Every week we'll be chatting with a business owner, helping them to bust through the challenges they are facing with their business in out new Fix Your Business series.
In today's episode you'll be learning about How to Start and Grow a Consulting Business because starting a consulting business is one thing, but actually growing a successful consulting business is another thing!
My guest today is Paul Truman - Business Consultant and Founder of Peak Performance Martial Arts. Peak Performance are the first choice for Martial Arts Classes in Horley, Maidenbower and Southborough, Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells.
Established since 2007, they have an excellent reputation for fun and informative martial arts classes for children, adults and families. But in 2020 Paul wanted a change, so we'll be discussing how to start a consulting business. Becoming a business consultant is a far cry from running a martial arts business.
0:00:00 - How to Start and Grow a £1m Consulting Business
0:04:20 - Consulting Business Model
0:10:21 - Growing a Consulting Business
0:14:50 - How do you calculate consulting fees?
0:26:40 - Consulting Business Ideas
0:33:08 - Perceived Value Pricing
0:34:08 - Price Matching Guarantees
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- Welcome back, everybody. It is the next episode of Fix Your Business. And today we are going to be diving into Paul Truman's business, which is, well, you hark from a martial arts business. However, we're actually gonna be talking about a new consultancy which you're looking at setting up, which is incredibly exciting. So welcome to the show today, Paul.
- Thanks for having me.
- It's a pleasure. Don't you look scared. Don't worry, we'll be nice to you, Paul, don't worry. Give me a bit of a rundown. What's the background behind Peak Performance? When did you set it up? How has that business grown so far?
- So, Peak Performance is just past its 13th anniversary. So, started in martial arts and one of the instructors invited me to open up a school with him. I did. He ended up leaving the business and I've driven forward with it ever since. We've moved around the country to now have four classes in different locations, and we've been building it up slowly but surely. I left my full-time job, I think it's three years, just over three years ago now, and started concentrating on this on a full-time basis. And, obviously, since the last few months, we've had to change what we're doing and change our focus.
- Yeah, and I can imagine that must have hit you pretty hard. I mean, it's quite amazing that you've managed to grow a business to four different locations in such a, well, a relatively short period of time. I know, obviously, it's a nod to the crisis there, but pre-crisis, how did you feel business was going?
- It was going really, really well. We had had a good few months, actually, we'd really got things lined up properly coming out of the New Year. We had found the right offers that we could get people in. We'd always struggled to get adult martial artists coming in the door. We'd done really, really well at growing the children's side of it and marketing correctly there, and that was working, but we were really struggling, playing around with different ways of getting people, adults, involved, and we suddenly found what was the right thing, what was the right tagline, the headline, to actually get people to interact with our adverts and then come and start looking in. So we'd started January very, very well. [chuckling]
- I think it's a sad thing, where I think a lot of business did, and then, obviously, with what's happened, you know, things went, sort of, south. We're not gonna be talking about the crisis now. What you've kind of alluded to, though, is the marketing side of the business, which sounds like you've done a really good job of kind of nailing down who your target market is and being able to attract them into the various different, what would you call them, studios? which you run.
- Yeah. So, give us a bit of an insight into what direct, what the change of direction looks like now for you.
- Well, one of the biggest learning curves for me has been the marketing side of it. I've never been involved in it at all. So, I was dabbling with it about three years ago when I was still working full-time, and I was just finding things were starting to sort of fall in place and the business was starting to grow, and, therefore, we made the call to go full-time doing it. And I'm trying to plug that gap. So, since that gap, or, certainly over the 13 years, I've had no knowledge, no knowledge, and then eventually somebody found some knowledge. I've been on some courses. I've invested in the right places and expanded my own knowledge. And over the last three years we've managed to take it up, up, up, up, up, and build the business really, really well. And the new job is to, the new project is to try and plug that gap for everybody else. They don't have to go on that long, expensive journey. So I've spent thousands of pounds on courses, thousands of pounds on training, videos, everything that you could possibly think of, and we're just trying to plug that gap so that small business can take something off the shelf and go, "Yep, that works for me." And it's only cost them a small amount of money, rather than a big amount of money and years and years of training.
