How He Wins 7-Figure Consulting Projects

If you’ve ever worked with a large client, for example, a Fortune 500 prospect, you might be familiar with a question they often ask, which is, “What size is your team? How many people do you have?” As a solo consultant, your heart might sink. You know you have the expertise, but you’re wondering, how do I respond? How do I deal with my smaller size when a larger company is asking? Well, that was the situation that Ken Ramaley was in until he engineered a counterintuitive approach that transformed his consulting practice. By challenging the conventional wisdom about hiring, team building, and digital transformation, he architected a path to a successful seven figure plus consulting business. Now, Ken has also been a client in our Clarity Coaching Program, and I’ve had the pleasure of watching firsthand how he’s grown his business. 

In this episode, you will uncover the mindset shift that helps you land major clients before building your team, a proven framework for commanding premium fees without perfect infrastructure, and the exact process for scaling your practice while reducing your operational hours. That’s right. I’m sure you want that as well. Being more effective, making more money while spending fewer hours working in the business. You’ll learn all that in this episode. Dig in and enjoy.

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.

Ken Ramaley, founder of Ramaley Group, has 20+ years in process engineering, auditing, and business consulting. Passionate about cultivating process excellence through projects, training and coaching, Ken leverages Lean Six Sigma experience from GE, Prudential, and Bank of America. He’s also a certified internal auditor with a risk management assurance certificate. A Brown BA in Mathematics and a UChicago MBA in Finance/Management underpin his expertise. Ken holds a patent for statistical sampling and is a published author in trade and academic journals.

Connect with Ken Ramaley

Discover more about Ramaley Group

All right, Ken. Welcome.

Hi, Michael. Great to be here.

Yeah. Excited to dive in and share a bit more of your story. So we’ve known each other for quite some time. You’ve been a client in the Clarity Coaching Program, and it’s been a real honor and pleasure to see the growth that you’ve been creating inside of your business. And that’s why I’m excited to have you here today to share your story and some best practices and kind of what you’ve accomplished and what you’ve learned as you’ve gone kind of through that whole process of building your consulting business. But why don’t we start off and just have you share: Who do you work with and what do you do?

01:48 – Ramaley Group 

Thanks, Michael. My company, Ramaley Group, is a boutique management consulting firm that focuses on business process improvement. That’s a sort of general skill. What we normally find ourselves doing is working with Fortune 500 clients, helping them improve their business processes and get them in shape for some reason, like a merger has just completed, where they’ll say, “Hey, Company A did it this way, Company B does it this way. Can we make A plus B be bigger than the sum?” So mergers are very common. Digital transformations are very common. In fact, one of the huge differentiating points in the way we do digital transformation is our focus on business process, which of course is- that’s our heritage business process and where we come from. What we found is a lot of other players in the game when they do digital transformation focused more on the digital part. “Oh, we’re specialists in like this technology and this thing over here.” You know, my company really is much more about helping you get the business process aligned first so that then you automate an excellent process. If you automate a broken process, all you get is bad results faster. More consistently bad results. Nobody wants that.

02:54 – Digital Transformation: Business Process vs. Technology

Yeah, let’s talk about that a little bit more for a moment because I think business transformation is one of these terms that has been, or I should say, digital transformation is a term that people have thrown around now for several years. A lot of people still don’t understand what it means. And in fact, what I’ve found from conversations, it can mean different things to different people. So you talk about the business process part of it in terms of how you differentiate, but how do you think about having conversations even in your messaging, just your content, everything that you do, how do you deal with a term like digital transformation when it can mean so many different things to so many different people? What have you learned about that process?

