60. David from Everything Business Consulting's Journey Part 2

David from Everything Business Consulting’s Journey Part 2 [Everything Business Consulting EP 60]

ConsultX founder, David Thexton shares his entire story in this 2-part series.

Starting from his Childhood in England, we're taken on a journey through his entrepreneurial exploits and follow him to the point where he became a business consultant.

View part 1 here

Everything Business Consulting is brought to you by ConsultX, your complete Business Consulting Solution.

Visit www.consultx.com to find out more.

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 who 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, and an international community of like-minded individuals. 

Julius David, you started telling us about your story last week, you gave us a really great idea of your background, and then when you moved into sales and built up your own business, if you haven't heard that, you should go back and listen to it. But I had one question that I wanted to know as you started to tell us about your consulting journey as it started. What exactly attracted you to become a business consultant? 

David I like helping people. And when I own the juice company in the 1990s, I set up a breakfast group which is in South Auckland and had about I think about six or eight of my friends who owned businesses would come along to that meeting. And funnily enough, I was about 10 years ahead of them and they had a little bit younger than me, but they'd all gone on their big overseas experience and I'd stayed back here, nose to the grindstone, etc. And yes, so we had some fantastic meetings that went on for almost a couple of years. And all those people who were at those meetings are doing very, very well. Some of them are millionaires and they've done very well out of those meetings. So I kind of was consulting, I suppose, back in the 90s, but in a very primitive way, more of a mentor than a consultant. But I knew, I knew a lot about business. And I knew I'd seen many, many people had gone broke. And I realized the size of the market out there. I was surprised by some of the names that had gone broke. And I decided to basically look into that. And that's what I did back in 2005. And as I told the story, going to Spain, etcetera, yeah.

Julius Okay, well, that's a good reason why. Can you take us back to the story we discussed last week? In 2006, you just started consulting and then you'd found out that the best way to do it was to stay with the business and the business owner over the long term. What happened next? How many clients did you have? And how did the entire of your consulting directly to clients, how did that go? 

David Well, I had 18 at the end of 2006. Some were big and some were small and. 

Julius They were ongoing clients. 

David They were ongoing. But I let two of them go in December of that year because they were too small. And really the industry that they were in wasn't that fabulous to get good growth out of it. So I reluctantly let them go and they were a bit disappointed. And I went round, took them, there were two ladies, a bunch of flowers and a gift box. And we sat down for 20 minutes and had a chat. And so that was that. So we're from eighteen to sixteen. What was happening was because we get paid or I got paid on a percentage of monthly revenue, my income was going up at about 25 percent a year. 

Julius Because you were able to help those businesses grow at a similar rate? 

David Yes. And the spare time from those two clients that I let go, I was able to give to my existing clients, the best ones, the ones that were really good to work with, and the ones that were on about 30 to 45-degree growth on a graph situation. So I was able to channel more time back into them. 

Julius What sort of clients did you have? What sort of businesses were they in? 

David Everything, because I go to the business associations and networking groups and that, there were from concrete slabs, meat pies, chips like fish and chips, chips, chips. They were software, cosmetics. They were two printers that I had. There were spread of everything. There were no particular size and no particular type. 

Julius And was that what you wanted when you started out? Did you want to work with all types of businesses? 

David I did, I did. I knew that there was the opportunity to be like vertically integrated and consult to only printers or only beverage companies, things that I knew about, or only radio stations. But I was just exposed to so many business types that these business associations and networking groups that it wasn't, I didn't need to choose. And I, in fact, I think I preferred it better by doing that because I got experience of so many industries. 

Julius Even though your experience was in those sort of three different industries you just mentioned, did you find that what you knew from them, translated to all these other different industries? 

David Absolutely, because every business has got the same DNA. It's all money coming in, money going out. And if you do a good job in the middle, you'll make a surplus, which ends up becoming the profit. And they're all exactly the same. And once that realization had come to me, during 2006, I wasn't afraid to tackle any type of business. 

Julius And did you have any trouble getting any of those different businesses to improve or make more money or more profit? 

David No, every single one of them improved, but some improved more than others. And those are the ones that I hung onto because it was just the income was coming in. So I just remember one when I had 16, one of them, he had some kind of issue with his wife and he became really grumpy and difficult to work with. And he asked if we could put on hold for three months. So I did. And when I went back, he didn't want to start again. But that was fine, because by then I'd taken his time and I'd given it to my best clients, which were building and building and building so that my income was going up 100000 a year, roughly is what I was doing, every single year. 

Julius Pretty significant. 

David Yes, it's good. Yeah. 

Julius What was the next step from here? You've got 15 really good clients and your income is growing significantly. What happened next? 