- One of the thing which you mentioned was, obviously, having a sort of, a DIY element to it, so people could buy a little bundle when they start up, and then eventually the longer tail product is then sort of the more done-for-you typical consulting thing, where you actually help your clients to build out their marketing funnel. So, talk us through a little bit more about that.
- So, the starting position, as you say, will be, people will get a taster of what we're doing for free. They will then be offered a more detailed taster for a small fee of about £5. Then there will be a, we'll build out the models so that there's more involved in there and they can get more, and that'll be a monthly fee, 30 to £50 a month. There'll be another bit where it includes more training, more information, so we've already segmented what information, knowledge that I have that is worth more, and we will put that into the next pack. And then, finally, there will be a much bigger pack, which will include potentially their set up and help showing them how to set up Ads Manager, showing them how to optimise their profile, their page, their group, and that sort of thing, to really optimise it. And that, as you've written there, is about £500. And we can even bolt on web design and that sort of thing, so we've got those people in the periphery.
- And you had various different packs, which are sort of £30, £50 a month, up to a £100 a month, and then they eventually, if they're struggling to... It's one of those things, if they can't do it themselves, "Let's get Paul to do it, he's the expert," kinda makes sense, doesn't it?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I was thinking as we go through this, so, the reason why I've drawn it this way is I have like a, it's something called a product architecture model, so what you've got down here are your core products. So, these are the things which you kind of really want as many people to get into these as you possibly can. Up at the top you've got something called a breakthrough product. That's like your gateway drug into what Paul and his team do. Over here we have the taster session, which is, these are what I call the marketing assets. Imagine this is gonna end up looking a little bit like a house. So this is like your For Sale board, which comes out, where you're running some ads, driving people through into that taster session. I don't actually think it's really a breakthrough product, 'coz it really is just a marketing asset that, effectively, I'm guessing you're gonna give away for free as a just to try before you buy.
- Yeah, that's right.
- Cool, so we've got the marketing assets there. Now, another thing as well is you've got specific niches that you want to focus on. So I always put a protective roof over the head, which is where we go through a process of assessing. I call it an assessment, or a quiz, or something like that, so that you can start to kind of, you know, you've mentioned hairdressers, you have personal trainers, you'll have those sort of, talking small bricks and mortar business, basically, where people have to, you know, come in in person to see somebody to get a treatment, or a haircut, or a whatever. But that doesn't mean that not every client for you is gonna be perfect. So you really want to, to want to give away as many taster sessions, but in doing so, you want to be gathering as much information about them as possible, to make sure that your core products, and certainly your, this is what I call a follow-on product, down the bottom here. So, you want to make sure that the right people are coming in at the top of your funnel, because you don't want to get all the way down to the £500 a month programme and find out that actually it doesn't work for them, or it's not appropriate. So it's kind of like a filtering process. And then, obviously, well, hopefully what gets spat out at the end is what we call, there's a bit more to this, but you end up with some, hopefully, some very positive case studies for each of the different elements of the business. 'Coz the beauty of it is, you mentioned my book "Take Your Shot" whilst we were offline. You know, that's kind of like one of my marketing assets, it just rolls out. I have to do very little with it, you know, in order to market it. People can passively read it, but I've had people who've read the book, got everything which they needed. You know, their business has just taken off. They don't actually need me as a coach. And, actually, in some cases, they're the best clients in many respects. So, is that kind of a fair representation of where the direction you're heading in with the various different packages?
- Yes, that's perfect.
- And how they all link together?
- Yeah.
- Cool. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about, so you mentioned about, in terms of your goals, was that magical, mystical, you know, "Could we get this up to "a million pound a year plus business?"
- Yeah.
- And one of the things I was thinking, and I don't know whether this will make sense to you or not, if you get too many of these in, ie, if 20,000 people buy products at £500, can you support 20,000 people?
- No. We would be limited. And the plan was always to limit that number all the time, because, obviously, we can't support that.
- Yeah. So that, in essence, so what would that number be? What have you said you're gonna limit it to?
- It would probably be about 500.
- Okay. So, 500 times by 500 is, have I done the right maths there? I'm not sure that I have. I think I've got one too many naughts on there. We're not that far adrift, then, 'coz that's 250K, isn't it?
- Yeah.