What I’ve learned in speaking with CIOs and CFOs who are generally the people that speak with us first, is that nobody has a business problem that is: “We don’t have enough technology.” That does not keep anybody up at night. They’re not worried about having the latest and greatest. I mean, well, maybe some of the CIOs that like to play with the toys, but not very often. Generally speaking, the business problem is something like, “We spend too much time doing this,” or, “We do too many errors in our invoice processing,” or, “We have no way of running an audit on who served this customer when,” or whatever. They have a business problem. They don’t have a technology problem. And what I’ve learned is that understanding what the business problem is that they want solved is absolutely key number one. And that’s the conversation that we have. What keeps you up at night? What is the business reason that you’re trying to do this? Ironically, sometimes they’re so far down the path that they’ll say, my biggest problem is I don’t have anyone to help me implement Oracle. That’s not it. I mean, if it is, then you’re thinking small. Let me talk to your boss. Let me talk to someone that’s focused on the business. You know, the business problem is, “It takes our customers too long to check in at our service desk and our customers are moving to competitors.” That’s a business problem.

04:44 – Identifying the Real Business Problem

You started out as a solo independent consultant. Today, you know, fast forward, you’ve built a team, you’re at significant levels of revenue. We can talk about any of that in whatever form you know, makes sense and you’re open to. But I want to kind of take us a little bit back in time or frame this that I know that you’ve been now consulting for over a decade, and when you look at what you’ve gone through to get the business to where it is today in terms of going from a solo consultant to a team, just getting started, lower levels of revenue to now, you know, much more significant levels of revenue, what’s been the most difficult part of the journey for you? And I know that that might bring up a lot of things, but what are maybe, you know, one or two areas that you feel like, “Yeah, that was a real challenge, but I was able to overcome it.”

When I first started, it was just me. There was a limit to how much I could charge, whether I was trying to do results based or whatever. If I told them, “I’ll do this work, it’ll be done in three weeks and it’s going to cost you $50,000,” they would say, “That’s too much, that’s too much per week.” “Well, it’s worth hundreds of thousands.” “That’s too much.” There was an optics problem. But the biggest problem I had early on, and honestly, if I were trying to do it alone, it would still be my biggest problem has always been having the right conversation with someone who understands the business problem in a business way and can have a business conversation with me. I said the word business like three times because, you know, for a digital transformation company, I talk about IT less than anyone you’ll ever meet who does that. And that part, ironically, that’s not a challenge. I have worked in IT. I’ve worked in the business. I worked as an auditor, I’ve worked in a variety of areas. I’ve worked as a constructor, I’ve worked in a variety of areas. Separating business from the technology, not a problem. Talking to people about business problems, that’s been the challenge. And just only getting to the right person. You know, too far down the food chain, everyone’s focused on what’s right in front of them.

06:31 – Reaching Decision Makers in Large Organizations

So I think that’s a challenge a lot of people face is reaching the actual decision makers, they’re the ones that influence the decision or make the decision and really understand the value of potentially doing something. What have you found then has helped you to reach those people? You know, if you were to counsel or suggest to another consultant who’s dealing with that same challenge, they have a hard time reaching the decision makers. What have you found works and what would you suggest to them?

First off, it’s important to realize that it’s different in every company. So job titles have done me no good. I thought they would. I said, “Well, I can use LinkedIn and target this way,” and job titles don’t seem to matter. You know, it’s when you speak with the right people, you know that you’re doing it and you just have to have a lot of conversations, I think. What I’ve been doing recently that has worked is I’m going to trade shows and, I’m not buying booths, but I’m walking around as if it were my trade show. I’m asking people, “How are you enjoying the show?” “What’s going on?” You know, if there’s a speaker that said something interesting, I might go talk to them a little bit. But as the conversation goes on, I’ve started to make notes about the sorts of things that the right person will say that the wrong people don’t say. That’s to me, the trick is just get in and have as many conversations as you possibly can. And along those lines, to grease the skins. I mentioned trade shows, that’s been great. The other thing I’ve done a lot more of than I ever thought I would and actually, I’m sure we’ll talk about it later. This came from a suggestion from my Clarity Coaching Coach. You know, I decided at some point that the more people who know exactly what I do and believe I’m good at it, the better off I am. Doesn’t matter who they are, it doesn’t matter what their job is. It can be my aunt, it doesn’t matter. Just the more people in the world that know what I do and believe I’m good at it, I’m just casting a wide net, someone someday- You know, I got a call three weeks ago that was a referral from someone I last spoke with over two years ago. Shame on me. I should have kept up more. But he knew what I was doing. He was in an audit department, she was doing customer experience. He knew I was focused on digital transformation and customer experience is a big part of that, and mentioned me to her. Suddenly, I get this call. It’s a referral from someone that again, haven’t spoken with for a while. By the way, though, the reason I spoke with him two years ago was that I was doing outreach that my Clarity Coaching Coach said to do. Before that, it had been probably 10 years. I haven’t worked with this guy since like the early 2000s.

