58. Unconventional path and working remotely - Business Consulting Journey with Julius Bloem
Business Consulting Journey with Julius Bloem - Unconventional path and working remotely [Everything Business Consulting EP 58]
ConsultX partner, Julius Bloem shares his background and journey to Business Consulting - including a 9 Month stint of travelling and working remotely.
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Transcript
David Welcome to Everything Business Consulting, a podcast dedicated to business consulting success. It's for those of you who are already a business consultant and want to improve your skills, are an accountant, and want to offer consulting services to your clients, or you may 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 over all those years to help others in business. I'm 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, and a framework and software to provide them with real results. An international community of like-minded individuals and a suite of resources and much more. To find out more about this opportunity, visit consultx.com.
David Today, I am interviewing Julius, the other half of ConsultX. He originally started out as a business consultant, with ConsultX before he joined me on my mission to help business consultants around the world. Julius, so you all fired up and ready to go?
Julius David, I'm ready to explode.
David Okay, that's great. You've been involved in business consulting for some time now. What were you doing before you became a consultant?
Julius David, I'm going to start way back. I had quite an unconventional path, I think. And I'll take you back to my high school days, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. There are a few things that kind of tickled my fancy, so to speak. And I was always interested in business, but that's not the path I took. My other passion or interest was cars, all things automotive things with engines, that kind of stuff. So I actually took the unconventional path of starting with a trade and became an automotive technician. Now, I did this for about sort of two or three years and I worked really hard at it. I tried to do the absolute best that I could and very quickly set myself the goal to become The Apprentice of the Year. This is basically an award for the top new mechanic or the top new technician to the profession. And it's actually, it was inspired by my grandfather who won the same award probably 50 years before me. And I thought that was a bit of an aspirational thing to do, and I always like to succeed and do well, whatever it is I did. And lo and behold, I was able to work hard enough and learn enough to be awarded The Apprentice of the Year. So I was really, really pleased that I excelled in doing that.
Julius The next logical step for me was to follow my passion a little bit deeper and move into motorsport. So I went from working on all raft of regular transport vehicles to specifically working on motorsport cars. And it's a saying that petrol runs through your veins. And that's how I felt, I absolutely loved it. And I learned something that I never thought I would learn in doing that. Typically the people that are involved with motorsport, the people that can afford to have a race car and afford to do big events and stuff like that, they're all really successful people to be able to have the money and to be able to afford that. And so I was surrounded by all of these mostly business people, and I quickly saw that doing what I was doing.
Julius I was going to be very capped in my income and capped in the success that I could achieve. But I was in the realms, I was surrounded by these people that were very inspiring and they'd all done really, really well. And I could, I resonated with them and I could see myself being more like them than I could with my colleagues and my bosses at the time. So I kind of shifted my sights slightly. Initially, I wanted to become an absolute expert technician at what I was doing, but that wasn't going to get me particularly far. And in New Zealand, we've got a very small market for that kind of work here. And perhaps the biggest I could have got was to own my own shop with maybe a couple of employees or something like that. But I shifted. It was an epiphany moment when my perception kind of shifted and I thought, well, I want to pursue business and management and that kind of stuff more so than being on the tools and being a technician. So that was kind of a turning point for me. And it started getting me thinking about consulting or not consulting so much, but more about moving into management and running of businesses, which ultimately in the long term led to my business consulting career.
David So what attracted you to business consulting?
Julius Well, there are a lot of things. I went along in my journey and I learned a whole lot about business and marketing and managing people and all of that kind of stuff. And then the sort of the next thing for me was to look at going a little bit further again, continue on my path of continuous development and success for myself. And I wanted to keep improving myself, keep that professional development running. And that was part of my inspiration to become a business consultant because I knew I was only working in one business and I could only learn so much from that one industry and working in that one sort of sector and then having everything looking the same every single day. So I knew that, if I was working across a whole lot of different businesses, I was going to learn a whole lot more. And for me, that was really, really valuable from a professional development point of view. That was the first thing that attracted me to business consulting.
Julius The next thing is, I absolutely love helping people. No matter what I've done in the past, people have kind of been a passion for me. I love talking to people and getting to know them and helping to solve their problems. So helping business owners, that particularly resonated with me. And from a completely selfish point of view, the flexibility in lifestyle was just super attractive. As you know, David and some of our listeners will know, because I've talked about it before, I'm an absolutely avid surfer, so I'd love to go surfing. And the surf is only good one or two days a week and it doesn't care if it's the weekend or not. The surf is good on the day, it's good. And I wanted the flexibility basically to be able to shut up shop and go and do what I want to do, and consulting, very attractively, gives you the ability to do that.
