Ultimate Guide Starting and Building Consulting Business 20200711 1

Five
Four Six
Get Clients
Quickly
Promote
Calculate Fees
Services
Three Seven
Profile Clients
The Ultimate Guide to Write Proposals
Starting and Building

Two Eight
a Thriving
Identify Niche Consulting Business Build a Marketing
Machine
One nine
Proven Step-by-Step Strategies,
Systems, and Tools to Start and Build a
What is Thriving Consulting Business Create Multiple
Consulting? Income Streams
Critical to Success
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Critical to Success © 2020 https://www.criticaltosuccess.com/ v 20200711

Proven Step-by-Step Strategies, Systems, and Tools to
Start and Build a Thriving Six- and Seven-Figure
Consulting Business
The Ultimate Guide

The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business has strategies, systems, and
insights for anyone starting a consulting business or building their consulting
business into a thriving six- and seven-figure business. As someone new to
consulting, this is your map to starting and building a thriving consulting business.
As an experienced consultant, this guide will show you how to accelerate your
consulting business and create more independence.
The Course
The online course, Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business, is the
results-driven course that executes what is covered in this Ultimate Guide. In the
course consultants and experts are led through the strategies, systems, and tools
using videos, steps-by-step guides, live online Office Hours, and an online
community of consulting professionals.
The best time to start and build a

thriving consulting business is now!
Get the most current

Ultimate Guide

Beginner’s Mind vs. Expert’s Mind
When you build your business correctly, consulting is one of the most satisfying
and profitable careers. This guide, its downloadable resources, and the course will
help you build a thriving consulting business where you contribute to a better
world, build a satisfying career, and create six- and seven-figure income.
There is a caveat! Experts who are very confident in their field often believe they
can quickly build their consulting business. They often start with a few good
referrals, but these often dry up within the first two years. They are used to
making good decisions in their knowledge domain. But it takes a different type of
expertise to build a consulting business.
Even experienced, practicing consultants get trapped in a loop of Feast-or-Famine
that drives them to work too hard, then face periods with no clients. This guide
shows you the systems, strategies, and tools that will keep you out of the Feast-
or-Famine cycle and create a portfolio of clients, a marketing machine, and
multiple streams of income.
Start Your Consulting Business with

Guidance
The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business has guidance and tips on the
business and marketing systems that take you from startup to a six- or seven-
figure consulting business. If you are a practicing consultant, this guide will help
you build proven systems that keep your prospect pipeline full. It shows you how
to build the multiple streams of income you need for a stable high income and
greater independence.
The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business is based on 30+ years’

experience consulting with Global 1000 and Fortune 1000 companies, two years
researching average- and high-income solo-professionals, and the proven
business systems demanded by investors in Silicon Valley startups.

The Stages of Starting and Building Your Six-
and Seven-Figure Consulting Business
There are many great reasons to become a consultant. There are few business
opportunities with such high potential and low risk for someone who has prepared
well. And, it provides a great independent lifestyle.
To be successful, consulting requires very low capital investment, but

it does require high business or technical skills combined with proven
business and marketing systems.
A consulting business’ growth usually occurs in stages that build upon one another.
Some consultants skip a stage but later find their business stalls or fails. They then
have to rebuild their foundation to create the stage they missed.
This guide and the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course help
you through each stage of building a thriving consulting business.

What is Consulting? Lifestyle,
Earnings, and Satisfaction
The business of consulting is straightforward – as a consultant, you use your
expertise and experience to help others make decisions, plan, solve problems,
and sometimes execute the plans.
Having been an independent consultant for 30+ years, I can say that in “most
cases,” consulting is a lot of fun. It’s intellectually exciting and challenging, and
when done right, it produces a great sense of contribution combined with high
income and personal independence.
Average consultants earn more than their peers in industry and boast a higher job
satisfaction rate as well. High earning consultants are off the charts in earnings
and in job satisfaction rates.
The purpose of this Ultimate Guide and the Starting and Building a Thriving
Consulting Business course is to show you how to be a high earning, high
satisfaction independent consultant.
Click to learn more about consulting lifestyle, earnings, and satisfaction…

1. Finding Your Best Consulting Niche(s)
Starting a consulting business is far easier and far more profitable when you find a
niche where you can make a valuable impact and can become known.
The riches are in the niches!
You want to select one or more niches where,
• You have high purpose, interest, or passion

• The niche has high-value, bottom-line problems
• You can resize, repackage and rechannel your consulting services to meet
their needs, regardless of pandemic or social distancing
• You can reach a high-volume of narrowly defined clients across a broad
geography
• You can create a unique brand or defensible position
While you can guess about which niche is best, the wrong guess could waste
years of your life and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost opportunities.
During the pandemic, recessions and recovery it is critical you target niches
that where you can give high value solutions, regardless of the business situation.
In the detailed chapter on niches and the blog and LinkedIn post series, you will
learn there are opportunities for consulting in most well selected niches, whether
they are growing or declining.
Be sure to follow the links for help on building a thriving consulting and
independent professional business during the COVID-19 pandemic, recession
and recovery.
Finding the right niche may sound daunting, but there are proven steps you can
take to find a niche that gives you great income and independence.

Using a little research and a grid to match your skills and impact to niches is a
much better approach than gut feeling or trial and error. It also enables you to
validate the niche before spending too much time and map how you can expand
once you are in a niche.
Click to learn more about finding your ideal niche…

2. Finding Your Ideal Consulting Client and
Learning Their Pain
To build a thriving consulting business, you must know how to find your ideal
prospect and be able to talk with them about their pain and its impact. If you are
going to do that effectively, you need to know exactly how to identify ideal
prospects and where to find them. As a solo consultant, you can’t waste time on
leads that will never become clients.
To connect with your ideal client, you must know

how to describe them and the pain they need healed.
Some of the criteria you can use to identify and find a perfect prospect are their
industry, seniority, job title, years of experience, location, and size of business. With
key criteria like that and the right search techniques, it’s easy to build a list of
prospects by networking or database searches.
Knowing who your prospects are is only the first part of knowing your clients. Once
you find a niche and potential prospects you must also know their important
problems, how those problems impact their organization, and how you can talk
with them about those problems.
Click to learn more about knowing your ideal clients and their pains…

3. Promoting Your Consulting Services
As a great consultant, you must give prospects two things to turn them into eager
clients. The first is a vivid image of how great life will be when their problem is
solved. The second is confidence that you can solve their problem. Talking about
your tools and methods won’t win a client.
Great consultants give their clients an image of a better life

and the confidence they can take them there.
When you promote your consulting services, you need a personal and professional
brand that quickly gives prospects the confidence you can solve their problems.
Your brand represents this trust, authority, and promise.
Your brand is not a slogan or logo.

Your brand is your trust, authority, and promise.
Your brand precedes you. It should create an aura so people quickly know the types
of clients you help, how you help them, and the results you deliver.
Memorable brands have a clear message, and support from many elements. As a
consultant, there are a few key branding elements you must have to start.
Click to learn more about promoting your consulting services…

4. Getting Consulting Clients Quickly
“Filling the Pipeline” is arguably the most important thing a consultant can do next
to delivering great consulting services. You will soon face the dreaded “Feast-or-
Famine” cycle if you depend upon just the referrals you were “gifted” on startup
from past employers and friends. You need a system that keeps your pipeline full.
There is a whole smorgasbord of methods for filling your prospect pipeline.
Whichever style you prefer - writing, speaking, networking, or direct outreach -
there are well-defined methods you can build into a pipeline-filling system. No
matter which method you use for filling your pipeline, you must create a consistent,
reproducible system you continue to use.
You must either work constantly on filling the pipeline

or create a marketing machine that does that for you.
What may be the scariest moment for most consultants is actually “closing a client.”
Asking someone to hire you feels like you are forcing them to make a judgment
about your worth and then pushing them to spend money. It’s a terrible feeling –
unless you remember the real purpose behind your consulting.
You need to remember two things. First, your purpose is to heal their pain. Second,
don’t try to “sell them.” Just use your natural consulting skills of questioning to lead
a prospect into asking you, “When can you start?”
Being able to analyze a client’s pain using the PAES method in our course and using
consultative selling are proven methods that come naturally to most consultants.
Click to learn more about getting clients quickly...

5. Calculating and Setting Consulting and
Retainer Fees
You can win new clients, deliver high value, and have an impressive brand and still
not create a thriving, successful consulting business. You must price your offerings
so you are profitable if you want to stay in business and grow. At the same time,
you must be competitive. Your fees must be appropriate for the value you deliver
and still beat your competition. Setting your consulting fees is a tough job.
Setting consulting fees is a tough job,

but you don’t have to guess. There is a scientific method.
Many consultants start consulting by charging an hourly rate. The danger in hourly
rates is that you become categorized as a freelancer and not a consultant. Unless
you are very careful, hourly work puts you into a commodity business that drives
everyone toward ever-smaller rates. Avoid hourly rates if you want to build higher
income and independence as a consultant.
You don’t have to guess at fees. Instead, use a well-designed consulting fee or
retainer fee calculator for calculating a realistic fee range. A good calculator
accounts for project estimates and business overheads while balancing against
competitive rates.
Click to learn more about calculating and setting consulting fees…

6. Writing Consulting Retainers and
Proposals that Win
While every consulting assignment is different, they all include a few important
pieces of paperwork.
That paperwork is important not just for legal protection, but because it involves
planning, scheduling, and assigning resources and responsibilities.
Accelerate your business with templates for frequently used legal and project
documents. You can save time and give more structure to your work using proven
templates for proposals, retainer agreements, and Statements of Work.
Click to learn about writing consulting retainers, proposals and Statements of

Work…

7. Marketing Your Consulting Services
When you first start consulting, it takes personal time with
speaking, writing, and networking to fill your pipeline. Although this
brings in clients, you can never let up. You have to continually hustle. It is
exhausting, but there is a better way.
Once your consulting business is working, you need to build a marketing machine
that automatically keeps your pipeline full. A well-done marketing machine will
automatically and continuously bring in qualified leads and prospects to fill your
pipeline.
A well-designed marketing machine creates a

steady stream of clients for your consulting services.
A great marketing machine does three things: it attracts a lot of leads, turns leads
into prospects, and builds trust and authority. What it should not do, once you have
it running, is require a lot of your time.
To create a smoothly running marketing machine, use proven software, scripts, and
templates. You can research and test these yourself or use the recommended
software, scripts, and templates with guidance in the Starting and Building a
Thriving Consulting Business course.
Another consideration as a solo consultant or boutique consulting business is the
time you have for production and marketing; there is no extra time. It is critical that
you create a marketing workflow that leverages each main asset you create so you
can use it multiple times for other marketing. An example would be using a
cornerstone web page as the foundation for a white paper, LinkedIn articles,
LinkedIn posts, and blogs. (You never want to duplicate, but you can leverage when
done correctly.)
Build the right marketing machine with the right workflow, and your marketing will
explode with power!
Click to learn more about marketing your consulting services...

8. Creating Multiple Streams of Income with
Packaged and Productized Consulting Services
Two great benefits of consulting are independence and the opportunity to make
high six- or seven-figure incomes through multiple streams of income. Packaging
and productizing your consulting gives you a chance to work when you want, where
you want, and with whom you want.
Repackaging, repricing and opening new delivery channels is incredibly important
to your success during the COVID-19 pandemic, recession and recovery.
Building multiple streams of income from packaged consulting

services gives you greater security, independence and income.
If you build your consulting business so your clients depend solely upon you, then
you have defeated one of the advantages of solo consulting, your independence.
You also are limiting how great a contribution you can make to the world.
Older consulting models depend upon the hours you put in working at your client or
your office. You are trading personal hours for income.
The old consulting business model pushes consultants to work longer hours and
increase their income by trying to expand the scope of work you are doing for the
client. This drives you to work longer hours, may not be ethical to the client, and
limits how many people and businesses you can impact.
Newer consulting models leverage your consulting services to create products that
don’t depend upon on-site hours. “Solo Scaling” delivers your value through a broad
portfolio of services and products across multiple channels.
Consulting models with the highest leverage and reward combine remote
consulting with multiple levels of packaged services. During COVID-19 and the
recovery you can deliver high-value solutions to narrow-niche clients, anywhere in
the world, at any time.
Click to learn more about creating multiple streams of income…
Index of Full Chapters...
Click to jump to a chapter
Beginning
What is Consulting? The Lifestyle, Earnings, and Satisfaction
1. Finding Your Ideal Consulting Niche
2. Knowing, Finding, and Closing Your Ideal Consulting Clients
3. Promoting Your Consulting Services
4. How to Get Consulting Clients Quickly
5. Calculating and Setting Your Consulting and Retainer Fee
6. Writing Consulting Contracts, Proposals, and Retainers that Win Clients
7. Marketing Your Consulting Services
8. Building Multiple Streams of Income from Packaged and Productized Consulting

Services

Ultimate Guide

What is Consulting?
The Lifestyle, Earnings, and
Satisfaction
The life of a consultant can be highly rewarding for the lifestyle, earnings, and your
contribution to a better more conscious world. A consultant’s expertise, experience,
and decisions are highly valued. It can be very fulfilling.
This section of the Ultimate Guide will show you survey results that can help you
decide if you want to become a consultant. While there are many advantages to
becoming a consultant, if you do not build your business correctly, the
disadvantages can be exhausting.

What do Consultants Do?

Consultants work in a wide array of fields ranging from helping small retail
businesses to researching artificial intelligence; and from social media strategist to
Global 1000 corporate strategy.
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Just a few areas consultants work in are,
Small Business Startup Fund Raising International Trade
New Product Development Sales Social Media
Sustainability Branding Medical Practice

Management
Financial Advice Competitive Analysis Quality Control
Performance Improvement Human Resources Recruiting
Digital Marketing Operations Franchise Management

Management
Medical and Pharmaceutical Environmental Cost Control

Research Engineering
Risk & Compliance Research & Strategy

Development
Engineering Training & Information Technology

Development

A 2017 State of the Industry survey by the Institute of Management Consultants
found that their US members self-selected themselves into the categories,
• Strategy 51%
• Marketing 19%
• Operations 9%
• Financial 6%
• HR 7%
• IT 2%
• Other 1% or less
Institute of Management Consulting, State of Industry, 2017

How Much Do Consultants Make?
Getting a clear picture of what consultants earn is difficult because there is no
precise tax or census definition of consultant tied to reported earnings.
Consultant earnings depend greatly upon the clients they serve, their offering,
and their marketing ability.
One method of calculating independent consulting income is to multiply the
income of a full-time consulting employee by a multiplier. A multiplier is used to
account for an independent’s additional overhead, benefits, marketing time,
taxes and non-employee status.
A second way to look at the range of consulting incomes is to look at US census
data for solo professionals who categorize themselves into categories that fit
consulting.
As you’ll see, there is a surprising distribution of income for solo-professionals
and consultants.
Comparing Corporate and Independent Consultant Incomes
You can find corporate consultant incomes for very specific niches by looking at
online job boards. The online job boards give you a chance to see salary
equivalents for very niche expertise and locations. (This can be handy later for
project pricing.) However, don’t just assume an independent consultant earns the
same as a corporate salary. Corporate salaries need to be adjusted upward for an
independent consultant.
The salary posted in job listings does not include benefits such as insurance,
educational leave, and family leave. In 2019, US corporate benefits were
approximately 30% of base salary. That means an independent consultant should
add at least 30% to the base salary listed in job boards.
A good Rule of Thumb is that a “full-time, well-marketed” independent consultant
charges 2 to 3 times as much as their salaried counterparts. However, that is not
all profit. That 2 to 3 multiplier accounts for the consultant’s time with admin,
overhead, and marketing.
Independent consultants with good

business and marketing systems earn
2 to 3 times the income of their corporate counterparts.

