57. Remote Business Consulting from a Yacht - Journey to Success with Bruce Cowan
Journey to Success with Bruce Cowan - Remote Business Consulting [Everything Business Consulting EP 57]
Bruce shares lessons and his learnings as a consultant after being one of the most location independent Business Consultants in our network.
Show Notes
1:20 Bruce Cowan has been a Business Success Partner for 4 years and a firm owner based in Helensville, North of Auckland
1:38 Bruce was brought up in Kenya and started his career as a civil engineer in the U.K. – Bruce talks about his career prior to becoming a business consultant
3:57 What attracted Bruce to business consulting?
4:50 I decided to just simply walk into the businesses that I knew or around the area and talk to them. I’ve absolutely brown away by the way people opened up –
4:53 Bruce talks about his first 6 months experiences as a business consultant.
6:08 I acquired my first 3 clients within about 3 months and two of those I’m still working with – Bruce recalls.
6:27 How did you get clients in the beginning?
I had to start from square one - initially worked on cold calling. Nowadays it’s much more about my network… Bruce tells us how he acquired his clients at the beginning and how he does now.
7:52 What benefits have you got from the Business Success Program?
Business Success Programme is a logical process – it enables you to look at every part of business and scrutinises it for the gap, and where the gain’s going to be in need. It also provides the tools that we will need to make those changes – Bruce explains about BSP
9:00 ConsultX has revolutionised my working process: what comes out of discovery meeting and diagnostic meeting flows directly through to the business plan, personal visions, business vison, implementation… it’s all integrated – Bruce describes the benefit of BSP
9:37 Most of my clients are well established now so my main use of ConsultX is in the implementation stage: we incorporate Xero or MYOB; get to download financials directly into the programme; monthly financial meeting is much easier to present nicely than it used to be – Bruce explains
11:06 Pharmacist, Liquor Outlet, Travel Agent, Construction Business and landscaping business – Bruce, who has two associates in his firm, tells us about his clients and their businesses
13:26 Client failures
16:53 Bruce tells us how he helped his clients to build better businesses in details
24:34 I set my boat up so that it has a modem on it, which means that I can do remote meetings and quite a lot of work from the boat, which means that I can spend awful lot of my time away not necessarily being in the office – Bruce talks about his unique lifestyle
25:39 Because I have very large distances to travel, I quite often do remote meetings by Skype or by the internet – again I don’t have to be in the office to do my work
27:21 Business Success Programme has been built up over a number of years; being put in many consultants’ (knowledge); the fact that each one of us still use the programme in the day to day process means that it does work - Bruce talks about the best part of ConxultX
29:30 Working with experienced partner is absolutely valuable – Bruce talks about benefits of working with his team
30:59 Remember If they say it’s true and if I say they can argue about it– Bruce gives listeners some advises from his experiences
32:30 David and Julius dissect important points of the interview.
Books Mentioned:
Michael Geber - The E-Myth Revisited
Transcript
David: Welcome to Everything Business Consulting, a podcast dedicated to business consulting success. It's for people who are already a business consultant and want to improve their skills, maybe they're an accountant and want to offer consulting services to their clients, they could be an ex corporate who wants to get out of the rat race and become a self-employed business consultant. Or you've owned a business before and you now want to use the skills that you've learned to help others in the business. My name's David Thexton
Julius: and I'm Julius Bloem.
David: Everything Business Consulting is brought to you by ConsultX, a global business consulting community that gives you everything you require to take control of your lifestyle and income by becoming a successful business consultant. ConsultX guides you through the entire process of building and running your own consulting business with a complete online academy, a system to acquire clients, a framework and software to provide them with real results, an international community of like-minded individuals.
Hi, Bruce, welcome to our interview section. Bruce's based in Helensville, which is a nice little coastal village north of Auckland. He's about as north of Auckland as I am south of Auckland, and he's been with ConsultX for around about four years.
Bruce all fired up and ready to go?
Bruce Cowan: Yes, I am David.
David: Excellent, you've been involved with business consulting for some time now. Please tell our listeners what you were doing before you became a consultant.
