Never Say No to Clients (Scaling Without Burnout)

Hey, what’s up consultants? So check this: You’ve built a successful consulting practice meticulously delivering results for your clients. But what if the very approach that got you here is now silently sabotaging your growth? After guiding over 300 enterprise level implementations and engineering $1 million+ transformations, today’s guest discovered something counterintuitive, that most consultants are leaving millions of dollars on the table by mishandling this one critical element of the client engagement. 

So join me as Blair Hicken, a 20-year veteran in enterprise consulting, reveals his battle-tested framework for scaling high value advisory services while maintaining deep client relationships. You’re going to discover the counterintuitive approach to pricing premium services that actually makes clients reach out more, how to structure your delivery model, command 5 and 6 figure engagements while reducing your personal involvement. and the exact discovery framework that converts complex projects into long term partnerships. Enjoy.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How offering fixed-fee advisory services can increase client communication and project success.

• How to structure your consulting business for scalability by utilizing a network of senior-level contractors.

• The distinct difference and value of advisory services compared to hands-on implementation, specifically in large ERP/CRM projects.

• Strategies to position yourself as a trusted advisor from the very first client interaction, before the contracts.

• How a low-risk discovery offer can build trust and lead to larger, long-term engagements.

• How to mentally navigate the ups and downs of consulting work and leverage project opportunities.

• How to transition experienced contract professionals to your team.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. 

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Blair Hicken, Principal at Dynamics Consulting Group, boasts 25+ years in CRM/ERP & BPM. He helps organizations enhance customer experience and drive revenue by implementing solutions like Dynamics 365 & Salesforce. Blair’s expertise spans project delivery, process improvement, and system design, streamlining client operations. His successes include a redesign for a medical device company’s customer intake, implementing solutions, integrating systems and developing a cost analysis solution, leading to significant cost reduction, and leading a global SAP to Dynamics migration.

Connect with Blair Hicken

Discover more about Dynamics Consulting Group Corp

Hey, Blair. Welcome.

Hi, Michael. It’s good to see you.

Yeah, great to have you on here. So I thought we would start off just having you share briefly what you currently do. What is the main focus of your company today?

01:22 – Transitioning from Corporate to Independent Consulting

We’re focused on helping clients deliver successful ERP and CRM implementation specifically focused on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

You’ve been in the consulting world in one form or another for about 28 years now, so you’re not new to the world of consulting. I think your company’s been around about eight years, give or take. Can you take us back to eight or so years ago when you decided it was time to maybe open up your own shop and kind of what did that transition look like for you?

So yeah, I was a partner and CIO for a large ERP and CRM implementation company based here in Toronto. We’d been focused on delivering to mid market and lower enterprise clients during that time and I was responsible for the solution design team for our enterprise clients along with the technical services and development. Certainly, I was there for just shy of 20 years and really through most of that I really thought I was going to be staying there and progressing on. But after 20 years of driving an hour and a half back and forth across the city, I realized that I was missing out on some valuable time with my family. And so I sold out of that organization so that I could work closer to home. Happens to be at home now, but closer to home because I realized I was getting home from work after my kids had been already put in bed and I’d be coming home and being told I needed to whisper and walk quietly into the house. And so I was missing out on some valuable time.

I appreciate you sharing that. We definitely hear that a lot from other people that are in our world and why they look to make that transition. 

I’m wondering, so you stayed with this larger implementation consulting company for 20 or so years, so clearly they were doing something right to keep you there. And for everyone who, like yourself today, has some team members that you work with and others who have definitely built out even more sizable teams, I’m wondering, what might you be able to share that they could learn from in terms of, was it the culture? Was it the types of projects? Like, thinking back to what kept you in that organization for so long. I mean, 20 years these days would be very significant. Back in the day, I think that was maybe much more common, but today it doesn’t seem to be as common for people to stay as long inside an organization. So for everyone who has employees and so forth, what might you be able to share from that experience?

