Overview:

The podcast discusses how Alexi built his consulting business to generate over $1 million per year with little work required from himself. He focused initially on finding the right client fit and narrowing his market instead of trying many different approaches. Systems and processes were implemented from the start and an operations manager was hired to help design them. Referrals and direct mail were used for lead generation. Paying clients upfront for packaged work and clear scoping of projects helped avoid scope creep issues. Alexi aims to have a business model that functions well without him through established feedback loops and an emphasis on quality.

Takeaways:

• Alexi built a successful consulting business that now generates 7 figures per year with minimal work required from him, as he has built a team and systems to run the business.
• In the early stages, Alexi focused narrowly on one type of client that was the best fit for their services through testing different markets.
• Alexi avoided many marketing tactics in the beginning like ads and funnels to keep their mental capacity free for building operations.
• Offline direct mail to CEOs became their main client acquisition strategy, supported by referrals.
• Getting the right client fit was critical to avoid short-term clients and ensure long-term, enjoyable client relationships.
• Productizing services and getting paid upfront was an important strategy to de-risk the business model.
• Building strong systems from the start was important due to Alexi's focus on quality and to avoid bottlenecks from writers.
• An operations manager was the first hire to help design robust systems.
• Staying disciplined to the target business model helped avoid distractions and unnecessary work.
• Being clear on the desired business model characteristics helped guide decisions even when opportunities pulled in other directions.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

All right, let's kick it off the automatic consultant, how I'm making seven figures per year and own a business that works almost entirely without me.

I'll spend the next 25, 30 minutes just talking about the two or three key things, the one oh ones pretty much that we did from the get go to get to this point.

And then, like Scott said at the end, we'll, we'll open up some Q and as potentially.

So those of you that are more experienced, you're probably not gonna see anything or hear anything here that's any great genius.

You would've heard everything in here before, but it's more about how we applied some of this stuff, these one oh ones to get to this point.

And the, the most exciting part of where we've arrived.

It's not so much the seven figures for me, that's not that big a deal for most people on trainings like this.

It's more that, yeah, Scott nailed it.

I don't have a lot to do to make the seven figures anymore 'cause I built the team and the team had built the systems and we've got feedback loops and all that sort of stuff in play.

So let's jump into it.

So if there were three things that three foundations were built the entire business on and it was at the very beginning, I, I knew that we couldn't do too much at once, otherwise we would be, there would be messes happening left, right, and center.

And so most people think success is very linear.

What we see on the left hand side, all of us on this training today know that is like the opposite of reality.

It's infinitely more messy, especially in startup mode.

And when you're in startup mode, we all know there's just, it never rans basically.

So I knew from the very beginning, 'cause I've been in business for a little bit 20 years, my God, that in startup mode you really have to get focused in on what really matters.

And that's really hard.

That's really hard because you think that everything matters.

But certainly in a consulting type context, agency type context, coaching type context, one of the things that we narrowed down on was who's our market?

And in the beginning we tried a few different markets 'cause that's normal in startup mode.

But very quickly as we were trying a few different markets and we were getting feedback and noticing which clients are the best fit, which clients were getting the best results for which clients were doing the best work, we started to narrow, narrow into one type of client.

And can't tell you just how important that is.

And that was especially in the formative status.

But it was hard at first because you get lots of ideas and you think podcasters can be a good market or coaches can be a good market, or e-commerce could be a good market.

Then all of a sudden, if you have, as soon as you have more than one market, you need multiple funnels, multiple probably sales pages, multiple autoresponder sequences, and the list goes on.

So things get very complicated very quick.

So this is why we, as fast as we could get to the decision point, I decided on the main market that that is for us, ditto for products and services.

Like right now we have a range of products or services.

We do a range of different content.

We write books, we do videos, we do lots of different things.

But in the beginning we had to narrow and narrow to one key series of deliverables.

And I'll get in a moment to what we specifically do.

But we, I try to narrow as quick as possible.

And again, in the beginning it was tough 'cause you're getting data coming through from different markets, you're seeing what your team are enjoying, what they're really good at, and you have 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 different directions you can go.

And, and I had to go down some of those different directions for a bit just to see what would happen and see how we do.