08:51 – The Power of Networking and Trade Shows

I think there’s a couple points that you’re making that I really want to put a spotlight on. So the first is that you found in your case, it’s not so much about the job title of the person that you’re targeting. It’s more the idea of let’s have as many conversations as I possibly can. But in those conversations, what you’ve learned is to look and kind of listen for the keywords so that you know when somebody is the right person based on specific things they say or don’t say. And then you kind of allocate more time to that relationship. 

Then the other one is just the importance of getting out there and making sure that as many people know what you’re doing as possible. And you just shared a great example of that, how it came back years later. But I think for everyone, right, it’s the name of the game in the consulting world is the more conversations you have, the more people you reach and you do it in a thoughtful way or you provide valuable content, then people connect you to the problems you solve or the results that you create. 

All right. So trade shows have been good for you, network reactivation, focusing on just having conversations. Is there anything else that you’ve been doing more recently or even if we go maybe one chapter back in the growth of your business as you were kind of building, the early days of building the team, anything else from a lead generation or kind of marketing perspective that you found has helped you to build the kind of pipeline that you have today.

10:08 – Targeted Marketing for High-Value Clients

We are just now starting to tweak the things you mentioned before, which I would call the basic blocking and tackling. And let’s be honest, still today, if I look at my network, there’s people I haven’t spoken with probably in two years, that two years ago I was doing kind of the same thing I am now, so it hasn’t gotten stale yet, but I should have spoken with them more recently. So I’m still going to spend a lot of time on the basic blocking and tackling. I have to. But we are looking to enhance that. So, for example, there is a trade show coming up in a month. Part of the reason for the focus on trade shows is that I do live in Las Vegas. A lot of them are here. 

Right. It makes it easy to attend.

Reduces travel expenses. But you know, I’m working with a fractional chief marketing officer and one of the things that he’s doing is we are targeting firms that are going to have a substantial presence at the trade show, specifically leaders in IT, in operations, at those companies. And we are targeting them just to see my logo and a little meme type thing of some sort on LinkedIn during the four to six weeks before the trade show. Now, this is a tweak, but the principle, and again, haven’t tested it yet, first time we’re trying this, the principle is when I say, “Yeah, I’m Ken Ramaley with Ramaley Group,” I don’t get, “Who’s Ramaley Group?” I get, “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of them. Where did I hear about Ramaley Group?” I don’t care if they remember, they know they’ve heard about it. And that’s a big deal too because I don’t want to spend the first 10 minutes of the conversation justifying why tiny consulting company is talking to behemoth client. Let’s just get into, “I know what I’m doing, let’s talk.”

11:40 – Confidence Shift from Solo Consultant to Business Leader

I can’t help but sense or feel that you have a different level of confidence than you had if we went back a couple of years or whatever it was when, you know, we first met. Just interested to know if that is the case, if you feel that same way, and if so, what do you think has contributed to that?

You know, I think that my business has been able to deliver more for the clients I serve. More, and am I going to say better? Let’s say more comprehensive. I don’t think I was doing bad work before, but it was just me. So there was a limit. I mean, I could go really deep, more narrowl. Now I’ve got a team, I’ve got some scale, I can go deep more broadly. I can stand in front of the CIO of a company I do not know and say confidently, “I can change the way you deliver your projects. Because I have. I haven’t changed some little tweak in their project management process. I’ve overhauled the way they decide if something is worth doing. I’ve changed the mindset of organizations about measurement, about the importance of business process ownership prior to applying the IT.

