Growing a Construction Consultancy From $800K to Nearly $4M

What does it really take to grow a consulting business from $800,000 a year to nearly $4 million in annual revenue? Well, for Adam Cooper, founder of Ascent, the answer wasn’t simply working harder. It was finding the right people, building the right systems, and learning to charge for the value that his firm creates.

Adam first joined me on the podcast way back in Episode 12. Well, a lot has changed since then. In this episode, we unpack the key decisions that helped him break through the million-dollar ceiling, how he built a team that could both sell and deliver without him, and the pricing shifts that took his engagements from $5,000 to six figures and beyond. We explore the systems he uses to protect profit margins as his team grows.

And if you’re looking to scale your consulting business beyond yourself, Adam’s journey offers a powerful roadmap.

Enjoy it.

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.

Adam Cooper is the Founder and CEO of Ascent Consulting. With over two decades of experience in engineering, business, and construction management, he founded the firm to give back by helping contractors grow. Adam began as an electrical apprentice while pursuing an engineering degree, eventually reaching senior operational roles at top U.S. electrical contractors and owning three electrical companies. He holds a GA Class II Unrestricted Electrical Contractors License, is an EC&M Magazine contributing writer, and was honored by Marquis Who’s Who in 2024 for Construction Business Consulting.

Connect with Adam Cooper: LinkedIn.com/in/adamcooper

Discover more about Ascent Consulting: ascentconsults.com

[00:49] – Catching Up 400 Episodes Later

Hey, Adam, welcome.

Hey, Mike. Good to see you again.

Yeah, I’m excited for this. So I was just looking before we hopped on today that you were on the Consulting Success podcast back on Episode 12. And here we are. I mean, officially we’re over 400 episodes, I think, if you go to our iTunes or any of those. But the official interviews, because sometimes I do solocasts where it’s just myself sharing some ideas or a take, but yeah, we’re over 400, just a bit under that officially interviewed. So it’s been a while since Episode 12. A few things have happened. Your business has grown a little bit.

Geez, I hope so.

Yeah, exactly. If it hasn’t, that would be an issue.

But you’ve had 400 episodes. Tell us everything, right? Wow.

Pretty much what happened between. But obviously, we have the relationship of you coming through the Clarity program. I’ve got to catch up with you over the years because you come to some of the Mastermind events that we host as well. And so it’s been pretty amazing to see how you’ve taken the business from pretty much yourself way back in the day and then getting to six figures and then to seven figures and beyond.

[02:11] – Breaking the $1M Revenue Barrier With the Right Team

And so I thought where we could start today is, when you look at your company, Ascent, today, you’re generating several million dollars per year as a business. And I’m wondering, when you look back, what do you think was the main thing that shifted in you going from a high-six-figure consulting business to just get to the first million, and then from, let’s say, a million to get to multimillions beyond that? What would you say are the key impacts or factors or things that just stand out that really helped you to get from six to one million and then from one million to the next couple million or so?

The short answer is people.

Tell me more.

I got it to about $600,000 or $800,000 on my own with support staff, coordinators, administrators, a marketing person. But I didn’t have another consultant. And I was looking to bring somebody in to be another consultant and potentially a business partner. I had this vision always of having business partners. I would be the only shareholder in the company. And around that time, it was 2019, an old friend of mine who I know from the industry, Jeff, came out of the woodwork and said he was not happy with what he was doing. I asked him to go to dinner and we had a great conversation. I told him about what I was doing with Ascent and invited him to come join me. And Jeff is somebody that I could see at that time had the potential to become a good business partner and be a great consultant in our industry, which is construction.

Jeff joined the team in January of 2020, a couple months before everything went sideways with the world and COVID. But Jeff was what I needed in the business to get over that plateau. It took him about six to eight months to really get up to speed and feel comfortable starting to be able to lead his own projects. And then by year two, he was able to start selling as well. But that’s how we got from, call it $800,000, to that next year with Jeff, we did $1.4 million. And that was the turning point. After that, we never slowed down. We added Greg two years later, Greg joined in 2022. He’s been with me about four years. And once we had Greg on board, we got to $3 million. And now this year we’ve got some other people we’ve added at the consulting level, and we think we’re going to probably do close to $4 million this year. It’s people who can run projects. I was a bottleneck after $600,000 or $800,000. I didn’t have any more bandwidth.