David And what's that called? Surf's up.
Julius Surf's up, that's the one David. Surf's up. Now, carrying on on my completely selfish mindset here, I wanted to increase my income. You know, I was working for someone else before and my income was capped. But I know that with business consulting, you can earn significantly more by leveraging your time and charging higher fees. So I want to like I want to succeed in and helping people, and my own professional development, success for me is also earning a significant amount of money. So I can do with all my extra time and flexibility, I can do the things and afford the things that I want to. And I did mention that I absolutely love cars and petrol runs through my veins. So I would really like the ability to afford a pretty flash car. So that definitely comes into play.
Julius And the final thing, David, is, as I mentioned right from day dot when I was at high school, I've always had this inkling in the back of my head that business is really interesting and entrepreneurship and that kind of thing. So the idea of being able to build a business for myself was very, very attractive and particularly attractive is the fact that if it's just you as a consultant, the risk and the baggage and having to organize a lease and a premises and hire staff, that kind of all disappears. So I could run my own business, be my own boss, but it didn't really have so much of the downside.
David Well, owning a business doesn't mean that you've got to have buildings and stock/inventory and factories and machines and staff and on and on and on. All you need, you've already got, like your car and computer and phone and things like that. And the only other thing you need is the six inches of real estate between your ears, which is a saying that I like basically because you've got the experience. What was your experience in the first six months?
Julius David, it was pretty transformational. Like I told you, I really wanted to get into it. First and foremost, for my professional development point of view, and I just learned so much like I went from having a particular mindset of being an employee and I was interested in business. And I thought I had a small idea about how business worked. And as you know, I became a consultant with ConsultX and did the ConsultX training. And it just transformed my way of thinking and gave me a completely different perspective on how a business works, but also how I operate as an individual, so it really transformed me. I went from knowing very little about consulting specifically to having basically a full catalog of eight different full-time clients in a number of different industries. And I was working with them to deliver results. So I had to quickly put a few pieces of the puzzle together and learn some things. But, you know, there's nothing like a little bit of pressure to get you going and to make things happen. So I followed the system that we've got in ConsultX as a 13-week marathon program. And what I did at the end of each week was, I had a diary and I made a reflection in that diary, I wrote it down, and then I actually recorded a little video of it. So I have it that I can share with people in the network. And I use this to sort of keep myself accountable and make sure that I was on track. So within the 13-week marathon program, you've got to talk to a certain amount of people every week and you've got to try and sign a particular number of clients and basically have a whole lot of activity to make sure that you succeed. And this reflection every week, basically, just kept me accountable, and it gave me the ability to think if I was doing something right or if I was doing something wrong, and then I just correct my course as I went.
David How did you acquire clients in the beginning and how do you get them now?
Julius Well, my first port of call was businesses and people that I already knew, things that interested me that were already within my network because of previous roles and people that I knew. So I actually ended up getting three clients really quickly within, I think, the first month or something just by talking to people and calling on people that I already knew. Now, another thing that I did is I made a video and I kind of launched myself by telling everyone that I knew on social media what I did. I just recorded a three-minute-long video and write a little bit of a synopsis saying, I've got a new career, I'm helping business owners, and I've made it a little bit entertaining. Had my cat in the video, and I was patting my cat. And it was fun, it was fun and a little bit professional because I was trying to show people what I could do, but also fun because these people were my friends and my family that I knew on a social level. And I sent this video out on Facebook and I got a really, really good reception, like a lot of people shared it. And I sent it to their friends and they gave me some leads of people that they knew that might be interested. So that was something I did that I thought worked particularly well.
Julius Moving along, a couple of my other clients I got, in the beginning, came from my local business association. So I just Googled my local business association to find where they were. They were literally just down the road and they were having a meeting. So I went along to the meeting and I met the chairperson at the time and I said, do you need any help? And her eyes almost fell out of her head, and she said, we're looking for help really desperately to try and increase our membership. We'd love to have you as part of the committee. So all of a sudden, within about six weeks or two months, I was part of this committee and I was on stage talking in front of 40 or 50 business owners. And I had the mailing list of all of the businesses in our area and, you know, there was a whole lot of leads. So I ended up getting two clients from the local business association within a pretty short period of time, and that worked really fantastic for networking.
