Is "Growth Mindset" Holding You Back

Curious as to how a PhD nutrition scientist pivoted from testing infant formula on pigs to advising Fortune 500 giants? Dr. Stephen Fleming reveals his entrepreneurial journey with Traverse Science here today, sharing how he transformed niche expertise and limited resources into a thriving consultancy. Sharing his strategies for effective customer discovery, he details how he built a loyal client base through strategic networking, and scaled a team while prioritizing work-life balance, especially after becoming a parent. Dr. Fleming goes on to offer tactical advice on doubling deal size with value-based pricing and impactful live proposals, and finishes up by sharing practical nutrition insights for entrepreneurs, including the power of fiber, the benefits of tea, and debunking fad diet myths for sustained energy and focus. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to identify and address client needs in a highly specialized field.

• Strategies for effective networking and lead generation, even with limited resources.

• How to structure client engagements and proposals for maximum efficiency and profitability.

• The importance of aligning business goals with personal values and lifestyle preferences.

• Practical tips regarding both nutrition and building and maintaining strong client relationships.

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.

Dr. Stephen Fleming, a neuroscientist with a PhD from the University of Illinois, helps research directors at global nutrition brands like Nestle and Reckitt Benckiser better understand and promote their products. His company, Traverse Science, provides evidence synthesis and literature reviews to substantiate claims, guide R&D, inform policy, and more. By offering an objective scientific perspective, Traverse Science empowers research teams to avoid data overwhelm, make informed decisions, and focus on their core strengths. Dr. Fleming’s mission is to cut through misinformation and provide evidence-based solutions for the food and beverage industry.

Connect with Dr. Stephen Fleming

Discover more about Traverse Science

Hey, Stephen. Welcome.

Hey, Michael. It’s great to be here.

Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. So great to have you on, and to start, I thought we’d go back a little bit in time and if you could just explain how you got to where you are today in your business.

It all started when I was a child.

Long, long ago.

Long, long ago. One of the common themes actually is at a lot of key inflection points in my life, I haven’t really known what to do next. I think some of my business journey actually began when I was going to community college, trying to pay for it. I would mow lawns. And at one point, I thought I wanted to have a lawn mowing empire. And I’m really glad that that didn’t pan out.  I actually got better opportunities, but I learned so much through that. But I was going to community college, I was mowing lawns, and then I transferred to U of I Urbana-Champaign and I got sucked into the science realm there. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after that. So I continued to grad school and I just really lucked out in some ways to get an experience where I worked in a lab where we would test infant formula. We would actually raise pigs, test infant formula for a lot of different companies. And I thought, “Wow, this is such an interesting unique thing. I’ve never heard of people doing this.” The research was going so well that in the last couple years of my PhD program there, I convinced my then PhD advisor, who turned into a business partner, to start a company. I think we were going off on like winter break and I was like, “Hey, we should start a company. All right, bye. See you in a month.” And then took like the next year after that to just do a lot of ground research on what to do, how to run a business, which is just like a forever learning thing. 

And so we started this business in 2018. That’s when I was still a PhD student. But I didn’t seriously run it for about a year. And then we ran it from 2019 to 2023. And it is nothing at all like what I originally thought it would be or started it out to be. We thought we were going to do all this like research on pigs and formula and things like that. Completely different. But I’ve been running it as a consultancy for the past five to six years, where now what we do is we work with a lot of commodity groups. So think of when you go to the store and you buy eggs, beef, avocados, whatever it is, there’s a lot of these commodity boards where a portion of that money circulates back to like a nutrition science program where they fund a lot of research. Are potatoes good or bad for you? Are avocados good for you? How much beef is too much? Where they do a lot of that type of research. We also work with consumer packaged goods companies. So think of big names like General Mills, PepsiCo, Nestle. I mean, those are really big companies, but you’d be surprised by the size of some of their nutrition science teams. So we work with them to make sure they understand the science and can substantiate claims. Everyone wants to put on the label of some food that this is gonna make you better, smarter, faster, stronger, whatever it is. But we work with them to understand the science and make sure they don’t cross lines in terms of what they say. So it’s been- what I’m doing now, I could never have predicted is what I would be doing.

03:25 How a Nutrition Consultancy Provides Value to Large Companies

So many thoughts that come up for me as you’re kind of describing that. I guess one of them is someone might wonder, and I guess I’m wondering, when I think about a large company, so I’ll remove any potential names in my mind, but let’s just say a large established company, a brand that many people know of, they already have these teams of scientists and people that understand how to develop the food product. Why do they actually need you? What’s the value add that your company is providing that they can’t necessarily do in-house?