Bruce Cowan: Well, it's a bit of a checkered career. I was brought up in Kenya and then went back to Britain and went to university there and qualified as a civil engineer. I worked with one of the largest British consultants and both in Britain and around the world on large construction sites, I was mostly involved on the site supervision rather than the design. In 1980, we moved to New Zealand where I was the tail race engineer for the tail race tunnel on the underground hydro station in the central north island at Rangipo. This was a complete hydro station that was built completely underground, it was quite exciting.
David: Yeah.
Bruce Cowan: Following this, we went into the horticultural business, had a couple of properties doing this, and then the last 17 years of that, we were growing some cymbidium orchids as cut flowers, all of which were exported. To achieve market standards, quality and consistency were absolutely paramount to remain viable in this very exacting market. We had to be highly productive, very clear on what we were trying to achieve, in other words, long-term goals, prioritize and plan ahead. Deal with staff, budget very well as our income was only over the picking period.
And therefore we had a period where there was no income, half a year, and we really had to monitor our costs. We built this up from absolutely nothing, flat ground, to become one of the top producers in the country and this experience of running various small businesses, coupled with my experience on the large construction sites, it gives me a very good background for being a consultant.
And I know exactly the pressures that the business, a small business owner faces, which are the majority of New Zealand businesses.
David: Yeah, your last professional occupation was the orchids. So what attracted you to business consulting?
Bruce Cowan: Well, we sold our business successfully, but I still wanted to do something and I felt that I had some really valuable experience and I wanted to help people. We were heavily involved in the church, and so I have a lot of experience of committees and making committee work work, rather than just talking. So I've got a wide range of dealing with different people from different backgrounds. I was looking around at all options when you invited me to that day seminar back in Auckland.
I came home from this absolutely bubbling and then had to try and persuade my wife who has a feet much more planted on the ground. Luckily, we had a webinar if you recall at that stage, and I was able to play that to her. And that was the beginning of my third career.
David: Tell our listeners about your first six months once you'd become a consultant and done the training, what happened on your first six months?
Bruce Cowan: I think the best way to describe that is total immersion coming from my background, which wasn't anything formal about consultancy work, meant that there was a vast amount to learn and assimilate. The training was done in a different format, but I found the process hugely exciting and using the Business Success Program, it was excellent.
I always had that voice of fear sitting on my shoulder, but that's pretty natural, and certainly in that particular state, it's very natural. But that is something that we all need to deal with and learn how to deal with. As you gather, I didn't have any really well, I had no training on this subject, but as I was fairly well known in the local district, I decided to just simply walk into the businesses that I knew, or around the area, and talk to them.
I was absolutely blown away by the way that people opened up merely because I came in there as a business consultant now, presented a card and asked them the right questions as per the program. And, they opened up, it was absolutely incredible.
I acquired my first three clients. Well, my first clients, two of them, within about the first three months of starting with,ConsultX and two of those I'm still working with, so that's quite reasonable.
David: That's almost four years.
Bruce Cowan: Yeah.
David: Very good. Could you tell our listeners also how you acquired those clients? You kind of touched on it there a little bit, but in the beginning, and then have you changed your methodology to how you get clients now?
Bruce Cowan: Yes, certainly, I didn't have a natural network because I hadn't been in this type of business at all. So I really had to start from square one.
So that for me, the obvious way to do that was initially work on cold calling. Again, I'd had no experience of that, so it was a question of simply doing it. We did also have a different form of telemarketing that we were following at that stage or using that stage, which was of limited success.
But certainly that raised one or two of the leads that I followed onto. Nowadays, it's much more about my network. I've got a very large network, I attend two breakfast meetings, so that's one BNI is every week and the business over breakfast club is every other week. So I attend those every, you know, regularly and I attend the chamber, and the business after five network meetings. So I have a very large network and that is the way the I get my clients, and I work through those, mostly on that now.
David: You touched on the Business Success Program, a couple of minutes back. Can you describe to our listeners a little bit more detailed, a benefit that you gained from it?
Bruce Cowan: The Business Success Program is a logical process, it's like consulting by numbers, to an extent. It enables you to look at every part of the business and scrutinize it for the gaps and where the gains are going to be made. It also provides the tools that we will need to be able to make those changes.
