126 – The Unspoken Rules of Non-Profit Consulting – Part Two

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. A few episodes ago, I talked about the mentoring and coaching that I’m doing for non-profit consultants as well as other digital agency owners. And this is part two.

I’ve got more ideas, topics, and things that you need to be thinking about if you are a for-good consultant, helping anyone in the non-profit, charity, NGO, community, or community-based organization space. You’ll want to listen to this episode. So tune in.

I’m David again, and I’m back to give you some more insight, thoughts, and advice as to my growth and what I’ve gone through. And hopefully you’ll be able to pick up some details and some thoughts and some little golden nuggets here and there to help you with your consulting to help you grow your little freelance, your side gig or your full-fledged agency. Stay tuned and listen up.

So, you’re starting your agency. What do you need to focus on first? Is it branding? Is it social media? Is it your services? Is it networking?

I’m, I guess, what you call a quick start. So I have lots of great ideas. Sometimes my team is not necessarily too happy with me about this because I’m like, ‘Oh, we should do this, and we should do this.’ Okay, we need to actually make a list of stuff and prioritize, and figure out how is it that we’re going to actually do this thing. But, you kind of need to do all of it.

But how do you actually figure out what should be done first? So my recommendation would be to get a webpage up, at least a one-page site. That’s it. Have a way for people to contact you. Set up something like Calendly so people can actually just book a consult or book a meeting with you right away.

Make it very clear what the outcome is that you deliver on that page. Once you’ve got at least a one-page site up there, then you can start doing some networking.

You need to connect with people whom you think that you would love to work with, and then network with your family, with your friends, your colleagues, your coworkers, the folks that you went to school with in the past. Let them know, ‘Hey, this is something that I’m doing now. I want to help, I want to do this, this, this and this. Do you know anybody, is anybody you could put me in touch with?’ So the networking part is really the second thing that I would focus on.

We need to remember I’m very much a pixel-perfect, very typical, A-type personality. Everything has to be perfect, perfect, perfect. It’s taken me a really long time to get into the mindset that this is good enough. And I mean that with the stuff that we’re doing for ourselves, not everything can be a hundred percent all the time.

Because then we’re just stuck in doing work and iterating, and iterating, and updating, and updating, and updating. And we’re not actually taking a step forward; we’re not actually doing anything and making things happen for us.

Get a page up, whatever it looks like; start talking about it, start networking, start letting people know about what it is that you’re doing. And if it’s like 80% awesome, you can make changes, updates, and tweaks to it.

One of my mentors would say, ‘I’m flying the plane as I’m building it.’ And that’s very much what you just need to do. You need to actually get started and put one foot in front of another and start walking down that path.

So you’re networking, you’ve got a page, app or website, multiple pages, a blog, whatever it happens to be. You’ve got a way for people to contact you. Maybe it’s a contact form. I really don’t advise putting your email address on the page. I’d really recommend getting a contact form or, like I said before, a Calendly link up there. People are booking calls with you, or they’re filling out a form, they’re getting in touch, they’re sending you an email – whatever that process happens to be.

How do you actually get them to become a customer, to become a client of yours? How do we get them to convert?

There are a lot of things that happen during the process. And what I’ve learned from my mentors is that you need to have more interactions with the people because that helps build the trust factor with you. People want to hire businesses, consultants, freelancers, people that they know, like and trust. And the only way that you can build the rapport with them is to meet with them.

So all the interactions my experience has been, and consultants that I’ve been mentoring and coaching, their experience has been that it takes anywhere from seven to eight interactions with somebody for them to know, like and trust you. And at that point, they’d be willing to hire you. And obviously, like, the bigger the spend you’re asking from somebody, the more interaction you need to have with them over time. If you’re trying to sell somebody something for $50, that’s really a low-budget, low-ticket offer. They probably don’t need to have much interaction with you. If you want to sell somebody something for $100,000, they need to have more interaction and more meeting time with you.