Yeah, that’s a really great question. And  an objection we still get to, to this day on some things and the answers are various. One of them, to give an example, we had someone ask us to review this topic about sugar. Is there a difference whether you eat your sugars from foods or beverages? And there’s been a lot of great research on this. So one, why do they need us when there’re other accomplished research professors who have talked about this? Two, the person I’m talking to is a PhD nutrition scientist. Why can’t they do it themselves? So one of the reasons that has really surprised me is just having third party verification. So this person reached out to us because they said, “You know what? I’m pretty sure I’m right about this, but we want a third opinion. We want someone from outside our organization who hasn’t unintentionally or otherwise drunk the Kool Aid around this to tell us like, do we have our heads on straight?” And I thought, “Well, why don’t you just go read these papers by these professors who also are third party.” And they went, “Well, they’ve also been funded by XYZ company. We’re afraid they might be biased.” So a few months later and $70,000 later, I came back to him and I said, “Yep, you were right. Those researchers were right. You’re on the right track.” 

So one element is just to make sure they don’t go down the wrong path because research is incredibly expensive. There’s the whole idea of sharpening the axe before you cut down the tree. These studies that companies run can cost a million dollars. So they might spend six figures just planning that, even, just ideating around what they even need to research. So that’s one element of it. Another element is just time. These nutrition scientists, they’re just busy. So you’ve got these huge or Fortune 500 sized organizations, there might be five or fewer nutrition scientists there. So they’ve got tons of engineers. They know how to make the stuff. A lot of them actually do not understand what actually happens once you eat it, which might sound so crazy and foreign, but there’s so much science that goes into how do you make something shelf stable. When I say nutrition science, I differentiate that from food science. Food science is like how to make it, the nutrition is what happens once you eat it. And probably a lot- we’re both aware there’s so much misinformation out there, it’s really hard to be an expert in all things, and so when we’re working with someone, they’re saying, “Hey. Our CEO just heard this thing from his cousin about low carb diets and they want me to look into it. Oh, and also can you tell me what’s the best thing to improve sleep and also memory and also gut health?” It’s like they are expected to be these walking encyclopedias. And for them to get up to speed on some of these topics to get to the point to, with some justification, tell their business unit, “Hey. Maybe don’t put that on the label or don’t spend a million dollars developing this thing.” They might have to read 50 to 100, 200 scientific articles. I mean, they could just do just that nonstop for weeks and weeks, but they don’t have that so it’s an element of time and risk aversion.

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Yeah. I mean, you’re sharing some really great points that I hope everyone joining us can start to kind of overlay on top of, even if they’re not in the business of nutrition science. There’s how are you dealing with these objections? How can you add additional value or kind of create that perception of value or your positioning right in the marketplace, I think is very significant there. So describe what does that look like? You talk about one engagement, you go off for a while, $70,000 later, you give them the third party verified like, “Yes, you’re on the right track. Keep going.” Just describe what does your typical kind of service and process look like.

08:52 Structuring Client Engagements for Maximum Efficiency

It’s definitely evolved. So I’ll talk about the good version of the process first. And it has become repeatable where we have something like a discovery offer. Someone says, “Hey. I need you to tell me, does magnesium work to help me fall asleep at night?” Or something like that. And there’s a lot of unknowns.

And does it? 

Melatonin is pretty good. Melatonin and tryptophan are good. Magnesium is not proven, in my opinion. Not yet. So when someone asks that, it comes down to like, “Okay, so how are we going to price this? How do I get this into a contract?” There’s a lot of moving parts here. I’m not an expert on it yet. It feels like I have to become an expert to even get to a price point. But we always start with a small part, which is just we’re going to find how many studies exist on this topic. That alone, for some things could do it in like a day. For more complex topics, it might take a month or two months just to do that part. So whether someone goes all in with us on an engagement or they just dip their toes, it’s still going to start in the same place, which is this little discovery offer where we say, “Okay. We’re going to collaborate. I hear the question you have. I’m going to translate it into what we need to do to figure out how much research is on this in the first place.”

Sorry, Stephen, what do you call that? What is that discovery offer? How do you kind of position that and brand it?