- Is my maths working? Yeah, four zeros, there we go, 250K. Okay. So we've still gotta find, we're still short of 750K, which, obviously, if you would then, I mean, really, so we were talking about these £5 bundles. Again, this is just like a bit of a reality check, where we take all of the numbers and just kinda have a look at the capacity, and things like that. And I know that, obviously, the money's gonna be spread across £5 bundles, £30 a month packages and £500 a month packages. But imagine if it was all based on £5 bundles. This is where you've got to be really clear on exactly what, like, clear on what numbers you're gonna be pushing through your business, okay? So, I run another very simple sort of, I guess it's a sales funnel, as such. Have you come across my five Cs model?
- Not something I've, no.
- So, it's based on Google Zero Moments of Truth, where they talk about three numbers, 70, 10, two. And it was originally, they got those numbers, well, they tested a whole load of data, and this is what they came back with for consultant software business, all sorts of different service-based business. Seventy, 10, two is a magic number. But if you imagine, like, the old call centre days, when it was like 70 calls, 10 appointments, two sales. Okay? And, actually, I've tested these numbers across a multitude of different clients now, and more often than not, I mean, it's different for every, slightly different for every business, but these do kind of pretty much work out. And what I liken it to is, so you have, the first C is Content, the second C is Conversations. Then you start off with your Consultations. So that's like the sales, and sales, actually, is like, sales fits in there. This is more of a marketing funnel. And then you have your conversion down at the bottom end of it. Conversion, there we go. If I could spell. And then, finally, you have some loyal clients, which get spat out the bottom. And they obviously refer in, not up there, whoops. They refer prospects into the Consultation phase. They're kinda pre-sold, if you refer somebody, basically. That's what I'm saying. Now, you're gonna be obviously be driving ads into here to get people to, like, these are kind of like, this is gonna be your, whoops, your, where has it gone? So that's gonna be your taster. That's gonna be your bundle. And this is gonna be one of your monthlies. Okay? So, in order to get, and by the way, you're probably looking at this, going, like, working out is this right, is this not? Trust me. Google have got a gazillion bits of data. I didn't make these numbers up. A good conversion rate is like one in five to one in three in software, and especially how you're bundling up what you're doing. It'd be interesting to see what stats come back for getting people to move through your marketing funnel and getting booked into those monthlies. But imagine those 500 clients. So, we've got 500 there. We can multiply all of these by 250. So you've got to sell two-and-a-half thousand bundles, and you've gotta get, oh, god, geez, I can't even do the maths here. Three, 35,000? So you've gotta do 35,000 tasters to get two-and-a-half thousand people to buy into a bundle at five quid, to then sign up to one of your monthly packages, which could be a 30, 50, 100, or maybe even a 500. Make sense?
- Yeah.
- So this is what I call just a very quick, like, business plans, we can throw them out the window 'coz we're not going for investment, necessarily. But this is just a very quick sense check to make sure that the numbers stack up. 'Coz one of the main things, and I wrote this down in my notes to start off with, was about data and validation. Is this all kinda making sense so far? Have you got any questions?
- Yeah, yeah.
- I'm well aware that I'm kinda just throwing stuff at you at the moment.
- It's all right.
- The key thing, though, is about getting data and validation. And I'm gonna come back. I'm just gonna switch the screen share off for a second. There's two things which you said to me as we were kind of in the pre-roll interview and as we've been chatting, around pricing, specifically. So, one of the things you said, and this was in your current business, the martial arts business, was that there's not an appetite, people don't have the money. They're penny-pinching and, you know, they're trying to save money right now.
- Yup.
- That's true to a certain extent, okay? There may be a few people out there who are penny-pinching, trying to save some money, a bit hard up. Maybe they've been either made redundant, or furloughed, or whatnot. Is it everybody?
- No, no, I don't believe it's everybody, yeah.
- Yeah.
- I think it's more, for the martial arts, I think a lot of it is that they're not seeing the same value that they would normally get, they're not seeing me in person. They're putting more value on that, even though I'm doing online one-to-ones with them, which I'd never have done before.
- Which baffles me, because I spotted that on your website, where you're doing the one-to-ones. And I was like, for, am I allowed to say how much you're charging for that?
- You can.
- It was 57 a month, I think I spotted on your website, or something roundabout that, including the one-to-one side of things, which, again, if you were to run numbers on that, you can see why you're so busy and things aren't. So, imagine this scenario, right, where, 'coz it, to me that feels like a bit of a discount, almost, 'coz you've added so much extra value in there, but you haven't put the price up.