You do that at a level that you weren’t able to do before, when it was just you is what I’m– 

That’s right. I think that’s the biggest key, Michael, is I’ve had the chance to really scale and direct people so that instead of Ken doing things the RamaleyGroup way, there’s a group doing things the Ramaley Group way. And of course, being a process guy, I have a lot of documented business processes.

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14:08 – Why and When to Build a Team

Let me ask you, Ken, there’s going to be some people who are joining us right now who are already bought into the idea of the concept of the power of having a team. They have a team, maybe it’s a sizable team, but there will be others who are in the place that you were a few years back that are the solo consultant that maybe got into consulting because they were tired of managing other people and dealing with all the politics and they wanted that free and that flexibility. And in their mind, they had a belief or maybe still have the belief that more people equals more problems. And so take me back to the mindset that you had when you were a solo consultant. Do you think, or do you know there was something that held you back from building a team sooner? Were there any beliefs that you had that, looking back, maybe weren’t real, they were your own limiting beliefs or just things that you thought were the case but actually weren’t?

Well, I believe there is a perfectly valid case for being a solo consultant, and that’s all you ever do. So I would never tell someone “No, you must have a team.” For certain kinds of skill sets, it’s a great way to go. But that being said, I think you can promise bigger things when you have more people to deliver. I loved delighting my clients when it was just me. I had a client for whom I single handedly changed their core way that they audited this very important financial services business. And I was in there and working with them, sort of extended team members and really helping and driving. They did all sorts of good things. If I had had four other people, they would have had those same good things faster with more impact, they would have been different. So your question was about limiting beliefs. I don’t think I ever doubted that it would be useful to have more people to do the work. I think it was more like I was afraid that having employees would be just its overhead. I was trying to keep expenses down, I mean down like, “Well, I can get one more year out of this laptop.” I mean making probably silly decisions to keep expenses down because every dollar I didn’t spend was a dollar I didn’t have to spend later. 

How do you view that now? So you’ve made that leap. You’ve now hired full time people. You also have a bunch of contractors. Looking back on that fear, as you mentioned of and wanting to keep expenses low, what would you tell your old self who- maybe do you feel like you could have and should have done it earlier? Did you view it in the wrong way? Like what have you learned since you’ve made that transition?

16:33 – Scaling a Consulting Business Through Smart Hiring

For me, the key that actually got me off the ledge was wanting to pitch a project that was too big, too fast for me. But it was a good project.

As a solo consultant.

Right. I mean the business needed a specific result with a specific timeframe, they wanted a not quite an end-to-end solution, but a pretty comprehensive solution. It would have been 80, 90 hours a week for me. I did not start my business so I could work 80 or 90 hours a week. And didn’t want to. And honestly it didn’t even make sense because there would be a huge bunch of those tasks for which I would be overkill. And I wanted to pitch on this piece of work and said, “Okay, well if I’m going to get this work, I would need some people.” So talk to an HR person, get a recruiting plan together, submit the proposal to get the work and take it from there and it has worked out. But to me that’s what I would say to someone that’s on the fence, that’s scared about what I was scared about,is, “Hey, take a swing at something that requires a team of five.”

How does your schedule look today, Ken, compared to years back before the team? Are you still working more hours? Are you working on different things? Because again, that’s a concern that many people have is I’m going to end up spending so much time having to kind of manage the herd and all the training and just all of these pieces that will take me away from doing the work and I might end up working a lot more hours instead of working less. And so what have you seen in your case?

17:57 – Reducing Operational Work as a Founder

I wish I could sit here and say I have fully cracked the code on effectively reducing my operational engagement. I have to some extent cracked the code on reducing my operational engagement. I’m down to probably maybe 20 hours a week of operational engagement on clients with the rest of the time divided between things involved in running the business, like one-on-ones with my staff and personal growth type things. I mean, growth for me too even. And we’ve got some of that, we’ve got some measure of administration stuff that I still haven’t been able to fully get rid of. Getting better, though. Getting better all the time. Two months ago, I turned over ownership of managing the company intranet to one of my employees. Now, he just says, “Oh, yeah. Ken, we need a post for the month.” And I send them one and it goes up and it looks good and everyone can see it and it’s publicized and when the policies change, the HR person emails it to him directly. Love it.