I always prefer having Zoom meetings or going to a meeting with them in person if they are local to you. COVID really kind of got rid of a lot of the in-person meetings, but maybe that’s something that you still want to do. Maybe you really enjoy, you know, going out for the day, driving around town, meeting with a few people and not being stuck, I guess, in the confines of your office all day. And that’s totally fine. However, you need to increase the number of meetings you have with people.

Think of it this way: if you’re not meeting with them seven to eight times, you’re not going to close that business for about two years.

I had a Post-it note stuck to the bottom of my screen that said ‘More meetings.’ And it finally worked itself into my brain that I’m always planning that next interaction, that next meeting that I have with somebody once I’ve got them in my pipeline. So that would be something that I would tell you. That’s what you’ve got to do to make that happen.

The other thing you need to look at is your offer. Are you priced too high for that customer? Is your proposal too confusing? Are there too many pieces to it? Are there too many options? It’s too hard to decide?

You know, there’s a TV show, Gordon Ramsey, I forget what it’s called, but he goes into these restaurants and he looks at the menus. It’s like you have 200 things on this menu. It’s impossible for people to pick. You need to cut this down to like 10, make it simpler, less chaotic. And then it saves the kitchen, it saves all the wasted food that you’ve bought, right?

So if you think of that in terms of the work that you’re doing, if you have fewer options, it’s easier to actually deliver the work. It’s easier to talk about the work, and it’s easier to explain it; it’s also easier for prospects to go, ‘Yeah, this is what I need.’ So that’s what I would focus on. Or helping get people to jump over that fence and go, ‘You know what? I want to work with you.’

All right, the next question is, how can I tell if a client is actually going to value my time and expertise? There are red flags with this, and it kind of jumps around depending on the situation. One of the red flags for me is when I hop into a Zoom for the first or second time with a prospect, and they just start overtaking the entire conversation. That’s a bit of a red flag for me. That, to me, lets me know that they’ve met with other people, they know who they want to hire, but they’re just going through the motion because they need to have so many quotes.

And quite often, my experience with those types of people or those personalities is that they will start nickel and diming when it comes to figuring out the cost of the project. I’m all for adjusting the scope of work. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like, ‘All right, this is going to be $50,000 and that’s it, or $10,000, that’s it. There’s no wiggle room.’ No, we can adjust the scope, we can adjust the deliverables, which would ultimately affect the bottom line on the project investment that we’re asking these people to put into their organization.

If they start nickel-and-diming, that’s also a red flag; that to me means that they don’t value the work that we’re doing.

I’ve gotten to the point with my agency where I know who our ideal customer is, what their operating budget range is, and where they have a few people in their marketing communications team, or they have a few people who are dealing with their website, but they’re busy with all their day-to-day work. They don’t have the time to deal with redesigning their site because they’re struggling with just keeping up with everything that they have to do, or they don’t have the expertise in their team to actually pull it off, because their website is 3,000 pages, and it’s just way too overwhelming.

When I have conversations with them, I can tell by their facial expressions, by the answers to the questions that I’m giving them, to the questions that they’re asking, whether or not they’re actually really interested, whether or not they actually really care about the value that my team brings to the table for them. So, it’s a little bit of a hard question to answer because it is very subjective.

If they’ve booked a call with you and they have a lot of clarity about what they need, chances are that they actually really care about your expertise. They might not care so much about your time, but they value the expertise, which is why they’ve reached out, which is why they’re meeting with you.

I know that my Calendly link, I asked them a few qualifying questions. So, before I even hop into the meeting with them for the first time, I’ve got some answers and I know where they’re at in their buying process, in their decision-making. So hopefully that’s something that can help you as well.

All right, how do I balance client work and growing the business? And I did talk about this a little bit earlier. You need other people in your team, or you need to increase your pricing so that you have less work but the same amount of money coming in. But once you’ve got people in your team and once you’ve got systems and processes, then it becomes an organizational issue. It becomes allocating proper time.

My little tip for you here is: I do calendar blocking. If something is not in my calendar, it doesn’t get done, and it’s a little bit of a problem. So, I religiously work on my calendar.