But I was always fishing for what is gonna be the 80 20 or the 80 20.

And this is again how we got a few years down the road because we got to seven figures in about three and a half years.

The seven figures is very predictable.

Uh, I knew to, to have a business that functioned without me to a very large degree, I needed to narrow as quick as possible.

And so we got to the one key product, so to speak, or the one key service in about six months of, of experimenting and tinkering.

And in our case, this is not for every case.

We had one key way that we get clients back in the beginning.

And it actually was not ads, even though I did test ads in the beginning, I didn't like the sort of clients that were coming through for our particular service.

So we again, narrowed, narrowed down.

And those of you who know me won't be surprised to hear that it was direct mail that we ended up on in the beginning.

What I wanna summarize at this point is one do less and e even though it's critical when you're in startup mode, ironically, it's actually even more critical in scale mode.

So to less fi find the clients, the markets, the products, traffic sources that give you the biggest leverage in all forms for effort, time, money, and so forth.

Adam Franklin's just joining us.

Very good.

And our company fugi.co.

For those that are not apprised, like we, we are a content agency.

So we have subscription packages where we product files our service and clients every month pay us a reoccurring monthly fee and depending on the package they're on, and we'll produce articles, emails, videos and so on and so forth.

And we'll talk more about the modeling in a moment.

But again, like I knew from the very beginning of this company, I wanted a machine that functions largely without me.

And those of us that have, that have done agency work before, we all know that as soon as you start to do bespoke, as soon as you start to have accounts receivables, as soon as you're starting to do proposals, the the founder is often needed and everything and you're constantly putting out lots and lots of fires.

So for me, I, I was very clear on creating a model that could function without me too.

And so like you look at what we can do in terms of our, in terms of our marketing, there's so many different things you can do, like funnels, webinars, virtual events, YouTube, blogging, email, and I guess they all have a time, there's a place to do all of these at some point.

I know in our case, in the beginning we didn't do any of these.

Um, like now we produce tons of content, now we have funnels and now we have webinars and all that sort of stuff.

But in the beginning, as tempting as all these things back here were to do, I had to say no to pretty much all of them.

Like I mentioned before that we, we did run ad run ads for a bit, but I got rid of those quite quickly because I didn't like the type of people that were coming through that were inquiring about our services that were just wrong fit.

And so I guess what I'm trying to say is the time place for all this sort of stuff.

Certainly in our case when we kick things off and the first six months to a year we didn't do any of that stuff.

And in fact like we had, I don't know, probably 40, 50 grand a month of reoccurring income, something like that before I even green lit hardly any of those other things that you saw before.

Like I didn't get the podcast up and running till about three years in.

'cause I knew again before we can really achieve any sort of semblance of scale.

Now seven figures is is not scale for many people, any scale for some, but, but in our case where we are, I'd call this some definition of scale because there's dozens of people on the team and so forth.

But before I greenlea any of these other activities, I knew we had to bolt down our processes.

I had to build the team, I had to build recruitment systems with the team.

There was a whole bunch of things that I needed to do before I got distracted with all this other stuff.

And so I had my brain and my mental capacity very free for longer than you, you'd think before I got focused on this stuff because I knew it would be needed to, uh, build out the team.

And again, it goes back to the vision I always knew and why we started this company was like, for years I was writing copy and I, I enjoyed it for most of the time, but I like 15 years in, I got tired with being the singular source of all the output.

I'd been the genius, so to speak that comes in and, and makes the work happen.

And Hang one second.

See, someone's trying to jump into, lemme just accept them.

Hey Scott, are you able to accept the person that keeps asking for admittance or do I have to do it?

Yeah, no, I think they're in, is that an anu I think Yeah, ANU, yeah, I think I've accepted.

Yeah.

Okay.

He's in.

Okay, very good.

Where was I?

Now I forget.

So in, in my case, like I knew because the vision was to have a company that worked without me, I had to keep my brain free for as long as possible for all things operation.

And so now we will talk about the, the one client.

The one client in our case is really critical because we're a service business.

It, it's a situation where with most service businesses, there is a few, there are a few key humps that service businesses need to get over if they're gonna keep a client forever.

The first key hump is that first month is critical and that first month also involves all the necessary pre-framing.