So first of all, congratulations on that.

Thank you.

Two questions that I want to kind of dig into a little bit. The first is, and you kind of answered this, but I’d love to know more specifically for everyone, when you say you brought them on, Jeff, Greg, that took the revenue to a whole new level. What specifically did they do or did they contribute that allowed that? Was it just now you have more capacity and so you’re going to sell more and you can deliver more and therefore revenue grew? Or was it something else that they brought to the table or that they did that you feel really allowed you to grow to that next level?

The way I think about it and the way it occurs to me is that growth happens in multiple directions. There are multiple ways to grow, and we’ve grown in multiple ways. So the first was bandwidth, just sheer bandwidth. I can’t be with more than one client at a time. Most of our clients are not local. We work nationally, all over North America, and with clients in Canada at times. If you physically have to get on a plane to travel to see your clients and then the next week you go see a different client and the next week you see a different client, you have got to have a week at home. You have got to have some time to actually do the work. So if you can see maybe four clients in a month, if they’re not local or you’re working virtually and you’ve got six or seven clients, you just run out of time. You can’t have more clients than you have capacity for. You’re not actually doing the work. Selling it is one thing. Actually being able to deliver is another. So the first thing they added was capacity.

The second thing they added was skill sets. I have my background predominantly working as and with trade contractors who self-perform construction work. Jeff has a general contracting background. So a lot more on the general contracting side than the trade contractor side. So he gave us more credibility on the general contractor side. I had some, but Jeff brings a whole other level. He came in with 25 years of general contracting. He also had worked as a developer for some years. Greg has an MBA in finance and was the CFO of a construction company for a decade. So he brings in a whole other skill set of finance and CFO-style experience that I didn’t have. I could do some of that work, but it was bringing in more skills. So it was kind of a combination of those two that were the main drivers.

The third thing was all three of us could sell. We went through sales training. We’ve done multiple things like that. So now you have more capacity to take sales calls, to chase leads, to evaluate prospects, to write proposals. And so as the lead volume increased, I was no longer the bottleneck on the sales side either.

[07:48] – How to Onboard and Train Senior Consultants

Right, no, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned that in Jeff’s case, it took kind of six to eight months for him to ramp up, to really start for you to see the benefits of him being in that role. For, I think, a lot of people, they may not have the patience or they might wonder, “Hey, we’re three months in, four months in, five months in, the business isn’t growing.” How did you think about that? How did you get through that? Did you know when you were hiring initially or bringing Jeff on that it could take half a year or more to really see the benefits of that? Or were you seeing little micro wins and progress even within the first month or two months? I’m just wondering, when people think about setting expectations and kind of making a senior hire or bringing in a partner as you did, what was your experience there and what might you kind of recommend to others?

Good question. I had hired people before Jeff. I had had some other people come in and I had seen the benefits of having somebody who could do the consulting work. They just weren’t a long-term fit or they didn’t have the background that I needed. They had some construction experience, but not the longevity that Greg had, that Jeff had in the industry. So Jeff brought in a much better understanding of the work. He just didn’t know how to be a consultant. He had been an operations manager, he’d been a project manager. So I had to teach him how to be a consultant. That’s what took some time.

I did see pretty quickly Jeff’s benefits. I mean, I would go to clients with Jeff, he was kind of second chair, and we’d get out of the meeting and then we’d kind of debrief and then he would actually go do the work, the output, he’d generate the deliverables to bring back to me. So I was kind of training him like I would train a coordinator. But then I would start after a couple of months. I’m asking him, “Do you want to lead a workshop? Do you want to lead this session? I’ll sit in the back of the room and you step up front.” So I let him get more and more comfortable leading those conversations that he’d never had before as a consultant. So I was seeing benefit. I was also coaching him and training him along the way. I like to think of it as setting him up for success.

And I learned with prior people, but mostly with Jeff, it takes about six months to learn about my intellectual property, my process, to be able to handle the questions that come at you from a client that you’re not expecting and be able to kind of dance. He was a good project manager in construction. Now he had to learn to manage people through a consulting engagement. So a lot of the skill sets transferred.