The table below shows the average consulting salary from the last week of
January 2019 for average and senior job postings for all jobs including
“consultant” in their title on the websites Glassdoor, PayScale, and Indeed. This
table is for salary and does not include bonuses, profit sharing, or salaries for
senior consultants or partners.
Website Average Senior
Glassdoor $79,526 $95,469
PayScale $71,170 $93,176
Indeed $79,727 $95,440
Remember, a good rule of thumb is that independent consultants charge 2 to 3
times the salary of their full-time employee equivalent.
Independent Solo Professional and Consultant Incomes
A second way of estimating income and distribution for consultants is to look at
US Census data for solo professionals in those segments where consultants work.
This chart shows the income distribution for solo professionals from an analysis
by Elaine Pofeldt of the most recent US Census data from 2015. This analysis is
from Elaine’s book, “The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business,” published by
Lorena Jones Books.

A lot of solo professionals make very high incomes. And outliers have amazingly
high incomes.
Totaling the long tail on the right of the curve shows that more than 2.7 million
solo professionals make more than $100,000 per year. There are far more solo
professionals now since this data is from 2015.
There are almost one-million solo professionals making more than $250,000 and
35,584 making between $1,000,000 and $2,500,000.
Even if you fall short of the top outliers it still puts your income in the high-six
figures.
Following the business systems used by these high earners significantly improves
your income and independence.
Following even a few of the business systems used by these

high-income earners significantly improves
income and independence

While Elaine could not identify from the census categories the people who were
consultants, she was able to see their industry categories. Four of the six
categories fit the type of work and deliverables produced by consultants,
• Professional services and creatives
• Informational content creation
• Personal services firms
• Ecommerce (consultants selling productized value)
Why Do Some Independent Professionals and Consultants Earn

Such High Incomes?
Elaine Pofeldt’s book, “The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business,” as well as my
own consulting experience, and two years of research shows that high earners
use proven strategies, and repeatable business and marketing systems.
For her book, Elaine interviewed thirty $1,000,000 solopreneurs to learn what
they did differently. She found six things they did that average earners did not do.
What they did differently wasn’t the tips and tricks you read in magazines like
waking up at 5:00 am or drinking “napachinos” to boost their energy.
Like Elaine’s six findings, my research found eight “stages” that incorporated
specific, business-building practices and systems that made the difference
between success or a mid-road slog. What I found enlightening was that Elaine’s
six things and my eight stages incorporated the business thinking and systems
that experienced investors demand of their new startups in Silicon Valley.
It isn’t magic. It isn’t productivity tips. Success comes from building your
independent consulting or solo professional business using well-proven business
systems that anyone can follow.
So, what do they do differently?

US Census data shows that in 2015, the average self-employed person in the US
earned $47,200. In that same year,
• 2,700,000 self-employed people earned more than $100,000
• 300,000 self-employed people earned between $500,000 and $2,500,000
The difference between average and high earners is huge. Imagine difference to
your life, your family, and your children’s future? And, the difference isn’t just in
earning. It carries over into satisfaction, independence, and well-being.
What is the Difference Between High Earning

Consultants and Average Consultants?
Two things separate high earners from average earners, their business structure,
and their marketing.
In Elaine Pofeldt’s ground-breaking research on high-earning, self-employed
people she discovered the factors critical to success are,
• Picking the right niche

• Finding a painful need and creating a high-value solution
• Testing the product or service before committing time and money
• Building a defensible brand
• Leveraging the offering instead of working hourly
Pofeldt, E. (2018). “The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business,” Lorena Jones Books.
My interviews and research into successful startups came to a very similar

conclusion to Elaine’s. Most successful startups, whether an independent
professional or a high-tech business, follow principles used by Lean startups in
Silicon Valley.
• Find a high-value need

• Target delivery to a well-defined client with a tested client profile
• Test the product or service offering before committing
• Use constant feedback from the test to refine the offering, delivery, and
price
• Build a defensible brand

And in the cases of consultants and independent professionals, they need to find
ways they can move away from working hourly or project-based,
• Leverage consulting offerings into multiple products

• Focus on a profitable in-demand niche
• Create multiple streams of income (usually using internet channels)
High Earning Consultants Create Business and Marketing

Systems
A survey of independent consultants conducted by Michael Zipursky shows a
couple of significant differences between consultants earning less than $150,000
per year and those earning more than $150,000 per year.
If we overlay these differences on the same earnings chart from Elaine’s research
it looks like this,
Those earning less than $150,000 per year had only 1 to 3 clients per year,
apparently marketing and looking for new clients only when a client was lost.
Their marketing primarily depended on referrals and networking.

Consultants earning more than $150,000 per year had six or more clients per year
and marketed DAILY. They also used a portfolio of marketing methods that filled
their prospect pipeline: referrals, speaking, networking, LinkedIn outreach,
seminars, webinars, and email automation.
What About the Consulting Lifestyle?

The percentage of people working as consultants, business coaches, and full-time
freelancers is growing rapidly. The reasons for this growth are more than just high
incomes. It’s because a large majority of consultants or freelancers love what they
do and are highly satisfied with their work.
Multiple surveys over the last few years have shown that independent workers
are more satisfied, happier, and healthier than their 9-to-5 counterparts. The
results from MBO Partners, the Institute of Management Consultants, and the
London School of Business all show the same result; greater job satisfaction,
career growth, and independence.
With that many solo professionals loving their lifestyle, you can expect the
independent workforce to continue growing. Wage stagnation is another good
reason to go independent, but more than income, people want to work
independently for greater personal freedom and greater work satisfaction.
One great advantage of independent consulting is being able to combine work

and travel with your family. This picture is from a Viking cruise with my family
going through a lock on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland to Amsterdam,
Netherlands.
Independent Professionals Have Higher Job Satisfaction
The 2019 MBO Partners’ report shows that full-time independents, not just
consultants, have a 69% satisfaction rate with their income. That’s only slightly
better than the 66% satisfaction rate of full-time employees. So, full-time
independents and full-time employees have almost the same job satisfaction rate.
There is a big difference though in the interest in their work. 57% of full-time
independents are interested in their work, while only 37% of employees are.
Full-time independents are significantly more interested in their work. This may
be because they can,
• Choose clients they prefer

• Work on their own time
• Use their methods
• Maintain their independence
• Build professional credentials
• Earn greater income

The increase in independent workers is not short-term. The number of full-time
independents planning to continue as independents continues to rise. In 2019,
70% of full-time independents said they plan to continue, up from 64% in 2018
and 58% in 2015.
Independent Consultants Have Greater Lifestyle Satisfaction

Research by the London School of Business and the consulting firm Eden
McCallum in 2018 showed even greater satisfaction among independent
consultants. The vast majority, 90%, of independent consultants are satisfied with
their jobs. This is the conclusion from a sample of 307 independent consultants of
whom 75% are the main or sole household earner.

A survey by the London Business School found very similar reasons to the results
found by MBO Partners,
• The work was more professional and had higher impact

• The work was intellectually challenging and rewarding
• They felt greater satisfaction than when they were employees
• They had more control over their time and greater flexibility in work/life
balance
This isn’t to say there were no downsides. The downsides that independent
consultants reported where were,
• Large swings in income (Feast-or-Famine cycle)

• No major brand supporting them
• Lack of employee benefits
The Biggest Complaints of Independent Consultants

There are two downsides to independent consulting that are a usual topic in any
late-night conversation between consultants: the Feast-or-Famine cycle and a lack
of recurring revenue.
Without a doubt, the Feast-or-Famine cycle is the biggest complaint among
independents. I’ve been hearing it continuously in my 30+ years of working with
consultants.
The Feast-or-Famine cycle happens because most consultants don’t build
marketing systems that automatically fill their pipeline.
A lack of recurring revenue is part of the same theme. Consultants often work
long hours improving client businesses, but they do not work on their own
business. You’ve probably heard it before – you need to work on your business
not just in your business. This problem usually comes from not having multiple
streams of recurring income.
You need to work on your business, not just in your business.

Consultants are hard workers, but you can only work so many hours. As an
independent consultant you can only earn so much and you have a limited
number of hours to market your consulting services.
Smart consultants identify key offerings they can leverage. They package or
productize their consulting offering so they have multiple streams of income that
don't depend upon hours at a client.
This Ultimate Guide and the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business
course show you how to avoid these two risks.

1. Finding Your Ideal Consulting
Niche
Picking the right niche is one of the most important things
you can do when starting your consulting business.
In this stage you choose and validate a consulting niche where you can deliver a
high-value solution to clients who need and want and are ready to reward you.
Consultants and independent professionals are known for their grit and tenacity.
They break through obstacles to reach their goals. However, this tenacity can be a
problem if you are pushing toward the wrong goal.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, recession and recovery it is even more important
that you choose the right niche.
The riches really are in the niches!
You can choose your niche based on your past work, your passion, or just a “gut
feel”, but if you are wrong you will waste time, money, and opportunities.
A better approach is to use the seven-step method described in this stage. This
approach starts by taking an educated guess (your hypothesis) at what you think
are your best skills and solutions as well as good industries to target. After that
follow the seven steps in this guide to validate your guess and to see if there is a
better niche.
You don’t want to waste time and money trying to build a consulting business in the
wrong niche!
The Best Time to Start and Build a

Thriving Consulting Business is Now!

General Business Consulting Will Kill Your Business
Some consultants avoid picking a niche. They think that if they try to be everything
to everyone, they will have a wider market and therefore find more business. This
could not be further from the truth.
Being a general business consultant will kill your consulting business. Few clients
will believe a “generalist” can solve their problems. Being a generalist makes you
matte grey – you blend in and are forgotten.
Being a generalist makes you invisible and

your expertise a commodity!
It is far better to approach specific prospects as an expert in their problems and

show that you have experience solving their problems. Case studies of clients you
have helped or industry case studies about the methods you use are a good way to
prove your authority and build trust.
You will never find an experienced commander or

a book on strategy that says,
"Attack on all fronts and you will win."
Always look at your consulting offering from the point of view of the client.
Imagine a medical scenario where you need a heart valve replaced. Would you want
your general practitioner to do the surgery or would you want a surgeon who
specializes in heart valve replacement and has done a lot of them successfully?
Both types of doctors do great work, but a specialist in heart surgery will have a
greater success rate at that specific job: referrals coming to them, providing a
higher value solution, receiving greater recognition, and having higher income.
Don't Focus Too Narrow, Too Soon

Until you have a lot of experience and contacts in a narrow niche, you may not want
to focus too narrow. It’s best to use the strategies and systems in Stage 1 to
discover a “wide niche” that needs a range of skills. Once you do more work within

that wide niche you may discover a narrower niche where you can create greater
value.
While I haven’t fished since college, many fishing analogies come to mind for going
wide vs deep. For example, you may be catch-and-release fishing in a stream with
lots of feeding trout. You are doing your best with “your favorite lure,” but you only
have a few strikes. It’s tempting to keep trying with the same lure, but it’s
frustrating because you think you should be doing better.
You look at a couple of different streams and find one where you can see trout
rising to the surface and feeding (finding the niche). You try a couple of different
lures (validating the offer) until you finally find a lure (the best offer) that matches
what the fish (your client) want. Now you’ve found the niche and the offer! The
stream, the lure, the time, and your technique all come together for a great
morning of catch-and-release fishing.
A real consulting example like this might be a human resources consultant who sees
that biotech is growing. Doing general human resources consulting gives her some
business, but the biotech industry has so much growth it seems she could have
more business. She talks to people in the industry. She tests different ideas and
finds that hiring and onboarding advanced biotech researchers gives her much
more business, higher income, and a greater feeling of contribution.
Mapping Your Niche and Scope

You could begin casting about looking for an industry, niche, and problems. But that
would be a waste of time, and you might be distracted into researching and testing
a small niche that looks good while missing one that is far better.
If we go back to the fishing analogy, you want to avoid fishing in a small creek with
“good enough” results while there is a great fishing spot just around the corner.
How do you know where to look?
Another problem is that you want to find an area that has adjacent niches where
you can expand. That gives you the opportunity to expand your scope of work
inside a client.
A good way to map your niche(s) opportunities is to use a grid like the one below.
Mapping industries, skills, and needs can help you identify your best opportunities.
In this grid example, you use research, your passion, and your purpose to help you
pick the industry segments of Healthcare and Sustainable Foods. You have multiple
skills in strategic performance improvement.
Your skills are facilitating executive strategy, defining objectives and key results
(OKRs), and working with IT to create measurement dashboards. The numbers in
the table are your guess at how much value you could contribute. This uses a rating
system where 9 is highest, 3 is mid, and 1 is lowest.
With this table, you can see how entering a Regional Hospital at the executive level
and helping define their strategy sets you up for additional work. You could go on to
work with departments defining OKRs and then work with IT defining metrics. By
entering at a high seniority level in this niche, you can contribute at multiple levels
and create a long term, highly profitable client.

Seven Steps to Finding Your Niche
The Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course guides you through
the seven steps for finding a good niche. Step-by-step guides, videos, and links to
resources help you find industry growth rates, common problems in different
industry niches, and how to validate whether it is a good niche.
Creating a map, like the grid shown above, is a good way to keep track of industry
segments that are interesting, the problems in each segment, and your skills. Start
with a large grid and narrow it down as you learn more.
Make sure you validate your niche using some of the methods below before
spending a lot of time, energy, and money.
1. Where is Your Expertise and Passion?

What are your key skills? What work do you love to do so much it doesn't feel like
work?
Make a list of skills you are expert in. Later, you may want to add skills you need to
learn more about so you can increase your value to clients.
Create another list of passions and high interests.
If you need to advance your knowledge or skills, there are many free courses given
by online (MOOC) colleges and universities.
2. Which Industries and Segments Should You Target?

Use the US or your country’s Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics
databases to find forecast growth rates for different industry segments. The course,
Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business, gives you links into many
databases and teaches you advanced search techniques. It also shows you how to
get free access to costly industry databases.
An extremely important criteria during the COVID-19 pandemic, recession and
recovery is choosing a segment that has high-value opportunities as well as the ability
to pay and the chance to grow into a long-term client.