Believe it or not, I actually just sometimes call it discovery because that is kind of what we’re doing. But the technical term, we call it search and screening. We’re going to search through some scientific databases and then we’re going to screen through all the hits. I mean, just like you might on Google. But here, like to be thorough you have to look through like 10,000 hits. So we just call it that. Sometimes we just call it phase 1. So it’s not quite as branded as you might think it needs to be. So that’s the first step. The second is, okay, we’ve searched through these 5,000 articles to find the 10 that are actually of interest and there is- we’re going to read the papers, extract a bunch of information about it, synthesize it, summarize it. So the way we structure these engagements is here’s that first part, and there’s usually not a ton of variability around it. We’ve got it down to how long it’ll take us. We’ve put boundaries around it, like how many topics they can ask about, things like that. 

Then when we get to the next stage, that’s where what has been really helpful and successful is instead of just giving them one number, giving them that three tier option, think like low, middle, high. Or think of like, here’s the studio apartment versus the starter home versus a mansion. And the things that change there might be like the depth of the review we do for them or like the quality of it. The quality, no matter what stage is going to be good enough for what they want.  There might be some bells and whistles on the very high end, but we try to ask why they need this service. When they just need this service to make sure their CEO or business unit doesn’t make a dumb decision, they’re looking for a quick ‘no’. So they don’t really care about 100% quality, thoroughness. They’re looking for enough to get to that ‘go/no go’ decision. On the other hand if we’re working with someone and they want to make a claim on their label, they don’t want to have any sort of legal suit following them. And that’s where we’re going to like, no stone unturned. And those are levers that allow us to say, “Okay. Here’s your three-option proposal to get to that answer quickly. Or we’re going to cross every T, dot all the I’s.” So it always starts with that initial discovery. We will do that. It usually takes about a month. And then we say, “Okay. Here’s the budget for the next part.” And some of them we just say “Hey, you just have $100,000. We’re going to fit that into this.  I actually don’t know how much is going to go into this, but we’ll–”

Your clients typically come to you with a budget in mind? Like they say–

Oh, no. We have to dig it out of them. I’ll say, “Hey, what’s the time and budget?” And the answer is always, “Well, the time is yesterday and the budget is, I don’t know, let me check.” But you can usually get some feelers like, “Okay. Well if you could do this for $5,000 would that- can you do that? If it costs $50,000? Does it cost $500,000?” And they go, “Okay. Well, that’s obviously not it.” And those sound like silly questions, but it actually does help me really quickly identify where they are in the ballpark because I’m trying to qualify them to usually a company that can spend $50,000 to $150,000 without that breaking the bank, which then that means I’m talking to a certain type of company at that point.

Right. So that’s kind of like your sweet spot for most engagements is somewhere from $50,000 to $150,000, give or take. So. And then just for everyone who’s joining us who might be somewhere else in the world, we’re talking $50,000 to $150,000 US.

Right.

Okay. So that’s the way that you structure the business right now. I know things are going well. You’ve continued to grow the business. I want to take a step back or just even go a slightly different direction, which is, how are you getting these clients? What are you doing right now to attract clients to get a seat at the table and bring them in, if you will?

14:03 Building Relationships to Attract and Retain Clients

Yeah. The first thing I did that I would recommend to anyone is– I was unproven at the very beginning of this. No one knows me. I have no network. I thought I was proven because I had this PhD and everything. That’s not the case. So the first thing I did is, I mentioned I have a business partner who’s my PhD advisor, and when I was in grad school debating this, I went through this program called the National Science Foundation I-Corps, and they talk all about customer discovery. The goal being you’re trying to find a business plan. Don’t try to sell immediately. But it hammered into me the idea of customer discovery and customer development. So for the first year, my business partner is bringing in things that actually close in terms of deals and sales. So I’m getting referrals from the business partner. But while I’m doing that–

And how’s he getting– Is it because he was a professor?

They’re coming to him saying, “Hey, can you provide us this service?” And he’s saying that’s not really a thing that I should be doing in my academic position, but I have this company and my business partner, so he’ll refer them to me. So a lot of people came to him and he said, “Actually, try working with Stephen instead.” So there would be no business if I didn’t have that, if he wasn’t referring them and we weren’t partnered there. So I’m completely reliant on leads coming in from him. And then what I’m trying to do is as much customer discovery as possible. So I would say, “Hey. Can you make me a list of 30 people you know who you just think I should talk to? They could be total dead ends, but they have titles that seem like they’re relevant in the right positions. And I would go on and schedule as many meetings as possible, kind of meet and greets.  I’m not even really selling at that point. I’m just saying, who are you? What do you do? What are your problems? What’s your day-to-day life like? And just that was helping vet and validate what are the type of people we should be talking to. 