David I started looking for systems to be able to make me more efficient. And I found this quite primitive to today's standards, primitive's system on the Internet. And I bought it and it enabled me, it was kind of like a poor man's project management, like Microsoft Project, but a poor man's version of it, which was fine. And I adapted it to consulting and found that it worked very, very well. That was through sort of 2007, 2008. And I was able to save probably 20, 25 percent of my time. And I had the option to go out and get more clients. And I think I did in 2006. I got another one to replace those two, and the next year I let two go. One of them let himself go. And I went and put two back on, so I was hovering between 14 and 16, but my income was going up 100 grand a year, each year that went by. Because I was becoming better at managing my time, picking the best clients, using the best systems. Some of those clients, I did what we called additional services, which is something like maybe a merger and acquisition or a joint venture or selling their business, things like that, which I get 25 to 45 thousand dollars for. 

Julius What sort of things did you do for that? 

David I put their business, well I groomed it, groomed it ready for sale, and then I advertised it for them. And then I handled all the people who are coming in, all the inquiries like who best to know about a client's business than me. This is their consultant. So, so and I put through two or three sales of businesses like that and made quite a bit of money on that. And sky was the limit really, like by then I was down to about 30 hours a month, sorry, thirty hours a week because I didn't need to. And I take Fridays off and had three-day weekends and things like that. 

Julius Okay, and then how did you get to the point where you started ConsultX? 

David Well, after doing this for about four and a half years Thexton Consulting just me and my clients, one of my clients said, David, you need to, he said, you need to franchise this. He said you need to teach other people how to do this because what you've created here is bigger than you. And you can only handle fifteen clients ish or less, slightly less. And he said, yeah, you should do that. And I said, well, well, if you join me as my partner, 50/50 partner, let's do it together. So he sold his business and then he bought in and he became fifty percent and the company was known as Thexton Armstrong, we are still in Australia. And we started recruiting franchisees in Australia, putting them together in groups of six or eight. And then I do the training with them and then every month or two months probably, we would have a whole new batch. So it was about six trainings per year, and we kept doing that right through. Gosh, it would have been 2010, 11, 12, something like that, maybe even thirteen. And Wayne got very, very sick and he had to leave. So I bought his shareholding out, well my wife did. And he went on to spend two, two and a half years recuperating and thankfully, was cancer, thankfully he got rid of it, and got a clean bill of health, but he was long gone by then so, and didn't want to come back. 

Julius What made you want to go down the path of the franchise? 

David I felt it was a very, very unique opportunity to just spread the word and teach other people to do it. So that was what we did and we had a lot of people in Australia and New Zealand, then we started to get people overseas and it got bigger and bigger. And then when Wayne left, my wife and I basically ran it between us, with a couple of office people helping. 

Julius How many franchisees did you have over that period of time? 

David Well, we trained, over our total period of time right up until today, I've trained 300 little bit more than that maybe. And as I said, most of them were in Australasia and but they were peppered all around the world. So we started the franchise and we had lots of these franchisees and we decided that we were going to develop an application to help them. And we're going to work towards utilizing the Internet, which was becoming pretty powerful in those days. So we did, so we spent a king's ransom on the software for the ConsultX program. And we developed a thing called The Hub where all the information was housed. And we started on and we carried along doing that. And that takes us right up until when you and I were talking back middle of 2018, I think, or late 2018. And you said you were going on an overseas trip. And I went, what, what and we talked about possibility of you getting involved, by then you were consulting. 

Julius Yep, I was. I was already a full-time consultant, been doing it for a couple of years then. And I will mention using the ConsultX system, which I'm now a part of. 

David Yes. Yes. And towards the end of eighteen, early nineteen, I suggested that you might want to come in and become a partner and help because you were sold on the program and then you decided to go overseas for nine or 10 months. 

Julius And leave your hanging. 

David Leave me hanging, you lucky bugger, anyway, but he's back now. So Julius came back late January 2020 and that was when we started together as a team. And he bought my wife's shares, so we're 50/50. And that's what we're doing. 

Julius Now, I want to go back to your vision, David. When you started ConsultX, what was your aim with it, what was your goals for it? 

David Well, it was ConsultX, that's 10 years ago was basically to help as many people as I possibly could to become business consultants and to work with business owners in the local area. 

Julius Has your goal changed at all now? 

David Only that we intend to use the Internet a lot more than what we had in the past. Like there are things that have been invented and created over the years that are absolutely fabulous and really good for global consultants because it doesn't matter whether they're in New York or London or in Johannesburg, it doesn't matter where they are. We can talk to them every week. They can just log on to the membership site and everything is at their fingertips. And you couldn't quite do that ten years ago, there were a few early systems that came on, but now it's magic. 

Julius And it's much more necessary now as well with what's happening in the world and the uncertainty out there. 

David It is, it is in 2020. And here we are early 2021, and we still don't know what's going to happen. 

Julius We've got absolutely no idea. And I suppose that something because of the COVID situation, we now know that things are actually quite uncertain and things could change in an instant because that's exactly what happened last year. 