However, I believe that the huge strength of the Business Success Program, apart from it being well tried and logical, is that it's a modular program. And this gives us a huge flexibility. So once you know what you're doing and how to use the program, it means that we can change the program to some extent, to actually suit the needs of our clients, rather than trying to fit the clients into the program. But having said that the order of the program works for something like 99% or 90% of the businesses that we would come across.
ConsultX has actually revolutionized my working process. The part of the thing that I like about it is that the discovery meeting and the diagnostic meeting, is what comes out of those meetings flows directly through to the business plan, through to the personal vision, through to the business vision and through to the implementation processes that we deal with the implementation meeting and the management meeting. So it's all integrated, which is a huge help. Most of my clients, as I say, are well established now.
So my main use of ConsultX is in the implementation stage, for the fortnightly meetings and the fact that we incorporate Xero or MYOB to download the financials directly into the program means that the monthly financial meeting is much, much easier to present and to present nicely than it used to be when we had to pull the figures off the web and then put them into another program, and produce it that way.
David: Yeah, that was a bit cumbersome. Wasn't it?
Bruce Cowan: It took much longer, and this way we have everything all together, all at our fingertips and we can refer from month to month. The graphs for the tasks to be done, are really good, and being able to send those to the clients as you finish the meeting is yet another bonus.
And yet it continues to be improved. Like I've got a list of suggestions from the network that have come in over the last two months, three months since we launched version four. And I've got Indy working, Indy's our programmer, I've got him working on those things now. So yeah, it can only get better and better.
As I say, you know, I've seen the advances that it's perhaps come through on it and it certainly is good and the continuing additions to it do make a difference, do improve it. So that's great.
David: Yeah, so how many, for the benefit of our listeners, how many clients do you have today and very quickly, what type of businesses are they?
Bruce Cowan: Well, a number of my clients seem to have come to a natural end and clients do that. There's the one client, whose main goal was to sell the business, we've just sold it this last week. Apart from that, I've probably got four ongoing clients. I've had another two that has stopped in the last three months or so.
And in addition, I've got my two associates, one of whom is in west Auckland, and one of whom is up in Whangarei, so that also gives me quite a lot of work. They've got seven clients altogether, and there are quite a lot coming through from them.
David: I forgot to mention that Bruce's, sorry Bruce, I forgot to mention that you've got a firm with two associates in your firm.
Bruce Cowan: Yes, they give an idea of the range of businesses that I'm working with. My clients are, I've got a pharmacist or chemist, a bottle store or liquor outlet, and he's just about to open a second outlet, a travel agent that has three outlets, a construction business, and a landscaping business.
David: Okay.
Bruce Cowan: My past clients included a saddlery outlet, a mechanic with two different workshops, the vets, and you know about them, David, we merged that firm with another firm to the benefit of both practices.
David: Yep.
Bruce Cowan: And, marine electrician. So it's a very wide range that we can deal with.
David: Would you agree with the comment, that the Business Success Program we work with any type of business?
Bruce Cowan: Well, I think you can see from the range of businesses that I've got there and the, you wouldn't know the size of them, but certainly the range of sizes that we've got. Yes, we can do work with any type of business because basically business hasn't changed very much and certain human character hasn't changed at all. So it's exactly the same thing that we're dealing with.
David: Yep, I agree. So, everybody has occasionally client failures. Could you tell us briefly about any client failures that you've had, and whether you think you could have done something to prevent it?
Bruce Cowan: Oh, David, I never tried to think about these.
David: No, but the people listening, you know, probably.
Bruce Cowan: It is always important and probably the big learning thing that I want to take out of any failure or any setback, is what do I learn from it? It's not the failure so much, it's the fact that I need to learn from it and go forward.
I think probably the biggest failure that I've had and I rather suspect I still do it, is that I tend to talk too much. I get very excited about things and I forget the golden rule of, if I say it, they will argue, if they say it, it's true, and therefore, to make them say it.
David: Yeah.
Bruce Cowan: So that's probably the ongoing sort of failure that happens. And what the results of that is simply doing an awful lot of work trying to acquire a client and then not acquiring them.
David: Yeah, yeah. It's about five hours isn't it? Sometimes more.