Let’s talk about your services. I’m wondering, how have your service offerings changed? I mean, you mentioned that, as you build the team, you’ve been now able to increase the scope or deliver a more comprehensive kind of set of services. But if you talk through and maybe just share, have you made any changes, anything that you’ve realized? For example we used to do it the A way before, but we realized that the C way was actually so much better for profitability, or it was so much better for delivering a result or more positive impact. Any shifts, changes that you’ve made to your service offerings over the last little while?

19:30 – Shifting from Hourly Rates to Value-Based Pricing

The services we offer are similar to what they’ve been in the past.

Maybe just describe them a little bit, Ken, like take us through, what do the service offerings look like today?

In a typical project, for example, we’re working on a project right now where the customer is concerned about customer experience for visitors to their facilities, which is a very classic problem. There are competing requirements. You simultaneously want to make sure you’re keeping all the bad guys out and you’re letting the good guys in as quickly as possible. TSA and airport security, by the way, have the same problem. So very, very classical kind of problem. What’s neat is they did not come to me with this problem. They came to me with, “We want to install a specific kind of solution. Can you help us with the business processes to support that solution?” And I said something like, “Well, are you really sure that you want that solution? What problem are you trying to solve?” And we got to the problem was about customer experience and balancing these. I said, “Great, so why don’t we do some work on that? Why don’t we size the problem? Why don’t we do time studies? Why don’t we figure out what’s really causing your problem, and then absolutely, we will help you with the solution.” Now, to accomplish this, I need a team. If it was just me, they’d be doing this project for five years, so I need a team. But the approach, I can write as if I am a big four or five, I don’t know how many there are now, you know, one of those legacy accounting firms that does consulting, I can act like I’m one of them and just assume, “You know what? I’m going to have a guy that does advanced modeling of this type. I’m going to write my proposal, assuming I’ve got that guy. And if I get the proposal, I’m going to find that guy, either as a supplemental subcontractor, which I know I can find, or I’m going to train one of my employees to do it, or maybe one of my employees can already do it.” So that’s really the difference. I mean, the nature of the work, I pitch it as if I’ve got every resource I could possibly want to get this done in an ideal scenario, and then I can always get those resources now.

Let me ask you about that, because some people might have that hesitation to go for a big project and proposal without already having the person that they’re going to bring on locked in and know who they are and make sure that they’re available. It sounds like you’re saying “I’m going to do some preparation, some research on this. But even if I don’t have the exact person, I’m still going to move forward. And I’m not concerned through my network or whatever it might be that I will get the right person.” Can you just touch on that for a moment? What gives you that level of confidence that you’ll be able to find the people that you need?

22:03 – Always Be Building Your Consultant Network

So obviously I am constantly building my bench. I use a HubSpot CRM, but in any CRM tool you could do this. I’ve got ‘prospects’ and I’ve got ‘bench’ and they’re both in there. And I nurture both networks. And bench are people that I’ve worked with in the past. Sometimes the people I’ve worked with in the past refer me to people that they know that maybe I’d want to work with in the future. And I have some conversations, keep some notes on the people and keep them in there. So I’ve got a skills database right there. 

But even more than that, the reason for doing it the way I described is I believe the other way is impossible. I don’t think you can make sure you are completely safe before taking the leap. And the reason I say that, and I know that that’s strong, I mean impossible. I mean the timing, how does that work? So if I need a specific, narrow, expensive skill set, let’s say I need a $200 an hour resource and I need to know for certain they’re going to be available at a specific time. I can’t do that. Not if they’re good. If they’re good, they’re booked. I could have someone that maybe will be available. Okay, great. So I’ll have that. I’ll have a broad network. I’ll have people that may be available. And I certainly can’t bring on an employee like that. I mean, if I bring in an employee and assume that the work will come, that doesn’t sound right. Now a little bit you could do this, right? I mean, I have one employee who I brought on. Actually, I intended to have him sold for a project. The project actually fell through after he came on board. But guess what? Suddenly my role in three other projects got diminished because I had him and he could pick it up. 