Julius Now, I also approached business owners in this area, in the local business association area, and I kind of used that as a soft way to get in the door with a couple of them, and a couple of them I just sort of introduced myself as who I am and what I do. And I got, ended up out of all the people I talked to within the first couple of months, I got another three clients from that. So within my first three months of the 13 week marathon period, I ended up picking up eight clients. Now, as you know, David, I actually stopped getting more clients and stopped trying to grow my business so that I could travel.
David So tell us about your traveling and how you are able to consult when you're on holiday.
Julius Well David, as I just alluded to, I stopped growing my business, but I actually picked my best clients to take with me remotely. So I traveled for nine months through Southeast Asia and through Europe. And the reason I picked my best clients is because for the amount of time that I spent with them, I earned the most. So I was, ended up working kind of about a day and a half to two days a week, depending on what was going on. And I was earning pretty much a full-time salary, like if you're an employee, and I was able to cover the costs of my trip as I was traveling around. And all I needed literally was my laptop, my laptop charger, headphones, and make sure that wherever I was staying had a Wi-Fi connection. And I would jump on a Zoom meeting and then I would do my fortnightly meetings with the business owners and arrange all the other things that I needed to keep them accountable for the tasks that they were doing. And it just worked absolutely fantastic.
Julius I did have to be a little bit mindful when we were moving around places that if I had a meeting coming up that I knew about, we were at that hotel, or wherever we were staying for long enough to be able to, you know, allow me to have a sleep in if it was a late-night because we were in different time zones. So sometimes I had to stay up to eleven or twelve pm, something like that. But we also had the situation where when we were in Europe, we got a train pass to travel all over Europe and we actually started coordinating my meetings with when we would be on the trains and the trains over there have fantastic Wi-Fi. So as we were traveling for five or eight hours, whatever it was on these train trips, I would actually be able to make the most of this downtime and either have meetings or just do work for most of that time. And so that meant that when we got off at the other end, I could actually go and explore and enjoy myself and keep my downtime and the time that I was consulting to as low as possible.
David Well, that's absolutely fantastic, and we talked about Bruce before about consulting from a yacht. And now we've gone through 2020 and the virus. Well, we haven't gone through it. We're still in early 21 and we don't know what's going to happen. But it does very much show that you can be consulting through the Internet as opposed to face to face. Now, what that opens up, it means that a consultant doesn't have to consult within 20 kilometers or 20 miles of where their office or their home office is. They can consult anywhere in the world, and that is just amazing really.
Julius Well I was consulting, I don't know, the distance, maybe 10000 kilometers away from where I was. And funny you should mention that whilst we were traveling, my partner, she's a social media guru, she actually ended up getting a remote job online as well with an agency back in New Zealand whilst we were overseas. And it went something like this. She did her job application in the Philippines, she did her first interview in Malaysia, and then she did another video interview in Singapore. And then when we'd gone to England, she got the job offer.
David Crazy.
Julius So I followed her all around the world.
David That's absolutely crazy, and that reminds me of when I was consulting full time, when I lived in Australia, that I had a client who had a PA, personal assistant who was on a circus train in Europe, and she basically traveled around, her husband owned the circus. One whole car, do they call them cars?
Julius Yeah, I think so.
David Train cars, one whole car was an office for her and her husband split in two, and she did all the PA for my client in the Gold Coast in Australia from a train.
Julius Wow.
David That's a long time ago, so they must have had wi fi ten, twelve years ago in Europe on trains, yes.
Julius So that's part of what I want to bring to ConsultX is make sure, and we're developing this at the moment, that all of the consultants that join ConsultX have the knowledge and the ability to be able to consult remotely and also to get clients remotely because it's really important too. We just don't know what's happening.
David How have you benefited from ConsultX's Business Success Program?
Julius Well, David, like I said before the whole learning of the journey that I've been on with ConsultX has just been transformational like I have, I've tried to absorb all of the information like a sponge, and I always do. And I think that has really sort of set in stone how fantastic this is as a career and what you can do as a consultant. So at the start, I thought the training was really, really thorough and it kind of gave me everything I needed to know to get me started. And then a sort of a situation where you don't know what you don't know, and it's only in hindsight that I've been able to realize all of the things I have actually learned. It's only after one year when I took a breath and started traveling and I go, well, you know, I've learned a whole lot about business, a whole lot about business consulting, and in hindsight, I don't think I would have been able to do it if it wasn't for ConsultX.
David How many clients do you have today and what type of business are they in?
Julius Well David, I've only kept one of my clients from when I initially started, and that's because I got rid of most of them for when I was traveling, and now I'm helping ConsultX Head Office. So I've retained that one client because it's something I'm very interested in, they're in the automotive industry. But it's also a client that's performing particularly well for me, now I will just give everyone a little bit of background that I started out with this client. They are a reasonably large client for me where I was charging them thirty-six hundred dollars a month, 3600, and my income from them is on a percentage basis above that.