Bruce Cowan: It can be quite a lot of time. Sometimes it can be much more than that because you can nurture them for a while and then you get excited at the last minute and try to pitch too early or not reading the signs properly.
And again, part of pitching is the need to just before you get them to sign is to ask that final question, now, is that anything that's going to stop you signing? And then to clear those objections up first.
David: Yeah.
Bruce Cowan: One of the big failures, I think that is worth highlighting, is the need for us not to be too fixed on the program. The program, the ConsultX, is a fantastic program, but it is therefore our use, the consultants use. It's not necessary for the client to know about it as such, in many cases. The client wants his particular problem solved and therefore we should work to solve his problem rather than saying to him, ah, I can give you a program that will solve this problem.
In actual fact, most small businesses, simply aren't interested in the program. They're simply interested in having their answers, well, that problem solved. So I think the question of using the flexibility of the Business Success Program is very important because it enables us to have that flexibility.
And it means that we don't try and squeeze a client into a square hole, if he's a round person, which means that it won't work. So we have to work to the client's needs and that's paramount.
David: And of course, except for what the client sees, or the prospect and the client sees in the program that we show them, we'll be getting them involved with it. They don't really know about ConsultX and what's in the background, ConsultX is for us, it's for consultants, it's not for business owners.
Bruce Cowan: Absolutely, and certainly myself in the early days and my associates, yes, my associates, they certainly, we have had this conversation many times that it's a question of, you're not selling the program, you're selling the consultancy, you're solving their problems.
David: Yeah, great. Could you give listeners a couple of examples of how you've helped your clients to build a better business?
Bruce Cowan: Several I could do, two of them. One is obviously the successful sale of this business in a long time that it's come, they haven't necessarily moved forward because they've been quite interested in getting out and that our concentration hasn't always been to build a whole business, which they could have, they could have improved it a lot. But the end result, and as he, the owner said to me at the end, the other day, well, we have achieved what we intended to do. And so that's great. And so that's very satisfactory, really.
The other one is my travel agent that I would like to talk about, if I can a bit.
David: Sure.
Bruce Cowan: A husband and wife are both involved in the business or were both involved in the business, and both selling travel fees, travel. The business is quite large, one, it comprises three different outlets, and has about 16 salespeople, the training of the staff and some of the analysis of how people were doing and things like that wasn't necessarily attended to very well because the owners were so busy selling, they were both top sellers.
Over this last year, since I've been working with them, there's been a complete C change. The wife is now only being employed by the company or by the travel agent as a contractor to do very definite tasks that she's allocated, mostly things like spreadsheets, setting up spreadsheets for analysis of KPIs and that sort of thing. No, she absolutely excels in this and loves it.
David: Yeah.
Bruce Cowan: What she's really doing now is her love, which is redecorating houses. So she's just started a new business doing that. The owner, he excels in the big picture stuff. He absolutely loves what I call crowd gathering. He attends seminars and travel evenings and sells travel marvelously because he tells a story and he relates to people very well.
So what has happening now is that he's now become the ambassador and goes around dealing with this sort of work and all the leads that he gets are then passed directly onto the other salespeople. And, so the process, and then he's now able to attend to training the salespeople much better. The net result of this while their income has dropped, the wife is now so much happier because she's doing what she loves and is feeling really positive about this and taken on a new lease of life.
The owner is able to do what he loves, but his income has dropped, but he's able to lift each consultant, each of the salespeople in procedure by two to 5%. So at a minimum, he's lifting his business probably by about 32%, which is something he could never have achieved on his own. So that again is a real success and they're thrilled by it.
David: Is he achieving that because he's got better measurement on the business? And he can, as I say, if you can, if you measure it, you can manage it.
Bruce Cowan: Yes. So the measurement is there, but it's also, he's imparting his knowledge that he has of the travel business and of different places, to the salespeople and hearing how they're dealing with the clients and constantly lifting their one-on-one approach.
So that training is becoming absolutely huge, and then I'll be measured, and they're getting their goals set, clearly set and being re-energized if they are not quite getting to where they have to get to and things like that. So it's taken a completely different turn from what it was a year ago.
David: That's great, good stories there. Could you tell our listeners just a little bit about the average lifetime of your clients?
