Six Powerful Lessons I Learned After Building A Six-Figure Consulting Business in 6 Months
No manifestations or daily affirmations are required. Just a bit of hard work, unfair advantages and a healthy dose of luck.
Pull up a chair and let uncle Michael tell you how to become a kickass entrepreneur overnight with little effort.
Sike! Overnight success is not real. What looks like instant success is probably fake, bought by daddy’s credit card, or built off decades (or at least years) of hard work and effort.
My story is no different.
While this story is framed as a six-month journey, I gave myself a two-year runway while I still had a full-time job to build the plane and learn how to fly the solopreneur plane.
And with any plane ride, I was:
Terrified to take off
Relieved that I wasn’t dead as I achieved escape velocity
Gripped my seat in terror during turbulence
Happy to be traveling in the right direction
I used my full-time job as a secure base to fund experiments, learn new skills and build the right networks.
I slowly started to distance myself from my work, subtlely telling clients my time was coming to an end and stopped taking on additional work to ‘prove’ myself.
This gave me the time and space to build my secret empire on the side.
I was quietly quitting and quietly building before I even knew what that was.
You could probably travel faster or slower depending on your appetite for risk and adventure. I choose a strategy that allowed me to sleep at night.
I am not your mother, but I think this advice is solid you can use.
Now here are those six lessons I promised, in what I hope will be applicable to your journey.
Lesson #1: Understand these two concepts first:
Building a profitable and scalable business online
= unfair advantages + leverage.
Leverage is relatively easy to obtain, so let's start with your unfair advantages.
A consultant like me is competing with hundreds of thousands of other consultants.
All you really need to be a consultant is a laptop, wifi and a pulse.
BUT…
A consultant who understands social media marketing, copywriting, podcasting, blogging, and visual design and can confidently speak on camera or in public is in high demand, but limited supply.
The secret is to develop a T-shaped knowledge base. Here’s how:
Learn 1–2 primary skills deeply. For me, this was management consulting skills (i.e structured problem-solving and writing) these skills are your ‘verticals’ or the ‘I’ part of your ‘T’.
Then stack on secondary skills that might seem unrelated at first glance (like the ones above). These skills are a horizontal part of your skill stack. They can be combined with a wide array of different primary skills.
Combine your secondary and primary skills to create a unique combination that in turn, provides unique value to your customers.
You already have secondary skills through your hobbies and interests that can be your unfair advantage. Now you just need to leverage them via code, media, labor or capital to build a business online.
Even with the skills that are not my strongest, I’ve learned enough to know more than most people (aim for the top 25%). And can speak about it with enough confidence to be able to sell services to a client.
In short, the breadth, rather than the depth of my skillset makes me more valuable to potential customers.
Lesson #2: Do this and you’ll never run out of business opportunities.
Some call it goodwill, others call it karma.
Whenever someone reaches out to me, I try to provide value upfront with no obligation. I don’t try to sell them anything or to win work. I even refer work to my competitors without asking for a slice of the pie.
I will happily chat with someone for 30 minutes to brainstorm a problem, listen to their challenges, and offer an introduction to someone or send them resources I know could help them.
Somehow, this goodwill or karma (depending on your philosophical bend) will find its way back to me.
We might not have a specific project to work on right now, but people I’ve helped previously are more likely to think of me first when an opportunity comes along.
If you do this for long enough, you earn the reputation of being useful, valuable and someone who everyone wants to work with. You become top of mind.
People will think to themselves:
If someone provides this much value without being paid, can you imagine what value they could provide when we do pay them?
This doesn’t mean working for free or letting others exploit you. I set these meetings in the afternoon when my concentration is waning and when I want some social connection anyway.
I usually combine it with a walk. I generally come back feeling more energized than before. Win-win for everyone.
Lesson #3: I constantly raised my rates without asking for permission.
Once I validated my value, I set my prices higher.
I raise my rates every quarter.
Too many people get stuck on the employee-salary mindset. They value their time at an hourly or yearly rate rather than by the value they create.
I set my prices based on the value I provide, but will articulate it through a daily rate.
But most of my clients don’t care if I work fifty hours or five hours on their projects. They care about results and outcomes.
I was scared to do this at first, but since I started raising my rates, people started to respect me more and my demand went up.
Lesson #4: I turned away a lot of work.
I could have built an agency with multiple people working for me within six months.
But I’ve seen close friends pursue this pathway and get stuck on the client-winning treadmill.
They are constantly looking for the next client and project to maintain the large teams they have hired. This takes away time to think strategically and slowly divorce hourly input into the business.
I only took on projects that:
Aligned with my values and interests
Had clients that I vibed with
Paid well
My threshold was a ‘hell yes’ or a no.
I refuse to compromise on any of these criteria. I learned to say “thank you, but no thank you” to work that didn’t make me feel excited or aligned.
People may not like that you said ‘no’ or agree with your values, but they will respect you more for having values you won’t compromise on.
Lesson #5: I surrounded myself with supporters and collaborators.
No entrepreneur is an island.
While you might be running your own venture, every entrepreneur needs a team of collaborators and supporters.
Just like my clients, I align myself with a network of subcontractors that understand the impact I want to make and the type of work I want to do.
If you find the right tribe, you’ll be in a virtuous circle where there will be a constant stream of meaningful and well-paid projects shared between the group.
Find a tribe with your vibe.
Lesson #6: I never try to touch a task more than three times.
Automate, automate, automate.
I document every business process I have on a Google Slide and then I will try to automate it as much as possible.
Either through technology or labor.
The name of the game: find software or a person to do the work for you.
Booking meetings = Calendly
Email marketing = ConvertKit
Publishing content on social media = Later
Project management = Trello (thinking of switching to Asana)
This Google Slide also serves multiple purposes. It allows me to:
Document key processes and the steps required to complete the task. I could potentially sell my company along with this user manual.
Automate low-value tasks as much as possible through software or technology saving me time.
Delegate tasks that a robot can’t do to a virtual assistant or subcontractor.
Turn my entire business processes into a suite of digital products that I can sell in the future. The Google Slide can be a script for a course, each process can have an accompanying checklist and first-hand experience.
What’s next for me?
Now that I’ve got a successful service model for my consulting business, I want to slowly stop trading time for money.
I love my clients and the work that I do, but I know that in order to scale, I need to divorce my time from the output as much as possible.
I want to be able to run this business from anywhere in the world, based on my own time and interests.
There are two ways I am going to go about this:
Labor leverage: Delegate fee-for-service work to a team of subcontractors and slowly liberate my time away from the day-to-day running of the business.
Media leverage: Create digital products and assets that require active work upfront but can be used to generate an income passively. I can sell these assets on my website and through the internet, anywhere in the world.
Will it be easy? Nope. Will I be stressed? Probably.
But I would rather be stressed doing hard things to build my own business than making someone else’s dream a reality
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