In the course, Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business, each cohort
does an online-virtual brainstorming exercise together to find niche consulting
opportunities for everyone in the cohort.
The pandemic with its social distancing, recession and recovery requires a
lot of change, adaptation and agility from independent consultants. I am
posting strategies, tactics and tools to help you in the Critical Success blogs
and in LinkedIn posts.
Click here for the blogs,
Consulting in a Recession (collection)
Independent Consulting in the Age of Crisis
Tips for Consulting in a Recession
Consultants Have Four Paths in Recession
In any environment, even one as terrible as that created by COVID-19, there are
consulting opportunities, but you must be agile. For example,
• Finance and accounting consultants can ally with attorneys to assist in

bankruptcies and restructuring.
• Strategy consultants can help pivot to new strategies and identify new
markets.
• Human resource consultants can identify critical strategic skills, ensure legal
compliance with downsizing, develop agile and rapid rehiring.
• Operational performance consultants can redesign workflows and improve
performance with fewer employees.
• Training and development consultants can capture work knowledge before it
is lost and build rapid retraining programs to assist in restarting.
• Branding and marketing consultants can help companies communicate new
market positions for products and the rapidly changing social structures.
There are many opportunities, but you will probably need to pivot, restructure,
repackage and reprice your services.

3. What are the Critical Pains and Needs in the Niche?
If you aren’t already familiar with a niche and its common problems, there are many
ways to learn what they are,
• Search Google for lists of problems in an industry

• Search Quora and Redditt
• Read industry forums
• Go to meetups and talk with people
Before you even open a discussion with a lead or prospect in a niche, you need to
learn about their problems and the language they use to talk about them.
4. Is There Demand?
Talk to people in the niche about your idea. Are they genuinely interested? (Don't
trust the "interest" shown by friends and relatives.)
Next, look at online job sites and see if the niche is hiring internal consultants or
experts in that area. Are there Amazon books and Kindles or podcasts devoted to
the topic?
If you find low interest or few resources, then move on to another niche. If there
was gold in this stream someone else would be panning for it.
5. Are There Enough Accessible Prospects?

Guess which manager or role would hire you in your ideal client, for example, how
would you identify them by seniority level, job title, or another qualifier. Can you
find a lot of them by searching on LinkedIn? Can you search Google and find a lot of
companies that might be prospects?
In the course, we show you how to use Google’s secret categories along with
Boolean Search Strings to get lists of ideal companies.
6. Are There Consulting Competitors? (You Need Them)

Do a quick Google search to see if you might have competitors and what they offer.
Use a search like
biotech HR consultants

Make sure you add “consultants” at the end of the niche descriptor.
You want to have competitors. It proves there is a market. When you are in the
course, you learn how to find out competitor’s highest value blog topics, keywords
and more.
7. Validate Your Niche and Offering

NEVER spend time and money to develop a consulting business until you first prove
that your consulting offering is valued. While talking to people in the niche gives
you a little bit of an idea, it won’t prove the monetary value and demand.
Instead, use Minimum Viable Offers (MVO) to see if prospects are qualified and
willing to spend time or money. They must be willing to spend either time or money
on your MVO to show that they put value on it.
Using the Minimum Viable Offers described in more detail in the course lets you
test what clients will pay for without having to invest a lot of time and money.
Don't move forward until you have validated your niche(s).
A few low-cost ways you can test a niche offering before committing are to make an
offer that requires a time or (low-cost) commitment. For these types of offerings,
you don't need to make a major commitment in development to test the interest in
your offering.:
• Low-cost seminars or webinars on the topic. Measure the response rates and
gather feedback.
• Emails to your niche with a link to download a white paper. Require extensive
opt-in registration information as a hurdle to measure commitment.
• Speaking at industry association dinner meetings with an offer of a one-hour
follow up.

2. Knowing and Finding Your Ideal
Consulting Clients
To build a successful consulting business, you must identify your ideal

clients and their pain and then guide them to a solution.
Once you identify and find your ideal prospects, you need to connect
and engage with them in their language.
Before you begin looking for your ideal clients, you need an image of your “ideal
client” and how you will help them. You also need a proven system that creates a
list of leads and another proven system that engages prospects and turns them into
happy clients.
In this stage, you will learn how to identify and find your “ideal clients.” You will
also learn a valuable method for talking with prospects about their pain.
Always enter the conversation already taking place

in the prospect’s mind.
- Robert Collier
There are many ways of finding prospects once you have a clear definition of who
they are. The course, Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business, shows
you how to find and connect with the people you want to meet using Google,
LinkedIn, networking, speaking, and many other ways. But, to use those methods,
you need to be able to identify them, know where to find them, know their pain,
and know how to talk with them.

Knowing Your Client Profile

To find leads and fill your pipeline with prospects, you must know how to identify
and find exactly the people you need.
Following the process in Stage 4, Fill Your Pipeline System, can leave you with
thousands of potential leads in your niche(s). You can’t go cold-calling and knocking
on all their doors, nor would you want to. You need to know how to identify the
most qualified prospects that fit the profile of your perfect client.
For consultants, it is a waste of money to advertise their services on television or in
magazines. Those advertise to broad general markets. You need to be laser-focused
on who needs you.
For one thing, as an independent professional, you probably don’t have the massive
funds necessary to appeal to a mass market. A far better approach is to find and
talk to the exact people matching your Client Profile.
The Client Profile you create needs to answer questions such as the client’s
industry, job title, job function, company size, industry associations or groups, etc.
When you create a Client Profile with these exacting descriptions you can pull
perfect prospects from Google, LinkedIn, and LinkedIn Navigator.
The Critical to Success Client Profile prompts you for the client criteria that help you
search Google, LinkedIn, and LinkedIn Navigator for your perfect prospect and their
company.
Start by building a Client Profile template that is similar to the one we use in the
Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course. The profile we use has
segments specific to LinkedIn and Google searches.

Testing Your Client Profile with Secret Search
Techniques
Using your Client Profile, search on Google and LinkedIn to find companies and
people that match your Client Profile.
Are the people you find the ones you expect will want your consulting services? If
not, modify your Client Profile.
After you meet people at industry associations, dinners, and meetups connect with
them on LinkedIn. Check their profiles. Who meets your criteria and looks like a
good prospect? Fine tune the Client Profile.
Google is excellent for finding companies that meet your profiles. You can use
Boolean search criteria and Google’s method of categorizing businesses to find
hundreds of potential businesses.
If you have a large personal LinkedIn network, you may have enough connections to
find and engage with prospects. If you have been developing your LinkedIn network
before starting consulting, you may have millions in your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
connections. (The network effect is amazing. When I passed the 1,000 connections
level, I had access to more than 3,000,000 businesspeople.)

If you don’t have a large network yet, or you want to develop international
connections, or you want to drill into a very deep niche, then I highly recommend
subscribing to LinkedIn Navigator. In the course, we go into detail on using LinkedIn
Navigator to connect and engage with people you would never find otherwise.
LinkedIn Navigator is excellent for building a large, refined list of prospects.
Remember, the size of your list is not as important as the quality of your list. It’s far
better to have 50 engaged prospects than 1,000 leads with a casual interest.
Knowing Your Client’s High-Value Pain

Once you identify your perfect prospect, you can learn their pains and gains –the
problems they face and what they want to achieve. Finding the pain takes research
and human “empathy”.
You need to talk to prospects about the problems already on their minds. These are
the problems that keep them awake at night – the problems that are already on
their minds and that they would pay to get rid of.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to get an overview of the pains and gains for a
niche is to look through discussions in industry and association forums, look
through tables of contents in Amazon’s lists of popular books for the niche, and
search niche-specific blogs about high-value problems being discussed.
As a consultant, you are like a doctor. You diagnose and heal the pain. To do that,
you must have a good idea of the symptoms, pains, and problems. You need to
know how to talk to the patient and the problem’s impact.
You need a broad knowledge of problems in your niche before interviewing a
prospect. Our course Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business teaches
techniques that work well in interviews, such as PAES, Go Wide then Deep, and
Consultative Selling.
Knowing Your Client’s Journey – from Lead to Client

People who become clients go on a journey: from being unaware to aware, lead to
interested prospect, to engaged prospect, and finally to client. Understanding their
Client Journey and how you can move prospects on that journey is critical to your
success and critical to helping them solve their problem.

Helping clients move quickly through the Client Journey helps solve
their problems quicker and helps you accelerate revenue
As a consultant, it’s important for you to know that you aren’t “selling” a prospect
and forcing them to buy your solution. Instead, you are guiding them on a journey
to the solution that will help their business. To get to that solution, they go through
multiple stages.
It is up to you to help a prospect move through the Client Journey. Prospects can be
held back at each stage by lack of trust, lack of clarity, or confusion over
alternatives. Understanding their journey, their hesitations, and the triggers that
make them move helps you turn them into clients so you can heal their pain.
A great metaphor for the Client Journey is a bridge. Clients want a bridge that goes
from Pain to Solution. They are first attracted by the idea that you can solve their
pain, then you engage and nurture them, and finally you convert them into a client
so you can heal their pain.
As a marketer you want to build that bridge. Building the bridge from Pain to
Solution is described at the end of Stage 4, Filling Your Pipeline and Selling
Consulting Services.

3. Promoting Your Consulting
Services
Promoting your consulting services is critical to
expanding the reach of your consulting.
You need messages and images that are as

strong and focused as your brand.
You are creating a vision of what you can do for your client and giving
them the confidence that together you can make that vision a reality.
You don’t have to be a mega corporation with billions of ad spend to create an

impressive brand that sells your services before you even meet the prospect. There
are proven systems to promote your consulting services, and you can learn and use
them.
Great consultants give their clients an image of a better life

and the confidence they can take them there.
Your brand is not a slogan or logo. It is far more.

First, your brand is an impression you give of the strength, authority, and
experience you have in solving your client’s problem. Second, your brand needs to
give prospects and clients a vision of their future. Your brand needs to give them
the confidence that you can help solve their problems. Third, your brand must be
memorable, so you are the first in mind when they have the problems you solve.
In Stage 3, Promoting Your Consulting Services, you’ll see the brand elements you
need to start consulting. Stage 3 includes proven steps like a networking

introduction that generates referrals, the best LinkedIn profile for consultants, and
some of the best website design methods.

Your Purpose and Message

One of the most important things you can do for yourself, your business, and your
clients is to have a clear mission and purpose.
When you’re finished and have a short statement of mission and purpose, I want
you to print it and tape it to your mirror, then read it each morning and remember
where you are going.
Writing a mission and purpose statement should not take a weekend retreat to
accomplish. (Unless you want to.)
The Balance Small Business website has a quick guide to creating a mission and
purpose statement. For the full description check at
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-to-write-a-mission-statement-2948001
Your mission and purpose statement should,
• Describe what you do

• Describe how you do it
• Describe why you do it
• Be short and inspirational
Try writing a few words for each of the bullets then combine them into one short
but inspirational sentence.
Some examples of Mission Statements that tell who, how, and why are,
Starbucks
To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one
neighborhood at a time.
Patagonia
Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and
implement solutions to the environmental crisis.
Tesla
To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.
TED
Spread ideas.
Critical to Success (Our Consulting Community)
Building a better world through smarter, conscious consulting.
Creating a One-Line Introduction that Captures

Referrals
Your introduction is extremely important. In that introduction, you can include a
one-line statement of your mission or purpose that sets up the conversation.
Done right, you can set up the conversation to instantly capture referrals. Sounds
great, but how!
A short one-line statement may be all it takes to create a memorable image of what
you do and whom you work with. When a potential prospect asks what you do you
can respond with,
“Have you ever known someone who had a problem with …?”
For example,
“Have you ever worked in a company where you felt every division and
department was going its own direction, there was no alignment or strategy, and
lots of time and money were wasted?”
After they answer with how they’ve seen that affect someone, you respond with,
“That’s just what I fix!”
“Can you tell me more about what happened to you/your friend?”
Concise statements of what you solve and the value you bring are excellent for
helping you refine your brand and focusing on your client and niche problems.
It’s also a great way to open a conversation into helping someone and getting an
introduction for a referral.

Creating Your Consulting Business Name
Once you have a mission and purpose statement you like and you’ve stopped
working on your logo, then you’re probably ready to create your business name and
get those all-important business cards.
Names for consulting businesses can be straightforward. Most small firms use the
founder’s name and add the mission statement as a sub-line to clarify what your
business does. You might also add one or two words after your name as a
descriptor. For example,
Robertson Engineering
Davis Strategic Performance
One advantage of adding one or two descriptive words after your name is that you
are more likely to get the domain name you want for your website and email.
A few corporations and firms you might recognize who are named after the
founders are,
A. G. Edwards
Adidas
Albertsons
J.D. Powers
Schwab
Arthur Andersen
Now, you can use the time you saved by not searching for a name and spend it
building your prospect list.
Creating a Logo – Don’t!

In a word, “STOP!”
Don’t waste any more time working on a logo. Take all the scraps of designs out of
your pocket and stuff them in an envelope.
You don’t need a logo for a solo or boutique consulting business. Instead, use a
logotype.
A logotype is a single piece of type that works like a logo. Some of the following
companies added logos or artifacts to their logotype, but only after they achieved
billion-dollar status. You might recognize a few of these companies,
If they can use a logotype, you can too. Now, use the time you’re saving by not
drawing logos and go build your business. And when you reach a billion-dollar
valuation, hire an artist to design a logo.
One thing I recommend in the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business
course is identifying a coordinated color palette and font set. In the course we give
you a resource list with recommended color palettes and fonts.

Consulting Business Cards
Even in this totally wired world you still need business cards. You will need them in
any networking situation.
Your business card should include,
• Company Name
• Your Name
• Short slogan or purpose statement
• Email address
• Website
• Phone
Leave white space on the business card. It drives me crazy to get a business card
that’s covered on both sides with a glossy picture or dark background. That leaves
no place to write notes about the person you have met.
Quick print business cards with same day turn around often use 100 lb. stock paper.
This is “good enough” if you need cards quickly, but it is a little light weight and
flimsy. If you have a week to wait for the heavier stock that print shops use, go with,
at least, the next heavier paper.
Don’t use odd shaped cards. They don’t fit in men’s wallets and they’re awkward to
carry or collect. If you want to be memorable, do it with your sparkling personality.
When you accept a card, hold it, and read it. Then put it in your breast pocket. I’ve
seen people take a card and not even look at it before stuffing it in their pocket. It
leaves the person you’ve just met with the feeling you have no interest.
As soon as you return to your office send the person whose card you accepted an
email acknowledging your meeting.

Always send a LinkedIn connection request if the person is in any way connected to
your industry or niche.
There are printing companies that offer pre-designed card templates online. Some
printers, such as Federal Express, have an online template you complete, then you
pick up the cards in a few hours or the next day. (Fast turn-around cards often use
the lighter stock paper.) Other online printers give you online templates and then
ship your cards in approximately a week.
Check for online cards for US delivery at,
www.vistaprint.com/business-cards
www.moo.com/us/business-cards
www.gotprint.com/products/business-cards/info.html
www.fedex.com/en-us/printing/business-cards.html
www.costcobusinessprinting.com/business-cards

Adding an Email Signature Block
Every time you send an email someone will see your signature block. Use it
effectively to brand yourself. You should include,
Name
Business Name
Mission or Purpose Statement
Direct Phone Number
Email Address
Website URL
Some additional items you might

consider depending on your area of
consulting are,
LinkedIn Profile Address

Photo
YouTube Clip
Shelley Golden, a personal branding

image consultant in Northern California,
has a well-done signature block that
shows multiple ways to contact here.
Because she is an image consultant, she
includes her picture. And the YouTube
video gives you an idea of what it is like
to work with her.