So clients have an alignment of values and understanding of what we're able to deliver versus what they think we can deliver and so forth.

And then roughly the three month period, the first quarter or so, and the three month mark is the other critical point where clients make the decision, should I, uh, continue or should I leave?

And again, if you don't set the the framing correctly, if you don't have the right fit clients and a whole bunch of things, all that ends up happening is you get one to three months worth of revenue.

But tons and tons of work that doesn't really pay off for that revenue.

And so in our case, we are extraordinarily, um, uh, disciplined on who qualifies to work with us and who does not.

And I'm very quick to say to, to a potential client, look, I don't think we're a fit for these reasons.

And I'm quite honest about it because it goes back to the vision that I've got in my mind.

And that is if we work with a client, we wanna work with them for years.

And we have a, a series of qualitative and quantitative sort of characteristics that we look for during pre-sales and during the sales process to make sure there's an alignment of fit for both client and us.

And this took a while to get to this.

We had to work with many clients that we had lots of problems with.

And then alone before we got into, before we got, we got really clear on who is a fit for what we, what we do.

And so in our case, we're never really looking to make a sale.

We're always looking for alignment.

And then if there's, if there's alignment, then we do the necessary things that we do in business to convert a potential client into a client.

And so for us, this has been critical because again, it goes back to the vision.

I wanted a business to work largely without me.

And that's also why our website is designed and written in the way that it is.

It's really transparent.

Like all the pricings on there, FAQs are on there.

The deliverables are very specific.

We, we use it as a filter so that before I speak to a potential client, they have all the unnecessary information they need at that point before they speak to me.

And I still do all the sales for the agency so that if they're speaking to me, they've really convinced themselves to a large degree there's a potential fit and that it's just my job to make sure that they're a fit for us.

And that's how often most of our conversations and our sales happen.

Now, that's not for everybody.

There are people out there that would say, Alexia, that's idiotic.

You want to maximize your number of calls so that you can get as many clients coming through.

You make as many sales as you can and and so forth.

And there's a case for that.

And the 30 year old version of Alexi would've said and probably done that the 46 year old version of Alexi can't be, can't even be remotely bothered with the idea of working with anybody.

But that that's not a great fit for us and vice versa.

That is absolutely enjoyable to work with.

That becomes a friend, ideally of mine personally and so forth.

And I will happily sacrifice money if it means the experience is much, much more rewarding for all.

And so this is the way we've gone about partly at least to get to this point and look again, I'm not sure what business everybody on today's trading is in, but these are the belief systems.

The one-on-one so to speak, that I brought to the table and then I trained into my team to think.

And there's probably not a team meeting that goes by where I don't keep reinforcing my own beliefs about what a successful business is.

And one of those is, I keep saying to my team, if we're doing anything urgently, something further upstream is broken.

We've dropped the ball somewhere.

If we're unhappy, a team member's unhappy, client's unhappy somewhere further upstream, we did something wrong.

We screwed up somewhere in some way, shape or form.

Even when the part of the team or one of the team members wants to blame the client for something, I'm going gonna stop right there.

That is all about client market fit or product market fit.

So possibly we made a mistake further upstream even when it's that, even when it's a client that hasn't paid attention or a client that expects one thing, but we deliver another, i, I just assume 100% responsibility for all things that happen in the business.

And so it leads to much warmer conversations and and pleasant conversations during the sales process.

It leads to, for the most part, like probably a good 90% plus we have the right people that work with us, which means it's more enjoyable to work with them.

The team are happier, we get better results and so forth.

And so this is a business ultimately that, and again, it goes back to the vision by implementing and really staying as disciplined as I've been able to, and the team stick to these one-on-ones so that we, we ultimately have a business where I don't have to do a lot of work day by day.

I rarely get caught up in the weeds.

And we can anticipate potential problems before they become problems 'cause we've got feedback loops and checks and balances in place in the system automatically that alert red flags before they become red flags.

So at this point, Scott, do we, can I open up with a question or two to clarify or can I, should I continue on?

I know we've got a bit of a time limit.

Yeah, no, whatever.

If people have questions then and you wanna do it that way, that's fine.

So I might take on just a question or two, but I'm, I'm moving along here at a million miles in it, I'm in it.