- Yeah. And so what's happening is, when you injected a discount into the marketplace, the idea behind that is it stimulates demand. So, at a time when, effectively, like, I don't know anybody who's in business right now with the crisis who has ended up with more time to spend on their business. Most people have ended up with less time, because we've got things like children, that, you know, require home-schooling and things like that. And so, imagine where you've got less capacity to deliver, and you're effectively injecting a discount in, you're increasing demand. Like, the numbers, economically... It's a really shit Economics 101 there, but the numbers just don't quite stack up.
- Oh, yeah, no, we'll be [muffled speech] about that.
- What you want to be doing is, like, I remember when the last recession hit, so we were charging, this is going way back, when, 2007, 2008? We were charging about 10 quid a month for support and hosting for our websites that we were selling. And everybody else immediately started discounting when the recession hit. It was a marketing based business, so naturally everybody assumed that marketing was the first thing they should be cutting. And I saw everybody dropping their prices, so I went completely the opposite way. We five x'ed our price, we went up to £50 a month for our lowest tier care plan. And, yes, we lost 40% of our clients, but our revenue went up two-and-a-half times. Our support for the pain in the arse clients when down 80%. So, again, when you start to balance off, you know, if you get the price right for those who really value what you're doing, you should, I mean, I'm not suggesting, you don't want to be going out and trying to capitalise on it, you know, you don't want to be taking advantage of people, or be seen to be taking advantage of people, but, you know, one of my clients runs a martial arts business and their basic package is 97 a month, and they haven't included in any extra one-to-one, and all of their clients have stayed. So, there's this notion about being able to articulate that value. And the key thing is the assumption. So, do you, when you kind of said that, did you really believe that? Or was it a? So, when you said to me off, sort of, on the pre-roll, you said, "Oh, people are penny-pinching." Did you really believe that?
- Well, I believe it to some extent. I'm not sure that, I don't believe everyone should be. I think people with the martial arts business, that they don't see the value, necessarily, in what we're doing offline, sorry, online. And they thought, "Well, I'm not gonna getting here "and getting my personal service." And when we get people talking to us about leaving and they're not getting it, we were explaining to them, "Well, actually, we're giving you one-to-ones, "which are a hundred pounds an hour, normally. "We're doing this for you, we're doing this for you." And we were adding up all the package, and the extras that we've now thrown in, which is huge, just to try to keep them happy. And then they do, sort of, buy in to what we're saying then.
- Yeah. So that's kind of, like, the amazing set of features which you're offering, that's great. But you've got to be able to demonstrate to them the heaven if they do and the hell if they don't. So, the hell if they don't buy your product, or don't continue to buy your product is, what impact is it gonna have on their mental health? Is it gonna impact their gradings when they come to move up through the belts, and things like that. You know, there's all of those intangible things, which they're not gonna be, you've got to show them the hell if they leave, basically, as opposed to, well, "Hey, you're gonna get all this extra stuff." Most people are happy to do the heaven if you stay. They're happy with that because, well, you'll get a tonne of great value and you'll feel better, and everything else. But too many people are afraid to go into the hell if you don't. So, if you leave, you know, imagine, you know, and this is about you, obviously, understanding, like, all of your clients and their needs as individuals and things like that. You'll probably find all the ones who are, like, have already gone through a lot of the belting and grading systems, they've been loyal clients for ages. They've had no problem buying into the online version of it. I can guarantee that it's mostly gonna be a lot of the new people who haven't yet see the benefits of it, who are having an issue with migrating to the online space. Does that make sense? So, my point here is really about, there's a bit of a, you've made a bit of an assumption about the marketplace, and there was also a little bit of belief behind it. Whether it was right or wrong, probably a discussion for another day. But if we take that clue for how you're treating this current business. So I was looking at this going, well, I was worried about the volume, when you said million pound a year business. And then the reason why I went through the exercise with 70, 10, two and the five Cs and getting you just to have that quick reality check about, well, how many people do we need at each tier, basically? Because there was kind of a, I think a bit of an assumption that you're kind of going in at more of that entry level, you want it to be affordable for people. And also the fact that there's a potential, and this is where I'm actually gonna, hopefully, add quite a lot value to what you're doing, I hope I will be, that people won't get the value out of just having an online version only, and not having your extra done-for-you service so that you can actually scale the software element of what you're doing, okay? So, take the £30 a month package. Well, actually, if you work it out, that's 3,000 clients paying you £30 a month.