03:47 – The Power of Company Culture in Retention

It was the culture and the people. So I was fortunate enough that I was brought into that organization. I think I was employee 12 at the time. And I was brought in specifically to focus on larger, more complex implementations and moving the organization out of small implementations into larger, more enterprise, which was my background – enterprise projects. We were fortunate enough to really build out a core team early in that organization’s lifetime of people who enjoyed working together. Implementing ERP and CRM implementations is stressful and dealing with external clients and walking them through the process, so surrounding yourself with people and really bringing core values. As we built out that company, one of the things that we realized is training people on the skillset that we had was the easy part. Finding people with the right value set- And basically our interview process really became– We had some rigorous things based on some of the skill sets, but ultimately the decision was: Is this someone that I would want to go out to lunch with, sit down, and have a conversation? And it wasn’t about having a work conversation, it was about, is this a personable person that I could converse with? Because in our role as consultants, that’s what we’re doing with our clients. And so if you can’t sit down and have empathy for the position that the client is in and why they need to solve it, then no matter what your skill set is, you’re just not going to be successful out in the field helping clients move forward from where they are stuck to where they want to be.

Yeah, I think that’s a really great tip. 

What have you noticed that’s different in terms of how you approach or execute, implement your services today as a smaller boutique consulting firm compared to the larger organization that you were part of when you left eight or nine years ago?

05:45 – Relationship-Driven Consulting: Why It Works

I really try focusing on the relationship side, again, tapping into what I had just talked about, tapping into working with the CFO or CIO, whoever the executive sponsor is on the client side, and understanding the position that they’re in and why the organization needs to move forward and how can I and my team make it easier for the organization to move forward – take away some of the stress and concerns of these executives about these implementations. One of the things that I really like to focus on is, certainly, in my years of experience, I’ve done hundreds of implementations, probably well above 300 implementations in my career, and many of the executives and organizations that I’ve been with, this might be the first or second, and sometimes you get some very experienced executive members and this might be their second or third implementation. So, bringing the experience that you have about the things that go well and the things you need to watch out for are really items that I try to bring up early in the conversation, even in the discovery or sales portion, and outline how we can help the advisors in addition to solution architects and implementers.

You mentioned that you’re using that in a sales conversation. How early do you bring that in? Is that part of the first meeting? Or do you find you’re even working that into your content or kind of initial touch points before you even have that formal kind of first sit down or conversation? Just as kind of tactical or specific as you could be about how you’re actually bringing that up?

07:23 – Selling with Authority: Establishing Expert Positioning Early

I try to bring it up as early as possible because I feel it’s a differentiator for the experience that I bring. Even in larger organizations, what you often find is that it’s led by a salesperson or a sales team. They might bring in a technical sales representative to help sort of move the technical sale portion forward, but then the implementation team itself may not be introduced until after contracts are signed. So I try to really highlight the fact that, you know, you’re talking to the principal and I will be involved in the project from this day forward and my role in this project is to be the advisor to the sponsor team or the executive team on the client side and highlight any risks or potential risks before they get there. So I work with the executive team and they can choose- so I have an advisory service role, and sometimes that may be my only engagement with the client and they may bring in other implementation partners, and I provide those advisory services, but I also have a full implementation team. But Blair’s role doesn’t change. I have an implementation team that has their own project management and their own solution architects, and they deal with the corresponding person on the client side, but my role is still the advisor and architect of the entire project and I really am focused on engaging with the executive team that signed off on the project itself.

08:52 – The Role of an Advisory Consultant vs. an Implementer

There’s probably two questions that a lot of people who are joining us right now are wondering. The first being what does that advisory role, that advisory offer look like? Can you kind of paint that picture a little bit more clearly of what are you actually providing? What are you not providing? How do you kind of position and communicate that to the client?