Does anybody wanna ask me anything?

Hey Alex, I might get one in quickly.

Yep.

You mentioned when you were building the team, you put recruitment systems in early.

Can you just elaborate on that a bit please?

Yeah, so what happened there was I knew that this was gonna be a systems intensive business.

Like service work is is brutally hard.

It's one of the harder models out there, that's for sure.

And because I'm a quality freak, I knew from the get go that I enough, what I can't abide by is crappy work.

I I, I have an irrational response to crappy work that's probably not healthy.

So I knew from the very beginning our systems and our people had to be amazing.

So the very first person that I hired was my operations manager, Clarissa.

And she was somebody that I worked with when we had our supplement company years ago who just blew me away at her level of intelligence, emotional intelligence, work ethic, everything, just her capabilities.

So I brought her on first up and I said, Clarissa, here's the vision, here's what I wanna create.

Helped me design the systems.

And then she was the person that helped me design, actually she wrote the vast majority of operational systems in terms of how the business functions.

I wrote all the writing systems, which stands to reason because I'm the writer.

And so from the very beginning I, I worked out how to hire writers at scale.

And so I've worked out ways to do the interview process with leverage and and so on and so forth.

So we built all of those from the very beginning.

'cause I knew that one of the big bottlenecks I would face with this business and it goes back to be me being the quality freak is writers, writers of the biggest bottleneck 'cause 'cause I'm such an obsessive, so I knew very early on I better work that one out or I'm gonna keep running into problems.

And then Clarissa, she runs all of the operations.

So hiring and firing virtual assistants, that all falls onto her.

There are things that happen most days that I'm not even aware of on the operations side 'cause that all falls under her banner.

Awesome.

Does that clarify?

Yeah.

Awesome.

Thank you mate.

Cool.

Cool.

I'll take one more question and then I'll keep moving.

I think Ben's got a question.

Maybe you can elaborate Ben.

It says early stage lead Dan Jen ordered.

Did you essentially JV Direct mail?

Actually direct mail was the big one we did in the beginning.

We'll talk about that in a sec.

Ben, I'll show you what we did.

Ly.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Cool.

Oh it's Ben Jones.

Holy crap dude.

How you doing?

I didn't recognize you.

Oh, I did good.

See you guys Ben man.

Alright, let's keep going.

So in the beginning, and those of you that know me will probably see this as unusual.

I did not run ads or produce tons of content.

We tested it in the beginning.

The main reason why I didn't continue running ads was I didn't like the top clients that were coming through.

But the other reason, and we all know this, if you're gonna run ads, you've gotta run ads properly and we all know to do them properly and you're constantly pulling your hair out, frankly, you're testing new creative, you're testing new funnels, then Facebook does the one thing that irritates you.

Then Facebook does the next thing that irritates you, so on and so forth.

And again, because I knew in the beginning this is gonna be an operations process intensive business, I didn't want to get my focus split too wide.

And so I knew that, and again, this isn't for everybody, but I knew, I was very clear on my vision.

A business that works largely without me.

I knew I had to put the blinders on in the beginning and not get too distracted with ads.

Uh, we now do ads and like we all know, I'm having to relaunch funnels and rere, re-record webinars and all the other garbage that we do with ads.

But back then I knew I needed the mental bandwidth to develop our operations.

Hence I put on the blinders.

But also ads have their place unless you're geared for it and you know what you're doing.

We all know just how much is involved.

Like I saw this, I just took a screenshot of this, I saw this in some, I forget whose webinar it was.

And they were teaching a beginner type market how to get clients right?

And they were showing, here's how we do it.

And they put up their infographic, their little image like this.

And I looked at this and thought, man, we've got hundreds of clients I can account on one hand who is pulling this off and doing this at scale.

It's doable, but you really gotta know what you're doing.

And so I thought to myself, man, whoever like this person that's teaching the beginner market that do this to get clients, I'm thinking they're really not doing themselves.

They're really not doing their, their clients a service here.

This is advanced stuff.

'cause you've got to set up all the funnels, you've gotta write the copy, you've gotta integrate it all.

It's easier nowadays than ever before with software like ClickFunnels.

But then you need to track it all.