The next most important thing was just– I know everyone says this, but I mean, it really is true – just literally getting in front of your customers. I remember going to a conference once and I felt like such a fraud because I had $80 in the bank account. And I’m like, “Oh. I’m the CEO of this startup.” And I was like, this is just kind of make it or break it. If I don’t get a deal out of this, I’m kind of done. Because the sales cycle is really long. And I just so happened to sit at a table with someone who had worked on a similar project. So we chatted about that and that turned into a deal three to six months later. There was a speed networking event. And I told someone, “Hey, I do XYZ.” And they said, “I need that.” And it was kind of amazing because they just gave me their business card and it turned into a deal immediately. And that, like, changed my brain chemistry because I had so many prospects that I thought the right title, the right person, we have the right background, I have the skills. And they would go, “Yeah, we’re just kind of nervous about outsourcing. We don’t want to do that.” And I was like, “Wow, I just exhausted my network incredibly fast.” So I had to start looking a little bit broader. And I went to that one conference with $80, and over the course of three to six months, I got three well paying leads out of that. And that was kind of like a lifeline that got me there. 

The other part was to join a trade association. So there’s a conference organization, American Society for Nutrition. And I joined one of their subgroups that was just about companies. By joined, I mean I had to pay for the membership. I had to pay like $8,000 to be a part of this. There were like four zoom calls a year. The only value out of it was I could see the emails on the calendar invites. I was like, so thankful because you get calendar invites, you can’t see who was there. And for whatever reason, they allow everyone to see who’s joining the meeting. So you accept it and the thing goes to your trash. I just pulled it up. I was like, oh my God, I have like 30 emails and everyone’s an ideal client. And so what I did is I had a sequence of emails to send over the course of three months to just set up meet and greets with every one of them. And of those 36, I had a 30% response rate. So I got to talk to 13, and three to four of them became clients. And that was a huge inflection point because then I was becoming less reliant on those referrals to come through my business partner, and I was starting to be able to actually generate business.

18:36 Transition from Outbound to Inbound Lead Generation

What about today, Stephen? What you say is working best for you today, or what are you doing to build that pipeline and to bring in clients?

This is really bad. I’ve actually probably been the most lazy now than I’ve ever been on building that pipeline. I have never– It’s been all inbound, which, if I talked to myself even a year, two years ago, I would be so jealous of– Like you don’t have to schedule so many meetings over and over again. But one part of it is I have had clients where we did little projects before, and they had a good experience, and they’ve come back for big projects now. It took a year or two years for some of them, which is probably not encouraging for people to hear when they’re starting out if they might have to wait that long.

For some situations.

Yeah, for some situations. But I’ve also just been– One thing I’ve been doing a little bit more is I had a venture capital guy tell me once, “If you want money, ask for advice, and if you want advice, ask for money.” I don’t know if it’s true, but I had an experience on a project with one client, and I knew other people in the industry were having similar ones, so I just sent them an email. It wasn’t even that flowery. “Hey, we’re working on this thing. What have you done to solve this? Or does this even affect you?” And someone just said, “Oh, wow. We are looking at that. Why don’t I connect you with this person?” And then that led to another call. So most of my sales are very outbound, even though I just said, I’m getting inbound requests now. But I’ve done email newsletters and things. That’s a weak spot for us. I’ve got to work on that. But a lot of it’s just been outbound, trying to have as many meaningful conversations as possible and talk of something of substance. I’m actually usually not trying to sell too hard on them.

20:25 Scaling a Business While Maintaining Work-Life Balance

I can see it’s not your style, which is a good thing in many ways. 

I’m interested in the progression of how you’ve built your team. So I know you have some full time people, you have some contractors. Can you just talk a little bit about what that looks like today? And then how did you get to that? Because you had this partner who was a professor or university position. You’re getting leads from that. It’s just you. At what stage do you start building the team?

Yeah, I got, I think, all the things wrong initially too, to get to having some things correct now. I really built the team too prematurely initially. But right now it’s myself, my wife and one other full time scientist and we have some people that we contract things out to, but really the three of us kind of handle a lot of it. So three full time equivalents, we’ve had probably up to five to seven full time equivalents total before. And so when I first started out, it’s just me. I have more time than I have money, so I didn’t really need to build out a big team. I did realize, and I think this is common for some or many business owners, I was a really good starter, but not a good finisher. I could get clients on the line, but then I would just get bogged down by the amount of client delivery we have. Things would take me a long time and I had a hard time just like finishing things. I was much more interested in like, let’s just get another sale than finishing my actual obligation. So I knew I needed some team behind me to help on the fulfillment side of that. 