It can be a separate offer and I’ve worked that with clients. In some cases, I help them write the RFP or evaluate an RFP that they might have already written. I’m not a big proponent of RFPs themselves just because there tend to be some generic responses or it goes to an RFP team for those responses. So you may not get value back. But I really work with the executive team to help evaluate implementation services. So in the case where I’m providing advisory services only, then I work to try to clarify the core objectives of the implementation. What is the client expecting? I try to keep it to less than 10. So 7, 5-7 key objectives that we’re trying to focus on. And then I work with the implementation team to make sure that everything they’re doing is tied back to one of those core objectives. The idea here is that the CFO or CIO or sponsoring executives, they have lots of other things on their plate, and there’s lots of acronyms in our technology space. And so my role is to sit between the implementation team that has all the acronyms and all the expertise and the executive sponsor team and give them the ‘Coles Notes’ or the ‘Reader’s Digest’ version of what’s going on in the project, risks to look out for, making sure that the implementation team is delivering on those core objectives.

To give people an idea of the size and scope of these projects and why they might want to have somebody to advise them and oversee even if it’s an external implementation team, not related to you directly, what does that typically look like? What’s the timeline in terms of how long these projects typically last if they’re doing a full implementation? And what’s the dollar value of those engagement? And I recognize there’s obviously a range, but if you could kind of paint that picture, what might that range look like typically?

11:01 – The True Scope and Cost of ERP Implementations

The types of projects that I enjoy getting involved in tend to be the more involved, complicated ones. Whether it’s the type of organization or type of client’s organization that I’m getting involved with, has some complexity to it or is just larger. So for my typical projects, the shortest one would probably be six to eight months. And I have some projects that run for three years. The implementation isn’t three years but the ongoing enhancements and upgrades, sort of a continual cycle of enhancements or upgrades along the way. So to answer your question about my engagement, typically it starts off as a six-month engagement as advisory services that will get them up and going. Whether it’s a new implementation or an upgrade, I walk through the planning of it, then the ongoing work with the implementation team and keeping a status report back to the executive team and keeping those focused. So in most cases it’s a minimum of six months. I tend to provide whether it’s a fixed fee engagement for that six month or it’s a monthly rate, I try not to worry about the number of days or number of hours in a day because projects go through real cycles of when your services or when activity is happening, and so trying to track that. I also find that by providing whether it’s a fixed rate for the engagement or a monthly fixed fee, clients tend to reach out more and they are not holding back on the questions. And that’s the thing that really causes most of the issues with these types of projects, which is lack of communication through anyone. And so by providing that sort of fixed fee, no holds barred, you can ask me any question at any time, just opens up the communication and we find that people will bounce new ideas and new engagements and makes the project better ultimately in the end. 

I saw firsthand that your clients don’t hold back to reach out to you. Because I remember when we were in Miami at one of our events, you’re a client on our Clarity Coaching Program, that you had to dash off or there was a late night or something where you had to get involved in a complex project. So, clearly your clients are trusting and reaching out to you when they need that help. 

And then in terms of the scope of the dollar value of these types of projects, not necessarily the ones that you’re always working on, I mean, you’re welcome to share whatever you’re comfortable with Blair, but just in terms of how big are these typical ERP CRM implementations? Do they start at $100,000 or less or more? And how high have you seen them go in terms of what you’ve been part of?

The types of projects that I tend to get involved in, as I said, they’re kind of we’ll say, larger than many that are out there in the dynamic space. They certainly start over $100,000. I would say, on average, my projects probably, the initial scope is usually around $300,000. And then depending on whether there’s additional enhancements, I’m often working on projects that are into their second year and so are now well over $1 million in investment by the client.

And I think that’s also painting the picture for why somebody might be wondering why would they bring in an external advisor. Like you and your team have- you can do implementation, as you said, and you do a lot of it, but there are some cases where a company will just want to bring you in to oversee the implementation partners or company that they’re already using. And I think that’s why it’s so critical to have that level of oversight and guidance from an expert like yourself who has done over 300 implementations, because these are not cheap implementations that- essentially you don’t want to go wrong. So that makes a lot of sense.