So definitely seeing benefit along the way. And I’ve learned, and now after many years of having other employees and bringing them along, we do find that six months is kind of that sweet spot. After three months, they’re usually ready to start getting up in front of the room. Hopefully by six months, they’re ready to start leading full engagements. And if they’re not, we look at ourselves first. What could we do to get them up faster?

[10:53] – Hiring for Experience and Culture Fit

Is there anything now, kind of with the benefit of hindsight and having done this several times, anything that you think makes a real difference in terms of when you bring somebody on in a more senior role to set them up for success? I mean, you mentioned several things that you did, but is there anything beyond what you shared that you feel like this is definitely a principle or this is something that is just part of our system or how we onboard people, especially if they’re more senior people, that is a requirement in order for them to be successful?

You know, it’s really interesting you’re asking me this. I’ve got a new hire. He’s been with us about three months, and we’re kind of at that stage of where is he in the onboarding process. I learned fairly early on that if they didn’t have the background in construction, I can’t teach them that. I can teach them consulting, but I can’t teach them experience. And if they didn’t have the experience, that’s one thing we learned.

The second thing is that when we’re evaluating candidates, they really have to be a culture fit for the company. And we’ve taken a lot of time to understand our culture and communicate that in the interview process and evaluate people for fit against our culture. Because even if they have the experience, if they’re not a culture fit, they’re not going to last.

So I’ve got an employee right now. He had a background, he’d been doing some consulting work before, and he’s been with us about three months, and he’s asking, “When am I going to get made a project leader?” And we’re saying, “Well, you’re not ready to be a project leader yet.” So there’s a balance between them wanting to pull it towards them and us having to push them into it. And we find that the ones that pull it towards them, they’re asking, “When can I lead? Can I do more? What else can I do to get to that independent state?” That’s a great leading indicator for us. If they are reluctant to get up, they’re waiting to be invited and they’re not pulling it towards them, it’s a yellow flag for us, like, “Why aren’t they more ambitious maybe to get into that lead role?”

[13:01] – Increasing Consulting Fees With Value-Based Pricing

Yeah, that’s a great distinction or thing to identify there.

In terms of your company and the services that you provide, I mean, you’ve steadily increased your fees. I remember back in the day in working with you, you went from a standard five-figure deal to then a six-figure deal and then a multi-six-figure deal. And then I think you’ve had pretty much almost a seven-figure deal or something pretty close to that. What’s the difference? What’s actually different between, let’s say, a five-figure deal and a six-figure deal and a multi-six-figure deal? How do you think about the difference? What goes into them? Is it just adding more services? Walk me through that transition or that path that you took to consistently increase your fees.

Oh geez, such a multifaceted question again. So let’s talk about the actual client. How big are they? How much value can we create for them, right? If they’re a small $5 million company, they can’t afford $150,000 typically for our types of services, the return on investment isn’t there at that scale. So part of it is right-sizing the engagement for the client. What can we actually do that brings them value? How much is that? How much value can we actually create for them? And then realistically, what kind of budget do they have? And not every prospect is a fit for us.

But we try and have some offerings that are somewhat standard at least. Typical projects, typical engagements, like an operational assessment or maybe it’s a Procore software engagement that have a known value, a known cost for us to perform, a known timeline, and we can sell it at a reasonable price. That might be like a $30,000 to $50,000 engagement for a small company. However, that same engagement for a bigger company where we’re creating more value because they do more volume, now we can charge more for that same project, but it’s worth more to the client. So now we can increase our fee to say $80,000 to $100,000. Same scope of work, maybe a few more hours for us to deliver because there are more people at their company that we have to work with and more engagement. But overall, we can charge a higher fee for that same scope.

And then you get into an enterprise-level client that might have two or three offices in different geographies. So now there’s more volume of hours to do that work. We have to go to more locations, more value for them, so we can charge a higher fee again. So now you’re talking a $100,000 to $150,000 engagement for essentially the same scope, but the delivery of that looks different. The next thing would be the scope changes. We can offer more services and bundle them together. So that allows us to increase the value we’re providing. Again, higher fee, the bigger the company, the bigger the value, the bigger the fee that we can charge.