- Yeah.
- Which is, you know, there's six, seven million, six million businesses in the UK right now. I bet a lot of them are very small bricks and mortar businesses that could do with your help and the templates that you're gonna be creating for your clients. So here's where I think it might get interesting for you. And I said I might mention this piece of software to you. I've been optimising my YouTube channel and I've been using a little programme call vidIQ. So, vidIQ is a Chrome plugin that teaches you, through a process of just going through and optimising video by video by video, how to choose your keywords, how to put the right words into the title, how to format your description so it gets found by Google, how to tag the videos, and numerous different data points and things like that. And what's really interesting, so, it costs £50 a month when you get up to the sort of, if you want the booster version, which, really, you do need the booster version to get the most out of it. But one of things they did incredibly well was they don't have any kind of done-for-you, we'll-optimize-your-videos-for-you option, which, actually, I would pay for because I'm time poor. But I have a bit of, I'm not loaded, but I have the money, I could afford to pay something to have them optimise it. But their attitude is, "We believe you can do all of this yourself "with the right tools." So they've built this incredible academy on the back end of vidIQ. Their YouTube channel, for obvious reasons, is just packed full of, you know, every video they've put up there you can learn something and apply it to your next video. And, you know, the results speak for themselves. I'm not gonna be a CuDiePie, or whatever his name is, just yet, PewDiePie, with millions of subscribers, but my subscriber base all of a sudden has doubled, my views have gone up overnight, I'm making money out of my YouTube channel, which is something which I thought, well, I've never put any time or effort into it, but I'm making money from it. But that's without having a done-for-you option. So I'm wondering, for you, whether you could just smash the £30 a month option, 'coz there is so much value in there, but then focus, rather than spending time building your done-for-you business, with those however many hundreds of clients. Where's it gone? Five hundred clients on that done-for-you products. You could just build one elearning platform and your own YouTube channel, which teaches them everything they need to know.
- Okay.
- And give it away as a gift, 'coz it builds the value of the £30 a month, the £50 a month and a £100 a month packages which you want to put in there. The other thing as well, so, you kind of made an assumption that £500 is kind of the ceiling for what people might pay.
- Well, we valued the product based on what we're giving what we're gonna be giving in time spent, et cetera, and we actually valued it at a thousand pounds. But, to get us going, we think £500, so that we can get some testimonials. That's the whole, sort of, the structure we're doing is for the slow build, and that we would gain feedback every time we do something. So we started off with just having the group and giving out some free advice. We started giving out some of the information, we're drip-feeding it out, to see what sort of impact we have. I mean, it's building slowly. And then it'd be the same across, once we get the packages out, we'll release them a little bit and see what the response is, so we can make sure that we are maximising what we're doing. So, as you've written on the top there, getting validation about what we're doing.
- Yeah. So, I'm gonna talk, 'coz I'm talking about, specifically, validation around pricing here. We'll come onto that in a second. But you are taking kind of the lean approach, where you're kinda gradually improving it over time and getting that feedback and making it better, and things like that, which is a hundred percent what I recommend. In fact, again, I mentioned a book offline, which was The Lean Startup, by a guy called Eric Ries, and it's brilliant for that whole sort of product launch process. The time and materials. So, you mentioned you kind of did a rough calculation, which came out at a thousand pounds. Well, you've already discounted it down to £500. So you're kinda saying that, actually, our time is worth half what it was, immediately.
- This is just to get the demand. So the idea was that we start off with low, we go in with some up-sales, we tell them that it's worth a thousand pounds but we're gonna, "As you're the first X customers, "you'll be getting it for 500." And then once we've started peaking out, so it might be with, if we go for the, if we go for that 500, we would have maybe the first 100 would be £500, and then after that it would start ramping up to the full thousand.