14:50 – The High Stakes of Enterprise Software Projects

Well, these projects, you know, they have a big impact ultimately. Once they’re live, they have a big impact on the organization moving forward. Brand new platform, you know, new capabilities, streamlining, taking organizations out of day to day, we’ll say transaction entry and into more analysis of the data, which is ultimately where everyone wants to be. But the same potential is the risk of something going wrong. And the risk is always in that first four to six weeks of going live, if something was missed or there was some process that was missed or wasn’t optimal. So there is a whole ‘go live process’ and ‘user acceptance testing’ that you need to complete before you can ultimately convert. And that conversion or that go live phase is typically a very stressful week, and then even more so stressful over a weekend so that you can go live potentially on a Monday or Tuesday, which is because we’re dealing with accounting systems, ERP systems, they’re typically the first of the month. And then helping the accounting team get through that first month of using a new system, watching these transactions flowing through at typically a higher rate than they’d ever seen before because now, many things are automated. Helping these organizations deal with new stresses, new learnings in that first four to six weeks, you need to be right there, ready to hold hands and dive in, both, you know, myself and my team dive in to help when something goes bump in the night.

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So the other question that I think probably some people were wondering: you’re positioned, which clearly provides a lot of value that you as the principal are directly involved in these projects. It’s not one of the negatives, if you will, of larger firms that they’ll bring in that the salesperson will get the deal done to hand it over to other people. Oftentimes, they’re junior people or the people that have not been involved in any of the earlier conversations. So things, it’s much more easy for them to break down or to have issues pop up. And so the advantage that you bring is that you’re involved throughout. The question I think people are having though, Blair, when they hear you say that is, “Well, how do you then scale the business, Blair? How do you potentially get out of working all day to day, working in the business so that you can work more on the business and growing the business? How do you think about scaling growth and still being able to provide that kind of involvement that you’re wanting to provide, but at the same time making sure that you’re actively able to work on growing the business?”

18:20 – Scaling a Consulting Firm Without Losing Client Engagement

It’s one of the things that I think about often. But what I did in my previous organization and what I’m trying to do now is surround myself with like minded, very experienced senior implementers who I’ve known for many years. In fact, some of them were employees in my previous organization and then they went off on their own, and so I’ve reached back out to them. And because they have also been working in the industry for 15, 20 years doing similar types of implementations, I found the biggest benefit or the biggest thing to consider is finding the right organizations and people to partner with to expand your reach, to expand your pool of trusted resources. So getting back to your question on how can I continue to deliver that level of advisory services while growing the organization is I bring on team members based on the size of a project. I bring on senior team members that I know, fully trust, that they can go out and deliver a phase of a project, a significant phase, let’s say, the financial accounting side. I can bring them on and they can manage that. So then I am only dealing with any escalations or executive meetings along that line. So it allows me to focus on a number of projects at the same time while knowing that the day to day delivery of those projects are being handled by senior people that fully trusted in whatever the decision is. I’m there to support the team so long as they’re striving towards those key seven objectives that the client laid out at the beginning of the project.

At what point in the life cycle of your business over the last eight years or so did you decide that that was the path that you wanted to take, where you would hire very senior people who I’m guessing are not inexpensive to bring on. But when did you decide that was something that you would be comfortable doing and wanted to do or needed to do?

20:20 – Why Hiring Senior Consultants Accelerates Growth

It was a learning. When I left my previous organization, as I shared early on, the people and the community of my previous organization is what kept me there. And it kept me there probably a few years longer than I might have been just because of the people in the organization and the values there. And so when I left and started off on my own, I started off and it was Blair delivering all the services. And I realized that I’m good at some things at the vision stage, at the executive sponsorship and advisory stage, but delivering the actual technical services, which I’ve done in my career, delivering those technical services, there are people better out there. And I wanted to build that same community that I had in my previous organization. So surround myself with smart people. I don’t want to be the person with the most experience in any one area in the room. Surround myself with smart people. 