[16:05] – Protecting Profit Margins With Better Systems

Many businesses see that, as they grow their team, essentially as a company gets bigger, their margins come under pressure, right? You’re investing more in your team and infrastructure and so forth. What have you experienced and what have you done to protect margin inside of your business as it’s growing? But also as you’re going from these more standard back-in-the-day, let’s say five-figure deals to six-figure deals and multi-six-figure deals, is there anything that you’ve identified or maybe now do as just part of, “this is how we operate and this is- for us, it’s integral, it’s key to maintaining and protecting the margins of our business.” Is there anything from that front that you found is really important?

Yeah, it’s like you’re teeing me up. I love it. So as a service-based business, as a consulting agency, the predominance of our job cost on any project is labor. We have to spend hours- like if we get on a plane and we spend money on a plane ticket, they reimburse us for the plane ticket. If they, you know, hotels, rental cars, those are all reimbursables. So those don’t really count. We sell it for a fee and then our cost is the amount of time it takes us to do that work. Travel time, delivery time, workshop time, content time, artifacts, whatever you want to call them, we have to deliver content, we have to deliver training, we have to budget our hours.

So we instituted this years ago, probably 2020 or 2021, we had to set a labor budget. So we had to figure out who was going to work on the project, what were they going to work on, like a cost code system, and then how many hours should it take them to do that work in that phase of the project. So we build out a very detailed labor budget for every project. Some people might call this like a labor estimate. Some people do that to price their work. I know that software companies sometimes put together an hours estimate by role. This is what a senior engineer is going to be, a developer is going to be, whatever that is. We kind of do that somewhat in the sales process to get a sense of what we should be charging at a minimum.

But then once a job is won, the lead consultant has to put together a labor budget in our software. And then we track our time on timesheets. Everybody fills out a timesheet every week, including me. And all of your hours for every project, as well as overhead hours, are recorded on your timesheet and they are applied to your project. So we can see every two weeks when we run payroll, we import everybody’s timesheets, and everybody gets an updated budget look- how much have you spent against what you budgeted? And then you can forecast and project the labor you need to finish the job based on how the job is going. So everybody does that every two weeks. And once a month at the board meeting, we review all projects. And biweekly, we’re reviewing all projects in progress with the teams on those projects. We are regularly checking in biweekly or at least once a month. “How is your project going? How are you doing on labor budget versus actual? How is the job going to finish?” And we’re managing and monitoring forecasted profit on those jobs.

Yeah, I mean, you’ve really, this is one thing I’ve always been impressed with, that you have a very systems-focused mindset and you bring systems into the business. And this is just, I think, one example of a system that for some might feel a bit sophisticated or a little bit complex, but obviously, as the business grows, it becomes very important to optimize and to make sure there’s not a lot of inefficiency in the business.

Is there an example of something, Adam, that you put in place, a system, a technology, something to solve maybe for complexity or to solve for growth, but you found that maybe to your surprise, even though you put it in, it didn’t actually have an impact, or it ended up becoming just even more complex than necessary?

Nothing immediately springs to mind. I will say my construction background kind of lends itself a lot to this because as a trade contractor where I had to manage a staff of electricians that were building a project, I had my material budget. Once you buy the material, it’s pretty fixed. I might have subcontractors. Once you lock them in on a contract, their price is fixed. Most of your risk as a trade contractor is in your self-performed labor force. So I always had to do these labor budgets and labor forecasts on my construction jobs. So I just kind of brought that into the consulting business as a best practice. Well, if they did it in construction, I can do it in consulting.

