides software to your ideal clients or an industry association?” Anything that comes to mind for you of where you’ve seen success?

You are right. It runs a gamut. It could be a subcontract or a piece of an offer that you provide. Some of the clients I have coached through our program together have a core offer. A client asked for a component that wasn’t in their sweet spot, but they could do it and add value and manage that, so they brought in a subcontract to deliver that portion of the work. That is one model that can exist. Another strategic partnership can be getting in front of your audience, whether presenting a webinar with a call to action, for instance. That was the case for some of our models and finding areas of value that can be positioned within those audiences. Another partnership is looking for folks with whom you can collaborate on the work and the delivery. It can create additional bandwidth and networking opportunities. The whole is greater than some of the parts.

Before you go out there and seek those relationships, be very clear on who you are and what your value proposition is. Click To Tweet

For anyone doing this now, if you want to get in front of more people, the strategic partnership aligns where you team up with another firm or a person as a way to provide additional work or increase your capacity. It’s a great thing to consider. One that I’d say is even more top of mind for a lot of people is, “How do I get in front of more people? How do I generate more business, create more visibility, or build a pipeline?” To what you are talking about now, this is such a tried-and-true approach which is finding a platform that already has access to your ideal clients and typically in numbers. If you are reaching out to an ideal client one-to-one, that’s great. It can certainly work and help you build a relationship.

Imagine if you could reach out to one person that puts you in front of 100, 1,000, or many thousands of people, which is essentially what you can get from writing an article for a certain type of publication or delivering a webinar for a certain type of company. That might be a software company. This might be another company that serves your ideal clients or has them in their database. There’s a massive opportunity for everybody out there to essentially leverage or use that model. I’m glad that you brought that up.

One of the things that are important there, too, is being very clear before you go out there and seek those relationships on who you are, what your value proposition is, and how you want to show up to those folks. If you are not clear on that and you have ambiguity going out in front of folks, it’s only going to accelerate that ambiguity. You want to make sure you do a little bit of that going slow to go fast when you get out there, but to your point, it can accelerate that process.

To someone who’s reading going, “That makes sense to me, but I don’t have all the answers, I don’t necessarily know how to improve my message. I don’t know how to make my offer more compelling,” what would you say to them? Is there something that they should be thinking about or should be doing? Is it about getting out there, taking action, and seeing what works and doesn’t? How would you counsel somebody who’s thinking through that now?

What we have in the program that we work on that I find particularly helpful is thinking about the problems you can help your clients solve. Not only what are the types of problems, but what are the problems you enjoy solving? If you have an affinity towards those and you enjoy and get energized by those, that’s going to tend to serve you better. It’s by following your energy and being mindful of that, and thinking about what are the steps or actions you take to address those problems. Most importantly, from a messaging side, what are the results? What are the outcomes for the clients that you can help them achieve? We often talk about together that clients don’t want to report and have workshop, meeting, and process. They want what’s on the other side of that.

CSP 264 | Meaningful Consulting Practice

 

What is it that’s on the other side of whatever action or steps that we can take? What we are often quite good at is consultants say, “We are going to do X, Y, and Z, and we’ll take you through this process there,” but we often fall short in saying, “We can help you achieve X and here’s how we are going to take you there.” The clients worry about X. What is that X? Understanding that is where that becomes the game-changer.

We say a lot in the Clarity coaching program about what tends to hold somebody back. Even somebody who may have a lot of experience running consulting businesses and has a team and is successful, if you are not confident about your message, offer, or something new that you are putting out there, you are typically not going to take action.

That’s the typical human mindset. If you can get a few of these things in place, you have more clarity around it. Now, it’s much easier to get out there and start seeing what works and what doesn’t work. That gives you the feedback you need to adjust and change and make it better. Let’s transition into this. I know a topic that is near and dear to your heart is the idea of crafting a meaningful consulting practice and consulting business. No pun intended, but what does having a meaningful consulting practice mean to you?

