From Customized to Productized

Port & Starboard provides Salesforce and WordPress consulting for the insurance industry, helping clients do better business through technology and greatly improve and enhance their business processes. However, as Alexandra explains, “Prior to working with Consulting Success, we didn’t have any kind of community of other consultants to lean on or ask questions of.”

And, indeed, there were some things about their own consulting processes that they needed to improve internally. Chiefly, the consultancy struggled to productize their offerings in a way that was profitable. This was especially difficult because most of their solutions are highly customized for individual clients, and they often found themselves doing a lot of discovery work for free.

Additionally, Alexandra was curious to learn how successful consultants developed and grew their own internal teams and culture. How had they made the leap from small consulting firms to larger companies? So she went looking for answers. A simple Google search brought her to a published case study on the Consulting Success website, and she realized she had found the solution.

Getting An Expert Outside-In View

After joining the program, Alexandra says the most meaningful part of Consulting Success was the coaching sessions. “Coach Patrick was fantastic,” she says. “It was great getting an outside view from someone who has been there and done that in the business realm.” The coach’s feedback provided a reality check that was very beneficial for her and Port & Starboard’s owner, Lisa DeNoia’s business.

They also got a lot of value out of the end-of-week calls with all of the other consultants, which provided question-and-answer sessions. “Just being a fly on a wall,” she says, “I would get a lot of helpful insights by listening to the experiences of other consultants and learning how they were dealing with various issues.”

Getting Paid for Everything

In the end, Alexandra and the team learned a lot of tactics and strategies that helped them grow their team and make the business more profitable. “The biggest impact,” she says, “was learning how to productize our services.” For a long time, the consultancy wasn’t getting paid to do any form of discovery. From finding out the problem, to analyzing it and putting together a proposal of work, there were no fees, which meant they often did weeks of work for nothing.

Their Consulting Success program showed them how to productize all of those services, and now, all of that work they used to do for clients without pay brings in at least $10,000 every single time for their business. That one change has made a profound impact on their growth and profitability.

Of her time at Consulting Success, Alexandra says, “It’s a great program with a lot of resources and educational information for consultants. We recommend it, especially to consultants who are looking to grow their business.”