And I will say Jeff was a big part of this in the beginning and we definitely overcomplicated it and then we had to scale it back. Like, we have, I’ll say 25 different cost codes. On any given project, you’re probably using 10 of them because we have cost codes for different scopes of work. And if you’re not doing fractional CFO work, you don’t use that cost code. If you’re not doing web design, you wouldn’t use that cost code. But if you’re doing like an operations project, you’ve got your training hours, your system configuration, you’ve got your travel time, you’ve got your process design, you’ve got your discovery time, and you use like five or ten codes. Well, when Jeff and I started, we broke it into like 50 codes and it was like nobody’s going to be able to pick the right code. We had to simplify the code structure first to make it very usable. And we do review that every year to see if there’s anything new we need to add or something we need to sunset or something we need to modify. We do tend to go a little overly complex and then scale it back. But once it’s working, we then look for ways to enhance it. So we do add more functionality, add more complexity over time. So nothing comes to mind that I’ve completely overdesigned and launched and then failed. But I did get a lot of very quick feedback that it was too complex.

Well, it’s good that you were open to that feedback. I mean, I definitely see this a lot with companies and consultants that are growing. They feel the need- tey see some ad or hear someone talking about this new technology, this new system, this new automation, they get all excited about it, right? It seems like it’s going to be the next sliced bread or whatever. Like it’s just going to revolutionize their ability to perform and to grow, but very quickly, they find that it’s just a distraction, right? They’re trying to manage that system and keep up with it and figure it out and then get it used across the team. It’s not always, you know, they act, I’d say, a bit too early. So it’s great to hear that you’ve been able to approach that in a very nimble way, cut where you need to build back on afterwards. So that’s fantastic.

[22:49] – How AI Is Changing the Consulting Industry

What about AI? I’m wondering what have you seen, if anything, in terms of the services you provide and what your clients are coming to you for? So not necessarily how you’re using AI, but more in your market, the construction market, are you finding, are you seeing that buyers are maybe selecting to use AI themselves in certain areas instead of hiring you or asking you guys questions as they used to, or any impact at all in the way that you or the services you’re providing to the market and maybe what the market wants because AI has been kind of proliferating?

We do get a fair number of calls these days from construction companies that are trying to figure out how to use AI in their business. So we’ve done podcast episodes about it, we’ve written articles about it, we’re talking a lot about this. And one of the things we’re explaining to our clients and our prospects is there are kind of three ways to get AI into your business right now. You buy something that somebody else has built, right? You go buy a pre-built piece of software that leverages AI technology. There are plenty of them out there for the construction industry and that gives you a tool that’s pre-configured and it solves a specific task. The second is you may already have software that’s got AI capabilities built into it. So let’s go look at what you have and see if you could leverage AI that’s embedded in that system already. And the third is to go build something custom yourself, like go get Claude, go get ChatGPT, start building agents and build something bespoke specific to you.

Just getting that conversation started with them has lent us a lot of credibility. We are now being engaged from our thought leadership to say, “Hey, come in and look at my business and let’s-” They’ll pay us now to come in and evaluate what they’ve got and start putting together an AI adoption strategy for them. So we are helping them figure out how to use AI almost like we used to do a diagnostic and say this is where you need better processes and this is where you need better systems or better role definition. Now we’re saying, “Hey, here are the opportunities where you could start leveraging AI. Either you have a problem that we can solve with an off-the-shelf solution, you already have software that’s got this, let’s help you build that out, or you’re asking for something that needs to be custom built. We could help you custom build that or find somebody to help you custom build it.”

So you haven’t necessarily seen, let’s say, a decrease in inquiries due to people feeling that they can use AI. Like let’s say in the past people would have come to you and said, “Hey, we need a strategic growth plan or an operational plan.” Now I can just go over to AI and, I mean, they can probably create an operational plan. You and I know it’s not going to be, it’s not going to have the context, it’s probably going to be ineffective, it’s going to be missing things, there’ll be errors inside of it. But a lot of people have this belief that just because they can produce something with AI that somehow now they may not need the same level of strategy, advice, or insight from, let’s say, a company like yours. Is that something you’ve been seeing or is that something that really hasn’t been showing up yet in the construction industry or with your company?

Well, I think first, if they’re using AI to solve their problems, then how would I know it? Because they’re not calling me.

Yeah, I just mean have you seen a decrease maybe compared to before because of AI or any impact around that, or are the numbers as a trajectory kind of the same?