Building a Cornerstone that Focuses Your Consulting
Services and Marketing
Your consulting business and your marketing needs a cornerstone to stay focused
and aligned.
The cornerstone is the first stone set in the

construction of a masonry foundation.
All other stones will be set in reference to this stone,
thus determining the position of the entire structure.
- Wikipedia
With all the “Shiny New Things” and the occasional off-track consulting
opportunity, it can be difficult to stay aligned with your niche and mission. Having
a cornerstone can keep you aligned, and your minimal time and resources
focused.
If your consulting business was a non-fiction book the cornerstone would be a
Table of Contents with each chapter title having a short descriptive excerpt. If
your consulting business was a skyscraper the cornerstone would be the open
iron framework and floors before putting up walls and offices.
Your initial cornerstone should be an enhanced outline

that keeps your services and web content aligned and on track.
While you are in Stages 3 and 4 your cornerstone can be just a good outline with a
paragraph description of each “chapter”. That’s all you need to keep your
business on track. It is NOT a business plan.
In Stage 5, Marketing Your Consulting Services, your cornerstone will become a
robust description of your consulting services. What you are reading now, The
Ultimate Guide to Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business, is a Stage 5
cornerstone for the Critical to Success business. If you have downloaded the PDF,
it is a print version of the cornerstone.

Eventually your cornerstone will become a framework and draft you can gradually
grow into,
• Whitepapers
• Case Studies
• Website Content Structure
• Website Search Engine Optimization
• Blog Topics and Categories
• Speeches
• LinkedIn Articles
• Kindle Book
• Print-on-Demand Book
Building Your Cornerstone Over Time

Keep your first cornerstone light and in outline form. Only after you have
validated that you have the right niche and found a spot where clients love you
will you want to write more and add depth.
A complete cornerstone on some websites runs to 100 or more pages. It’s a good
start towards a book.
You can’t do that all at once. It takes too much time and you won’t know the right
content until you have tested your consulting hypothesis.
Your initial cornerstone will change as you work with clients, competitors, and the
marketplace. Just work with it, modify it when you see your business has to
change, and in a year, you will have a book.
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy”

- frequently quoted version
“No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the

first encounter with the enemy’s main force.”
- original from Helmuth van Moltke
Chief of Staff, Prussian Army, 1880

Your initial cornerstone sets the framework for your consulting offering and
marketing.
Initially, create a cornerstone with one to three consulting areas. For example,
think of the one to three major pains you solve in your consulting. Outline those.
If your marketing or sales “wander” outside those one to three pains you know
you are off course and are wasting time and resources.
If you find that the market and clients are demanding something different from
you then you may need to change your cornerstone, but don’t let shiny new
things and random events change your cornerstone.
After having written 27 non-fiction books published by Macmillan and J Wiley
Press, the best way I have found to write non-fiction books is,
1. Dive in.
Forget the idea of writer’s block. Relax and let your mind and fingers go.
2. Write outline headings as fast as possible.
Use bullet format in MS Word to quickly write short headings and phrases.
Do it fast. Fix grammar and reorganize later.
3. Rearrange headings in a logical order.
(Ctrl+up/down arrow moves bullets up or down in Word.)
4. Leave it overnight.
Review it later with new eyes. Look for and add what might be missing.
5. Add short, descriptive text under each heading or sub-heading.
Do it fast. Correct later.
6. Let it sit for a few days, then begin to write longer paragraphs.
If you need a chart, figure, or graph put in a marker to search for it later, for
example, <chart: growth rate>. If you need to research something, don't
stop writing, insert a marker like, ???name of city. Come back later to fix it.
Find markers by opening a search box in MS Word with Ctrl+F.
7. Return later to dive in and expand your stream of consciousness writing.
8. Cut, edit, and cut again.
9. Hire a professional editor.
Grammar checking apps can catch some grammar errors, but it won't catch
logical errors or correct poor structure.

Writing Your Cornerstone for Maximum Google Search Ranking
Your cornerstone forms the backbone of your website content. As described in
Stage 5, Marketing Your Consulting Services, it is critical that when you add your
cornerstone to your website you write with keyword phrases similar to the
keywords your prospects are searching for.
After you brainstorm and draft an outline of your initial cornerstone use Neil
Patel’s Ubersuggest, https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/, to see what keywords
are ranked highly on your competitor’s’ sites. Ubersuggest is a GREAT free tool. In
the course we cover additional tools and how to correctly use keyword phrases to
improve your ranking and prevent Google from penalizing your website.
You do not have to use the exact keywords and phrases shown in Ubersuggest or
other SEO tools. Google is very smart in analyzing language. It understands
synonyms and related words and phrases. In fact, you can be penalized for
“packing” or “stuffing” web content with keywords. Write so it’s readable, but
stay on topic.
An Example Draft of an Initial Consulting Cornerstone
Here is an example of a quick, short draft for someone doing strategy and
strategic performance consulting for mid-sized business. This draft has three main
areas of consulting. Keep your cornerstone to one to three consulting services or
your consulting will be too broad.
A cornerstone draft for consulting with three service offerings might look like this,
• Corporate Strategy
o Interview executives
o Develop one-line Strategic Statement with exec team
o Guide executive team through SWOT
o Facilitate executive team in developing Strategic Objectives
o Guide team members in crisp write up of Strategic Objectives
• Departmental Objectives
o Interview department heads
o Develop inclusion of management and leads at all levels
o Develop Objective Statements with each department leadership
team
o Develop projects, tasks, and responsibilities with management and
line leaders
• Key Results and Metrics
o Assist heads, managers and line leaders in developing metrics
o Work with IT on data definitions, warehouse and dashboards
o Teach objective review process in meetings
A cornerstone like this can keep your consulting services on track and aligned. It
also acts as an editorial map for blog topics and LinkedIn posts.
Over time, you should expand your cornerstone pages online with evergreen text
that doesn’t change. Blogs that link to the cornerstone add more detail.
For example, if I were starting a consulting business with this cornerstone, I would
focus my marketing and consulting on strategy for mid-sized companies. If I could
not gain entry at the executive level, then I would market and sell my skills with
Key Results and Metrics to the IT and functional departments. The entry there is
easier and there’s lots of opportunity. Once inside a client and having built
relationships with stakeholders, I would be in a good position as a known expert
to be introduced to the executive level during the next strategy cycle.
Having a simple, concise cornerstone like the one above will help you stay focused
as you develop the rest of your branding and marketing.
By continuously adding to your cornerstone it will become an

Ultimate Guide, like the one you are reading. Ultimate Guides are
magnets for Google searches, organizers for readers, and the
foundation of a book.
Creating a Client Attracting LinkedIn Profile

As a consultant you must have an excellent LinkedIn profile. A LinkedIn profile is
often the first-place businesspeople check to see your authority.
Most LinkedIn profiles do a poor job of presenting a consultant’s capability. They
could just as well be a copy-and-paste from a resume or C.V. They tell what you
have done, rather than what you can do for your clients.
50% of B2B buyers use LinkedIn as a source for their purchase decisions. That is
either powerfully for you or against you depending on your LinkedIn profile.
In the following example I have written the LinkedIn profile so it is all about,

• How I help people
• Who I work with
• More about my potential client
If the reader is a prospective client, when they read your LinkedIn profile you
want them to feel like they have just found the medicine that will soothe their
pain.

Your LinkedIn profile should have a photo with a professional image and a
professional or experience-related background. Write and format your experience
section with bullets and concise text that addresses your prospect’s biggest
questions,
• Can you solve my problems?

• What experience do you have with my problems?
• Can we build a relationship with trust?
In the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course you can follow
along with videos that guide you through each technical step of inserting your
photos, cropping and adding backgrounds from thousands of free images, and
writing a professional, easy-to-read profile including bullets and indents.
In Stage 5, Building an Automated Marketing Machine, you will learn how you can
use your LinkedIn profile as a publishing platform to increase your brand's reach
and gravity gravitas. A well-designed LinkedIn profile is one strong magnet that
brings you leads and strengthens your brand.
Building the Best Consulting Website

Consultants must have a website. Your website is as critical as your LinkedIn
profile. Not only should it illustrate your capabilities with examples, it should also
give testimonials that build trust and rapport.
Websites can also be a powerful vehicle for capturing and engaging new leads and
prospects.
Professional Website Layouts
Independent consultants usually use one of two types of basic website
homepages and layouts. One is a personality-based website. The other is a
business-based website.
A personality-based website can be very simple and highly effective, even if you
aren’t Marshall Goldsmith, Simon Sinek, Marie Forleo, or Seth Godin. Personality-
based websites are used by many one-person, online, millionaire businesses
where, as the name implies, everything is presented under the brand of the
personality.
A business-based consulting website presents a stronger professional image
based on your brand and services. Use a business-based website if your market is
larger businesses or organizations and if you want to demonstrate multiple
consulting specialties, such as, corporate strategy and operational performance.
Structuring Your Website
There is a specific structure and set of menus that work best for consulting
websites. Whether you are building your website yourself or through an agency,
you should follow proven structures.
Unless you are a recognized author or speaker you will probably find it difficult to
rank highly in Google search in the beginning. Most of your visitors will come from
personal connection. Even so, it is still important to build a website that highlights
your consulting services, shows your authority and builds trust. At the same time,
it is critical that you use certain technical features and layouts so that you rank in
Google search.
The cornerstone you wrote earlier, and its keyword orientation is important to
your website. In Stage 5, Building an Automated Marketing Machine, you will
expand on the cornerstone and make it the lever for your marketing workflow.
In the course we go over multiple website layouts. Here is a simple website layout
combining elements for personal and professional branding,
Homepage
Who my clients are
What I do for my clients
Call to Action
Cornerstone – “Ultimate Guide to …”
Simplified cornerstone outlining your services
Call to Action to download the “Ultimate Guide” as a PDF
Who Am I
Build trust with a short “letter to the reader” and signature block
White papers to build authority with opt-ins to collect contact info
Case studies to build trust with opt-ins to collect contact info and segment users
Blogs
Contact Page
Include another “trust builder” letter from you with personal signature and your
photo
Give multiple ways of contacting you

Consulting White Papers
Even with the web and LinkedIn, well-written, attractive white papers and case
studies are part of the proof that you are an authority. Each major service
described in your cornerstone could be a white paper. For each white paper you
should have one to three case studies describing how you have solved the white
paper’s problems for a specific industry or situation.
White papers are different from most marketing materials. White papers show
serious content and prove your authority. You don’t want it filled with marketing
fluff, promises, or extra words. Serious and authoritative!
White papers should be concise and include quotes, proof, and citations from real
research. You want the reader to know that you know what you are writing
about.
While this makes it sound like white papers should be stuffy and academic, don’t
make them that way! You want your prospect to read it.
Don’t make them long. In fact, white papers should be only five to twelve pages.
Use a great layout with a lot of white space. Include charts, graphs, and pictures
that make your point about solving a specific pain point. You don’t want seven
pages of border to border text.
If you want to start spending money,

hiring an editor and designer for your white paper is
money well spent.
If there was a spot where you wanted to spend a little marketing cash, this is it.
Go to UpWork or Toptal or another freelance website and hire an editor to review
your copy. (I also use Grammarly, a Word plug-in, to cross-check my grammar.)
Hire a graphic artist to layout your white paper using Adobe InDesign so it looks
attractive and then print it on good quality paper at a print shop.
Eventually you should have a white paper for each of your consulting service
offerings.

4. Getting Consulting Clients
Quickly
Most new consultants start with client referrals that keep them
busy for a year or two, then the referrals dry up.
Consultants who enter the feast-of-famine cycle

have a hard time getting out; the cycle traps them.
The only way out is to use proven systems that

fill your prospect pipeline and consistently close clients.
New consultants usually start their first year with client referrals that carry them
through the first year. Then referrals begin to disappear, and so does income. It is
then that most consultants enter the feast-or-famine cycle, a cycle that too often
plagues their careers.
Consultants who don't consistently use a proven system

to fill their prospect pipeline have massive revenue problems.
In a Feast-or-Famine cycle, consultants work long hours with clients and have no
time for marketing. Then, when the client engagement ends, they face long
stretches with no income as they work on stop-gap marketing. It’s a continuous
cycle that drives consultants and their families crazy.
Getting out of this Feast-or-Famine cycle, and building steady growth is key to a
successful consulting business.
In this stage, you learn about short term techniques to quickly fill your pipeline and
convert prospects into clients.

These techniques fill the pipeline, but they take constant work, and you don’t want
to be on this treadmill constantly. Once you have a couple of clients, start building
the systems in Stage 5, Marketing Your Consulting Services.

The Feast-or-Famine Cycle

New consultants often start with referrals from friends, business acquaintances,
and their previous employer. These referrals often fade after the first year, so new
consultants find themselves facing months of no revenue.
Most consultants, even experienced consultants, face the Feast-or-Famine cycle.

The Feast-or-Famine cycle swings you back and forth between high income and no
income. The cycle alternates between all work and no marketing, and all marketing
and no work. Of course, income follows the same cycle leaving most consultants
yearning for stability and pushing them into accepting low paying work from low-
quality clients.
The "Client Getting Techniques" can quickly fill your pipeline, but
using these alone put you back in the Feast-or-Famine cycle.
To thrive, you must create a marketing machine like those in Stage 5.
You don’t have to go through this Feast-or-Famine cycle. By spending 10% to 30% of
your time using these Stage 4 techniques, you can fill your prospect pipeline. Once
you have two or three clients, begin building the marketing systems in Stage 5 that
can constantly fill your pipeline.
Start Networking Now
Before you start your consulting business, you should build your LinkedIn network
with quality contacts. Contacts you connect with should be people you would want
to work with or who work in the organizations you want to consult to.
To build your LinkedIn network connect with,
• Work colleagues
• People at meetup groups in your field
• People at industry association meetings in your niche
• People in LinkedIn groups you join
• Conference speakers and attendees
Matching Your Marketing to Your Experience

Before you run out into the street and start wildly marketing your consulting
business, stop and think about how you like to work, how you like to connect with
people, and how your prospects like their communication.
All those need to come together when you build your marketing plan. You want to,
• Do the type of marketing work you like, for example, speaking vs. writing
• Connect with people the way you prefer, for example, private meetings vs
large networking events
• Know how most of your prospects get information and connections they
trust, for example, referrals vs. online articles
The Marketing Matrix can help you identify your best way of filling your pipeline
and nurturing leads into prospects. If you are just starting your consulting business,
choose marketing methods in the first column. If you have a running consulting
business or are looking to the long-term choose from the second or third columns.
Check the marketing that works best for your stage of consulting business maturity.
Click here to download your copy and read more about the Marketing Matrix for
consultants.

Do Marketing You Love, So You Love to Do Marketing
If you read about the differences between high earning solo professionals and
average earners you learned that high earners,
• Market constantly.
High earners are marketing every day.
• High earners don’t spread themselves thin.
Pick three types of marketing you like, and your clients use.
• High earners keep marketing even when they have clients.
If you stop marketing as soon as you get clients, you will fall into the dreaded
Feast-or-Famine cycle. You must keep marketing.
If you are going to work consistently on marketing, you want to do marketing that
works and that you enjoy. That’s why you need to pick just two or three types of
marketing that use work styles you enjoy.