It was a great idea, but I didn’t listen to myself. I went off and I hired some intermediate striving to be senior consultants. And I thought I could bring them up to that level. And what it ended up being is Blair spent more time either managing and trying to develop those skills on those consultants or dealing one on one with the clients. And I felt that I was getting too involved in the projects because the skillset or the consultants that I had on board weren’t senior enough. So I stepped back, started to bring in the most senior people that I knew, previous relationships, and it’s become a much smoother process now, having them fully trusted on my side, they bring great ideas and are much better at the implementation and configuration phase than I am. But I help them in other ways on the advisory services, engaging with executives, clear direction on projects. And so that allows us to be focused on the things that we enjoy doing that we’re very good at, and then we backfill with intermediate people. But I find surrounding myself with smart people is the best way to build your business.

Was it initially a financial decision of why you started off with more junior people as opposed to just going straight to more senior level people if you kind of look back?

So one of the challenges of doing the kind of consulting work that we do is we have waves of projects. Especially because we’re involved in accounting and ERP implementations. You know, there are financial quarter, month ends. Everyone wants to start and go live on a project in and around the same date. So we have waves of a lot of activity and then we have real troughs of no projects at all. And so, you know, those senior people tend to be occupied in that period of time. And so finding the right resources and then trying to find the finances to keep them engaged even during the troughs of work, was the original decision why I didn’t go there immediately.

And so how did you structure that? How did you make sure that you have the financial ability to keep them busy or keep them around, or make you- just paint a little bit more of the detail of what you’ve done to be able to bring in senior people and keep them?

23:30 – Structuring Contractor-to-Full-Time Transitions

I guess the first senior person that I brought on board, I kind of brought them on as a contractor, but it was as a contractor and we had talked about it, I brought them on as a contractor with the hope to bring them on board full time. And so we laid out a contract agreement that gave them a rate that they were happy with, but also at the same time we laid out what full time salary would be and I think we laid out a four and a six-month plan on them becoming a full time employee. And we laid out what the steps were to become a full time and amount of activity. And really because they are senior people, they understand that part of their responsibility is looking for new opportunities and value to bring to a client. So, by helping them expand the project or the scope of work that we were engaged with, bringing more value to the clients, then that is exactly what we measured and that’s how we made the decision on whether it was going to stay a contract role because we didn’t have a long enough, I guess, runtime on that project or moving into a full time. And they wanted to get to the full time role. Their preference was to be full time and more engaged and be participating in the company’s valuation and they understood what the measures were to become full time.

Have you done that with every person that you work with, that level of specificity around the plan to go from contractor to full time, or have you also brought up on people full time right away?

I’ve brought on intermediate people, junior and intermediate people, full time right away, not a concern. And then I’ve brought on, I also work with contractors as well and they have no interest in being full time. But even those contractors, again, because I’ve known them for years in my relationship even before engaging with them in a contracting role, they want to remain as contractors, but I still trust them completely. And so we had the discussion beforehand: Are they interested in full time work or do they want a contract role?

25:37 – Managing the Mental Challenges of Consulting Business Cycles

Can you talk a little bit about how you kind of mentally handle the ups and downs, those periods where there isn’t as much business? So as you said, you’re very busy at certain periods, less busy at other periods. This is, I think, a challenge for many consultants, especially in the early stages where they’re lining up one client or a couple clients, and then they’re so consumed by it that they’re not able to spend time or they haven’t intentionally spent time on building the business, and so when those projects wind down, they’re hunting again for new business. And it’s like a mental battle at times. And for some, it’s what gets them to actually go back to find a full time job. And then maybe later they come back to consulting or they just doubt and self esteem and everything kind of starts to creep in. So you’ve gone through this multiple times, I’m sure over the years, especially in the kind of business that you’re in, can you just talk a little bit about what is the mental chatter or what is the mindset of Blair in those periods? And what have you learned that if you were to counsel somebody else who might be going through something similar, what would you share with them?