My gut response to that is I think they are starting to use AI to solve the easy problems, but they’re still calling us with the more complicated stuff. Even if they’re using the AI to develop a strategic growth plan, they don’t have the resources or maybe the skill set to actually execute that plan. So they’ll come to us and say, “Hey, we put together this plan, but we need resources or we need expertise, we need a subject matter expert. It’s saying that we need to put together a better Google Ads strategy, but we don’t know how to do that. You have Google Ads experts on your team,” or, “It says we need better project management software and we should do all this stuff with Procore, but we don’t have an expert in Procore in-house.” And they actually went to ChatGPT or Claude and said, “Who should we call to get assistance with this?” And Claude told them to call us because we do a lot of generative AI search optimization. So we get referrals from ChatGPT.

Yeah, no, it’s, I actually, I just recorded a video about this yesterday that information by itself is now being viewed much more as a commodity. It used to be something that if you had information, people really valued it. Well, now information is so abundant, but in the professional services space, being able to either execute or implement for a client or support that implementation, have responsibility and kind of walk side-by-side with your clients, that’s something that AI can’t do, right? And so there definitely seems to be a lot more demand or interest in, and I encourage people to think, well, how can you not only provide advice, but how can you also be there side-by-side with your client to help them to implement or to ensure they’re successful and moving things forward.

[28:10] – Optimizing Content for AI Search and SEO

To switch and talk about marketing for a minute, I know the vast majority of your business, inbound leads, inquiries, comes as a result of inbound work, right? You’ve done a lot of work historically on making sure that you show up, that you’re visible, that people find you, right? They’re consuming the content and information and ideas and insights that you put out. Has that changed in any way over the last 12 months in terms of, here’s what was working 12 months ago, today this is no longer working, but this is working?

The short answer is yes, the whole world of search has changed. What that has looked like for us is a complete rewrite of all our website content and restructuring of our website content using what’s called a pillar-based strategy. We are now adding a lot of FAQ pages and we’re adding a lot of question and answer type things, like an FAQ, because that’s what the AI is using to determine credibility, knowledge base, and produce you in the results, even if you’re on Google. Gemini is doing that in the background. We’re having to optimize for the AI search now. Content is still king, but it’s no longer around keywords. And you remember it went from keywords, then it went to context. Like you had to have whole sentences or paragraphs that made sense, not just keyword stuff. And now we’re at the next version where the AI reads the whole page, the whole article. Even if a human only goes a third of the way down and then moves to the next page, the AI reads all the content in a blink. And so it’s looking at your whole- it can read your whole website in like a couple of seconds. So a wholesale rewrite of our content to optimize for AI search is what we’ve been undertaking and getting through over the last 12 months.

[30:02] – Generating Consulting Leads With Podcasts and Social Media

Yeah. And is there anything that you’re seeing right now, aside from that, that you’re finding from a content perspective is really, or even just marketing perspective, is really working to help you to build your pipeline? I mean, I know you talked about, you have a podcast, right? You’ve done ads before, but you also are very focused on search engine optimization from, now, an AI perspective. Out of all those things or other things, like I remember back in the day, you used to host poker nights to build relationships with people. What today, aside from thinking about AI and being found in the AI citations, so forth, what else would you point to to say, “This is really a key driver for growing our pipeline and building the business”?

The podcast has been a big driver. We have a lot of people who say, “Hey, I found your podcast and that made me want to talk to you.” Or we have clients who are telling us, “Hey, I watched your latest episode of your podcast. You were spot on with that. I learned something from your podcast.” So the podcast has been a great vehicle. No matter how reluctant I was two years ago to do a podcast, it has been fantastic. I don’t like to be a social media persona. I don’t like post about my life on Facebook or Instagram or anything like that. I have accounts, but I’m more of a reader than a poster. And so there was some level of, I have to give up some level of privacy, it felt like, in order to be on a podcast on either audio or, we’ve recorded, everything’s on YouTube as well. So it’s a visual podcast.

And then what kicked in was like, “All right, well, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right. We can’t just be sitting at a desk in our spare office. Now we have to build out a studio.” So now we’ve got a studio with chairs and a background and they just put up a big neon sign in the background. It’s like we keep amping it up.

So is it all in person, the podcast? So you don’t do it like you and I are doing right now, where you’ll have people in different places, so you have to get people to your office?