My team knows how ridiculous my calendar is because they try to book some time in between meetings and things with me. And we’ve got some internal Calendly links for them to use to book in. So it doesn’t really become much of an issue anymore. But if something’s not in my calendar, it just doesn’t happen. I have focus blocks on my calendar, so I’ve got time to respond to emails during the day. If there are proposals or client work or projects or systems or internal things that I want to work on, I make sure that I put that into my calendar and I block off time to do it.

One of the things that I coach and I do myself is quarterly strategic planning. And as part of that, I go, ‘Okay, we follow the entrepreneur operating system, EOS method.’ And so, what we do is we actually create rock and goals for the quarter to go ‘Okay. At the end of the quarter, and at most, there are three per person. I need to focus on these three tasks because my driver for the quarter is, let’s say, sales.’ Right?  These are two or three rocks or big goals, whatever you want to call them, that need to get done this quarter to help me move forward on the sales focus that I’ve got for the quarter. Amazing.

So those rocks get broken down every week into what is the thing that I need to do to move forward on this, to get closer to getting it completed at the end of the quarter. You’ve got three months to get it done. You should be able to get this 20-hour task completed, 30, 40-hour task, whatever it happens to be, including all the components. Maybe it’s not you doing it, but you can definitely get people involved, but it’s you who actually owns that task. And I’ve got everybody in my team who has rocks as well.

So I’ve got the big ones for the business as a whole, but everybody’s got their own ones for the roles that they fill, so that they can help move the agency forward.

The only way that’s going to get done is by actually setting up time in my calendar. One trick I have for my calendar is that I only allow myself to move an item once. Yes, there are going to be emergencies, there are going to be fires that you’ve got to put out. There are going to be days when you’re sick and you can’t make it in. Or, like, I’ve got two kids, I need to pick them up or take them. Like today, I’m recording this, they’re getting out of school early today.

So, if I had something in my calendar and I need to leave at 2 o’clock to go pick them up, and I had something in there for 2 o’clock, I’ll let myself move that task one time. I put a little asterisk in the title of it. If it’s something that I’ve moved that way, I know I can’t move it again a second time. If something comes up and I have to move it a second time, that’s when I go, ‘All right, do I still need to do this? Can I get somebody else to do this? Does this even need to be done anymore?’ And then I figure out what I’m going to do with it.

But really, if I have to move it a second time, usually that means that there’s some psychological reason that I don’t want to actually complete this thing. And that’s when I look at it with a really objective eye and go, does this actually really need to be done?

So getting your calendar in place is really important. Making sure that you’re using that to block time off to do the things that you need to do to help grow the business. Absolutely. Using Calendly is honestly an amazing thing because it doesn’t let anybody book calls in when I’ve got busy sections in my calendar. So it’s not like somebody comes to the website, they book a consult, and then it overtakes some time that I’ve got blocked off. That’s how I’ve got mine set up.

The next thing is to get very clear, as I mentioned earlier, on what it is that you do and how you deliver it.

So when I talk about that, I mean, what are the systems and the processes that you have in the business? Do you have SOPS documentation around how you complete this, this, this, this and this? Is that something that you can give to somebody else, and they can walk through it step by step and get that thing done?

If not, you need to start with that right now. We use a tool called Komodo Deck to build out our SOPs in our library. We also use ClickUp inside the agency for product management, managing tasks, and managing requests from clients as well. Highly recommend that.

If you want to deep dive on that, just hop over and just go to wowdigital.com/consultants and book a call with me. Happy to walk through and show you how we’re doing our product management.

Even if you are a non-profit organization and not a consultant, you still need to have systems and processes in place. So when somebody gets in touch with you, ‘Hey, we need a post to advertise this event that we’re doing, or we need Instagram posts, or we need to do some video.’ You know exactly how you’re going to do it from start to finish and all the steps in between, so that you make sure that you didn’t skip anything.

The third part is about balancing client work with business growth, and that is automation. Are there any tools and systems that you can use to help automate anything? I’m talking about tools like Zapier, Make.com, or Albato, where you can take data from one source and automatically move it to another. In ClickUp, there are also AI and automations. Is there stuff that you could use ChatGPT agents for N8N to start moving data between different AI platforms, prompts, and stuff?

