Background/Context
I'm a successful entrepreneur who has started multiple businesses including an eight-digit venture-backed startup with six-figure revenues. Now, I'm becoming a consultant so I can help and meet first-time entrepreneurs and other people who aren't sure what to do next for their business or just want an objective, experienced perspective. So far, I've helped 18 different businesses including 10 Redditors. This series is the live story of me building my consulting practice from scratch.
Previous threads: Day 13, Day 8, Day 4, Day 2, Day1
If you want to book a free initial session, please write me a PM!
This update's a bit unpolished, but there's lots to do and I wanted to write you guys now rather than waiting. Expect the next update to be a little more detailed and polished.
What I've been up to
- "Downgraded" my client tracker from Podio to an Excel spreadsheet. It's faster/easier for me to just build the analytics I want in Excel than to try to use the Podio reports, which were becoming a hairball. I also hated the interface on Podio, and was wasting too much time clicking around and generally just didn't like it. Of course, there are other CRMs out there, but I think I can be faster in Excel and don't want to waste anymore time or money on this at the moment. Lesson: keeping it really simple is fine, especially at first, and especially when you're working by yourself and don't need any integrations.
- Started using Calendly as a live scheduling tool. Huge shout-out and thank you to /u/wakawakafoobar for showing me this tool. What a life-changer! Now, people can see exactly when I'm free and book an appointment that adds itself to my calendar, which means it prevents double-booking — and it's all displayed in their own timezone.
- Worked hard on refining my initial paid product offering.
- Had a brief gap in the frequency of my meetings because I hadn't been watching building my "pipeline" of scheduling. That's fixed for the moment now, but shows me the importance of maintaining a steady supply of people interesting in talking to me.
- Got a very interesting suggestion from a mentor of mine: offering the initial session as a "pay what you want" session. I'll discuss this more below.
Exploring new pricing models
I thought this was a very interesting idea. After each free session I've held, I've gotten very positive feedback about how valuable it was. But, it's hard for someone to be confident that I'll be able to create a lot of value for their business until they have actually already met with me. So the prospect of giving people the option to choose what to pay after the session sounded very appealing to me — they wouldn't have to risk anything, and I could make a big impact for them in a way that seemed worthwhile. Finding some way to monetize my initial sessions, even if I'm not earning a lot for them on average, would also boost my overall effective wage a lot.
So I reached out to a number of the people I had worked with for feedback on the idea, and got a very mixed response. Some people loved the idea. Others hated it and told me they wouldn't have gone for the free session under this model. My natural instinct in this kind of a situation is to test it out, since the downside risk of doing so is pretty low... BUT one particular early client of mine made a very good point that really hit home with me.
My strength is in my in person or on-the-phone communication. I'm a MUCH better salesman for myself and stand out much more in those formats than in text or design formats. If I push the first point-of-sale decision up the funnel to before I interact with someone, I'm shooting myself in the foot and not using my best assets — all for the sake of a likely relatively small overall increase in revenue from the people who do end up booking initial sessions. This just doesn't sound like a smart move, especially at such an early stage. I'm still really interested in this idea, but I'm going to put it on the back burner for the moment and see if it makes sense to incorporate at some point later.
So what am I doing now for my pricing model? For the moment, I'm going to keep doing initial free diagnostic meetings. The goal of these meetings will be to get to know the client, provide them with a basic blueprint for what to do, and provide some clear actionable items and value. The client will then have the choice to either take this and try to implement it on their own, or to have another meeting to either do a deeper dive or to review the results of what they did and to go into any other problems they may have had.
Ultimately, my value proposition is that I have the perspective and experience that many people operating on their own don't, can help them set directions and solve intractable problems, and hold them accountable. This is the role that investors often play in later-stage companies, but people who are pre-seed, don't have active investors, don't plan to take in investors, or just want another perspective can benefit hugely from this perspective.
Okay, it's late here now and there's lots to do, so that's it for now. Thanks for reading, and as always, please let me know your feedback!
Coming up next week: 1/3 of the way there! Time to review where I stand and how things are going.
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