Yeah. Mostly it’s me, Jeff, and Greg on the podcast. Catherine’s on occasionally from the marketing side, and then we’ve had a few people come in to be guests in person, but mostly we don’t have guests on our podcast.

Okay, so most of it’s just you guys talking about whatever you’re talking about that is resonating with your audience.

Right. And then the marketing team not only does the podcast, but then they chop that up into clips for all the social media channels, including LinkedIn. We have a TikTok channel now, which we didn’t have three months ago. We’ve got a video on there with over 50,000 views.

Yeah, who knew that construction executives were spending their time on TikTok? But maybe they are.

They are. Apparently plenty of them are.

[32:47] – Key Lessons From Scaling a Consulting Business

Listen, I want to be conscious of the time that we have here, but I do want to ask you one other question, which is, you started your business, I guess, 2014. All right, so you’re 12, almost 13 years in. Knowing what you know now, I mean, you’ve gone from getting started to six figures to high six figures to seven figures to now multiple seven figures. Is there anything that stands out that if you were to look back, with the benefit of hindsight that you say to yourself, or maybe you’ve thought to yourself, “I would do this differently. I would make this hire earlier, I would wait over here, I would make this investment.” Is there anything that just stands out to you that you think, again, knowing what I know now, I would have done this differently?

Yeah, a few things. You can always critique your own performance and be our own worst critics. I definitely would say, shameless plug, you guys did a phenomenal job helping me reimagine how to run my consulting business. I learned so much through Consulting Success just to go from the retainer-style stuff I was doing to value-based selling. And that was a huge lift. That was a huge shift for me in the business. And I would say I should have raised prices sooner.

You’re not the only one. That’s very common.

Yeah, it’s shocking how I was able to raise prices the way I did, thinking that people were going to push back and they didn’t. Like, I used to sell a diagnostic for $5,000. Then I made it $9,000, thinking nobody would ever spend $10,000. Then we took the leap and we made it $19,000 and people still kept paying. Then we went to a tiered structure where it started at $40,000 and nothing was cheaper than $40,000. People were still paying for it, and then $50,000 and they’re still paying for it. I’m like, wow, there was so much value I gave away for free in those early years, just trying to, but I was also kind of building my muscle and getting better at it. So, could I have raised prices sooner? Sure. Should I have? Probably. But I didn’t. And I learned now what the value is. So that’s one thing.

I think the other thing is I’ve learned to slow down the hiring process and not just hire somebody because they have a few of the qualifications I need. Slow down the hiring process, take your time, and make sure you’re hiring the right people for a long-term fit. You know, the great ones will stay with you. The ones that weren’t so great that you probably shouldn’t have hired in the first place, they never last anyway.

I really like what you said earlier about the hunger, you know, being able to see when you hire somebody that they’re the ones pushing for more. They’re not just sitting back waiting to be told what to do. And they’re not just getting by. Like they clearly want to accomplish more. They bring ideas. They want to drive their performance, their productivity, the growth of the business, the growth of their role. I think that’s a really important characteristic or trait for people to have.

I got one more for you, which is I should have gone through sales training sooner. I’ve gone through multiple sales trainings. The most recent was with Robert, who we both know very well. But every sales training I went through taught me something more, to be a better salesperson. So more sales training sooner. I look back and say, “Oh, that was an area I could have done that faster. I could have done more sooner.”

Awesome. Well, listen, Adam, I want to thank you for coming on. I’m looking forward to seeing you next week at our upcoming event, our Mastermind here. And to make sure that people can learn more about you, about Ascent, where should they go to learn more?

Yeah, go visit our website at ascentconsults.com. You can find me on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/in/adamcooper. I’ve been on LinkedIn so long I got my name as my URL.

Thanks for having me on, Mike. Always a pleasure. Great to see you this way. And I’m looking forward to seeing you next week in Montreal as well.

100%. Thanks so much for coming on. And we’ll link all that in the show notes so people can access that, learn more about you and everything you have going on. But thanks again for coming on, Adam.

Thank you, Mike.

Important Links:

Adam Cooper: LinkedIn.com/in/adamcooper

Ascent Consulting: ascentconsults.com

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