It’s about understanding what drives us at a human level. What are our motivations? Why are we doing what we are doing? Often, we fall onto the treadmill and mindlessly pursue a goal where we haven’t asked ourselves, “Why am I doing this?” I was working with one of my coaching clients. We had a significant conversation where they shared that they had a revenue goal to achieve seven figures this 2022 in their practice. They were very honest about some of their motivations around that. They also had some goals to spend more time with their family, both their children and their aging parents. They were also feeling frazzled and wanted to reduce that feeling.

They had a set of goals that were in competition with one another. There was some tension in there, and that’s true for many of our goals. It’s about holding those imbalances. One of the suggestions that came up here is how you prioritize what is meaningful to you. I will try not to geek out too much because I did my research on work meaningfulness, but it’s complicated. It’s a multidimensional concept. There are a lot of things that can contribute to meaning. It’s not something that you can ever arrive at. It’s not a destination that you achieve and go, “I got the work meaning, and we are all good to go. I have got my meaningful practice.” It’s a constant equilibrium like personal health and fitness. You constantly have to work at it, and it will come and shift there.

Your consulting clients don't want a report, a workshop, a meeting, or a process. They want what's on the other side of that. Click To Tweet

What’s also significant about work meaningfulness and having a meaningful consulting practice is that it’s different for each person, and only you can define what that means for you. That is dynamic as well. Things will evolve, and things will change in our life. Being clear on what it is that drives you, what’s your source of inspiration and purpose and how you are prioritizing the different things that are going to be held in tension can be powerful in terms of making those day-to-day decisions here when they come into conflict with one another.

That’s such an important inventory or audit for people to do and take themselves, and very often, people don’t do it. You are so busy working on the business. You are grinding it out. You are delivering on client projects. You are thinking about marketing. You are dealing with your personal life and everything included inside of that.

You don’t take time to think about what is meaningful, how you prioritize, and what matters out of all the business. That’s why it is so important not to think about, “How can I do more?” but, “How can I do less of the wrong things to do more of the right things?” I know you did a lot of research on this. You apply this on a regular basis with your consulting clients as well as the clients that you coach in the Clarity program. How often do you think people should be thinking through this in terms of doing an audit or an inventory and paying attention to their priorities and meaningful work?

It’s when you are starting out your firm. That should be part of the fundamental groundwork that you are laying. At least annually, you should be calibrating how you are doing in terms of our mission, vision, values, and goals. Quarterly is probably the optimal cadence to do that calibration check because that’s what can translate to your quarterly goals that will help move the needle in your business. It takes these concepts of meaning, which can be rather esoteric in their own right, but then says, “How can I translate that into my business?” What does that mean in our terms of the quarterly decisions that we are making? How does this align with what is meaningful for us?

To give a little bit of additional context, some of the things that contribute to meaning are dimensions like creating a sense of unity with others. That’s one dimension. That can take the form of how you interact with the clients you serve, the team members you are on, the vendors you interact with, and so forth. Another one is being in service to others. What value do you add to your clients? What does that look like? Is that one-on-one coaching? Is that a large-scale team transformation? That’s a significant dynamic.

If you want a meaningful consulting business, you need to understand what drives people at a human level. Click To Tweet

Another component that’s important dimension is your ability to express your full potential. The ability to the extent that I can be my full self in the work that I’m doing is significant. Here’s one other variable. I’m borrowing from a model from Marjo Lips-Wiersma and Lani Morris in terms of some of these dimensions. Here’s a well-researched model here that they formed. The other quadrant that they refer to is having integrity with self. The extent that my consulting practice or my work aligns with who I am and who I want to show up to be. If I feel like I have to be a slimy salesman, for instance, and that doesn’t jive with my values, you are going to feel out of alignment. Ultimately, those are all held in balance between doing things for self and others and being in doing. Each of those quadrants has to align in those areas to have that centered meaning.

You mentioned that there is a graphic around this model. If you head over to ConsultingSuccess.com/podcast or type in Patrick Farran and Consulting Success into Google, I’m sure the page will come up, and you can see that graphic and model there. You talked about this conflict that some of you were speaking to in terms of them wanting to get to seven figures. They have all these other competing components of their agenda.