Julius So over my three approximate years that I've been working with them, I've been able to get them to sort of grow by about two and a half or three times, so my monthly income from them has gone from three thousand six hundred and now it kind of sits somewhere between 8000 and nine and a half thousand every month. So that just goes to show if you've got the ability to help a business and you've got a good contract in place with a percentage base deal like that. And that's what ConsultX teaches you. You can earn a heck of a lot like I do that and I probably some months would spend as little as 12 hours with them, and in other months it's a bit higher I might spend sort of as much as 20 or 24 or something like that, but on average probably about 15 hours something like that. So what clients do I have, I've only got the one in an automotive-related business. And my focus now really is to work with ConsultX and helping other consultants succeed.
David Well, it's just so important, Julius, because there are literally millions of businesses around the world that need help from our consultants, and that help apart from us, I don't know of many or any other businesses out there that are like ConsultX that take a, when I say an ordinary person, I mean a person out of corporate, a person who's not a consultant and taken through a whole process and train them to be a consultant so they can run their own business and get all the benefits from lifestyle and from income and things like that. So, yes, there's millions out there and there's going to be millions more. There have never been a shortage of business owners that need help.
Julius Nope, and I don't think they ever will be.
David Do you have any client losses?
Julius Yeah, I did, actually. So I told you that I got rid of most of my clients and they were all amicable when we agreed to it. And they weren't happy to see me go, but they understood my reasons and stuff like that. But I did have another one that was a little bit of a problem child that I didn't lose them, but I terminated them purposefully and earlier than what I would have liked. Now, the reason for this was they really wanted me to work in the business and they were trying to draw me in to do what we call chicken plucking work where they wanted me to do things that I was far more valuable than doing. And the business owner basically didn't want to do a lot of the meaningful work themself, and they either wanted me to do it or they wanted me to do other things. So it kind of just wasn't really working out. I did persevere a little bit and try and encourage them. And I actually got his father on board, his father owned half of the business and he was kind of like a silent shareholder. He sort of gave him a little bit of guidance, but there was a little bit of conflict there as well. But ultimately, I made the decision that this gentleman owns this business. He wasn't going to do what he needed to do to drive the business forward. And if anything, he was just going to drag me down by trying to get me to work in the business. So I made the decision that this isn't working out for me and I'm not going to carry on with this relationship. And he kind of understood, he did hold on to me or try to hold on to me for as long as possible. And he kept trying to convince me to come back in. But it was not for the reason of me being a consultant, he wanted me to come in and help him work in the business and that sort of stuff. So I made that decision and I was happy with that. I think that if I did it again or if I had my time again, I might be able to work a little bit harder to try and convince some of the reasons why, but I'm also of the mindset that maybe it wouldn't have, maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn't. I just don't know.
David Very occasionally people will get a client that tries to turn them back into an employee. I've had one, me and lots of our other consultants told me stories about this, but it doesn't work properly because you can't be doing a twenty dollar an hour job for a client when your value to that business is significantly higher than that. Do you have any examples of how you've helped your clients to build a better business?
Julius I've got two examples I'd like to share with you, David. In the first and probably the most moving one was when I was working with a small business. It was a husband and wife sort of ran it, and they had a couple of employees, sort of two or three employees, and they were having massive issues with profitability and cash flow. And they worked in this business for two or three years. And they'd started it and they hadn't in that entire time been able to pay themselves anything. And so it was, as you can imagine, highly stressful, especially when you consider that they had twins and they had another child on the way.
David Wow.
Julius And the wife was sort of part-time working and part-time studying. And they got some sort of government benefit but was barely enough to live on. And they were under a lot of stress. Now, I went in there, and basically, all I did was I deemed them to be in a rescue situation where our absolute focus was to improve their cash flow and profitability as fast as possible. We just did some small things, we changed some payment terms, we increased some of their prices and we sold off some of their old equipment and stock. And very quickly, we were able to get them to be able to pay themselves something. It wasn't a huge amount, but they were so thankful, they couldn't believe it that they were finally getting to pay themselves something. And that was really, really gratifying, having the wife come to me, and she was in tears and she said, this is the first time that we've actually been able to draw anything out of the business. And that was incredibly moving.
David That's incredible, really. That's really good, because in most cases, and I'd say over 80, 90 percent of cases, the consultant is able to have helicopter vision and see what's going on in the business, whereas the owners can't. It's that can't see the wood for the trees type analogy, I think.
