46. Managing Client Relationships – The ConsultX Wheel Of Life Tool

Managing Client Relationships – The ConsultX Wheel Of Life Tool [Everything Business Consulting EP 46]

Business Consulting can also involve coaching your Client on a personal level tool. We have developed a Wheel of Life Tool to assist you in this area. 

Through using the Wheel of Life tool we are looking to capture how the Client feels about areas of their business and their personal life, we are looking to help them to make improvements and the first step is to identify them and capture them in a process.

While we are discussing how they feel we encourage them to set some action steps or tasks for improving the situation.

Visit https://www.consultx.com/ for more information and to receive complete show notes for all of our podcast episodes. 

HELP US TO REACH AND HELP OTHERS! 

We are on a Mission to empower Business Consultants, Coaches and Advisors across the globe. We assist them to help struggling Business Owners get the advice and support they need.

If you like our show, please subscribe in iTunes and write us a review. Your review helps other likeminded people to find us and gain access to our resources.

Transcript

David: Hi global consultants, David Thexton here from ConsultX and welcome to this week's podcast. Everything Business Consulting, a weekly podcast all about business consulting, where we talk about many different topics and interview really interesting people from our global network. If you want to be or are a business consultant, this is the podcast for you.

A big part of business consulting can be coaching the client, and in many cases, we drift into coaching as we discover that the client has some personal issues that he or she is grappling with. These issues may have come out in the discovery meeting, which is our first face-to-face meeting with the prospect. But this is too soon to delve into personal matters, best left for a few months until the consulting program is underway. 

We said business consulting is purely what we do to help the owner of the business to improve the profits, growth, and value of the business over a long period of time. In other words, Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was a good business. In order to build a good business, we usually need to re-engineer it and then develop a business plan, then implement the tasks. Once into the monthly meetings, we organize a one-to-one meeting with the client after the monthly management meeting. And this meeting is to discuss one-on-one with the owner, how he or she feels the consulting program is going in their opinion.

Once they've spoken, this is your chance to present to them what is actually happening and show them the progress that has been made since you got involved with the business. Remember that this will be the first time they've actually been running their business properly and it will be strange for them, so you need to show them how we measure progress in a business. 

You may need to create some graphs showing financially the improvement, or if it is too soon to get financial results, show some key performance indicators on important areas that are improving in the business. In the first few months, the client generally is a bit nervous and wondering if he is getting a return on his investment with you, so you may have to show him to keep his mind at ease and focused on his business. 

Let's talk about the wheel of life tool. There are two types of the wheel of life tools, one business and one personal. We always start with the business one first to get them comfortable with the process. This is another session where the client ranks himself on a series of topics 1 to 10, 10 being the best and 1 being the worst. The idea is that the client ranks how he feels on 13 parts of his business. You'll recognize them from the business triangle. We'll quickly go through them, strategy, structure, culture, systems, people, finances, sales, products, services, marketing, business vision, processes, and expenses.

Now the client ranks how he or she feels about each of these parts of their business between 1 and 10. The idea being that you'll be able to gauge his feeling and open discussion as to why he ranked it that way, the objective is to get all tens obviously. If you can imagine 10 being around the outside of this wheel, and if you get all tens then you're going to have a round wheel that you would be proud to have on your car, a bumpy wheel means a bumpy ride.

And as part of the tool, you can highlight the topic and a drop-down box appears and further expands out on the topic that you're discussing. The system collects the information over time and allows you to print out a graph showing, hopefully, a steady improvement over the time. While we're discussing how he or she feels, we encourage them to set some action steps or tasks for improving the situation. This is a very powerful process as we're continuing to get information out of their head and down on paper (and the computer). Remember if we cannot measure it, we can't manage it. I suggest you do only the business wheel for the first three months before you introduce the personal wheel. 

You may choose not to do any work on personal issues, but if you identified some issues in the discovery meeting or any other meetings you might want to do this. The personal wheel of life ranking is on the following subjects, family relationships, health, fitness, personal relationships, family wealth, personal growth, business health, social life, and hobbies.

So in both these wheel tools, we're looking to capture how the client feels on these areas of their business and their personal life. We're looking to help them to make improvements, and the first step is to identify them and capture them in a process. We do not suggest going much deeper in this coaching process unless you are trained to do this. However, just getting the client to talk is going to go a long way to helping solve their problems. We do this simple coaching to help further strengthen our relationship with them and genuinely help them to improve in all the areas of their life. Not just in business, although in many cases, they're entwined, and you'll need to untangle them first. 

Some people in our network have had clients for over five years due to having a very good relationship. So it pays handsomely for both parties. In training. I used to draw a picture of a man with a flip-top head, opened up to show his brains like spaghetti, all mixed up. And then I showed another picture of a man with a head opened up, showing the spaghetti all straightened out in lines. This is what we're trying to achieve with our clients, giving them total clarity on all major parts of their business and their personal life.