116 – The Unspoken Rules of Non-Profit Consulting

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Are you feeling stuck or unsure in your journey as a non-profit consultant? Well, you’re not alone.

Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different., I’m going to be answering the fundamental questions that consultants are asking. We’re going to talk about pricing, positioning, scaling, and being able to stay sane as you deal with everything in running your consultancy, as well as how you can leverage that to help grow your consulting business, or your agency, or your little freelance side gig that you’ve got. And if you’ve ever wished that you had a mentor in your corner, this is the moment we’re going to dive in and set your consulting path up for success.

I’m going to be addressing some of the most common questions that I hear from non-profit consultants who are just getting started or who have been doing this for a few years and are just looking for a way to level up and get to the next step that they want to get to. So I hope that you enjoy this episode.

Some of you might know, I’ve been doing mentoring and coaching with digital agencies for a little bit over four years now. And in doing that, I was under a non-compete, well, now, that non-compete is done. And my goal right now is to help as many non-profits, non-profit consultants, non-profit agencies, anybody that’s helping the for-good sector grow and scale and get to where it is that they want to be.

I see in my feed all the time, “Oh, you need to have a seven-figure agency, you need an eight-figure agency. You need to be at a hundred million dollars or whatever.” Honestly, don’t buy into any of that. Okay? Think for yourself where you want to be. As you grow, you end up having different… I’m going to say “problems” in the business. Maybe it’s dealing with people because you’ve got 20 people in your team, or 30 people, or 200 people. So you end up with HR issues that you need to deal with, vacation time, and things like that. Maybe you just want to be a solopreneur, and you want to bring in $150-$200,000 a year, $50,000 a year, whatever.

Getting the mentorship and coaching is going to help you figure out and pinpoint the pieces that you need to actually focus on.

I’m going to start off. I’ve got a list of questions here, and let’s jump in and get going with this. So, first question, how do I know if I’m offering something that non-profits actually need? Not just what they think sounds good, or not just what you think sounds good?

A lot of this comes down to doing your market research. There’s something called Customer Development Interviews – CDIs. And figuring out, I guess, a few things before you get into that is: one, who is your ideal customer? Who is the ideal organization that you want to help? What are their pinpoints that they’re experiencing, and how can you solve that? How can you help them with that? Then you put together a little bit of an idea about, “Hey, this is the thing that I really want to do. I’m really passionate about doing this.” I think passion is very important. You need to be willing to care about what it is that you do and how you deliver it. So, knowing who your audience is.

In an episode, I think it’s episode 16 of this podcast, I talk about psychographics, so take a listen to that episode. Psychographics is: what is it that people care about? What are their pain problems, and where do they hang out? Everything that kind of goes on in their mind. So get clarity on that. Then, figure out what can you do to help solve the problem.

Then, what you want to do is, you want to find some potential non-profits and businesses that you want to work with, if they fall into the right kind of category. So they’re the right size, maybe they’re the right geographic area. Maybe you want to help people who work with children. Maybe you want to help people who are health-related in their organization, and their focus.

You want to seek out those, and you want to call them up. You want to maybe reach out to them by email and say, “Hey, I’m thinking of offering this type of thing as a service. I’m not doing this just yet. I don’t even know if there’s any validity or if there’s a need for this. Is it okay if we talk for five minutes?” And you get on with them, you meet with them, and you ask them, “Hey, like, what’s the biggest problem? How are you trying to solve it right now? If you’ve already solved it, what did you do to solve it? Have you worked with other agencies or other consultants that are doing this type of thing? What did you think of your experience with them?” And that type of thing.

So, I would probably say if you can get 10 of them, that would be great. But once you’ve done a handful of them, you’re going to start to see some trends in what they say. You’re going to start to see some similarities in what they’re doing, how they’re doing, and what they have done. Then you can figure out, okay, is what I want to offer the thing that is going to help them? And if they are, well, then you’ve answered the question. And if they’re not, you need to rethink what it is that you want to do or rethink the ideal customer profile that you want to connect with. I hope that helps you.