Bruce Cowan: We always talk about three to five years with a client. Often clients have a, they ask you to come in for a natural life, a natural thing. And I think mostly we will expect to have a two, two and a half, three year life with our clients.
I have, as I say, a couple that are four year olds. Most are about two, but, I have had ones that have dropped out after three months, and that was actually one of my failures that I could have mentioned where I tried to get them on board. I tried to acquire them and one of the carrots I offered was, well, let's just try it for three months.
David: Yeah.
Bruce Cowan: And after three months he said, we've done it for three months now, let's stop. And I was agency of my own destiny there.
David: Yeah, talking to a couple of other guys, Phil and Steve. Steve's got clients go back right to the start like four years, and a little bit beyond that. What we talk about in training Bruce is to use the language of three to five years, or five years, set five-year visions, five-year goals and those sorts of things. And that's really communicating to the prospect that we're here for the longterm and not for the short term, like a everyday consultant would do so, but I am certain. And so as Steve and Phil, that some of their clients will go out to five years and some might even go beyond that so that's the target.
Bruce Cowan: I mean, my liquor outlit, once we get the new outlet in is going to have a completely new set of problems and new array, everything's going to have to be re-evaluated as to how he works. And so that's going to be a completely different thing. So yes, I can see that uncaring or running on and my pharmacist, which I've got as well. He's very comfortable with just how we're working at the moment so that it continues. Yes.
David: Lets talk about lifestyle was one of the things that I talk about when I'm talking to new people coming into our network, is that the consulting business can be as big or as small as you want it to be. And yeah, we had a good talking to Phil, the talking to Steve. Steve's got his head wrapped around a certain lifestyle, and so has Phil, can you tell people a bit about what your lifestyle is like and what you've achieved so far?
Bruce Cowan: Well, I've always thought that I'm probably one of the more extreme people in believing in lifestyle, rather than just work. And I believe that we need to model this ability to have a lifestyle rather than just work, to all our clients. The concept that I believe that we should be having is that our business should be such fun that we enjoy doing it, but we should also be able to have a full life as well, and it shouldn't be all consuming. All too often, the small businessman is completely drawn into his business that he's bought, and then he has to make work.
So he's working every hour there is, and this is really exactly where we can fit in for them. So just to give you an idea of the lifestyle I have, I don't obviously have any office hours. I set my meetings in that so that they will fit with my lifestyle and also what the client has on.
David: Yep.
Bruce Cowan: Then I need to work around that. I've set my boat up so that it has a modem on it, which means I can do remote meetings and I can do quite a lot of work from the boat, which means I can spend an awful lot more time away. Not necessarily being in the office. But still yet completely attend to my clients.
My office is basically my home office, but I also use various rooms around the country, which have belonged to either lawyers or accountants or such, like all the banks. Or I meet in the client's offices, the client's premises. And just as an example, yesterday was a beautiful day, so I was sitting outside by the pool, in the shade of the sun, with my computer and just working on a little bit of work there, but that was pretty idyllic.
David: That sounds like heaven, like I'm sitting in my office now, I'm looking at all the, it's a bit rainy today, I been looking at all the paddocks and all the trees of all the rural country areas of south Auckland.
Bruce Cowan: Yeah, we have that same sort of view as much similar to what you have David and that's from my office. The other aspect that is worth highlighting here is because everything is remote based or, on the cloud.
And because I have very large distances to travel, up to Whangarei, around here. I quite often do remote meetings by Skype or by the internet. So that is part of what is happening. So, again, I don't have to be in an office to do my work. And the other thing that is worth talking about lifestyle, working with clients is just hugely exciting, especially when it starts to move it's enormously rewarding.
David: Well, that's all I've done since 2005. And you probably heard me talking that, I even, I think I've always been a consultant, was back in the day in the nineties when I owned a big beverage company. I got a group of all my friends together and every second Tuesday we had a breakfast and I ended up being kind of a mentor to them.
So I kind of been a consultant from way back then. And then in 2005, after I sold that business, I was able to get into it full-time, and it's all that I want to do. It's all that Mandy wants to do. We do believe in focus, we got an interest in a small mechanical business, but, that only takes about three or four hours a week. But apart from that, this is it, and I get a big kick out of getting results for clients. It's a very gratifying, I feel.