For example,
• If you like writing, you will probably want to write blogs, LinkedIn posts and
articles, white papers and case studies. Some of these give long term results,
but white papers and case studies can be combined with networking to give
immediate results.
• If you like planning and creating systems, then make checklists, workflow
diagrams, systems designs, or mind maps to connect with your prospects.
• If you enjoy meeting new people, then go to Meetups and networking events.
Follow up with coffees and high-value handouts.
• If you get a kick out of speaking to groups, (I do even though I’m an
introvert), then speak at local association monthly meetings or Meetups.
• If you enjoy teaching, do small pre- or post-workshops before conferences.
Always have a high-value follow-up that gives you a reason to reconnect with
attendees.
• If you work with leadership or skills-based consulting, then call local
companies and talk to their HR or training and development department and
setup free “lunch and learns” where they supply the lunch, people and a
room and you do a small workshop.
Getting Clients Quickly

There are marketing and direct outreach techniques that quickly bring in clients.
While you can get results quickly, it takes a lot of work and hustle. That can be hard
to keep up.
The following section describes marketing methods that are known for quickly
filling your prospect pipeline. What follows is an overview. For execution, you need
more detail which is in the course Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting
Business and in the blogs.
While the following are some of the fastest methods for filling your prospect
pipeline, they require constant personal attention and hours of work. To build a
marketing machine that works automatically make sure you read Stage 5,
Marketing Your Consulting Services.

Startup Referrals
Most new consultants begin their practice with a few referrals. However, these
usually dry up within the first year.
If you have been an employee, you should try to make a mutually beneficial referral
arrangement with your past employer. In some cases, you can continue to support
your old employer’s customers and clients for everyone’s benefit.
Some of the referral building tasks you need to do when starting are,
• Get recommendations on LinkedIn from past managers and acquaintances.

• Build a working relationship with your past employer by supporting their
business rather than competing with them.
• Write email templates you can send to your professional acquaintances so
they can easily refer you to their business acquaintances. (The course
includes sample templates.)
Network and Meetup Events

You CANNOT sit back and rest even if you have the benefit of starting with a full
pipeline. If you have startup momentum from referrals, then use that momentum
and the time it gives you to network and to start building your automated
marketing machine as described in Stage 5.

Here are a few tips on networking,
• Work on the “That’s what I do.” introduction from Stage 3. It works.

• Build your network with high-quality connections in your niche as rapidly as
possible. Use the energy that comes from being a new solopreneur to start
your network.
• Add old connections to your LinkedIn network and stay in touch.
• Let people in your network know that you are starting a consulting business.
Write them a short personal note and send an email explaining the types of
problems you solve.
• Join professional organizations and go to all the meetings to build your
network. Join only the organizations that build skills you need and connect
you to people with your ideal Client Profile.
• Some associations won’t let you speak unless you are a member or a
recognized expert with books and a national speaking background.
Direct Outreach with LinkedIn

Building your prospect list is significantly easier when you have a large number of
quality LinkedIn 1st degree contacts. For example, at one point I had 1,000 1st
degree connections. That created a network of over 3,000,000 (three million) 1st,
2nd, and 3rd degree connections that I could search, connect with and engage.
LinkedIn and especially LinkedIn Navigator are like the Google of professional and
businesspeople. They are a goldmine of professional connections.
If you didn’t do the Client Profile exercise in Stage 2, go back and do it. You have to
use a consistent system with LinkedIn to test which profiles are best. Searching with
different client profiles and not testing which profile gives you the best prospects is
a waste of time.
One new consultant in the Starting and Building a Thriving

Consulting Business course increased their
LinkedIn acceptance rate by 400% with a
minor change in the Client Profile.

If you do not have a large personal LinkedIn network, practice using the free
LinkedIn and then when you are ready, get a month-by-month subscription to
LinkedIn Navigator. Use it long enough to build an initial prospect list.
Create the best LinkedIn connection requests by connecting with some form of
personal relationship or an exchange of value. Connecting and building rapport by
creating a high-value exchange on LinkedIn is critical. We do a lot of work on this in
the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course.
DO NOT SELL on LinkedIn! You hate spam emails and phone calls and so does
everyone else. Spam LinkedIn messages are just as annoying.
LinkedIn activity can be slow. Many people only go on LinkedIn once or twice per
month so you may not see responses for a week or more.
Don’t be discouraged by a 10% to 20% connection acceptance rate. Once you have
a great LinkedIn profile, published LinkedIn content, and have built a brand from
speaking or writing, your acceptance rate should be over 50%.
Find your ideal prospect profile.

Make a connection. Build rapport.

Here's a proven process for connecting on LinkedIn,
• Prove your client profile against your real-world network.

Meet real people at association and networking events and connect with
them on LinkedIn. Would you have found them using your Client Profile to
search LinkedIn or Google?
• Create a high-value offer you can send people.
Build a high-value offer like a trouble-shooting guide, white paper, workflow
diagram, etc. that you can forward to new connections. You won’t be
forwarding it immediately.
• Search with your Client Profile in LinkedIn and Google.
Use the Advanced Search box in LinkedIn and LinkedIn Navigator. In Google
use the Advanced Search Page, https://www.google.com/advanced_search.
The Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course teaches you
how to use Boolean search strings to make very refined searches. (The
Boolean Search String cheat sheets are part of the course as well.)
The Google Advanced Search box.

The LinkedIn Navigator Advanced Search box.
• Send a connection request to five to 20 people per day.

Be honest and tell them you are in the same business and want to build your
network. As an expert, you would like to send them information that may help
them in their business. If you truly have a common connection, like the same
college, hometown, sports interest, then comment on it.
• Send requests on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday between 11:00 AM and

2:00 PM at the Recipient’s Time. These are the most common times people
check LinkedIn; however, some people only check LinkedIn weekly.

Never Use Connection Request Software on LinkedIn!
LinkedIn detects when you use software that

“scrapes” prospect names from LinkedIn
and then sends a mass of connection requests.
LinkedIn will ban you.
• When someone accepts your connection request, send them a thank you.
• Wait a day or two, then send them your high-value piece. (You must know
what the most common pains and problems your clients have.)
• If you are a student of the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting

Business course, use the scripts and templates to accelerate your work.
• Wait another week and send them a link to a critical high-value article that
might be of value to them.
• It often takes multiple messages to engage with someone.
• Once you begin a conversation, ask if you can exchange emails since emails
are easier to use than LinkedIn messages. If you have started an email
newsletter, ask if they would like to get your newsletter.
• Send a message to your LinkedIn connections asking to meet with anyone

going to the next local association meeting, dinner, or events.
• Keep connecting on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Some people may take

months to connect with you. Some will connect when they need your help.
• DON’T TRY TO SELL. Just try to connect, engage, and build rapport.

Workshops, Lunch-and-Learns, and Webinars
Workshops and lunch-and-learn sessions are an excellent way to build your
prospect list. They give you the chance to demonstrate your consulting ability,
engage with attendees, and build rapport and build a mailing list by offering
additional post-workshop material.
Again, this is where you must know the key pains and problems of your Client
Profile. You want a workshop with a title and pin-point solution that your audience
can’t ignore.
In all three of these, you must create offers so that prospects want to reengage with
you one-on-one afterward. That will build your email list and personal connections.
Workshops
If you have an idea for a good one to three hour-long workshop, approach the
organizers of an industry event and ask if you can do a pre- or post-event workshop.
You will need to give the organizers a white paper, testimonials, sample worksheets
and an outline. If you have a video of you speaking, put it on YouTube and send
them the link. Always have an irresistible offer for attendees so they will connect
with you afterward.
A good way to engage with a small group in a workshop or Lunch-and-Learn is to
end the workshop or Lunch-and-Learn with a brainstorming session on how the

learnings can be applied when they return to work. This is a great time for you to
learn about client needs and pain.
Workshops and Lunch-and-Learns can be a great time for you to

learn client needs and for attendees to see you in action.
Webinars
Webinars can be almost as good as real-world workshops. But they take more work
to build rapport. The key here is to engage the audience in the chat and have
workbook exercises. If you just talk you will lose your audience.
Webinars work well done in participation with companies or associations.
I’ve used many different webinar platforms, but I prefer Zoom for its quality, low-
cost, and ease-of-use.
Lunch-and-Learns
Lunch-and-Learns are a little different than workshops. Lunch-and-Learns were a
staple in building my first computer training and consulting business.
Lunch-and-Learns work best for skills-based training where the sponsoring company
brings in lunch and you bring in the workshop material. Besides computer skills,
these also work well for management and leadership scenarios and training.
Speaking
Speaking, when done with the right structure and offers, is an excellent way to
capture leads and prospects.
One significant advantage to selecting the right niche market and knowing their
pains and gains is that most high-value niches have professional meetings or
conferences. These meetings and conferences are a perfect place for you to
present, build your brand, and gather leads.

When you present to a meeting or conference, you have two objectives.
First, you want to be recognized as a captivating expert who helps your audience
learn and advance. This will also get you rebooked for more speaking.
Second, you want to capture leads to build your consulting business. Capturing
leads as a speaker takes a few extra tricks that are in the Starting and Building a
Thriving Consulting Business course.
Even a great speech can leave you with no leads.

Use a speech structure that generates desire and captures leads.
Even a speech that garners standing ovations can leave you with no leads. To get
leads you must structure your speech with prompts that build desire, have a Call to
Action, and drive attendees to contact you. We go through this speech protocol in
the course.
One consultant who took the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business
course was very highly qualified, had a Ph.D. in her niche, and was a successful
speaker. Although a good speaker, she rarely got leads. She turned that around
when she started using the speaking protocol that drives an audience to become
leads. In her next speech, she got seven leads. Three of those turned into clients.

Connecting with Leads, Engaging with Prospects
Connecting with leads and then not engaging with them is an effort in futility and
waste. I get connection requests every week from people that look interesting. I
respond to them and then the communication goes dead. There is no return
response. There is no engagement.
Building a big LinkedIn or email list you don’t engage and build relationships with is
nothing more than food for your ego. It is far better to have a small list of people
you engage with and nurture.
Building a big LinkedIn or email list and not engaging them

can build your ego,
but it won't build your wallet.
You need a clear roadmap on how you will engage prospects, nurture them, and
convert them to clients. One proven way to do this is to move new contacts into an
email sequence. If you are working with new LinkedIn contacts move them as
quickly as possible out of LinkedIn and onto your email list.
Try to make all prospect and client engagements a two-way value exchange. Don’t
think about how you can sell them. Instead, think about ways you can help them
and give them value such as white papers, industry trend forecasts, high-value
newsletters, short webinars, etc.
Guiding Leads and Prospects on the Client’s Journey

If you are going to help your prospect solve their pain they must become a client.
That means you must help them move along the Client Journey.
To do that you must know the prospect’s needs, pains, and psychological triggers.
Knowing and using psychological triggers is not “sales trickery” if you are helping
people solve their pain.
A great consultant is no different than a doctor or healer who understands their
patient’s pain and wants to heal them. You have a duty to help clients get better. It
is no different than a doctor’s duty to heal a patient. To do that you need to turn
them from lead to prospect to client.

You don't need magic or sparkling personality to
turn leads into clients.
Learn a proven system that consistently converts
prospects into clients.
Setting the Initial Client Meeting and Agenda

Cold, hard, sales techniques have never worked for me and don’t seem to work for
most consultants. What does work very effectively is just talking with the prospect
about the pain, the consequences, and what they have tried as solutions.
If you have built your authority and you have the prospect's trust, the conversation
seems to naturally progress into “When can you get started working on this.”
Have you ever watched world-class athletes like Simon Biles do her astounding
gymnastic routines or Rafael Nadal slide across a tennis court to return a winning
tennis shot? They make it look so easy and natural. They look like they were born to
it.
They weren’t.
They practiced and practiced and practiced. They knew exactly what their strategy
and tactics would be. They developed mental and muscle memory of what they
needed to do.
You need to do the same to be consistent about winning your consulting
engagements. You want to walk into a meeting relaxed but know how you want it
to go.
Before any client meeting where you might propose an engagement you must go
through the same steps we guide our students through,
• Know the pains and problems for the industry.

Use Google, Quora, Redditt, and industry forums to research probable
problems.
• Research the prospect’s specific problems.

Review local and online newspapers for information about the prospect and
the people you might be meeting. Check their profiles on LinkedIn.

• Map a Client Meeting Agenda
Know which of the four types of meetings you expect and be prepared for it.
• Create a PAES Map like the type we use in the course

Know how to guide the discussion from pain to solutions. PAES combined
with consultative selling does this perfectly. (PAES is described at the end of
this stage.)
• NEVER TALK ABOUT YOUR PROCESSES

Talk about the prospect’s pain, the consequences, and visions of the future.
Talk about what you have done for others in the same situation, but don’t
talk about your “XYZ Handout” and your “Very Cool Sticky Note
Brainstorming.”
Selling Consulting Services

This whole process during the meeting uses “consultative selling.” This is nothing
more than understanding your client’s pain and asking a set of well-structured
questions. The questions explore the client’s needs, show the potential for
additional problems and pains, build rapport with empathy, and then build a vision
of your solution.
It is up to you to help a prospect move through the Client Journey. Prospects can be
held back at each stage by lack of trust, lack of clarity, and confusion over
alternatives. Understanding their journey, their hesitations and the triggers that
make them move will help you turn them into clients so you can heal their pain.
Marketers usually think of the Client Journey in four steps, Attract, Engage, Nurture,
and Convert. A great metaphor for the marketer’s Client Journey is a bridge. The
steps of Attract, Engage, and Nurture are a natural part of Stage 4 and Stage 5, but
Conversion comes hard for most consultants.

The problem with the marketer’s bridge is that prospects often balk at saying “Yes!”
and consultants are hesitant about pushing for the sale.
One consultant who used PAES for the first time said,
“I used to feel nervous in initial prospect meetings.
Now I feel confident and I know how to move the conversation along
until the prospect asks to become my client.”
At the Convert stage you need to go through a final short closing. In the Starting
and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course we practice this last step using a
PAES table as a structure for the closing conversation.
The GREAT thing about using a PAES table to prepare for meeting with a prospect is
that it makes it easy to talk with the prospect and lead them through the Convert
stage of the Customer Journey. Numerous consultants, new and experienced, have
told me how PAES helps them prepare for a client conversation.
In the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course we go through
multiple examples of using the PAES table when closing a client.
FREE WEBINAR

5. Calculating and Setting Consulting
and Retainer Fee
Setting consulting fees is not easy.
Too high, and you lose the job.
Too low, and you devalue yourself and go broke.
Setting fees by an hourly rate will commoditize you.
Instead, set fees using rules, multipliers,

and competitive ranges.
In Stage 6 you will learn the different ways of setting consulting fees. Consulting
fees are often magical and difficult to define and defend. There are six basic ways of
setting your consulting fees. The ranges of fees that come from these six methods
will vary widely depending upon your branding, your experience, the value you
prove to the prospect, and your competition.
When you combine the skill of setting profitable but competitive consulting fees
with the pipeline filling methods from Stages 4 and 5 you will be well on your way
to a highly profitable and thriving consulting business.