David Well, it was a very good idea that when you first came back early in 2020, you and I decided to streamline everything and put everything on the Internet or make it online. And so software was improved, we've brought other systems in to help us out and make it easier for everybody. So now it's very, very easy to become a part of ConsultX and start getting your own clients within two to three weeks. 

Julius Even if you're in a state of lockdown or you are not comfortable with meeting people face to face, it's still a possibility that you can do it. 

David Oh, big possibility and some of our training is based on how to work with clients over the Internet. And as you probably know around the world, the thing is that a lot of people, even people are Amazon and Google and Yahoo! and so on, IBM are working from home. And they're saying that half of them won't go back, won't go back to the office and the work from home thing has been vastly accelerated throughout 2020 and it's just becoming a normal way of working. 

Julius I was on a call the other day with a Google expert. He's a man that helps you set up Google ads, and he lives in I think he lived in India somewhere and I was talking to him and he said he's been working from home for over a year now. And he said that they're probably not going to go back ever. So if that's happening there and he said that in his area, there are almost no cases of COVID anymore, and people are allowed to go back, but they've just chosen as a business not to. 

David Well, you just think about the people that own those businesses. All of a sudden, they've got skyscrapers full of offices, commercial offices that people don't want to go back to. And it's just got to be more efficient like commercial office space is through the roof. And so, you know, it makes you wonder what's going to happen to all of those business owners that are landlords of commercial premises is probably not going to be pretty if half of them are going to work from home. 

Julius No, it wouldn't be a good thing. So to close, David, I want to dig down and open that big head of knowledge of yours up and get a couple of gold nuggets. Can you share us some of the most important lessons, perhaps two of them that you've learned over of your time in business and consulting specifically? 

David Well, people who want to become business consultants, really most people can. The traits you require are not what people who are listening to this podcast would ordinarily think. Like, you need to be passionate, you need to be motivated, you need to have long-term goals or visions of where you want to be, you need to be unhappy where you currently are. So you need to have all of these things going on and genuinely want to change into a new profession where you can probably in two, three, four, or five times what you're currently earning. That's the first thing that somebody needs. And a lot of people are like that. A lot of people had a guts full working in corporate, stuck in gridlock and all of those things, and working 12 hours a day and that sort of thing. 

David The second thing you need, people who want to be a consultant need, is they need to have a system and a process that's been proven and ours has been over sixteen years. And they need to get involved with somebody, just like me way, way back when I said that in 2005, I went on the Internet looking to buy something off the shelf because I knew how long and how much work will be involved in writing something myself. And I probably wasn't even qualified then totally to do it. It's the same thing now if you want to be a business consultant and you want to work with business owners of small to medium enterprises, then you need a system, a system like ConsultX. So that's the second nugget, really don't go out on it alone. Don't go and get a coaching program, as a coaching program is not what we do. It's not a business consulting program, I don't think you can make your own one up. You'll make no money because the 300 people that have contributed to our program, it's not just me. I made the skeleton and they made the flesh and the skin that went on the skeleton. 

Julius Before we did this interview, you mentioned another gold nugget and I know I said that you could only give us two, but I know you can give us more than that. 

David Alright then. 

Julius You mentioned, just to give you a hint, something about the pool of business owners to choose from. 

David The size of the market, when you become a business consultant and you've been through our training and we teach you how to identify clients and how to get them and all those sorts of things like you will be astounded the size of the market, like if you've been involved in any form of sales or anything like that in the past, you will all of a sudden from pre-training to after training, post-training, you will be in a market like just where we're sitting, we live out in the country, in South Auckland on a hill. I'm looking out in the distance there and I can see about four industrial areas out there of which has about 150 businesses there. I could just walk out there, go and meet them and start signing them up. The market is huge and they're going broke and starting up faster than babies are being born. So you'll never, ever, ever run out of possible prospects, which then become clients, of course, that's what we're talking about, aye. 

Julius Absolutely. So the market is huge, should have a system and have passion, motivation, and desire to change, to become a consultant. So those are the three gold nuggets that you just delivered. Well, thank you, David, for that in-depth and interesting interview. There was actually two parts of it, I'm sure our listeners would have gained a huge amount from it. 

David Yeah, I hope so, too. I've been doing this since 2005. Julius is about three, almost four years into it. And it's a fabulous profession to get involved with, like talk about lifestyle improvement and earnings improvements and things like that. But no, we could spend all day talking about this. We could take that podcast and split it over eight hours. And I could go. 

Julius Even deeper. 

David I'd go a mile deep on each of the things we spoke about. But no, thank you for coming. I appreciate it very much, and I hope that was interesting to you. 

Julius Before you go, are there any ways that people can connect with you will follow what you're up to?

David If you want to connect with me, then you can send me a connection request through LinkedIn or you can go to our website, or you could send me an email david@consultx.com. Or go to the website, www.consultx.com. 

Julius All right. Well, thanks, David. I gained a lot from that and I'm sure our listeners did too. 

David 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.