Bruce Cowan: Yes. I agree. It's just hugely satisfying when it goes well. And when they turn around and say, you know, thanks, Bruce. That's great.
David: Yeah.
Bruce Cowan: Yeah, it's a big high, big buzz.
David: It's great. Think about the people who are listening, and, once upon a time you were a flower grower. And you were thinking about the best path to enter the consulting profession. There's really two things you, well, there's three things you can, you could be what Wayne used to call.a note book and pencil guy, which is you go and buy a pad, and a pencil, and some business cards, and just go and start talking to people.
The other way is that you can, you can scour through the internet to find, I suppose, bits and pieces of consulting and cobble them all together. Or you could join an organization like ConsultX where most of the hard yards have been done, and I said on the podcasts I had with Steve. I said that I started building the Business Success Program for myself in 2005, and really in hindsight, all I did was build a skeleton and it's all people like yourself and other people in our network who have put ideas forward and who have helped us to build ConsultX to where it is today.
So thinking about those people who are listening again, could you talk to them just about what the best path actually is?
Bruce Cowan: Well, I was going to pick up on some of what you've just said, David, that basically consulting, which is based on just your own experience and to an extent, however, wide it is, I think it's flawed and it's limited.
The advantage with the Business Success Program is that, as you say, it has been built up over a number of years, and it's been built UP over a number of years. In other words, it's combined the inputs of many, many consultants. The fact that each one of us still use the program in our day-to-day process means that it does work otherwise we would have stopped using it.
David: Yeah.
Bruce Cowan: The other aspect about this is that working with an inexperienced partner, I believe it's absolutely invaluable. The gains that are achieved in using a team is huge. As you say, I've got a firm and I've got two consultants or two associates with me at present. We'll be looking to build more, but the discussions and the exchanges that we have are absolutely invaluable for both, for myself and for them. And they talk about most of their clients, in fact, all that clients with me and talk about the next meeting that they're having and how they go, which means that they can bounce ideas off me. I can throw some ideas back at them, but it saves that awful feeling when you're sitting in front of the client and they throw a complete curved ball at you and you should have the answer, and you don't, and how do you answer it?
So it solves a lot of that problem. So certainly going into a business that has support is huge. Going into a business that, to an extent, you can consult by numbers, painting by numbers type thing, is also huge because as I said, right at the beginning, ConsultX does look at the whole business. And it stops us as consultants getting sidetrack just down one area and enables us to be able to go back and go back and see the rest of the business rather than just concentrating on one thing.
So I think it's essential to do it that way.
David: That's great, thank you. And to close the interview, could you give our listeners a couple of golden nuggets of advice that will help them and their consulting career?
Bruce Cowan: Well, I think the greatest one, right the way through, and it applies from day one, that you meet the prospect, to the end, however many years later, that is, is to remember if they say it, it's true, if I say it, they can argue about it.
David: Yeah.
Bruce Cowan: It's something that is so easy to forget when I get excited or enthusiastic, or when I can see what should be being done, and I don't take the time to get them to say it, then it's always a hard yakka and often, they just simply don't take it. Doing regular reviews, both of yourself, and with the client of the progress there, is just hugely essential, which does mean that we need to be taking notes and keeping measurements of what is happening in the business.
And I think the last one is that we need to remember that while ConsultX provides us with a fantastic program, we actually have to work to achieve the client's goals, not our goals. And therefore we have to deal with what he wants so that it will work and not.
David: That's great.
Bruce Cowan: And not be too fixed on trying to make them fit the program.
David: You gotta be a bit adaptable, don't you?
Bruce Cowan: Yes, very much so.
David: Well, Bruce, take you for frank and interesting interview. I'm sure our listeners will have gained a heck of a lot from it.
Bruce Cowan: Right, thank you, David. That's great. I've enjoyed that as well.
Julius: Well, David that was a really interesting interview and it was packed with all sorts of valuable takeaways. I'd like to dive a little deeper into a few of these points.
David: Sure.
Julius: Bruce mentioned a golden rule. If I say it, they will argue. And if they say, it's true.