And everyone I ever hired, I would start out just as a contractor, just part time for that project. There were times though, where I converted a lot of them into salaried before I actually had the size of repeat business I really needed to. And then I also remember listening to one of your podcasts actually and someone said one of the first key hires people need is not a marketer, it is not the chief salesperson. It’s someone who can help them with the operations. I mean, I did the wrong thing. I was like, let me get people to help with the marketing before I even really knew what I wanted. So I built the team up a bit bigger too quickly. And then I downsized a bit to be where we are now as well. And I’ve just learned a lot about my tolerance and what I want to do for management. I’ve listened to your podcast for a long time. It’s interesting hearing people who have 20 employees and those who have done that and said, actually, “I just want it to be like me and a couple other key people.” So right now I’m really riding that. And what I’ve envisioned for the business has really changed over the years, too, especially once my son was born.

Stephen, can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I remember you’re one of our amazing clients in the Clarity Coaching Program. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing some of the things that you’ve been working through. And I remember, it really stuck with me when you said that it was like a very intentional decision to change the model and kind of change the structure of the business. And what resonated with me a lot and what I remember very clearly is, okay, here’s somebody who’s being very thoughtful and is not just prioritizing money and growth for the sake of it. You’re really thinking about what you want from a lifestyle perspective. You still want to make money. You still want to build. You have your son, right? You have a family. So you’re being very thoughtful about those things, but you’re not just only thinking about growth. You’re really wanting to have a good, strong balance. And you’ve been building a great, very successful business. But can you just talk a little bit more and share what was going on in your mind at that time? How do you think through it to arrive at the current model that you’re at today?

Yeah, I was actually really nervous to have our son. Not because– Obviously that’s a lot, but I was nervous that I would lose my ambition and my fears were correct. But I no longer feel bad about it. It actually did kill my ambition in some ways. But it was good because I did have this growth mindset. But it was a bad growth mindset. Before Henry, my son, I was like, if I have lots of clients and lots of projects, that means I’m valuable and people like me. So I would say ‘yes’ to projects I really should have said ‘no’. I would unintentionally discount or undersell myself when prices should have been really high. I remember selling something for $20,000 that if they asked now it would be $100,000 minimum. I had no idea at that time. Then I had our son. And this is a few years into the business, so I had gone beyond being starving. I went from grad school where me making $30,000 before taxes and my wife, a special ed teacher, making $45,000 before taxes, we weren’t even getting $80,000 before taxes, US dollars. So any success was nice. I didn’t need to make much to feel good. But then our son came around, and one, I just don’t have time. I didn’t have time to entertain things that were not going to be very profitable or high enough volume. But I had also gotten to a level of income where I started noticing that I don’t really know if I’m going to feel that much happier if I break my back to get this, to do this project. We’re kind of at capacity now. Before, I probably would have said ‘yes’ and done the whole figure out later, which I have done before and has not gone well. And so now, that caused a whole shift in my values and mindset because now I no longer feel like I need a lot of clients and a lot of revenue to feel that intrinsic worth. Now it’s kind of coming internally, which is a good thing. But it’s totally reframed how I approach things because I used to just get that value from, “I’m doing the marketing and the sales, and it’s growing.” And now sometimes I’m like, “More money, more problems.” And every parent I’ve ever talked to is always like, the years go by fast, and young age is so important that I’ve kind of intentionally, I don’t want to say paused or slow down, no, that is kind of what I’ve done a little bit. But I guess just be more serious about what type of people I want to work with, what type of projects I want to take, the price points, to make sure that I have enough time to spend with him when he’s young.

26:51 Prioritizing Lifestyle Over Aggressive Growth Strategies

I think in terms of what you’re saying, Stephen, your choice of words, someone could look at it and go, “Oh, you don’t have ambition anymore,” or maybe you’re a bit lazy is not the right word, but you don’t have the drive that maybe you had. And you might feel that part of that is true. But what I recognize in terms of what you’re saying is, I would probably use different words, I would say that you’re much more selective and you’re much more intentional. So I know where your business is at. You’re doing very well. You’ve got a nice tight team. You’ve structured the business to achieve what you want at this current chapter of your life. And that doesn’t mean it’ll always stay like this. It might change going forward, but you’re selective. 