And as most people are learning now, if you're just relying on the Facebook dashboard, then you're gonna have all sorts of problems.

You need third party tracking, then you've gotta set up third party tracking.

That's easier said than done.

And then God help us.

You've gotta find a way to actually make all the numbers work.

It's all tons of work and you need massive amounts of focus.

So in the beginning we did not run ads for these reasons.

So I knew how much focus it would require, which is why our, our main thing was direct mail.

And while I direct mail, not only is that my main background, but there's no technology involved.

These envelopes you see here guys, you're about to hear a bit of a background noise in a moment.

Apologies.

But these envelopes you see here, we had a university student come in and and stuff them.

There's no compliance issues.

I need to worry about.

It is the most dummy, simple, easy thing on the face of the earth to do.

And hence this is why we went offline.

In addition to that being my background.

Now, am I crazy?

Not really because those direct mail envelopes you just saw there, in our case, 30% of the people that reply, 30% of people that receive the envelopes reply and say, let's talk.

And then they move into the sales conversion process.

A lot of those, depending on the market, depending on how much time we're talking about, between 10 to 30% of those people would actually become clients.

Now what I need to mention here, like what you don't see here is these go out to like founders and CEOs of some of the like fastest growing companies in Australia.

These are the people you read about in the news and we're getting really good reply rates.

And because they're well-funded companies, fast growing companies, they're companies that fit.

So this is why in our case, I went offline and chose to make this the main way that we get clients.

And then Ben earlier asked what was the other way?

The the second thing we did after this was JVs we get lots and lots of referrals with j with clients and and so forth.

Tons of referrals, which is a form of a JV and for a good long time, that was how we got to this point and it allowed me to put the blinders on and stay focused whilst we were building operations and and building, uh, building the team.

So that was the second thing.

Now I'm happy to take any quick questions around that.

I know it all seems simple and you guys probably wondering what did you write, what did you send, who did you send it to?

Happy to clarify some of that.

Now if you guys want or I can keep moving.

Yes.

Yes.

So I would like to know what was your approach?

Did you put something inside that envelope or it was just like a letter and Yeah, So what we did was we got the market right first.

That's the most important thing.

We didn't send it just to the wrong people once we got the market right.

I attached a $5 note to the top of the letter and that's called a financial, like a grabber, like a financial eye catcher.

You can learn more about that if you Google Gary Halbert, Gary Halbert grabbers.

We'll probably get you there.

Lemme just have a quick look.

Gary Halbert.

I don't wanna spend too much time on this now because there's tons of information.

Yeah, Gary Halbert grabber.

If you google that, this is where I learned it from all these years ago.

There you go.

You'll learn more about that.

And with the letter we inserted a, we included a copy of my book as well and with the letter we included a, a letter from Warren Buffett to me inviting me to his annual general meeting years and years ago.

And with the envelope we also included a whole bunch of screenshots of just amazing feedback from our clients telling us basically how great we are.

So it was all together, all, all in it probably cost me 10 bucks per envelope to send in the mail.

A hundred letters, a thousand bucks, 30% replies, you can see for 33 bucks basically a reply.

So it's money for jam.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's great.

We've got, I've got a question from Adam Franklin.

So do you have a role description of an ops manager?

What is the question?

I can't see the question.

So description of an ops manager.

Do you have a role description?

Yeah.

Okay.

No, I don't.

That's the problem.

I don't have a, I can give you c clarissa's characteristics if you want.

So I hope you're recording this.

Yeah, beautiful.

She's way smarter than me.

Not hard to do on the Kolbe Index.

K O L B e.

She has really high follow through a seven.

That will make more sense when you understand Kolbe and she's got a decent fact finder, fact finder.

Those are the two most important things.

Her emotional resiliency is higher than mine as well.

On Angela Duckworth Squits call, she has 4.7 outta five, which is ridiculous.

That makes her a very stubborn, intelligent woman.

So when I need to change something, I have to think through how to persuade her.

Otherwise she'll fight me on it.

But as soon as I, she understands the reason for a change, instantly she gets it.

So having a high grid score is a good thing and a bad thing.

But in her case, she's got a good emotional balance, high intelligence, very fact-based.

So if I, I know how to communicate to her.