Warning - the New Consultant's Dilemma

As a new consultant you have skills, but you may lack the brand, client testimonials,
and experience to compete with more established consultants. This situation often
forces new consultants to work as freelancers paid by the hour or by the short task.
Working as a freelancer can get you into companies and earn short-term revenue,
but too often the client views you as an hourly contractor and freelancer. Once you

are seen with that image it can be difficult to be seen as a high-value, high-fee
consultant.
If you do work with a client using time-based fees, build rapport with the
stakeholders and learn their positions. Learn the client's pains and opportunities for
adding value. Continually look for situations where you can step out of hourly and
skills-based jobs and step into decision making and consulting roles. When you
begin getting more of these opportunities you’ve earned a new Statement of Work
and proposal.
The skills and strategies for expanding your value and scope in a client are taught in
the course Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business.
Setting Consulting Fees

There are many different methods of setting consulting fees. Here are descriptions
of the most frequently used methods.
Pro-Bono
As a consultant with little or no experience in an area, one way to get work, learn
skills, and get testimonials is working pro-bono. These combine to mean more work
and higher pay in the future.
You might think that pro-bono work won’t help you, but it can. A lot!
“Pro bono” is a Latin phrase meaning, “for the public good.” This isn’t the same as
volunteer work. Pro bono work is professional work done as a service for the public
good.
One of the easiest ways to do pro bono is to partner with experienced consultants
who need assistance. Spread the word amongst your colleagues that you are
available for pro bono work in the areas where you want to gain expertise.

How Pro Bono Consulting Helped Me and the Community
As one of Microsoft’s first twelve independent consultants I had a great, but
extremely busy career for 17 years. The non-stop pace, however, was
exhausting, and I was ready for change.
I faced the problem many consultants face. I went from having lots of
referrals from Microsoft to suddenly being out in the cold and starting from
scratch in a new business field.
I had always been interested in strategy and performance so I began reading
every book I could find on business strategy and execution. When I saw the
first article on Balanced Scorecards in Harvard Business Review, on how to
use objectives and metrics to measure strategic performance, I was hooked. I
took a certification course from Kaplan and Norton on Balanced Scorecard
and earned my Six Sigma Black Belt through a long well-done online course
with Villanova University.
Then I faced the problem of finding clients. Two friends said they were going
to do a pro bono for our county’s childhood development organization. It was
an umbrella non-profit that covered preschool education, children’s
healthcare outreach, and more. The three of us did a multi-week pro bono
consulting project that involved interviews, tactical objectives, projects, and
metrics. Everyone benefited.
A month later, I heard that one of the largest performing arts centers in
northern California was changing its strategy to prepare for commercial
competition. They were going to do the facilitation and strategy in-house. I
volunteered to facilitate and guide the work. That “mostly weekend”
engagement lasted six-weeks and involved facilitating executives, operations
staff, and million-dollar donors. The strategy and objectives they developed
with my facilitation was successfully used for three years.
With those two “pro bono” experiences and two certifications, I was ready to
start the next ten great years of consulting in strategy and strategic
performance management. A few years after moving in this new direction I
wrote what for years was one Amazon's top selling books on strategy and
Balanced Scorecard.
And, it all started with a pro bono.
Sub-Contracting
Another way to start consulting with little or no experience and get paid is by sub-
contracting to another consultant. Sub-contracting enables you to work for another
consultant, help with lower-skill work, gain experience, and get paid.
Not all sub-contracting jobs require expertise. For example, if you want to be a
facilitator or trainer you can assist the primary consultant by taking the role of
course registrar, responding to student’s questions, and assisting in-room
preparation. While the primary trainer runs the course or facilitation you can be in
the back of the room visualizing how you will do it when you are on your own.
There are many ways to assist even if you are not yet an expert. You can do
research, backroom preparation, mentoring, interviewing, writing code, or
preparing reports.
Hourly and Daily Consulting Rates

Most consultants begin working at an hourly rate. It’s easy to calculate and you can
find competitive hourly rates on freelancer websites. Using an hourly rate makes it
easy to calculate a daily or monthly fee. Although many consultants start here
because it’s easy, you don’t want to use hourly or daily rates as a permanent pricing
structure.
There are many problems with charging at an hourly or daily rate.
Employers will view you not as a consultant being hired for the value you add to
their business, but rather as a freelancer doing skilled work by the hour. From that
viewpoint, it becomes easy for them to see you as a commodity that can be
replaced with a few minutes search on the internet.
If you use hourly rates or use them as a base for other calculations, make sure you
include all the hidden “wages” you would receive if you were a full-time employee.
Make sure you adjust the salary for your overhead costs, marketing time and costs,
self-employment tax, healthcare, retirement, missed time for professional
education, and vacation. These are all “costs” that usually don’t show in online
salaries for full-time employees.
A rule of thumb is to use 30% of the salary as overhead. Personally, I recommend
adding a minimum of 40% as overhead because you should be spending 30% of
your time doing marketing. In addition, the US Federal Self-Employment tax is
15.3% in addition to federal and state income tax.
An ethical problem with hourly and daily rates is the conflict between your interests
and the client’s interests. You want to earn more which means working longer
hours. Your client wants the job done as quickly as possible. This conflict can lead to
doubts about trust and competence.
Always track the tasks and time in your consulting work.

Data from past work is extremely valuable when you
calculate project-based consulting fees.
An even bigger problem with hourly-based rates is that there is no way to leverage
or scale your work. You are stuck at the hourly/daily rate. The only way you can
scale your business is to hire lower-skilled consultants and bill them at higher rates
and to continually look for ways to expand the scope of work.
One acquaintance, long experienced in consulting with a big defense industry
consulting firm, told me that the firm’s standard mode of operation was to win
government contracts by bidding low, staff with lesser experienced consultants at
high rates, and then expand the scope as quickly as possible.
As an ethical consultant, there are better ways to keep your business small, in
control, and scale to a great income. Scaling growth through packaging and
productizing your consulting services is covered in Stage 8.
Project-Based Consulting Fees

You should move as quickly as possible to project-based consulting fees. Most
consultants charge using project-based fees.
Project-based fees have the advantage that, if you are experienced and know your
hourly rates and costs you can make an accurate estimate of costs and then add
your profit margin. Don’t forget to add a profit margin for your business in addition
to using accurate project estimates and hourly fees plus overhead costs.
The website, Metric.AI, gives a range of profit margins for professional service firms.
“The typical profit margin for a professional services organization is in the range
from 15% to 25%, while a particular project margin could be from 25% to 50%, and
the profit margin for a particular consultant could be from 50% to 400%.”

“Why Profit Margin is an Important Metric”,
https://www.metric.ai/metricopedia/profit_margin/
Two metrics you must track to improve your consulting business are Gross Profit
Margin and Capacity Utilization Rate. Your Capacity Utilization Rate is the
percentage of time you are doing billable work. Obviously, if you have a high
utilization rate you will be more profitable and competitive.
A good rule of thumb is that riskier, more specialized work that is done less
frequently has the highest profit margin. Of course, having a highly recognized
personal brand translates into higher fees as well.
If a type of project is new to you, look for a mentor. Under estimating can be
personally painful as well as financially costly.
Retainers
Most consultants use retainer fees as their first step toward stabilizing and
increasing their income. Retainers are funds paid to you by the client on a recurring
basis, whether you do work for them or not. You are being paid for your expertise
and ability, not for being on-site.
Most consulting retainers are of two types. One type of retainer ensures you
reserve a specified number of hours per month for work with the client. If those
hours aren’t used by the end of the month they do not “rollover” to the next
month. This type of retainer is usually used for onsite work doing a specialized skill.
The second type of retainer is the type you want. This retainer makes you available
for your expertise and experience to help the client make decisions. You could
deliver high-value in a fifteen-minute phone call that helps the client make a crucial
decision.
Retainers are great for stable, recurring income. The downside of retainers is that at
some point they will end.

Value-Based or ROI-Based Fees
Value-based or ROI-based fees are fees based on how much value you will add to
the client’s business. ROI stands for Return on Investment.
Few consultants use Value-Based or ROI-based fees. The fees are difficult to
calculate and easy to refute. You need high trust and high brand recognition in a
unique area to use these fees.
There are a few consultants with high name recognition and close personal ties to
C-level executives who propose value-based fees. For most consultants there are
easier and more viable approaches to high income like those described in Stage 8.
For Value-Based or ROI-Based fees you must determine ahead of time what the
measurement will be for determining increased value. From my experience, it is
very difficult to get businesses to pay based on an estimated future value. The
reason is that future value usually depends upon multiple factors. A tough-minded
owner will ask you how you can prove that the increase in sales was due to your
consulting when the sales increase could have been from new salespeople, a
change in the economy, or decreased competition.
Before committing to a Value-Based or ROI-Based fee, check with other consultants
or staffing agencies to see whether the client is reliable and ethical. Some
companies make it a practice to refuse or delay payments to small consultants and
businesses.
I know two solo consultants who were not paid by very large companies after they
delivered the agreed value add. In one case, the cable company was entering
bankruptcy and told the consultant to “get in line.” In the second case, the company
told the consultant to set a court date. The consultants settled for significantly
lower fees.

Using ROI-Based Value to Sell Your Consulting Services
While I find Value-Based or ROI-Based fee setting is risky, the use of ROI is excellent
for justifying a higher fee for a unique or a new service. You can use ROI-based
selling to gain client buy-in for higher fees. Use an ROI calculator and the client’s
own estimates of change to justify your increased fee.
I’ve used this method to help an international internet software company sell
million-dollar software licenses. I built a robust Excel-based ROI calculator that
calculated the increased sales and decreased costs a buyer would receive by using
the software company’s product.
The prospective purchasing managers would sit with the software salesperson and
enter estimates of employee time savings, increased marketing reach, industry-
standard high and low conversion rates, and more. The output from the calculator
showed the three and five-year Net Present Value attributable to improvements in
IT and marketing performance. It also showed the ROI of the investments using the
CFO’s own risk rates. The printout of the inputs, estimates, and background
calculations made it much easier for the executives to justify the purchase.

6. Writing Consulting Retainers and
Proposals that Win
Writing proposals, Statements of Work, and retainers
is not something most consultants like to do.
However, this “paperwork” can be critical to winning business and

setting up a smoothly running engagement.
Being asked to submit a proposal is a great feeling but it is no guarantee you will
win the business or that you will have a long, smoothly running client relationship.
There are processes and paperwork that will help everyone get started with the
right vision and smooth out disagreements.
You can save yourself work in the future by creating standard templates for your
retainers, Statements of Work and proposals. Working from a template saves work,
ensures you remember key structures, and helps you and the client agree on the
work to be done.
Consulting proposal templates, retainer templates, and Statement of Work
templates are part of the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business
course.

Writing Retainers for Recurring Income and Client

Support
Retainers help both you and your clients. They help you build recurring income.
Retainers help your client by guaranteeing that you will be available to support
them with decision making or with guaranteed work availability.

Retainers should be written as part of the original proposal and presented as a
means of giving the client on-going support. Retainers are usually written for a
monthly basis, but they can also be done quarterly or annually. Of course, your
retainer agreement must include responsibilities, deliverables, and payments.
Writing Statements of Work to Clarify Requirements

and Deliverables
Every consulting assignment, no matter how large or small, should have a
Statement of Work (SOW). An SOW is like a travel itinerary that specifies cities,
times, and events. It gives you, the client, and other stakeholders a clear picture of
deliverables, responsibilities, and timelines. A well-written SOW prevents
disagreements and clearly defines jobs and deliverables.
You don’t always have to have a Statement of Work but when there are questions
or things go wrong you will wish you had one.
Writing Proposals that Win Clients

Consulting proposals are written by the consultant and sent to the potential client
defining the work to be done, requirements, and conditions. It is a good idea to
write a Statement of Work to go with the proposal.
In most cases you and the client will define the work requirements and details
before you write the proposal. A good way to get buy-in and ensure your proposal
covers all requirements is to have stakeholder meetings where all stakeholders
build a consensus on the Statement of Work.

Structuring Proposals as Portfolios of Solutions and
Fees
An addendum that covers additional possible work can help the client and you.
Keep the body of the proposal as simple and straightforward as possible so it
doesn’t distract or confuse the client’s decision. However, in an addendum you can
include additional solutions in case the client wants to reduce or expand the scope
of work.
Packaging sets of additional extensions is a little like creating a ladder of solutions
with the simplest and least expensive at the bottom rung and additional related
solutions (and fees) on higher rungs. While the prospect can still choose to address
only their original issue, they can see that you are ready to solve related problems
that might arise.
Additional services you might suggest in an addendum might include combinations
of,
• Board and executive facilitation

• Executive and management mentoring
• Research and development
• Project management
• Product development
• Classroom training
• Online training
• Train-the-trainer workshops
• Manuals, eBooks, and PDFs
Your foresight in developing a portfolio of solutions shows that you have more
value than just completing a simple project or task. Proposals with depth can open
your prospect’s eyes to building a long-term relationship with you.

7. Marketing Your Consulting
Services
High Earning Consultants Market Continuously.
If You Don't Market Continuously,

You Fall into the Feast-or-Famine Cycle.
The Solution is to Build a Marketing Machine that

Continuously Fills Your Prospect Pipeline.
Your automated marketing machine can attract leads, engage and nurture
prospects and even qualify leads for you while you work with clients or take
vacation. You need a marketing machine.
Magnify your lead generation and reduce your workload by

building a marketing machine.
Consultants without an automated marketing machine spend approximately 30% of

their time marketing. If they fall behind on their “personal marketing” they fall into
the hell of the infamous Feast-or-Famine cycle.
As a consultant your marketing machine should not require a lot of technology.
While information marketers create astounding “marketing automation systems”
you don’t need to go that far as a consultant. However, you do need to design,
prove and build systems that leverage your work and magnify your marketing. Do it
once, prove it works, then automate it.
FREE WEBINAR

Start Filling Your Pipeline, then Build a Marketing
Machine
If you do not have clients or a good number of prospects in your pipeline, then
DON’T start building the marketing machines in Stage 5. Scan this chapter to see the
road ahead but do not depend on a marketing machine to quickly fill your pipeline
and close clients. To initially fill your pipeline, go back to Stage 4, How to Get
Consulting Clients Quickly.
The prospect list you build with automated marketing

is the foundation for multiple streams of income.
A good marketing machine works constantly but could take six months to a year to
really start cranking out prospects. To grow a thriving business that gives you a
great income and independence you need a combination of Stage 4, How to Get
Consulting Clients Quickly, and Stage 5, Marketing Your Consulting Services.
If you are just starting your consulting business or struggling to fill your pipeline,
you need to use the techniques in Stage 4. This takes feet-on-the-ground work, not
automation.
If you are just starting you can still use the information in Stage 5 to,
• Begin developing a mailing list of prospects

• Develop and expand your basic consulting website
• Publish a weekly newsletter/blog
Key Parts of Your Marketing Machine

Do not attempt to build an entire marketing machine all at once. The best process is
to try different marketing methods, see which works best, and then automate the
marketing that works.
Don't attempt to build an entire marketing machine all at once.

Run marketing programs manually.
Prove which works best, then build a marketing machine.