And in fact, this is, I think, a really powerful thing for everyone, regardless of whether you’re a team of one or you’re a team of 10 or 20 or beyond. Just to pause for a moment and think about, what do you want to select? Because the value in your message is that just saying ‘yes’ to more or discounting or making all these sacrifices, does that really align with what you want? And what’s interesting is if you look at where your business is at today, you’re working with the kind of clients that you want to be working with. You have clients that are paying premium high value fees because they see the value. And so more is not always more. Sometimes less is more. And you structure your business to be a business that is based on value, not based on volume. Not everyone chooses that. Everyone has different goals. There’s no right or wrong. We work with lots of clients who want to build a team or they want to reach multi millions, or they want to have a productized offer and less customization and so forth. There’s no right or wrong. It’s all about figuring out what is right for you. So I appreciate you for sharing that.

Yeah, I think there’s a timing of it because there’s going to be a point in time- my son is 3, so I think when he starts going more full time to school, that’s when I’m probably going to ratchet up the way I scale the business, maybe to be more in volume. Because right now when I think of scaling it’s very easy to– Yeah, more is more. More projects, more money, more top line. Right now I’m thinking, let’s scale this such that I’m buying back as much of my own time as possible, such that I’m having as few late nights, early mornings and weekends. There was a time in this business early on where I was doing all three of those things and now I don’t get up early or stay up at night or go on the weekends. I have very well defined boundaries with clients. It’s 8:00 to 4:00. I don’t even look at email after that. I’m trying to scale it and really work on the process as much as possible, so that one, I just have enough time to spend with my family. I’m making the amount of money we want to make and I’m doing it with people and on projects I want to be doing it on. That was also a big learning where there were things we did that on paper were amazing. I just never really wanted to do it again because it was just mentally draining. So I don’t even know what the right word is – scaling inward? So I’m still trying to do all those, but do it in a way that makes sense for my current life stage and where we’re at.

30:07 Strategic Growth Through Defined Boundaries and Process Optimization

Yeah, it’s strategic growth. And how you define that will be different for different people.  And I think that to me is the most important thing. When we think about growing our business or ourselves, it shouldn’t be done based on the benchmark of what others are doing. It should be based on what is right for you and being open to bigger possibilities, but also being open to the idea that just growing for the sake of growing may not actually be the right thing. Even though a lot of society says it’s all about that’s how you measure success. That’s not the only way to measure success. It’s interesting because I was delivering a presentation just the other day and we talked about– I was kind of sharing and getting a lot of response from people in the audience. This was online so I could ask and see the Zoom chat being filled up with responses. But I said, “How many of you here are interested in just making more money but having a worse off lifestyle?” And it’s like nobody. Well, how many here are interested in making more money and having more freedom, having more flexibility, but essentially at the same time, what you’re doing is you’re creating a better lifestyle for yourself. And of course everyone’s like, “Yeah, that’s what we want.” So very often, people, unfortunately, when you get into business, not uncommon what you experience I’ve experienced is at times, I think most people have, where we’re just working so hard to grow, and we lose sight of what’s really important. And then we start to figure out, “Well, okay, what really is important?” And then we start to make these optimizations and adjustments so that we’re back on track. And I think that’s what you’ve done very well.

Now, I am trying to get rid of this in myself, but a lot of us really attach our value to how hard we’ve worked, and that gets into our pricing models too. And you’ve talked a lot about pricing by value, certainly not by hours. And I’ll have times where I look at what we’re doing and I find a way to do it better, and it’s saved, I don’t know, 80% of the time. Paradoxically, I feel like I’m not working as hard. I feel like I’m not working as hard, like, “Well, should I discount the price?” And I have to remind myself like, no, no, no. You just found a way to do this faster and better for cheaper. And if you’re getting it to your client faster, that’s more value, right? So maybe the price actually increases on some of these things. So it’s just so easy to just convince yourself that well, “If I just work hard, it’ll be okay.” And that actually might be why it’s not okay.