- I think you can, 'coz the thing is, by the time somebody's gone through your taster pack, you've assessed them properly, you've seen whether you can get them good results or not, they've bought the bundle, they've bought a monthly package. They've been through all of the touch points that you need to get them on to what we call a high ticket programme. And even a thousand pounds still isn't a high ticket. I'll be honest, if somebody can afford 500 for your product, and it sounds bloody amazing, they can afford a thousand pounds. And the reason for that is, and this something which it does seem to crop up fairly frequently now on this Fix Your Business series, but it's about being able to, you need to become a master at working out the return on investment your clients will get through working with you and your consultancy. So, what I mean by that is, for example, somebody who's just setting up a new hairdressing salon, or something like that, you know, who has goals themselves to maybe get to 50K a year, or something like that in the first year. Well, if your just, what you're saying is, for a thousand pounds we can kind of, you know, it's like a jackpot machine, for a grand, we can get you 50K. So it's kind of a no-brainer, especially if they've already gone through those first few products. You've built their trust up. They should have got some results, I would hope, through the £30 a month package, or the £50 a month package, at which point, when they turn around and say, "We've got some results but we've not optimised it. "We need your help to optimise it." The thousand pounds seems like a no-brainer to me.
- Yeah.
- Yeah?
- Yeah, that makes sense.
- And also, so, going back to this. We talked about your goal being a million. If you go in at a thousand your first 500 people get it at a thousand pounds, you've just got halfway to your goal, like, twice as quick.
- Yeah!
- 'Coz that 250K all of a sudden becomes 500K, okay? Five-hundred, there's an extra zero in there. Five-hundred K, make sense?
- Yeah.
- So, think about the time, energy and effort it would take to, you know, would you not rather put in the same time, energy and effort, 'coz you won't have to put much more in to get people sold at a thousand as you would 500, but to hit your goal twice as quickly.
- Yeah, yeah, that's a--
- And it's probably, but, probably, to make it relevant, it's probably the same as what you teach your students at the martial arts academy. If you only come to one class a week, you're gonna struggle to get your brown belt. But if you come two or three times a week we can get you to your brown belt in eight months, or however long it takes, I don't know how long it takes.
- Yeah, I know what you mean.
- Yeah. So, it's a common mistake, with consulting-based businesses and software businesses, to put out offers and discounts on, sort of, the back end of products, but actually it ends up being more destructive than anything else. And what I would also say is, like, if you go out and you're pitching this at £500, and you never pitch it. Or you wait for 500 people to come on board before you pitch it at a thousand, you've got no validation as to whether people are willing to pay a thousand or not.
- Yeah, that's true.
- So, what I would be doing is I would actually be testing, and this is hard, by the way. And I've probably, if any of your clients are watching this, this might give the game away, but I would actually recommend testing multiple different price points through this early validation phase, and just starting to garner the feedback. And part of the reason for that is, you know, I talked about the 70, 10, two, so imagine if we go and pitch it to 20 people. And we want four people to say yes to something in order to validate it, to agree. I can guarantee you the first 16 people will say no. It will be the last four out of the 20 who will say yes to it, 'coz human being are unpredi-- we like think, when we design business plans, it's predictable and linear, but it's really not, in practise! You know, you're dealing with human beings who are volatile and difficult and different in all sorts of different ways. And they're very much like buses, you'll have a dearth of people who'll say, "Oh no, that's too expensive." But you'll start to believe them. And it's actually, you've gotta go out at volume, and pitch at volume, in order to get the volume of data back that says, "Yes, actually, we're on track "with our 25% conversion rate "of people at a thousand pounds. "Cool, we can roll with the thousand pounds." If we go and pitch it to 20 people and, actually, only one comes back and says yes, and the other 19 are categorical in the fact that a thousand pounds is too expensive, we validate it. We've said, "No, a thousand pounds is too expensive. "That doesn't meet our data. "Let's now drop it down and try 800, let's try 600." Or, conversely, if our closed rate it too high, so, if we're closing more than one in three, we're too cheap. So, as you start going to market with this at 500, and it's like, boom, yes, yes, yes, everybody's saying yes, you've gotta increment that price quick, 'coz otherwise you'll just destroy your capacity. Does that make sense?
- Yeah, no, it makes good sense.
- That's kind of what I was referring to around, sort of, the validation of pricing. When you're talking about the cheaper pack, the £5 bundle and the £30 a month, doesn't really matter so much. When you start to hit volume it'll matter, and a small increase from your baseline, from 30 to 40, or 30 to £50, for example, that might have an inference. But you'll already have a warm audience at that point, with people getting value. For this consulting gig, and because it's, the key thing is, because it's time and material based, that will have the biggest impact on capacity.