David: Yeah, Bruce is a hundred percent correct on that because, we need to get that, through discussion, we need to get them to talk about what their problems are and they will tell us. And, we're obviously taking notes and, Bruce's right, because if they say it, then they will believe it. It's their perception that it's true. So that's a really important part of business consulting.
Julius: And if they perceive that they have a problem, then they're probably more likely to agree that there's obviously a problem if they've told you, but agree to coming up with a solution for it.
David: Of course, yes. Part of the process, is that we need to find out what their challenges are and, get them to express what those challenges are. And as you said, they'll believe it. So we take notes on that, of what they believe their challenges or problems are.
Julius: So is this mostly applicable when you're trying to sign the client or does this carry on throughout the relationship?
David: Mostly when you're trying to sign a prospect into a client, that's the most important place to do it, but it's an important part of the consulting process all the way through. It's what's in the client's head and what they believe to be true, that's most important.
Julius: When you're talking to a business owner, can you give us an example of a situation where if you say something, they would disagree, and if they say it, they would agree?
David: To answer your question, in the E-Myth, which is a very good book, Julius, he talks about there, that a business owner will defend to the death just about, the beliefs that he actually has. But the problem is that his beliefs are the things that has got his business into trouble and why we've come along to help him.
So, in the early stages of turning them from a prospect into a client, we need to get him to verbalize or express the problems that he's having, and we need to take notes on that because if he says it, he believes.
Julius: Okay, and Bruce also shared with us another lesson that I think we can learn from, and that's perhaps not to plant any negative or detrimental ideas in the mind of the client or prospect.
And this occurred when Bruce mentioned to a client or someone who is signing up as a client as let's try it for three months and see how it goes. What are your thoughts on saying that to a client and planting the idea that maybe this relationship should only last three months, because in Bruce's case, at the end of that three months, they terminated.
David: I heard Bruce say that, and, when he recorded that a few years ago, I did go and talk to him about it, because I don't recommend that. I believe you're setting them up for a cancellation in three months, and it sounds short term. Whereas our whole process is we want to work with them long-term, like you can't do anything in three months.
Julius: Okay, but then on the flip side, you've also said that there might be a time and place to say something like that.
David: If it's an absolute loss cause absolutely, totally, and the prospect has determined that they only wanted to dip their toe in the water and have three month agreement, then that would come under the commander's intent.
Which for those that don't know what that is, that's an armed forces term for battle instructions that are given to the commander of a whole lot of soldiers or something like that. I think it's a platoon of soldiers. This is an American term, and it means that if it's going really, really, really bad, open up the envelope and there'll be instructions inside of what to do.
Julius: So almost like a last ditch attempt, this is the bare minimum. So you would say that in the instance where you think you're probably not going to get them over the line, unless you give this a go.
David: That's right. It's your decision as a consultant to whether you're going to use that or not. I probably wouldn't use it, I would keep saying it's long-term, it's long-term, it's long term and keep driving on that. Because you've got to think about this, the prospect has taken them 15 years to get the business into the mess that it's in now, we're not magic, we can't fix it in three months.
Julius: Of course not.
David: However, however though, we can make some substantial progress moving forward. And, you hate taking a bit of risk because in the first three months of consulting, you will spend a lot of time building a business plan and doing all of this sort of stuff. So if you're confident that you can talk them around at the three month mark and have it continuing on, then that's your decision.
Julius: Bruce mentioned a phrase that he uses in closing the deal, the phrase is, is there anything that's going to stop you signing? Now, David, what makes this such a powerful technique?
David: Well, what it does, Julius, is it draws out objections because nobody will sign anything if they've got a question mark sitting over the top of their head.
So, so the whole idea, in selling anything to anybody, is to draw out the objections and write them down, as you're going along, because they'll see you writing them down and it's the equivalent of them agreeing with it. And then you answer their objections and then as you answer them, you tick them, which means you're eliminating them in front of the prospect.
And then you close again, is there anything that's going to stop you from signing, you know? And, he might come out with one objection and then you write that down and then you tick that off and that's it. He should say, no, let's get going on this, I'm really happy, I want to do this, I want to see all the improvements that we've spoken about after the last two meetings.