So there are ways to make it work, but I think that the trick is to just start acting as if you’ve got the team you want to have and then good things come.

And I’ll summarize that from what I’m hearing you say is, one, always be building your bench, always be building those relationships because it gives you what people like to call ‘optionality’ these days. It puts you in a much better place. And then I think your second point of just having that mindset of “I’m going to go for it.” If you’re playing defense all the time, it’s hard to win. You need to play offense as well. And so that’s really what I’m hearing you share.

24:02 – Flexible Pricing Strategies for Consulting Success

100%.

Talk to me about pricing. How has your pricing evolved? I mean, you mentioned you’re working with Fortune 500 organizations. I know we talked before hitting record, and you know, you have projects that in some cases can be seven figures, like million plus dollar projects that you target. What have you seen change or how do you kind of think about your pricing today?

No seven figure projects yet. I would love to have one though. If you know anyone who needs a guy–

You’re the guy.

You know what I do, you know I’m good at it. There you go. But regarding pricing, my biggest lesson there really has been flexibility. I spent the early days, everything was hourly, then everything was fixed price and value-based and now I have a mix. And the mix, I think is the right way to go for me because, depending on exactly what the project is, the client has an expectation and I can shake their expectation. They can say, “Well, we want to see exactly what level of people are going to be on the team and what their hourly rate is.” Sometimes I can get away from that, sometimes I can’t, and sometimes I wouldn’t want to. Because, at the time of decision making, if they’ve got a proposal from me and they’ve got a proposal from again, one of the big legacy accounting firms or something, it’s hard for their proposal to have a rate sheet and my proposal to be a fairly big hairy number. Now somewhere in their proposal they said, “We want a purchase order of at least this much.” That is probably a big hairy number, but it makes it harder for the client. And in certain engagements that’s the right way to go. And I know that’s something that I’ve had people try to beat out of me and say, “No, no, you must always get them focused on the value.” 

And for sure, given my choice, I love doing those projects. I mean, heck, I hate having to do time tracking so much, I’m thinking of hiring an assistant just to track my time. Like just to ask me where I am and write it down and bill it to the right projects. But I hate doing that. But you got to meet the client where they are and if that’s what it takes to get in the door, then I’ll do that. 

Now, I’ll have clients for whom I’m doing, “All right, I’ll give you one of these and two of those and a senior one of these for this much and here’s your rate sheet.” And then the next project, I say, “Okay. Phase 1 will be X dollars and phase 2 will be Y dollars.” “Well, how many hours is it?” “It doesn’t matter. Phase 1 is X dollars and phase 2 is Y dollars.”

26:19 – Positioning Yourself Against Big Consulting Firms

You’re saying that- so the difference is that once your foot is in the door, once you’ve already delivered value, there’s a relationship there. You’ve proven that you’re not just talking the talk, you walk the walk, you can deliver. And so now they’re more comfortable. The trust is there so that they’re not wondering, well, they don’t necessarily care so much about the hours because they know that you can already deliver the result. As long as that price is a fair price in relation to what the value that they’re going to receive, they’re okay with it. But if they don’t know you well enough, if it’s early stage, they haven’t done a project with you yet, then what I’m hearing you say is you find that sometimes people want to stick with what- the way they’ve done it before, which is kind of time and materials and so forth.