I wouldn’t say it’s easy. I will not admit that I’ve got it conquered at all. I certainly go through those waves of concern and looking at my backlog of projects and the run rate of current projects all the time. And so there’s dealing with anxiety and anxiousness around those waves of project work. The easy one is don’t ever say ‘no’. So it’s one of the things that I learned early on in my larger organization: where there’s an opportunity that comes whether there’s a sales team involved or an opportunity that comes, you may be overwhelmed at the time and think that you can’t fit it in, but very rarely do clients require immediate activation of a project. There are lots of things that you can do to onboard, start a new project, initialize a new project without fully engaging your team and everything. There is planning in place, scheduling out meetings, lots of things that suddenly, without causing the clients any concerns or stress or feeling that you’re not giving them attention, that you can now move a date four to six weeks out and maybe by that time you’ll have more resources to kick off a project.

27:50 – A Mindset Shift for Business Growth

So big learning is when opportunities come, don’t ever say ‘no’. 

The other one is scale. Do a good initial evaluation of each opportunity and understand what the client’s looking for, what they’re willing to invest so that you can then scale the right type of resources that get involved. There are projects that my company engages with or I help close and engages with, that Blair really does not get involved with. I just sort of send that off to the team and make things happen that way. I check in with them. I certainly still have my check-in conversations with the client’s executive resource, but it’s not occupying my frame, my mindset week to week at all. So it is something that I manage, but I really try to have because the projects are big and they’re long term. Our sales cycle is pretty long. A typical sales cycle, short one would be three months, long one is probably a year. And throughout that you’ve got multiple engagements. There might be a detailed discovery, there’s some demos involved, there might be a little prototype development involved and they still haven’t signed on to the bigger implementation project. And so trying to fill those lower points of the waves of projects with a demo, with a detailed discovery, we have some low hanging fruit or some smaller engagements purposely at the beginning of a project to build that level of trust. So these clients come to you, they don’t know, they hear what Blair has to say, they might be talking to other implementation partners, but what differentiates me? And so we try to get in there very early with a pretty low cost discovery. And with that we sort of highlight their seven objectives, we give them an overview of what we believe the solution could be and then a timeline to implement if they were to go forward. And they could take that away and go off to another consulting firm and use that somewhere else.

29:47 – The Low-Risk Discovery Offer That Wins Clients

That’s not our concern because it’s about building that trust. And by having those initial conversations with the client, we really find that that builds a lot of trust so that they can move forward on the next bigger step.

What do you think is the main reason that the buyer turns into the client and says yes to that discovery offer? What’s so compelling about that initial offering?

We try to make it very easy to grasp. So we’ve clearly outlined what our deliverables will be. We fully define who we expect- In most cases, they’re all done remote. These are all remote meetings that we record and are documented. We share all of our documentation with them at the end and then we provide a summary presentation and design document. And so I think because we’ve outlined it requires two meetings of two hours each so they know what they’re responsible for and who they’re bringing, here is our list of deliverables that is out of that. We give them a timeline of four to six weeks to turn around and present back to them. So we’ve outlined all the steps, made it easy for them to engage. And the whole purpose of this is to help them understand the risks that these types of projects bring, how we as a team can mitigate those risks – and I mean we as a team as in the client team and our delivery services team together – how we mitigate those risks to highlight the fact that things are going to go bump in the night and be prepared for them. And so now build contingency plans on how we mitigate those and raise those risks early and then allow them to make their decision. Don’t be breathing over them and pushing the next phase of the project. Ultimately, they want to be able to, I guess, consume the new acronyms, the new things on the horizon, and everyone consumes it at a different rate. And so give them time to understand what’s involved.

What does that look like from a pricing perspective? What’s the range of that discovery offer would typically come in?