Julius: I feel like that would also be a good relationship building tool if you're looking to solve their objections throughout the sales process. You're looking basically to make it work for them.
David: Absolutely, and you got to remember too, that the prospect, that this is a whole new world to them, they've never come across anything like this before. They've never told anybody their problems.
They haven't told their bank manager, their wife, their mates, they haven't told anybody. And they've told you, as the consultant. And it's really important that they are a hundred percent invested in you and believe you and trust you and all those sorts of things to do what you say is possible to do, which you've gone through in the acquisition process.
Julius: Now Bruce has done something pretty exciting as well that he mentioned in the interview. He appears to have pioneered remote consulting from his yacht. And he also mentioned the ability to be location independent. How does this relate to us in today's age?
David: Absolutely relates to us because in the last year, we've had issues with the pandemic, and a lot of our people have been forced to work from home, but gosh, who would have thought that four years ago he was doing this. And it's not just in his yacht, parked in the marina, he and his wife go for trips all around New Zealand, they go across the, just for those of you who are outside of New Zealand, he does like 500 to a thousand kilometer trips, around New Zealand and he parks up in, what are they, in little coves and things like that, where it's nice and calm.
He goes away for three or four weeks, and he's still consulting to his clients because he's got a little internet antenna on the top of his boat and it works really well. So that does, it relates very much to today because part of our training is that we teach people to do remote consulting because we don't know what's around the corner. And just for the people who are watching this, this is recorded in January of 2021. So we still don't know what's around the corner for this year. So we're up-skilling everybody to be able to use the internet just like Brewster four years ago, to be able to work with their clients.
Julius: So it sounds to me like it is fantastic lifestyle benefits, like imagine getting on your yacht or your boat or road tripping in your RV all around the countryside. And it also gives you the ability to not be directly consulting face to face in the instance that we had a lockdown, or your client didn't even want to meet face to face for health reasons. So it just sounds like a win-win.
David: It is, but there's lots of other benefits too, because when you're consulting through using the internet, then you're saving on travel time. So you're saving on the time and the expenses and costs, fuel costs of doing that travel time. The meetings over the internet tend to be shorter than face to face. Like face-to-face, you've got to wait for the coffee or tea to come and this and that, and how's the weather and, over the internet there'd be a little bit of that, you can't get coffee though.
You make your own coffee, but it's straight to the point. And, the clients appreciate that because they are aware of the costs and especially where there's the management team involved as well. The owner sitting there and he's got three people sitting in the meeting and they cost X dollars per hour. So yeah, there's lots and lots of benefits. And you can move meetings around easier and record them if you wanted to and all that sort of stuff.
Julius: So another thing that Bruce mentioned, was there was a lot of value in bouncing ideas off other consultants. So he's part of a firm that's got three others, that had three other consultants. That's actually since grown to a much larger number, since this interview took place. But how important is this, the ability to bounce ideas and have a bit of a conversation about what your clients are doing, to other consultants?
David: It's very important, some consultants tell me that they get a bit lonely out there and cause they go from working in corporate, for example, then they go into working for themselves by themselves and they appreciate it. But one of the most important things that they get out of that comradery is that they're able to bounce questions off them.
Julius: And in our network, we actually have a once a week meeting where all the consultants in our network can get together and they chat and that's incredibly valuable for all of them to be able to say, Hey, I've got such and such a client, this is the problem we're having. What do you think you would do? And someone else who might have a similar client or even experienced a similar problem in a different kind of business, they can put in their 2 cents. And it's the old one plus one equals three situation where you get two consultants that are really experts in consulting and they come up with some fantastic ideas. So I can absolutely agree and see what Bruce is getting at with having the ability to have that conversation.
David: Yeah, it's great.
Julius: His parting piece of advice was to have regular reviews to ensure you're focused on meeting the client's goals. Why is it so critical to put the client's goals above all else?
David: Well, because it's all about him, and it's not about us, it's about the client and what he wants to achieve out of his business. And maybe even personally as well. So we've got to keep focused on that at every meeting and keep moving forward with the client towards what his long-term goals are.
Julius: Well, thank you, David. And thanks again to Bruce for that fantastic interview. Four years on, the value is still absolutely all there.
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