So with her and I having to almost know friction when I wanna change a system, she's disproportionately talented at documenting systems that partly comes about by her seven on the follow through.

But she's a trained biochemist as well, man.

She's got that iq, I don't know where it is, but it's, it's certainly somewhere very high.

What else is there?

Uh, very honest.

Her standards are impeccable.

She will get the s***s about some st.

Shoddy work faster than I will.

Didn't know that was possible until she came along.

So she's got super duper high standards.

What else is there?

And I had a prior relationship with her too.

I didn't just, there was a deep trust there because I had upwards of 31 32 VAs with her as well and she just blew me away like for years beforehand as well.

So there's experience, there's a relationship prebuilt.

That's probably most of it.

I'm sure there's more, but I've given you the big ones.

That's awesome.

Alexis, does that help?

Yeah mate, thank you.

That's good.

Alright, cool.

Did it, sorry, did it start full-time or part-time?

Oh she was the F full-time first hire straight out the gate.

Yeah, but I used her to build all the systems 'cause I knew I didn't wanna write them all myself.

Yeah, there, there are systems operationally that exist that I'm not even aware of.

Which is her.

Yeah.

Yeah, actually plus she's got impeccable Excel skills.

She initially, first, she was the first that initially programmed our project tracker, which is quite an extensive Gantt chart and there's all sorts of programming in there that I'm not even aware of that she first built out then passed to our actual full-time project manager person melody.

So yeah, that probably speaks to her left brain cultivation.

I suspect her having such strong Excel skills.

So I think that's probably the defining characteristic to fish four rather than singular Excel skills, if that makes sense.

Cool.

All right.

Lemme keep going here.

I think I'm a bit over time, but I'm not doing too bad.

Hey Scottie, I think, Yeah, no, no, I think, I think if we break out about 20 to 12 into breakout rooms so we've got a bit more time.

Cool.

Cool.

Number three, the business models.

So this is where we talk about productizing in the service.

Like I knew in the beginning I, because I had years of sending invoices when I was writing copy, years of doing bespoke work and I was so fatigued that I knew that I wanted the machine to run without me.

And so this is where I built to sell.

Yeah, that book was very formative for me.

I forget the author's name, I should know it.

Ham, What was his name?

Is it Neil Rackham?

Is that it?

No, that's been selling.

That's been selling.

Yeah.

I'm getting confused.

Warlow Warlow.

Warlow.

Yeah, Warlow.

Yeah.

That was the book that was formative for me.

And at the time I was speaking a lot to James Schramko and he's a systems head as well.

So between those two guys I knew where I wanted to end up.

So for me, like there's this, an interesting story, what you've seen there and you, you probably can't read much of it.

This was before I even knew I was gonna start our company.

I wrote on the whiteboard, if you could see the word model there in the beginning, that's what that little, that circle is in the middle, it's model.

So I was just thinking, I, I knew I was tied with writing copy and I wanted to do something different, but I didn't know what it was.

So instead of like me trying to force myself to work out the specific business, what I, what got clear on was the characteristics of a model.

And we branching out, there are all the qualities of a model that I wanted and didn't want.

And I got really clear on that.

And then lo and behold, about six months later I had started OOBE and then I found literally I found this photo in my photos on the iPad and stumbled on it way later down the line.

I went, holy crap, I modeled out the characteristics of my model before I knew it was gonna be our business.

And so this was how I was gonna define success.

And there's a few things there that you probably can't read around.

Recurring revenue, low risk, big ticket, high margin, all that sort of stuff.

And so for me, again, it really, I know this is 1 0 1, I really just got really clear on what I wanted and whenever I felt like I was stuck, I probably meant I had a values conflict on something which meant journal time.

So I had to start journaling and work out where the values conflict was.

And that's a process.

It still happens even to this day.

We, I keep working on the value system.

I keep working on beliefs that are limiting that 'cause situations unfold with clients and the business where, you know, if I'm not careful, if it's something especially irritating, it can form a limiting belief.

It can form a false perception 'cause of the intense emotionality.

And then bang, before you know it, how do you boil a frog, put it in cold water, then steadily put up the temperature.

That's how stupidity unfolds.

If I had to put it anything like in elegantly, it's something dramatic happens on a particular day.