31:46 – Pricing Strategies for Scalable Consulting Services

So one of the things that we do in doing our initial, mostly sales call or initial discussion with the client, is we try to understand how many teams, how many departments would be involved in this project. And then as our discovery offer, we basically scale it by the number of teams that we’re interviewing and engaging with. So if it’s a small implementation, we might be engaged with executives and sales team, then we might include a finance team. We may have different offices at different locations that we’re talking with. And so the more teams that we have separate discussions with, the longer and more costly the engagement is. But we’ve sort of built out tiers. So 1 to 2 discovery engagements is this price, 2 to 5 is this next price. And we lay all that out for them. The deliverables all remain the same. And then we ultimately have a custom, they can choose all of the pieces that they can put together. And where we find that when you get into larger organizations that may have their own development team and IT team and they have custom integrations, then now all of a sudden, it becomes a much bigger scope, and now even that discovery offer, that initial offer becomes a bigger engagement.

And so do you find, like, is this somewhere around $10,000 on the low end or $50,000 on the high end? Kind of somewhere in between that or higher, lower.

So for the initial, so two teams that we’re working with, we try to keep it under the $7500. So it’s about $6,000, $7,000 somewhere in there.

Very reasonable. Yeah.

And then on anything that’s five teams and up, it’s basically at just under or just over $10,000, trying to keep it as appetising as possible. And then as we get bigger than that, until we get to the custom where we have a development team and an integration team, we really try to keep those engagements less than $25,000.

And then before we wrap up, I’d love to ask you, Blair, over the last 12 months or so, what’s been one shift that you’ve made or one lesson that you’ve learned that you feel has had a really big impact on your business?

33:53 – The Biggest Shift for Growth

I think that building out your initial offer is harder than you think. It is for me or it has been for me. Because I’ve been maybe, you know, me trying to find an excuse on why it’s so challenging for me, but because I’ve been doing this a while and I’ve offered many services along the way, trying to focus on one area and just deliver one offer that you’re going to live up to has been difficult for Blair being focused on that. So that was one thing in the beginning when you have referrals. Listening to how people are referring you to the next client, what do they see is the value that you’re bringing to their colleague, their friend or the other associates. So listen to why they’re referring you because that’s going to help you shape your messaging. The next one is find partners that you want to partner with. They can present your skills to their clients and you can present your partner’s skills with the next client. And so those are key. 

In my role, unfortunately, before I had a whole sales team and marketing team and filling that funnel and I was fortunate enough that I could pick up after they’d sort of done their initial evaluation, could pick up an opportunity and bring it to a close. And that was one of the skills that I had, was doing the close. 

35:05 – Surrounding Yourself with a Strong Consultant Network

But now on my own, starting in the marketing and the sales funnel, that’s been one of the bigger growth areas for me. Still trying to build it out and so surrounding myself with a community of like minded people. Again, driving back to my earlier comment is surround yourself with smart people who are all being challenged in the same way and bounce those ideas off one another.

You’re an amazing client in the Clarity Coaching Program, Blair, and we’re really glad to have you and really enjoyed spending time with you at the event that we had in Miami not long ago. I want to thank you again for coming on here. I know we’ve just literally scratched the surface in terms of all of your years of wisdom and experiences, but I’m sure people would want to learn more and should check out your website or look to connect with you and if they want to do that, where’s the best place for them to go?

Well, certainly on LinkedIn. Blair Hicken is my link on LinkedIn. You can see a lot of my history there. Or you can reach out to dynamicssuccess.com and find out more information about both Blair and my company of skilled implementers. 

So great talking to you.

Yeah, Blair. Thanks so much for coming on and you’re a great person. You shocked me by sharing some of your background in sports. So for everyone that doesn’t know, Blair is world class, very high levels, Olympic level, I believe, in swimming. So there’s a whole story that we didn’t have a chance to get into on that front there on the more personal side. But what you’ve accomplished there is truly, really, really amazing. So thanks again for coming on Blair, and we’ll talk soon.

Thank you very much for the invitation. It was great talking to you again.

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Blair Hicken

Dynamics Consulting Group Corp

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