The second question that I’ve got is, I’ve got skills, but I’m not sure how to stand out in the non-profit consulting space. Where do I start?

That is super interesting. Whenever I talk to about my agency, Wow Digital, we are focused, we are niched in non-profits, charities, the for-good sector. People always go, “That’s really interesting. Why are you doing that?” And I’ve got my backstory, I don’t have to get into it here, but I’ve got my reason why I do what I do.

And that’s part of figuring out how do I actually stand out? What is the thing that you can do, or you believe that you can do, better than anybody else in the space? And you want to lean in on that. You want that to be your go to, that is your guiding star, and that is how you are going to stand out.

You need to have a really great website. It doesn’t have to be the most beautiful thing on the planet, but you need to have a website that really talks about what you can deliver, not how you deliver it, but what the outcome is that these organizations that you work with are going to get. From an operational standpoint, you want to really refine what it is that you deliver to maybe one or two types of things, and you want to really nail down your process on how to do that, because that’s going to help you become profitable.

If you did anything and everything, if you did content writing, if you did grant writing, if you did web design, if you did graphic design, if you did audio and video going on-site and shooting and then going and editing, if you do social media management, that is way too much stuff to actually be an expert and deliver extremely well for that thing.

Now, eventually, over time, as you grow, you might open up to a vision that does audio, video recording and post production. You might open up to a vision that does social media management. You might open up to a vision that does Google Ads Grants, and whatnot. So I think that it’s definitely essential for you to make sure that you specialize in one or two things so that you can get really clear on how to deliver that. You can create SOPs, Standard Operating Procedures, on how you deliver that, and then, that is your go-to market strategy.

All right, next question: Everybody says that I need a mentor or a coach, but how do I know if it’s really worth it?

I can tell you that, from my experience, I wouldn’t have been able to grow my agency to where we are. We’ve brought in millions of dollars in net revenue over the last few years, and we wouldn’t have been able to get there without having the mentoring and coaching, and the awesome team that I’ve been working with, to help us get to where we are as quickly as we did. So, having a mentor, having a coach, really does help you bypass a lot of the learning that happens along the way.

Because I meet with them on a regular basis, I’m like, “Hey, you know, I’m having an issue with this, or I need some help thinking through this idea.” And they are like, “Yeah, you know? I’ve gone through that. This was my experience. Here’s my recommendation for you.” And it just bypasses the whole learning curve and figuring it out, and wasting time and money.

Not that, I guess, wasting isn’t really the right word, because there’s always benefit in spending the time doing that. But if you can cut out two or three months of effort and just cut to the chase, and go, “All right, I need to get here. This is what I’m going to do.” That’s going to save you a lot of time, a lot of aggravation, and potentially a bunch of money as well. So it helps you get to where you want to be faster than you would have been able to on your own.

The next question that I’ve got is, what’s the biggest mindset shift that I need to make to succeed as a consultant?

Well, for me, it’s about, as I mentioned before, the passion, really getting clarity on purpose versus profit. What is it that we can solve for people, and are they willing to pay for it? And that’s where we need to get clarity on the pinpoints. That’s where we need to get clarity from those customer development interviews to really understand what it is that we can solve.

If we could be passionate about it and we can deliver really, really well, that is going to help us deliver, which will help us grow, which will help us get referrals, which will ultimately turn us into doing the work that we really love to do.

The other thing that we need to think of is that we need to position our mindset that we are the CEO of the business that we’re running. Even if you’re just doing something five hours a week as a side gig because you’re not feeling fulfilled in your day to day job, or you need to bring in some extra money because you’ve got more expenses or whatever happens to be, you need to think of yourself as the CEO of the work that you’re doing. And that is going to start to frame your mind in terms of the type of work that you do versus what you bring in other people into your team to take care of for you.