It forms the initial inception of a negative belief or a fall like a perception.

And before long a month, two, three months later you, you've ended up down a tangent that is completely painful because of that one experience that you let unfold and influenced the company.

So I'm, I'm very careful with this and I, I am very reflective on this.

So I don't feature creep on systems, products, clients or anything at all.

And so in our case, the big thing that I knew a hundred percent that I wanted to do was get paid first.

And that that, that is what all of that is what productizing is all about.

And anyone that's in agency work of any kind man, oh man, I, this was the smartest move that we did and that was actually affirmed not too long ago.

The founder of Strategic Profit, not Strategic Profits, uh, what's his name?

I should know it.

What's his name?

Strategic coach.

What's his name?

Strategic Coach John?

No.

Oh, strategic coach Dan Sullivan.

I saw him on a training the other week and he was talking about the two times he went outta business and then one time that he went outta business was because he, he was invoicing and it was just before a recession hit and he was unable to collect money from the work that he did and went under, and this is just recent like a couple weeks ago I saw this and it was just again an affirmation of how intelligent a move it is in business if you're doing services especially to productize and get paid first.

And it removes such a risky component of the model.

Such an incredible risky component.

I reckon at covid a year bit over a year ago at the peak of Covid, if we didn't productize we probably would've gone outta business 'cause we couldn't have collected the money that we had done.

And because we were productized we still got hit and then bounced back.

But we got through it.

I didn't have to fire anybody, I had to have some of my team go part-time just for a bit.

But we got through it.

But I reckon we dodged a massive bullet there if I hadn't productized.

But also productizing is about having a list of deliverables that are within your genius zone and staying true to that.

And this is about if clients ask for of scope, having the discipline to say no that's outta scope, we can't do it.

And then being okay with a client or a potential client going somewhere else and actually not spending money with you.

Because as we all know an agency, if you're not very clear on your scope of works, then you start to feature creep and start to do stuff that is just even a bit outta process or a bit outta scope and all of a sudden fires start to happen left and center and agency work becomes a nightmare very quickly.

It becomes a very unpleasant model.

But if you have the discipline to productize and stay within scope, it can be a very wonderful model.

It can be beautiful model in fact.

But every day, look, we got a request yesterday from an existing client for out of scope work and the team were wondering should we do it or not?

It's doable, we have the team to do it but it's not within scope.

And I said Nope, stop right there.

We're not doing that.

And this is a client that's given us some trouble who's probably going to discontinue services at some point as well.

So again, very tempting to think let's do this work for him so we can keep him.

No, I've gone the other way on purpose 'cause I'm very clear on the model.

Very clear on the model.

And so this is just an example of all the reoccurring payments that come through.

I probably shouldn't include this slide, this you guys don't need to see that point is most agencies, most coaches, most consultants, they're really on a road to nowhere because they haven't thought through their business model very well.

And so they end up, oh did, were you guys seeing my screen just then or no, not just then.

No.

Oh, okay.

All good.

You didn't miss much.

So I, I guess in conclusion how we got to this point was being very clear on the model so that we don't end up on a road to nowhere.

Being that and consultants often they fall into this trap of having, they focus on getting the work then when they get the work, they have to go do the work which takes the focus of getting the work.

And so they go and do the work then they're shorter clients and then they have to get, stop doing the work, focus on getting more work and everything is like half done.

This fire is left and center and it's just a, a really unpleasant way to go.

And if it's agency work as well, they're starting to do stuff that's outta scope and now they're doing work that is somewhat bespoke and they keep getting pinged about what do we do here from the team, what do we do there?

And now that gets even more complicated and go a bit, if you're growing you can X 10, X 50, the complications and the difficulty and it's no wonder why so many agencies go wonder.

So I knew all this going into it, which is why I tried, I've tried to prevent most of those symptomatic issues and this is how we got here.

That's that's awesome.

Alexi, I you a, In a nutshell digital Clap.

That was, that was really good.

I think my big takeaway from that in a nutshell is just how do we simplify what we are actually doing?

Like the whole thing with just starting with direct mail when you had 22 different options, the whole thing of simplifying the offering.

So that was a big, if there was one word I would take away from that is simplify.