When you think about the biggest challenge that consultants face, and maybe it’s something that you faced back in the day, recently, or something you see other consultants faced, what stands out to you as a big opportunity but also can be a pitfall or danger that competes or creates a lot of conflicts when you think about the ultimate opportunity to create a meaningful consulting business and something that weighs people down? What tends to come to mind for you when I say that?

One common theme is sacrificing the long-term for the easy short-term option. Where that tends to manifest itself most commonly in the clients I coach, as well as in my own practice, is sometimes we are afraid to delegate. We struggle to systematize things. We hold on to things because, “Only I know how to do this,” or we do lower-value activities. Maybe we are procrastinating something that has a little bit more ambiguity associated or whatever the case may be, but we are not optimizing our time. We are creating a bottleneck for ourselves and the amount of growth we can do in our business. We are also adding stress to our plates. We have become that single point of failure. We feel like, “Everything is resting on our shoulders.”

If I’m the primary rainmaker of the company, for example, I know that at any point, if I want to take a vacation, my kids get sick, or whatever that is, that funnel is going to shut down if I haven’t built systems in place or if I haven’t brought other people up to speed. It’s that general theme of being mindful of, “Is this the best long-term game plan?” knowing that sometimes in the short-term, you make decisions that are going to take longer, but if it has a payoff in the long-term, it’s being mindful of those investments. To a process you alluded to earlier in our conversation, sometimes you are going to make a call at the moment where knowing that’s maybe less than optimal, but if you can do that and be mindful of it, aware of it, and ask yourself, “What can I do to work on this to improve for the long term?” that’s something that we often miss in the day-to-day business that we all get tacked into.

Meaningfulness is a multidimensional concept. It's not a destination that you achieve. It's a constant equilibrium. Click To Tweet

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you this, Patrick. A lot of people want to do more things. They have hobbies. It might be some business activity. It might be personal fitness, relationship, spiritual, or whatever it is. Here you are, you teach at Notre Dame, run your own consulting business, and are coaching our Clarity program. You are in theater. You do triathlons. You are a family guy. There’s a lot of stuff going on, and I’m wondering. You must know something that allows you to be able to do all of those things where a lot of people struggle. All I have is like, “I run my business and try to keep up and take care of my family, but I don’t have time for myself to do X or Y.” How do you think about those things? How do you schedule and compartmentalize them? What’s your secret? What do you think helps and enables you to do so many different things at once?

One comment that one of my early coaches said, “You like to do a lot of things. You can do anything and everything you want, but you can’t do them all at the same time.” It’s important to prioritize. There are things where there are seasons for things. For example, I’m in my busy season at Notre Dame and my work there. There’s nothing happening in community theater now. I have a show coming up. I know when I can schedule some of those. Here’s another decision I make for me. The triathlons have made such a significant impact on my own physical health but also my mental health. It has created greater productivity, clarity of mind, and other benefits there. That’s one of the first things I schedule.

I have a coach from an accountability and support perspective. I don’t have to worry about the decision fatigue of what my workouts are. She will give feedback from the data and all my workouts and so forth. She will schedule my training plan with me and say, “Here’s what we are going to do.” I don’t have to think about it. I can execute it.

The first thing I calendar for my week is my workouts, and I know that if I don’t get those in, I’m going to be worthless to myself and everyone else around me. I have also learned over the years the importance of protecting my sleep. Being mindful that if I have a day and I struggle with insomnia from time to time, I know that if I have a day or two that starts to rack up, I have got to reprioritize some things that get back to the basics because if I’m not well rested, I’m not going to be any good to anyone.

It’s being mindful of also what are your personal priorities, whether it’s your kids, activities, or business. I have made some conscious decisions, and I know for a fact that I have made some decisions that I’m not as optimal in my business because I have a lot of context switching going on. We could be making a whole lot more revenue if all I did was my company, but that’s not what’s most important to me. I get bored easily, so I know I love to have lots of different things going on. I love that intellectual growth and stimulation. There are a lot of synergies there that excite me, but there are also some costs associated with it, like the cost of doing business. When I’m shifting here and got energies there, it means that I’m not going to make the seven figures in my business, and I’m okay with that. I have made that conscious decision to have that meaningful practice because it supports the lifestyle I want to have.