It could take you a year or more to build some marketing machines. The essential
components of marketing machines are,
• Prospect list (mailing list or CRM)

• Your website and cornerstone content
• LinkedIn profile, articles and posts
• White papers and case studies
• Email
• Blog
• Newsletter
• Scripts and templates
• Lead magnets (downloadable offers)
• Marketing Automation Services (integrates and runs the other components
automatically)
These are core components, like the bricks in a building. You can build almost
anything with them, but you don’t need them all at once.
The most valuable component of your marketing is your prospect list. Your list is the
gold mine that yields future clients.
Don’t automate right away.

All basic marketing can be done manually
until you prove which works best.
One thing that is important is to choose software that gives you flexibility for future
choices. It’s better to start simply and migrate to the more complex. Initially you
can start marketing with a simple and inexpensive website, blog, email list, and
newsletter software.
Don't be trapped into using one software application. For example, after a year or
two you may have hundreds of blogs on your website. If you choose the wrong
platform for your website it will be extremely difficult to move your blogs to a
different platform.

The Cornerstone: Your Key to Aligning, Leveraging
and Magnifying Your Work
Google ranks one website structure more highly than others. Using the tree-like,
cornerstone structure described earlier ranks your website higher in Google. This
structure also makes it easy for your human readers to understand what you do and
how you do it.
Cornerstones are a secret to ranking highly in google.
Gurus such as Neil Patel and Brian Dean and leading sites such as
Yoast and Digital Marketer
use cornerstones for each major service or product.
A cornerstone does more than help you rank in Google. A cornerstone keeps your
consulting services and marketing content from wandering from your core.
Consultants whose websites lose focus are ranked lower on Google.
This “information architecture” shows Google how strongly your topics are related.
It also makes it easy for readers to understand what services you focus on. If you
use your cornerstone as a guide for blog topics your blogs and website will be
aligned with your consulting services.
Using your cornerstone as a guide for blog topics will keep your blogs
and website aligned with your consulting services.
In the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course members learn
how to use free tools to build the structure, topics, and keywords that will rank
their website higher and make it easier for people to use.
In Stage 3 you saw how to draft a simple cornerstone with two or three levels of
outline depth. You might have also added a paragraph of description after each
heading or sub-heading.
In Stage 3 the cornerstone example was written about your consulting services.
Now, in Stage 5 you will want to expand your cornerstone to include your

consulting services and the value it produces. Here is an example of the expanded
cornerstone from Stage 3,
• Corporate Strategy
o Purpose of Corporate Strategy
o Case Studies
o Strategic Statement
o Mission, Vision, Values
o Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats
o Porter’s Five Forces Model
o Industry and Demographic Trends
• Departmental Objectives
o Purpose of Objectives
o Alignment with Strategy
o Objective Statements
o Defining Objectives
o Defining Key Results
o Inclusion of Ideas at All Levels
o Execution and Management
o Case Studies
• Key Results and Metrics
o Purpose of Measurement and Feedback
o Core Metrics
o Industry Standard Metrics
o Data Definitions
o Data Collection
o Data Display and Review
o Case Studies
Over time you can add a few pages, not blogs, to each heading and sub-heading in
your cornerstone. Your blogs on cornerstone topics should link to the appropriate
heading in the cornerstone.
With this cornerstone as an architecture you could write a library full of blogs,
speeches and articles and they would be aligned with your service offering. The
important thing is that you would be writing on topics that are part of your
consulting services using a structure that Google will rank higher.

Leveraging and Magnifying Workflow and Content
When you imagine all the different types of content you need to market your first
thought is probably, “I’ll never have time for consulting.” There is a solution.
What you need is a way to leverage and magnify your workflow and content.
You need a system that leverages and magnifies

your workflow and content.
I teach my students to use the cornerstone as a guide for their marketing content.
The cornerstone also become a mine from which you can pull a lot of content for
other purposes.
The cornerstone is like a map of the content you want in your blogs and lead
magnets. It keeps your topics aligned with your consulting services. A cornerstone’s
headings or sub-headings can become the topic for marketing content: white
papers, speeches, blogs, newsletters and LinkedIn articles.
When you write a page under a cornerstone heading it’s very easy to take your
content and research and expand it into a blog, a speech, and presentation slides.
Combine them together and you have a Kindle book or webinar.
A cornerstone keeps your content aligned so you can leverage one asset into
multiple pieces of content or marketing campaigns, like this,
By linking back to the original source with internal links you can magnify your
ranking in Google.

Structuring Your Website Around Your Cornerstone
In Stage 3 you wrote a cornerstone that briefly described your consulting services.
In Stage 4 you used that as part of your initial website. Now, in Stage 5 you should
expand your cornerstone pages to become the structural hub and guide for all your
marketing content.
Your cornerstone should be the structural hub and guide

for all your marketing content.
Don’t stop consulting and filling your pipeline to write your cornerstone.
Start with a skinny outline like the example earlier in this stage. Then add a page
(not a blog) under each heading. Continue to extend and expand over time. It might
take you six months to a year to get a 50+ page cornerstone. What matters to your
readers and Google is that you got it done.
Linking Content Internally
You want all marketing content, like blogs, to link back to the appropriate heading
or sub-heading in the cornerstone on your website. This way Google can find the
original source and see the main headings of your cornerstone. This helps your
cornerstone headings rank higher in Google.
As you add blogs, podcasts, reports, or videos to your website you should link them
to the appropriate page in your cornerstone, but never duplicate content.
Google loves it when you update and add to content. What it will downgrade your
website for is having multiple blogs, pages, or articles about the same topic. In
effect, Google gets confused when it sees the same topic on different pages and
blogs. It doesn’t know which to rank higher on your site. What you want to do is
extend a topic on the topic’s main page or post by adding more detail.
Building Your Consulting Website

A well-built website and your LinkedIn profile are the foundations of your consulting
marketing. While you can do "part-time consulting" with just a LinkedIn profile, you
need a well-constructed website to present a clear image of the value you bring to
clients and to capture leads using your automated marketing machine.
In the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course you learn how to
use free tools to find the top ranked keywords, blog topics and competitors. These
are critical in your cornerstone.
Another critical consideration for your website is whether you want to use a
content management system where you do the technical development, such as
WordPress, or whether you want to use a platform that handles the technical
details.
If you use WordPress it gives you incredible flexibility but requires technical skills or
outsourcing. If you use a platform, technical issues are taken care of by the
provider, but the website’s capabilities are not as robust, and you might not be able
to migrate your website content to another platform.

Here are a few of the important considerations,
WordPress Content Platform
Providers WordPress.org WordPress.com, Weebly, Wix,

SquareSpace
Normally referred to as
"WordPress” this is free Platforms require no coding and make
software you download creating a good-looking website and
from WordPress.org and blog easy, but they may limit your
run on your own host. ability to expand later.
Beware
It is the most widely
WordPress.com is not the same as
used web software in
WordPress. The same organization
the world.
produces both, but WordPress.com is
a platform that makes it easier to
operate, but you lose some
customization and expansion ability
and the ability to improve your search
engine ranking.

Cost WordPress is free but Minimal cost. Annual or

custom development, monthly fees.
domain hosting and some
plug-ins cost.
Site Hosting Site hosting paid separately. Site hosting is included.

(Where your Good hosts will install
website resides) WordPress free for you.
Custom Features Unlimited. Seems like Your site is lumped with

and Capabilities everyone has thought of all other sites on the
everything you will ever platform. You have no
need, but choose highly control over Google
used and rated plug-ins. ranking.
Marketing Simple to very powerful Simple capability may be

Automation and add-on software available. included. Some platforms
Customer This software is separate allow integration with
Database and can be expensive. automation and CRM
(Automate applications.
marketing
campaigns and
manage customer
lists)

Customization Unlimited. Easy to very difficult. Easy, but limited to

features designed
into platform.
Content Plug-ins are used to migrate Most platforms make

Migration content. Many different content it difficult to move
(Moving your backup systems available. If you your content, like
content to other are inexperienced, get help from blogs, to another
platforms) the receiving host or platform. platform or system. If
you pick the wrong
platform to start with
you may be locked in.
Training Basics are straightforward. Training libraries

Hundreds, if not thousands of free included with demo
YouTube videos and sites, but it sites.
will take time to learn.
www.WPBeginner.com is one of
the best sites.

Many free or low-cost themes Platforms come with

Themes available. libraries of pre-defined
(Visual Custom theme control done themes. You can
appearance, with CSS language or modify
colors, fonts,…) occasionally menus. themes using a menu
selection.
Learning LearnDash is an excellent, fully Link out to a

Management customizable WordPress plug- courseware system
Systems (courses) in created by an expert in like Teachable or
learning design. Thinkific.
Or link out to a courseware
system like Teachable or
Thinkific.
Website Platform Recommendation

If you are solo and don’t have the extra time to learn WordPress or you don’t want
to spend the money for someone to set it up, then it is probably better to NOT start
with WordPress.
Other platforms, like Weebly, Wix or Squarespace, create good looking websites
and are easier to use than WordPress. You can pick a layout template, paste in
content and have a website in one day. Adding blogs takes little more than typing
and importing images. (I recommend doing all your writing in Microsoft Word or
Google Docs and then pasting into your blog.)
Make sure you buy your own domain name.

Do not use a domain owned by the platform.

While all the platforms have nice layouts and themes, Squarespace is more
technically difficult to work with and Wix makes it very difficult to move your
content to another system.
I recommend using Weebly when you

start your consulting business.
Get a good-looking site up quickly,
then migrate later to WordPress.
I recommend using Weebly when you start your consulting business. You will be
able to publish your website cornerstone pages and blogs quickly and display them
in a great layout and theme. That will give you time to fill your pipeline and then
work on your marketing.
An important advantage to Weebly is that it is easier to export your content to
WordPress when you want to upgrade and expand your website’s capabilities.
As your consulting grows you may want to migrate to WordPress. Here is why,
• If you want the best analytics and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), then you
will want to use WordPress. (Not WordPress.com.)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks, like using a cornerstone and
keyword phrases, only work when you have the website on WordPress, not
on a platform. The cornerstone is still great for keeping your content aligned
with your consulting services, but it won’t enhance SEO ranking in Google
until you move off platforms like Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace and onto
WordPress.
• If you want to use marketing automation software and Customer
Relationship Management databases that automate marketing campaigns
and track each customer’s profile, then you will want to use WordPress.
• If you want to use some of the advanced marketing techniques that create
high six- and seven-figure incomes described in Stage 8, Greater Income and
Impact with Packaged and Productized Consulting Services, then you will
want to use WordPress.
• If you want to build a customized learning management system with online
course delivery, then I recommend LearnDash running as a WordPress plug-
in.
I receive no affiliate fees for any of these products. I just know that as an ex-
“UberGeek” I spent too much time in WordPress when I could have spent that time
on consulting, marketing, and content. (I did enjoy web development as a hobby.)
On the other hand, I know the WordPress SEO tricks I’m showing you here work
well because of the results on my original WordPress site supporting my clients,
Chief Marketing Officers and marketing analyst. My site normally had 70,000 views
per month, and it was just a hobby to support my clients.
Own Your Domain and Email Names

Make sure you own your domain name. Some providers will “rent” you a domain
name, but it remains under their service and cannot go with you if you move your
website.
With your own domain you can use the name with WordPress or any other platform
and create your own email, for example, myname@consultingbiz.com.
Having your own domain name is critical to looking like a real consulting business
and not a “fly by night” that will disappear.
I recommend also having a Gmail account with a similar business name, for
example,
myname.consultingbiz@gmail.com
A Gmail account gives you the ability to use certain LinkedIn “secret” techniques we
cover in the course. It may also be easier for you to access while traveling in foreign
countries.

Lead Magnets that Attract Ideal Clients
Attracting loads of people to your consulting website and having them thrust their
email address on you is a great ego booster, but that should not be your objective.
To build your consulting business you want to attract and qualify people who fit
your Client Profile. You want to build a list of ideal prospects.
A large email list is great for your ego,

but a quality email list is great for your wallet.
To capture a reader's email address, create a two-way value exchange. You need to
create an offer they can’t refuse, for example, a checklist or mind map of tips on
how to solve one of their pains.
When an opt-in box pops up on your website giving them a chance to enter their
email address in exchange for your tips, they feel like it’s a good exchange. You not
only get their email address for future mailings your tips also show your expertise.
Remember in Stage 2 where you went to Google, Quora, Meetups, and forums to
learn the pains and needs in your niche? This is another place where you will use
what you learned about the client’s biggest pains.
Lead magnets are usually a small offer like a cheat sheet, mind map, checklist, or
tips that quickly soothe or fix a pain. It offers the reader some value in exchange for
their email address. You might also see lead magnets called Opt-In Offers. They are
small tasty morsels that hold out the hope of quickly solving a single pain.
Do not make a large generic lead magnet.

Make a point solution to a specific pain.
In most cases your lead magnet should not be large or complex. If you are building
your list you want it to be “snackable” so people quickly grab it. Keep it short like a
cheat sheet. Until readers trust your authority, they won’t really take the time to go
through an in-depth lead magnet.
The exceptions to the idea of short and “snackable” are “Ultimate Guides” and
white papers. These are high value to the target audience and usually require
commitment to read. “Ultimate Guides” are often cornerstones published as PDFs.
Ultimate Guides show your site visitors you really are an expert, as well as boosting
your Google ranking. White papers can be of such high value to the targeted
audience they often have a long opt-in form including full name, title, and phone
number.
Lead magnets should give a quick,

concise answer to a specific problem.
Once you have captured your reader’s email address your email system can engage
your visitor with a sequence of newsletters, blog links and offers that build trust,
build your authority, and move them closer to working with you as a client.
Connecting and Nurturing with Email Sequences

You can manually send emails to your prospect list, but after a few months of
networking and marketing you would have no time for anything else.
What you need is an email service that includes autoresponders. Autoresponders
automatically send emails and email sequences when someone opts-in to your
email list.

Consultants and experts in the Starting and Building a Thriving
Consulting Business course save a tremendous amount of time
starting with the email and LinkedIn scripts and templates
The first email sequence you need is for Welcoming and Onboarding. This goes to
new people who opt-in to your email list. They get a Welcome email, instructions
on how to White List your emails so they aren’t sent to spam, Onboarding to learn
the benefits of your emails, and then they are sent to a nurturing sequence of
weekly or bi-monthly emails.
Once someone is in your email list you can send them emails to keep them
engaged, build their trust and your authority, and to let them know about events.
With an email autoresponder, you will want to,
• Welcome people who have joined your mailing list

• Guide people on how to use your website and resources
• Notify people of new blog posts, podcasts, or newsletters
• Nurture people, build trust, and help them grow their skills
• Announce offers for events and consulting opportunities
Another alternative as your business grows is marketing automation software. This

software runs intelligent systems that send sequences of emails depending upon a
customer’s profile. It can modify emails and change responses depending on the
prospect’s response.
A great benefit of marketing automation software is that you can track or “tag”
readers who click on specific topics. This lets you keep a database of what they are
interested in. (If you work with clients in Europe you need to notify users you are
doing this in accordance with GDPR laws.)
Engaging and Nurturing Prospects with Newsletters

and Blogs
Email nurturing sequences, newsletters, and blogs can work together to help you
engage with your prospects and clients. And, reduce your workload.
Your email, newsletters, and blogs keep you in your clients’ minds, if your content is
of value. You want to be the first person they think of when they face the problems
you solve.
You want to be the first person your prospects think of

when they face problems you solve.
Posting an informative blog to your site on Wednesday night followed by sending an

email Thursday morning with a synopsis and link to that blog let’s everyone know of
new content. If you can tag people on your list, you can selectively send different
emails and newsletters to different people.
There are many different types of blogs. It’s a great idea to create email and blog
templates you can use repeatedly to save yourself time and get your readers used
to a specific format. The course covers many blog types and templates to make
writing easier.