Right. Well, I had a client once I met for drinks after a project. It had concluded. First of many projects I wound up doing for this particular contact. And he said, “Ken, you know the nice thing about doing business with you, it’s like doing business with one of those other guys, but you get more direct engagement with the partner because the partner is the one that usually sells the work, but then the partner disappears. And you’re working with the right out of college, but have access to the best practices database people. But with you, Ken, with you, we get the partner right away. And I love that.” And I said, “Well, does the partner show up on your rate sheet as an hourly rate?” And they said, “Yes.” And I said, “Is their hourly rate much more than mine?” And they said, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, given what you just said, would you mind if we fix that on the next engagement?”

And how did that go over?

“Well, it wouldn’t have to be you. Maybe you could hire someone more junior that could help us.”

Right.

Which, by the way, was kind of what I was getting to. That’s the model I want. I actually want to do less operational delivery anyway. But I think that’s the point is when they focus on hourly, that’s fine, as you can get them away from that, it’s better. I’m certainly not going to die on that hill and say, “No, I won’t do business with you if you insist on paying me by the hour.” I can just keep jacking up the price per hour and eventually they’ll say, “How much for the project?”

Yeah. I want to be respectful of the time that we have in the calendar here. And I know there’s so much more that we could go over. We’re just kind of scratching the surface in terms of your journey and what you’ve built. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you think you know for another consulting business founder, something that you’ve learned, something that you’ve uncovered or discovered that you want to share?

28:35 – Applying Consulting Expertise to Your Own Business

I think the biggest thing is the application of your consulting wisdom to your own business, is something that I was not doing and started doing.

What do you mean more specifically?

My business, for example, is business process improvement. I didn’t have well documented processes for my own business. But also, I never have a client tell me something without questioning it at least a little bit. I’m at least going to think about what they said. When it came to how to grow my business, Consulting Success was not the first attempt that I made to get other people’s ideas about how maybe I could improve my business. But yet one of the things I got out of Consulting Success was an interest in questioning Consulting Success’s own advice, if that makes sense. In really thinking about the problem, I did not have a coach telling me, “This is the one and only official good way to do this. If you’re doing it some other way, you’re doing it wrong, Ken. Get on the bus.” I never had that. You know what I had was, “Well, why don’t you think about why you’re not talking to the right people?” Well, why don’t I think about that? That’s a really good idea. In fact, I can’t believe I needed someone to tell me, “You should think about this.” Of course I should think about this. But that’s been one of the just huge, huge breakthroughs, is to treat your business as if you were consulting for your business.

I think it’s great advice. Too often I catch myself as well, working on things, is why we’re also always surrounding ourselves with our own coaches and mentors and so forth, because you get so busy working in the day to day and everything you have going around that sometimes or I’d say all the time, it’s helpful to have that external perspective and somebody to get you back on track. And as you said, the cobbler’s kids don’t have shoes. It’s just such a classic kind of, I guess, truth that we experience. And so I think your example of being this business process kind of optimization expert, but then waking up one day realizing, “Well, maybe I should have a few more processes and SOPs and so forth inside of our business.” And I know that that’s been key for you to grow and scale your business now with your team. So I appreciate you sharing all that Ken and want to thank you again so much for coming on. I also want to make sure that people can learn more about you and about your company. So where’s the best place for them to go to learn more?

30:51 – The Key to True Digital Transformation

The best place to learn more about Ramaley Group would be ramaleygroup.com . That’s R-A-M-A-L-E-Y like my last name, the word group .com. Feel free to find us there. We also have a company page on Ramaley Group LinkedIn. Feel free to email me [email protected]. Love to hear from people, you know. And the most substantial takeaway that I really want to make sure everyone has heard that has ever heard me speak about anything is that digital transformation is not about technology. It’s about some business problem. And getting to the heart of that business problem is the problem that the consultant needs to solve. It’s always, always, always. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. No one has a problem that they don’t have good HR practices. They have a problem that they don’t know how to manage people, maybe. Their problem is some business problem. And focusing on the business problem is- the lack of focus on the business problem is the biggest pain point in business.

Well, it’s a great reminder and point there for us to wrap up on. Ken, thanks so much for coming on.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Important Links:

Ken Ramaley

Ramaley Group

Ramaley Group LinkedIn

Email Ken

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