Take a look at those and go, okay, map out your process. I’ve done this on my iPad, where I went, all right, start to finish. Here’s what a project looks like. Where can we optimize? Where do we need feedback from the client? Where do we need this, this, this, this, this and this? To go, how can we streamline this?

Make it easier, make it less cumbersome, make it ultimately more profitable. If you can streamline processes and you can still deliver something really high quality and that benefits the client, but you can automate some of it, that’s going to end up saving you time and ultimately putting some more money in your pocket as well.

The next question is, what does scaling look like for a solo consultant, and how do you know if you’re ready? A few people recently have been in touch with me, saying that they’re just doing this as a little bit of a side business. They need some extra cash or, you know, what they’re not really so interested in the business, their full-time job that they’re working in right now. So they’re looking at doing some other stuff.

There is a point in time where you’re going to end up with more than enough work to take over the full-time. The thing that you need to pay attention to is where are the next projects coming from. If you think of it as like a CRM, a customer client relationship management tool, you have a pipeline in there, a sales pipeline usually. And where are people at in the various stages of your pipeline? I think in ours, we’ve got like 14 steps in our pipeline. 

Figure out what you want your pipeline to be. It could just be as simple as initial contact, first meeting, second meeting, proposal presented, client signed, or project loss. Could just be like five, six steps like that.

But as you’re working on the work, you also need to focus on marketing so that you’ve got the next projects set up. I know that for us, it’s usually three to four months from that initial contact that they’ll sign with us. If they’re going to sign with us, it’s usually three to four months. As of late, that’s shifting a little bit longer. Because of everything that’s happening in the United States right now, people are a little bit more concerned about investing in their organizations versus keeping cash flow. So, there are some interesting conversations happening there.

But barring that, once you’ve got enough work and you’ve got leads coming in on a regular kind of consistent basis, maybe you’ve got two calls a week with prospects, that’s when you start to go, ‘Okay, I can actually make this thing work,’ and it’s going to be really hard. I started Wow Digital because I was restructured from the hospital where I was working, and I was looking for work. It’s a full-time job. This was about nine years ago, and I just kind of ramped up my freelancing.

I started getting project and project and project, and I finally said, ‘You know what? I’m done. I’m not looking for work anymore for full-time work. I’m just going to focus on the agency.’ And that was one of the best decisions I ever made because that allowed me to actually really go all in on the business, make sure that I’ve got leads coming in, that I’m converting them into sales that we’re able to deliver, and we’re able to grow the agency to get to the next step. And those are really kind of like the four phases of your business that you need to focus on.

So I’m not sure if I’m actually answering this question, but yeah, you need to get other people involved, get somebody helping you out, even a part time basis, like five hours a week kind of thing, so that you can start getting them to help you. And once you start building up processes and you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, yeah, you know what, this is what we do, and I can deliver extremely well, and these are the results that we’re getting.’

That’s when your gut is going to tell you: you can actually do something with this. And at that point, you just got to go for it. You need to, at some point just go all in on it. If it’s something that you are passionate about and something that you really want to do, awesome.

I talked about mentorship. I talked about clarity. I talked about growing your business. I talked about mindset, I talked about systems and operations. I hope that you’ve stuck through to this point, right now that you’ve been able to get some great thoughts and advice, advice from me and to everybody listening to you.

I want to challenge you to actually sit down over the next day and plan out what it is that you can do and what you think you do better than anybody else and plan that out. Just think about it and write it down.

You want to take that one step further? Send me an email with what it is that you’ve written down. Be accountable. Once you put it out there into the universe, and you write it down, and you say it out loud, and it’s something that you really, truly believe you are going to make magic happen for yourself. So send me an email: [email protected] do this today or tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

If you feel like you need support, that there’s something kind of missing that you’d like some clarity on, I’d love for you to head over to wowdigital.com/consultants. Book a free consult with me. Even if you’re just starting up or looking to break through a little bit of a plateau. It happens to all of us. It happens to me still as well. I can help give you some clarity on the next steps that you need and the path that you need to take in order to get there.

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

And until next time, keep on being successful!