Julius Absolutely, and this was an instance where it was, I guess, the typical technician that had been drawn into running a business and he didn't really have any understanding of how business should be run and what he should be doing. And he was kind of flying by the seat of his pants. So it wasn't really a surprise, but it was very unpleasant to see. And it was gratifying to be able to help. And I was very fortunate that I could go in there and be able to help them. I really enjoyed that engagement.
Julius Now, my other example that I would like to share is of a larger business. And this is a business that I have been working with for the past three years that I mentioned before. Now, I did say that I've been able to get two and a half to three times growth over that period. And it's not through rocket science or anything like that or magic. It was through some simple steps, and I'll just share them. So I created a business plan and the business plan was basically to work with the business owner, and we came up with it. We just wanted to transform the business, really give a new lease on life. And it didn't have any really complex parts. It was just to come up with a consistent marketing campaign and to give them a little bit of a rebrand to implement some systems and processes. And we look for some new staff and the right staff, the staff I think the staff count has roughly increased by about 50 or 60 percent. And what we did is we took a lot of their sort of individual packages, sorry, individual products and services, and we package them. And this made them easier to sell for the salespeople.
Julius It's easier to manage for the management team. And it's also it's easier for customers to understand, but it's also easier for the staff to perform because they're performing sort of more repetitive tasks, doing the same stuff with the same products all of the time. So it kind of ended up being a win-win. And we just looked for the most scalable parts of the business and we began to exploit those areas. So getting three times revenue in this business wasn't actually that difficult. It just took a bit of time and doing the right things and that sort of stuff. And they're now in a position where they're kind of known to be the industry leader and you've got clients and manufacturers banging on the door trying to get into to get them to be their supplier or getting them to do work for them. So that's sort of my marque consulting client that I really, really enjoy working with. It's in my area of passion and I still work with them today.
David That's great, and to close this podcast, what are a couple of gold nuggets of advice you can put forward to help others in their consulting careers?
Julius My first and probably the most valuable one is to become invaluable to your clients, so they'll stay with you over the long term. Now, what I mean is just make them feel like you are so valuable to them that they will just never, ever get rid of you. Make them know that you'll help them through thick and thin, and you'll kind of do whatever you have to do to keep your relationship going. And I'll just give you an example of what I did, is this year we had this huge hit from COVID and businesses couldn't operate in New Zealand for about a month. So without being asked, I immediately went to the business owner and said, hey, look, you know, I'll do whatever we need to do to get us through this. But also, I know that our consulting, my consulting fees are going to be one of your highest expenses this month. And I don't think that's fair to either of us. So I made the decision that I'm going to reduce my consulting fee for this month down to X amount, which was below what was in our agreement. But that was really, really well received, and the trust that helped build, and they already knew I was invaluable to them and their business. That's sort of solidified my relationship for the long term. And I know that there is almost no instance that they'll get rid of me unless the business sells to someone else or something like that.
Julius Now, my other point, my other gold nugget that I would like to share is to keep a really well-organized schedule and then be disciplined enough to stick to it. I already mentioned that you're going to get people that try and drag you into their business and you need to be disciplined to stay away from that. But in terms of your own time, if you want to have the flexibility and freedom and get the most out of this, having a really organized schedule so you don't let anything fall through the cracks. So you are delivering your clients exactly what you say you are when they expect it or before they expect it because often they're in the business and they're running around trying to get stuff done. If you add that sort of consistency and reliability, they already see you as kind of a person that's guiding them through this journey of them being in business, they already look up to you. If you can show them how well organized someone can be, that's inspirational to them as well. And they admire you to be like that and they admire the hard work that you put into it. So being organized allows you to do that and it allows you to have that freedom. And then just keeping that discipline means you're going to get to have that time to yourself, whether it's going away and playing golf or for me, it's surfing. That's something very, very valuable.
David Well, Julius, thank you for that frank and very interesting interview, I'm sure our listeners will have gained a heck of a lot from it.
Julius Thank you, David, and I challenge anyone who has learned anything or who is interested about consulting, to do something about it and make something and make the most of 2021. We know that 2020 was a challenging year and we don't know what's around the corner for 2021. But there is a huge opportunity out there for people to do something. So if you're interested and if you learned anything, I would love to hear from you and I would love to see you become a member of ConsultX.
David That'd be great. Thanks, Julius.
Julius Thank you, David.
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. Also, we have a suite of resources and much, much more. To find out more about this opportunity, visit consultx.com.