Stop sacrificing your long-term game plan for the short-term easy option. Click To Tweet

That’s such an important point. We have clients that we work with who are earning a very healthy seven figures. Others are six figures. Others are earlier in their journey, but they come from a lot of expertise and experience in their corporate or nonprofit background. There is no one definition of what success is. This is why the topic of creating a meaningful consulting practice is such a powerful and important one for people to consider because you could spend a lot of time working hard to build a business to achieve whatever society.

It’s like you need to make X amount. The more money you have, the better it is, but what if you don’t feel fulfilled or your energy is being drained, and you wake up and are not looking forward to doing that work? You could very easily make a lot more money than you do now if you did less of the things you enjoy doing. If you ask yourself what’s the real goal of having more money, wasn’t it to do more of the things that you want to be able to do and to have more freedom? If you can live the life you want to live now, still make a great income, and do all these other things, to me, that sounds like a real win.

I’m living my dream. This is something I have worked for years to have. For me, what drives me is impact. I have never been monetarily motivated. For me, it’s what personal impact I have in people’s lives and the organizational impact. For me, the biggest win I can get in the day is knowing that I helped change the trajectory of someone’s life for the better. Sometimes I get to see that actual outcome. That’s very fulfilling many times. I know I’m planting seeds I may never see, but I’m okay with that. I get enough of the visual wins to keep me going, and that’s what helps me put up with the other ancillary areas that I don’t enjoy as much, whether they are administrative meetings right at the day job or things like that.

Before we wrap up here, I want to do two things. One is for people can learn more about you, your work, and everything you have going on, which is a lot. Also, I would like to ask you this. Over the last few months, what is one book that you have either read or listened to that could be fiction or non-fiction but that you enjoyed? What comes to mind for you?

I have read several that I enjoy. One that comes to mind that’s in line with what I shared about was Dorie Clark’s The Long Game. A lot of what she talks about resonates with me that made some intentional decisions. One phrase that I love that she shares in there, which I’m paraphrasing, is, “If you don’t have a clear sense of direction, optimize for what’s interesting.” Those words resonated with me. If you don’t know what you are going to do, if something looks more interesting to you than something else, go for the one that’s more interesting. That’s going to inherently provide you more meaning and fulfillment, and usually, more additional tangible rewards as well because you do a better job with it. That’s one that comes to mind. There was another one that I read, and I forgot the author. It’s The Gap and The Gain.

You can do anything and everything you want, but you can't do them all at the same time. Click To Tweet

It’s Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan.

It’s a simple concept or premise there. It resonates with me as an entrepreneur. We often have done that work here and have this vision up here about where we went, and we are often beating ourselves up because of all these things that we didn’t accomplish to do, never got done, and so forth instead of taking stock of what we have achieved and where we came from. It’s such a simple but profound paradigm shift there.

Those two have put out a few great books. The Who Not How is another one that aligns very well with The Gap and The Gain. Those are the good ones for people to read. Patrick, thank you so much for coming on. You are an amazing coach in our Clarity Coaching Program, so people can certainly see what you are up to over here. If they want to learn more about what you have going on in your world, Ad Lucem, in terms of working at the university or anything else, where’s the best place for them to go to?

They can check out our website at AdLucemGroup.com or my LinkedIn profile. Feel free to if you do. I’m happy to take LinkedIn requests. If you message, tell me you heard me on the show here so that I know you are not pitching. I’m happy to connect and continue to build the network. One of my mantras is if there’s anything I can help you with personally or professionally, I’m happy to be a resource to you.

Patrick, as always, thanks so much for coming on. Always great spending some time with you.

Likewise. Thanks so much for the opportunity. Have a great day.

 

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About Patrick Farran

CSP 264 | Meaningful Consulting PracticeMy calling is to catalyze individual and organizational transformation by advancing systems through which organizational performance, their people, and the communities in which they are embedded flourish.

 

 

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