Here are some of the most common blog types,
Blog Description & Example How To...

Type
Top # List Lists of the top # items List Posts are quick and easy to write.
Posts with links in a category. Make sure you actually evaluate
For example, what you recommend, or you could
Top 5 Books on damage your credibility.
Consulting
Top 10 New Client
Interview Questions
Best 7 Productivity Apps
for Consultants
Curated Review key articles for Don’t just write a synopsis, show
Content your niche and write a your expertise by adding your
synopsis with citation. insights, pros and cons, additional
Asking the Right tips, additional resources, and how to
Questions execute the ideas.
“The Surprising Power of
Questions”, A.W. Brooks,
Harvard Business Review,
May-June 2018

Blog Type Description & Example How To…
How- To Explain step-by-step how to do Use numbered steps, images,

Posts something. and videos to clarify your
Getting Subtotals from explanation.
Databases with Excel’s
PowerPivot
Checklist Checklist posts are easy for Checklists not only make you
Post experts to create but highly feel more confident they save
valuable for new practitioners. lives. Ask any pilot or surgeon.
Room Setup Checklist for
Workshops
Connecting and Publishing on LinkedIn

You already know from Stage 3, Promoting Your Consulting Business, that LinkedIn
is the world’s largest database of professionals and businesspeople. That means you
must have a great profile on LinkedIn.
Did you also know you can publish to your target audience on LinkedIn?
The Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course takes new and
experienced consultants step-by-step through all the methods of targeting and
magnifying their publishing with LinkedIn.
Publish to your target audience and groups on LinkedIn.
As a consultant you can leverage Linkedin multiple ways. It’s like having your own
custom publishing house and mailing list. You can publish to a broad audience,
(hopefully building your brand), or you can publish to people that are similar to your
Client Profile. You can create links to go from LinkedIn posts to LinkedIn articles that
then put people into your email and newsletter nurture sequences.
Here are a few ways you can use LinkedIn as a consultant,
• Display your profile and how you help clients

• Connect with and expand your network
• Find profiled people and job titles within a company
• Outreach to precisely targeted prospects
• Find people and companies interested in specific topics and trends
• Publish downloadable cheat sheets, diagrams, etc.
• Publish to niche and interest groups
• Build brand awareness
• Publish paid advertising to precisely targeted profiles
With the right techniques you can magnify and focus

your LinkedIn publishing so it repeats sequences of posts to your
target audience.
LinkedIn allows you to publish two types of content for free: articles and posts.
Think of articles as multi-screen magazine-like articles. Like a magazine they are
usually not usually in-depth, but instead cover the general scope of a topic. Doing a
1,500 to 2,000-word article on one of the main headings in your cornerstone is a
great. Don’t forget to include links from the article to your profile and relevant
content on your site.

Articles are excellent for adding authority to your profile. For example, you may
want to rewrite some of your white papers as shorter articles and post them as
PDFs under your profile.
Your visibility and authority on LinkedIn increase when you share and publish
articles and posts. The articles you publish show under your profile. The figure
below shows an article published on LinkedIn by Leslie Lawton, a copywriter and
creative director in the San Francisco Bay Area. She specializes in working with
companies and BCorps that are creating a better world. On LinkedIn, clicking the
article or a shared post in this section takes you to the article or to a connecting
link.
You also can publish PDFs and white papers to increase your audience awareness
and authority. For instance, Sheella Mierson is a consultant who helps biopharma
and tech companies build cultures of collaboration.
At the bottom of Sheella Mierson’s profile are PDFs and website links that expand
on her work building creative collaboration in high tech, biotech, and non-profit
companies.

Narrowcasting with Webinars
In the real world you can start your own Meetup groups, host professional dinners,
or just go have afternoon coffee with your peers and prospects. You can do the
same online and turn it into a marketing engine. (You will have to get your own
coffee or dinner.)
If you do niche consulting, this is a good marketing engine. As you become more
niched your clients find it harder to get information and they are more
geographically dispersed. This makes an online gathering of peers even more
valuable.
Pick a time when people in most of the time zones you serve can spend 30 to 60
minutes online. In the USA, Wednesday or Thursday afternoons are good. Mondays
and Tuesdays everyone is too busy.
You don’t need expensive, high-tech webinar software to do this. You can setup a
private Zoom conference system for $15 a month for up to 100 participants and
have it recorded.
Leveraging Work with Scripts and Templates

Writing welcoming messages, email nurturing sequences, LinkedIn messages, and
weekly newsletters is just too much for one consultant, but you need them to
attract and nurture leads and prospects.
The best way to handle this overload is to create scripts and templates and then
modify them as needed. Write samples, test them, and then just use and modify the
templates that work best.
Consultants who take the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business
course can jump start their marketing using the library of proven headlines, scripts,
and templates included with the course. These scripts and templates engage and
nurture visitors, build strong relationships, and convert readers into clients.

8. Creating Multiple Streams of
Income and Consulting During
Social Distancing
Consulting’s old business model tied consulting revenue to hours.
If there are no hours, there is no income.
New consulting models enable independent consultants to build high six-

and seven-figure incomes.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its social distancing has created even
greater need for consulting models that
leverage remote consulting and productized consulting services.
New consulting models leverage virtual consulting needed for social distancing.
Productizing your consulting services into modules that can be delivered at different
price points and through different channels fits this new environment and positions
you for multiple streams of income.
The new consulting model using remote online consulting and

productized consulting services gives you greater independence and
creates the foundation for a million-dollar consulting business.
The business of consulting is rapidly changing. In the past, independent consultants

worked one-to-one or with a small group. Now independent consultants can deliver
their services over the internet at any time, in multiple formats, to any location.
Consultants who scale by productizing their services and distributing them through
multiple internet channels have a significant advantage over their competitors in
building their brand and their income.

Old Consulting Delivery Methods Are Changing

There are many problems with the old model of consulting.
With the old model of consulting, your reach, your brand strength, and your total
revenue were limited. If you weren’t hustling with your marketing and hustling at a
client’s site, then you weren’t earning, and your business could slide back.
Even as a great, in-demand consultant, the old model causes problems. There is
only so much of you to go around. Most clients want to work directly with you. You
can hire junior consultants, you can certify others, but there are still limits.
A few of the problems with the old consulting model are,
Hours
The only way to make more income is to work more hours, but this has problems.
It’s exhausting and burns you out. To increase your income, you must increase your
fees, and that has limits. And finally, you can’t scale your contribution, whether it is
delivering sustainable solutions or spreading a new technology.
Accessibility
Access is limited by your travel or telephone availability. By offering packaged
consulting over the internet you can deliver consulting to any geographic location at
any time.
Client Profiles
Not every client wants or can afford to have you as their consultant. You need ways
to give value to clients at all levels.
Rapidly Changing Competition
Consulting is changing as rapidly as the internet is expanding. You need to stay
current with new means of communication, networking, and service.
New consulting models offer packaged and productized consulting delivered

through multiple internet channels. Using the new models of consulting you can
deliver your offerings to different client profiles, at different price points, with
different learning styles, and not have to be at the client’s site. In most cases you
can scale by delivering your offerings to multiple clients at the same time.
Leveraging the Massive Changes in Consulting
Consulting is a relatively new business, starting in the early 1900s, it grew slowly
until exploding in the 1960s and shooting upward until now. Until recently,
consulting was a business where large consulting firms served large clients, and
one-person or small consulting firms served small and mid-size clients in a local
area. Both large and small consulting firms used a business model where work was
face-to-face with executives and managers.
The world of consulting is rapidly changing. Even independent consultants can’t
ignore the changes but they can use the change to their advantage.
Five forces are driving the massive changes in consulting,
• The COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting social distancing, Working from
Home and economic impact.
• New communication and knowledge delivery methods using the internet
• Widespread access to knowledge over the internet
• Massive shifts to freelancers for knowledge-specific, short-term projects
• Globalization of businesses and organizations
These changes give agile consultants using the new model an advantage over
consultants using the old model. In the past, consultants traded their work for
income. The old consulting model demanded younger people, high energy, and long
exhausting hours.
With the new models of consulting, you can deliver your value as products or
services whether you are physically available or not and through multiple channels.
You can connect with niche clients anywhere in the world. With the new business
models, independent consultants can deliver value and earn recurring revenue
while dining aboard a Viking Cruise down the Rhine River.
Consulting Online Creates More Opportunity

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the business world’s move to working
remotely from home. While this change was shocking and rapid, large corporations
with web-enabled employees found productivity increased. Many of these large
corporations in the US are closing their large headquarters and satellite offices and
dispersing their workforce.

The pandemic with its social distancing, recession and recovery requires a
lot of change, adaptation and agility from independent consultants. I am
posting strategies, tactics and tools to help you in the Critical Success blogs
and in LinkedIn posts.
Click here for the blogs,
Consulting in a Recession (collection)
Independent Consulting in the Age of Crisis
Tips for Consulting in a Recession
Consultants Have Four Paths in Recession
This shift toward Work from Home and the economic slowdown has pushed large
consulting firms to follow their standard approach to recessions, lay-off junior
consultants. Large firms depended upon pushing junior consultants into client
offices and billing for butt-in-seat time. They increase billings by increasing brand
strength and butts-in-seats. ,
As an independent consultant you can be more agile. As an independent, you can,
• Focus on narrow, well-defined niches that translate to greater value delivery

and greater income
• Expand your geographic reach using digital and automated marketing
• Deliver consulting services without wasted time in travel and layovers
• Productize solutions and deliver them with different prices and channels
You can take advantage of your narrow niche, global marketplace and unique
positioning to market and deliver your consulting services over the internet just as
well as a large firm. You can use,
• Email nurture sequences

• Live or on-demand webinars
• One-to-one mentoring over Zoom
• Zoom/Google/WebEx conference meetings
• Communication and project management with Slack, Trello, Asana, Basecamp
and many more
• Brainstorming with Miro, Mural or Google Docs
• Kindle and On-Demand-Books
• And more…
While terrible, the pandemic has opened opportunities for us and forced us to
evolve faster.
Creating Multiple Assets from a Single Value Offering

Smart consultants leverage their value by turning a single consulting service into
multiple assets delivered through multiple channels.
Build recurring income faster by leveraging

one asset into multiple products.
As an independent consultant, you can turn one asset into many products or
services. All it takes is knowing how to run a few software applications or
outsourcing production to freelancers.
As an example, imagine that you like to speak to industry groups. Your preferred
method of working is speaking. From your speech and slides you could use the
following workflow to create multiple products.
You can leverage your speech into many other products. For example,
1. Outline your speech and create slides.
2. Record your speech with your smartphone as you deliver it.
3. Create a video of your speech using another smartphone or digital camera.
4. Hire a freelancer to synch the audio and video files, then cut snippets for
use on YouTube.
5. Transcribe the recording using a low-cost, but excellent transcription

service.
6. Edit the transcription into multiple blogs.

7. Add a new introduction and remove high-value content from the slides,
then post it with brief notes to LinkedIn with links to your website.
8. Edit or rerecord the speech into a podcast.
9. Transcribe and combine multiple speeches into a single document, then

hire a freelance editor to publish a Kindle book.
10. Use the Kindle or PDF book as a lead generation offer on your website.
11. Expand the Kindle book and create a Print on Demand (POD) hardcopy.
12. Offer the POD book at “shipping cost” to your mailing list and use this price-
hurdle to qualify prospects who are more interested.
13. Edit the speech and slides to become modules in an online learning course
All those products came from one-hour speeches and the QA session that followed.
Imagine what you could do with content from four or five speeches!
No matter which media is your best, there are always ways to leverage your
workflow and create multiple products from a single offering.
Turning Your Consulting Offerings into Products

If you have more time than money you can learn the skills and repurpose your
content by yourself. The tools for some production, like screen capture video or
publishing Kindle books, are free or relatively low cost. There are many training
programs on YouTube but the time will take you away from marketing your
consulting.
Another alternative is to invest in freelancers to repurpose your content faster and
with higher quality. Sites such as Fiverr, Freelancer, or Upworks have freelancers for
hire for projects such as graphic design, editing, and book layout.

Many consulting offerings can create multiple streams of recurring revenue when it
is repurposed as,
• One-on-one coaching through screen sharing apps
• Group consulting through webinar software
• Project and team management
• Kindle books compiled from cornerstones and blogs
• Print-on-Demand (POD) books published from Kindle books
• Webinars customized and delivered in conjunction with industry associations
• Online learning courses
• Reports for niche trends and expertise
• ”How To” blogs for high-value skills
• Weekly Patreon videos (a low-cost video learning community)
• Podcasts of expert interviews
• Niche-based paid-membership communities
• And more...

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Five

Starting and Building

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The Ultimate Guide

The best time to start and build a

Get the most current

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Start Your Consulting Business with

The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business is based on 30+ years’

Critical to Success © 2020 https://www.criticaltosuccess.com/ v 20200711

To be successful, consulting requires very low capital investment, but

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Click to learn more about consulting lifestyle, earnings, and satisfaction…

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The riches are in the niches!

You want to select one or more niches where,

• You have high purpose, interest, or passion

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Click to learn more about finding your ideal niche…

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To connect with your ideal client, you must know

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Great consultants give their clients an image of a better life

Your brand is not a slogan or logo.

Click to learn more about promoting your consulting services…

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You must either work constantly on filling the pipeline

Click to learn more about getting clients quickly...

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Setting consulting fees is a tough job,

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A well-designed marketing machine creates a

Critical to Success © 2020 https://www.criticaltosuccess.com/ v 20200711

Building multiple streams of income from packaged consulting

What is Consulting? The Lifestyle, Earnings, and Satisfaction

1. Finding Your Ideal Consulting Niche

2. Knowing, Finding, and Closing Your Ideal Consulting Clients

3. Promoting Your Consulting Services

4. How to Get Consulting Clients Quickly

5. Calculating and Setting Your Consulting and Retainer Fee

6. Writing Consulting Contracts, Proposals, and Retainers that Win Clients

7. Marketing Your Consulting Services

8. Building Multiple Streams of Income from Packaged and Productized Consulting

Get the most current

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The best time to start and build a

What do Consultants Do?

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Small Business Startup Fund Raising International Trade

New Product Development Sales Social Media

Sustainability Branding Medical Practice

Financial Advice Competitive Analysis Quality Control

Performance Improvement Human Resources Recruiting

Digital Marketing Operations Franchise Management

Medical and Pharmaceutical Environmental Cost Control

Risk & Compliance Research & Strategy

Engineering Training & Information Technology

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Institute of Management Consulting, State of Industry, 2017

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