The Challenge of Creating a Sustainable Business

Blake Walden is a consultant and programmer who works primarily with wealth management firms, creating customized software solutions that enable them to make data-informed decisions and cut technology costs.

Before launching his consulting firm, Black Owl Strategies, he spent years in the world of finance and as a programmer. Eventually, he began to do private consulting, and he enjoyed it so much that he decided to transform it into a real, sustainable consulting business.

It soon became clear that sales and marketing were going to be more of a challenge than he’d expected if he wanted to build a pipeline and keep it flowing. As he explained, “I had a lot of technical expertise, but I just didn’t have much experience in operations, sales, or marketing.”

Filling in His Knowledge Gaps

Not knowing where to turn, he began searching on Google for terms like “how much to charge,” “hourly rate,” and other relevant keywords. One of the top responses was a blog post from Consulting Success. Impressed by the quality of the content in that post, he reached out to us and eventually joined the Clarity Coaching program.

Our Clarity coaches soon began to fill in all of those knowledge gaps for him. As he put it, “It was super useful to get a blueprint for how to do all of that [sales and marketing].” He describes his experience in the program as “fantastic,” and he has been impressed with the “very detailed, in-depth, quality content…you can take it and run with it, and they also teach you how to do it all step by step.”

Immediately Doubling His Revenue

Along the way, Blake learned how to set his pricing and communicate the real value of his consulting services, and when he began getting bigger clients in his pipeline, he received no pushback for his higher fees. “I immediately more than doubled my revenue,” he explained.

For anyone who is on the fence about joining the Clarity Coaching Program, Blake says, “It is absolutely worth it. I was always very skeptical of ‘coaching,’ but it has been fantastic. I feel like I’m running a real business now!”