Well, so the other way this shows up, and I see this a lot, and I’ve definitely dealt with this is the entrepreneur, the business owner, not wanting to take time off for themselves. You feel bad not working, you feel bad not spending time on your business. Yet when you look at some of the most successful people around us, generally, they– I’ll put Elon Musk in a whole other category because he’s from another planet. Whether you love him or hate him, he had made amazing, amazing progress, and definitely do not want his lifestyle – but what I think what’s interesting is that so often we don’t feel good. We feel guilty taking time for ourselves. Yet, my point that I was making before going on the tangent with Elon is that the way that we all get our best ideas is not when we just. When we’re sitting at our desk trying to do our work, our best ideas come when we’re out for a walk, we’re in nature, we’re in the shower, we’re at the gym. And so these times, by giving ourselves more time to think, we actually end up creating more value inside of our businesses and become better parents or better partners or whatever it might be. 

And so this is one of these things that is hard for people, I think, sometimes, and I again, was hard for me for quite some time to understand that you need to give yourself that time if you want to actually grow as a person and as a leader and grow your business. But you can feel guilty doing it. But once you recognize that it’s not something that you should consider doing, it’s something that you really must do to show up and be your full self. 

Question for you then, I wonder if you were to go back in time, kind of the benefit of hindsight, what would you have done differently in any aspect of your business or your structure of the business, or price? Just anything that comes to mind, what stands out for you as something that you would do differently?

34:29 Practical Tips for Improving Proposals and Pricing

So two, I think, really tactical things you can do that I think made huge differences is present your proposals live. So I would have meetings with a client. I’d go away and I’d come back and I would email them a proposal. And sometimes they would say ‘yes’, a lot of times they would say ‘no’. And you just can’t tell what’s behind that ‘no’. And you don’t have an opportunity to combat any of those objections. And I resisted that for a long time because I was like, well, that just draws out the sales process. I could send it to them today, but now I have to schedule a meeting and people are in and out of the office. This is going to take another month. It is worth it. And to give an example of why it’s so worth it, I had a client say- well, we did this first discovery part for them. And then I said, “Okay. Well, the next part, what’s your budget look like? And they said, “We’re thinking only like another $10,000.” They had done $15,000 so $25,000 all in. And I was like, “Man, this is bad.” But I was like, I knew what they needed, and I presented something to them that was like $130,000, and I did it live. And that person went on maternity leave soon after that. But they were like, “Our boss loved that. We’re going to go with that.” And I was like, man, if I didn’t do that live, I would’ve just sent them the thing for $10,000. It just wouldn’t have worked. 

And the other part was doing the three options. I would usually just give them one number. And  there’s all sorts of reasons people have trouble with pricing. Like you don’t feel valuable enough or you don’t want the rejection or whatever it is. The three option thing is great because it takes the load off of yourself because you’re like, “Look, I gave them a budget friendly option that’s going to work for them, but I also gave them things that are going to provide even more value. So if they have the budget, they can choose those.” So you no longer have to feel like maybe you made a mistake by under or overselling and you missed the sweet spot. It’s like, well, you can kind of capture those three things. So that was so simple. Anyone can do that. And it literally changed my average, doubled my average deal size just doing that. So easy. Those are the things like that you don’t get on a lot of other business podcasts. You get all this like fluffy, un- intangible advice. I used to listen to How I Built This with Guy Raz and it’s like, I don’t need to be following the playbook of Ben and Jerry’s and Airbnb. We’re a different company, which is why this stuff was very helpful. So proposals, live with them, three-tiered.

I remember Stephen, you sharing in the Clarity Forum. Like some of these, I think I remember, if I’m not mistaken, that $130,000 deal specifically when you were talking about it with Patrick. And there are some things happening and I didn’t see you in that moment visually, but I visualized some of the light bulbs going off and the power of, “Oh, yeah, I can see how this makes sense to actually meet the client directly and review the proposal together” or the power of three options. And now you’ve applied it so, so well. 

Okay. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you, and I know I mentioned this before we jumped on. Your expertise is in nutrition. And so when we think about business owners, we think about people who are very active. Their minds are very active. They need energy to focus, to get stuff done, to give presentations. What stands out for you or what could you share with either a very common misunderstanding when it comes to nutrition, something you maybe think people are like they’re choosing, they’re selecting to eat or ingest or whatever, but it’s actually either much better or much worse for them than they understand? Or just maybe a little known nutrition fact or tip. What would you say to somebody who wants to stay more focused, more energized and, and just overall be healthier?

38:21 Nutrition Tips for Focus, Energy, and Long-Term Health

Yeah, I mean there’s long term things you need to do to change your lifestyle and habits, but there’s some short term ones which maybe are kind of obvious. Like tea. Tea has L-theanine in it and caffeine–

What kind of tea?