- Yeah, okay. That makes sense.
- So, hopefully, that's give you... I think we're already at time. I can't believe that's actually gone super-quick. And I've barely let you talk, so apologies. [laughing]
- That's all right!
- But hopefully you've kind of found that helpful.
- Yeah.
- I was just having a quick look to see if we've had any questions, actually, come in as well. Few people have come on board and said, what have we got? Oh yeah, somebody's just said, "I remember you sharing about 70, 10, two, "very interesting and very practical." So, use 70, 10, two as a benchmark, to test the different points of your marketing funnel now. You can implement that straight away, even with the small numbers you've got at the moment. I would start to position, 'coz you could probably start delivering, even now, that £500 package straight away. So put something together, pitch it. Build a few of them out now. Just see how it goes.
- Yeah, well, fleshing it out, I'm a bit worried about going straight to the 500, or having that there. I was literally trying to build out one bit, then the next bit, then the next bit, so it's all there, ready.
- Yeah, but you don't want to fill your funnel up and then have that stumbling block of not knowing that you can't deliver it.
- Yeah, sure, yeah.
- So it's worthwhile, you want to test each. Each of them are independent products. You want to test each product, like, now, and get that feedback, and see if it generates the results that you expect. And how I would position it, so this it the key to it. So, the reason why I said somebody will buy a thousand, if they were gonna buy a £500 product they'll buy a £1000 product anyway. And there's two things you can do to help people out with this. So, one is to potentially offer either payment plans or guarantees. Now, you can't guarantee the result, 'coz part of it is gonna be based on what they've got to do, but what we do is, the guarantee which you offer is based on perceived value. So, take my book. This is a shameless plug, but take my book, right, you've got a copy of it. If you were to walk into, I was about to say Wetherspoons. What's the bookshop called? Waterstones! Wetherspoons is the pub. If you walk into Waterstones, or Smiths, or go to Amazon, how much would you pay for a paperback book?
- Five to 10 pounds.
- Yeah, okay, £10, let's say it's £10, right? Might be on special offer at a fiver, but let's say it's £10. It cost me £1.82 to get a copy of this printed off, okay. And then to distribute it, right? So, your perceived value of the book is actually five times the value of what it cost me to print it, okay?
- Yeah.
- So, people's perceive value is always much higher. So this why the guarantees are based on perceived value. So what you say to somebody is, if they're starting to have price objections over, say, a £1000 product, you can say something along the lines of, "Well, actually, if you invest in this product, "and you do everything that we ask you to, "we'll obviously take care of everything from our end. "If we don't get the results, "or you don't feel that you've got the value out of this "that we promised you, "we'll just hit the refund key." It's actually very hard for people to say no. Now, the reason why people don't offer money back guarantees typically in the consulting world and coaching world, is 'coz they have, they lack the confidence in their ability to deliver. So, you've first got to get to that point. That's why I'm saying test the product now so you get to that point where you're confident in your ability to deliver and get results. That will help you through building up your confidence in the sales process and start to add in those extra sort of, confidence boosters, basically. You want people to be confident that you can deliver results.
- Yeah. Yeah, cool. That's good.
- Make sense?
- Yeah, absolutely.
- Have you got any questions for me? I'm aware that I just did a Gatling gun download on you.
- No, I've made lots of notes and taken lots in.
- Awesome. Well, what I'll do, Paul, is that I will send you a copy of the notes. If you can translate them, then good luck! But I'll send you a copy of my notes so that you've those diagrams as well. Obviously, this is going to be going up onto YouTube after this recording little bit later on this week. But it sounds like you found that helpful. I think if anybody else is watching this and they'd like to get stuck in and have me fix their business you can email me, robin@fearless.biz. We'll also put a link through to Paul, just in case there's anybody out there who is thinking about tapping Paul up in terms of that marketing product which he's putting out there. So we'll make sure that we share your, I've tagged you into the post on Facebook anyway, but we'll make sure we share that. But thank you very much, Paul. It's been a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed it.
- Yeah, thanks. It's been good, thank you very much for your help.