I’ve had over the years a number of amazing virtual assistants in my team. I still have amazing VAs in my team, and my team is absolutely amazing. I wouldn’t have been able to get to where I am if I were doing everything. There are only so many hours in the day, and I need other people in my team to help get the work done, to help with client communications, to help with getting our designers the information they need or developers’ information they need, or get me some information that I even need. And the only way to really think about it is to go, “Okay, what is it that I want to do? And what is it that has to be done, but I really don’t want to do it?” And then, getting other people involved in it.

And yes, there is some money that will leave your pocket to have people do those, but it’ll free up your mind, it’ll free up your thinking and give you more time for clarity to focus on the pieces that you need to in order to drive your business forward.

So, pricing, how do we actually price services? Because a lot of non-profits have very tight budgets. I worked in non-profits for close to 16 years, so I get it. I understand the pain that they have in terms of budgets.

But the go-to thing that I always say is that non-profit doesn’t mean no profit.

Many non-profits have budgets that they set up, and if they don’t spend it that year, chances are that they won’t get the same amount next year for that part of their budget. What I mean by that is: let’s say there’s an organization that has $20,000 set aside, for this year, for digital marketing and web. If they only spend $5,000 this year, usually what happens is, the following fiscal year, they’ll only get allocated $5,000, not $20,000.

So, they have the will and desire to spend the money provided, and they’re spending it smart. They’re not just going to throw the money out; they actually get something real that is helpful for them with the budget, and that way, they will have a repeating budget for the following year. So, maybe that’s support, maybe that’s spending money on ads in the non-profit space, there’s Google Ad Grants and stuff. But maybe they want to do META, or something else, maybe they want to revamp their website. Whatever it happens to be, if they don’t spend the money, they’re not going to get that same amount the following year. That’s typically how it works.

So knowing that organizations have the budget, and knowing that non-profits have to publish their fiscal reports, their annual reports, they have to report it to the government. So all that information is actually publicly available. So you can take a look at the operating budget. If you dig into their annual reports, you can sometimes see how they break down their operating budget. But usually there’s something like administration and operations, which is like one giant number.

You don’t necessarily know the specifics of how that’s actually broken down, but it’ll give you a rough idea. Then you need to figure out, as part of the customer development interviews, that one of the questions is, you know, how much did you spend last year on this thing? Or how much are you thinking that you’re budgeting? Or you’ve allocated for X, Y, and Z. If you ask this enough, you’ll get a sense as to, the size of the organization and then, how much money they’re willing to spend on that thing, approximately.

And then, you can look at what it is that you want to deliver. You can figure out how much time it is going to take and what the cost is for that time. Are there any fixed things that you need to buy? I know that in the web world, there are servers, there is design line work, or if you’re with WordPress, there might be paid plugins that you need. If you’re with paid platforms like SharePoint, there are licensing costs; for non-profits, they can get licensing for extremely discounted or free, with a lot of stuff quite often.

But what is the cost to actually produce the thing that you want? And then you could take a look at: Is this in budget for my ideal customer? For my ideal non-profit charity, NGO, community group, whatever. Is this something that will fit in their budget? It’s possible that you’re going after startup non-profits, and their budgets are usually really, really tight and slim. Is there anything that you can offer to them? As a service that will potentially help them grow and scale, where will they stay with you as their budgets get bigger? And then over time, ultimately, that would bring in more revenue for you on that side. Quite often, these non-profit startups, it’s the founders who are paying out of pocket for it. So, quite often, the budgets are quite limited.

So I would look at, you know, how long the organization has been around, what’s their operating budget? And is the offer that you’re putting together something that will fit inside of that? And is it something that they need and want?

Awesome, that concludes the first part of this episode.

So to everybody listening, if you’re looking for any of the information that I’ve talked about, head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com, click on this episode for all the details.

So until next time, keep on being successful!