Green tea or black tea. Black tea is going to give you more caffeine, but L-theanine is like an amino acid in it and that’s in green tea as well. And those are well documented for promoting cognition, attention, memory, those types of things. Now long term, the majority of Americans actually people in western civilization are deficient in fiber. They’re not getting enough fiber. I mean everyone knows to eat your fruits and veggies obviously, of course, but a lot of people think of fiber. And I’m going to put in that bin prebiotics, which are technically not fibers, but they’re close. Think of them in terms of like oh, that’s in the laxative aisle, right? Oh, I don’t need to go more or I want to go less–

Metamucil or something like that. Right?

There is more and more evidence and this is why I did my PhD on that. It promotes brain development, it helps even on the emotion regulation side of things, waking stress levels, helping you pay less attention to the negative stimuli in your life and more on the positive. It’s unbelievable. Fiber affects everything in your life and that’s more of a long term. You’re not going to feel these–

And what would be the source of that? Is that just people going out and having more vegetables? So if somebody says, “Hey, I don’t really necessarily like the idea of having to hunt for fiber. What’s the one thing that I should eat or ingest that would give me more fiber?

Yeah. If you are not going to change any of your cooking habits, just go for a fiber gummy, just start there. That’s the easiest thing. Really long term, try to become a better cook and start consuming more beans, legumes, non-starchy vegetables. Non starchy would be like your broccoli, a lot of the leafy greens. Starchy, think like potatoes. It’s a lot of vegetables and fruits. And as scientists, we might debate about which ones are the best ones. And there’s all sorts of different types. And someone who’s not a scientist, doesn’t matter, just get more.

So, quick disclaimer and then I have one more question for you. None of this is legal advice, financial advice or health advice. We’re just talking here, two people, and take whatever you want from this, everyone, but just that disclaimer here. We’re not saying what you should or shouldn’t do necessarily. 

Is there one thing from a nutrition perspective that you hear, Stephen, or you see over and over again and you just think like, someone is lying completely because all the data, all the evidence that I’ve ever seen points to the opposite direction?

That is such a good question. Because it’s like death by a thousand cuts. There’s like a million little things that really bother me. I think one thing, though, is that a lot of fad diets do work, at least for a little while. If someone goes on a low carb diet or ketogenic diet, I’m not saying those things don’t work, but a lot of times when you have to go on a really restrictive diet, one, you’re probably being more disciplined than you’ve ever been. But two, you also are probably eliminating a lot of things that you shouldn’t have been eating. So it might not be the fact that you went low carb or keto or whatever it was, it’s that you stopped eating in excess or you stopped eating things that you shouldn’t really have been– You were having less candy, something like that. So the reason you get that benefit might not be what you actually went in for.

Yeah, I love that perspective. That’s really interesting to kind of think about that, because that’s probably what most people just focus on. The sexy, flashy, shiny object of whatever they’re being kind of touted. But you’re saying just the shift in habit to get there is what actually might be having a much bigger impact.

42:20 Debunking Misconceptions About Fad Diets and Sustainable Habits

I’m a sucker for this of like, “Oh, I just want to get more information and then make a decision. What’s the ideal macro combo? What are the foods?” I actually think knowledge is like 10%, maybe as little as 5%. Because you do see fitness influencers spouting off completely wrong stuff. But you’re like, “Look at them, they’re really fit.” Maybe not for the right reason, but it’s really a lifestyle change. It’s hard. It can be very hard to hit the right amount of nutrients and calories and things like that. And if you’re not a good cook, it’s not going to be fun so you really need to change your entire lifestyle. And I’m trying to do that myself. I’ve been in this for a long time. I just have a goal to eat three vegetables a day. And I’ve given myself an out that if that means I just have to go and eat one carrot, I got one. But try to have it more often because for me, big changes are totally unsustainable. So it’s got to be like a slow burn to a new lifestyle.

All right. Well, we’re going to wrap up then on the vegetable note. So, Stephen, where should people go if they want to connect with you or learn more? What’s the best place?

Yeah, our website, traversescience.com is a good place and that’s got a lot of examples of our work. And you can contact us through there, but you can also just reach out. I mean, if you search me, Stephen Fleming – Traverse Science on LinkedIn, happy to connect there as well.

Stephen, again, thanks so much for coming on.

Excellent. Thanks for having me.

Important Links:

Dr. Stephen Fleming

Traverse Science

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