Why the Best Consulting Clients Aren't the Biggest

What if the biggest constraint in your consulting firm isn’t demand, but the type of clients you’re saying yes to? In this episode, you’re going to hear from Hasan Mahmoud, founder of Boeing Group, a global consultancy helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies rethink how they design, scale and optimize their revenue operations. What makes Hassan’s perspective different is how intentionally he’s built the firm. Not by chasing the biggest deals, but by but by identifying the right sized opportunities that actually drive profitability, predictability, and team performance.

In this episode, you’re going to discover how to move from chasing elephants to building a more strategic client portfolio. How to create predictable growth through partnerships instead of pure outbound. And why shifting from time and materials to outcome based pricing is one of the most important evolutions a consulting firm can make. If you’re thinking about scaling but want to do it with more control, better margins, and less chaos, this conversation will change how you approach growth.

In this episode you will learn:

• How to move from “chasing elephants” to building a more strategic and profitable client portfolio.

• How to create predictable growth through strategic partnerships instead of relying on pure outbound marketing.

• Why shifting from time and materials to outcome-based pricing is a critical evolution for a consulting firm.

• How to build a trusted team and develop methodologies that allow you to work “on” the business, not just “in” it.

• How to navigate market plateaus and the importance of diversifying your service offerings and partnerships.

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.

Hasan Mahmoud, founder of Boeing Group, is a global consultancy leader helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies optimize their revenue operations. With a team of four dozen consultants, he focuses on designing effective go-to-market strategies, including territory and quota design, incentive compensation, forecasting, and workforce planning. Hasan’s expertise lies in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and technical implementation, moving organizations from spreadsheets to scalable systems. His firm, Voyant, evolved from its initial focus on compensation analytics to address the root causes of revenue challenges, positioning itself as a strategic advisor in the revenue operations landscape.

Connect with Hasan Mahmoud

Discover more about Voyant Group

Hey, welcome. Hassan.

Michael, It’s a pleasure to be here with the legend himself.

I’ll take it. I don’t hear that too often, so I appreciate it. Let’s talk about what you’ve built with Voyant Group. It’s now been well over a decade. Walk everyone through what does the firm look like today in terms of size, scope, anything that you’re able to share and just talk briefly about what is the work that you do. What are you really known for?

Sure, Voyant is a global consultancy. We are about four dozen consultants globally and we focus on helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organization go to market more effectively, helping them with systems such as their territory and quota design, their ability to pay incentive compensation, their ability to forecast, their ability to workforce plan, amongst other things. We help them with the process, the data and the technology bits of making those systems come to life, those are major problems. As you grow your salesforce and you get to a certain size, you have to graduate from managing things in spreadsheet. That’s where we are today. But when we started the firm about 10, 15 years ago, it was under a different guise. It was a similar mission, but we were really working with large organizations that were implementing technologies around something called incentive compensation. And we thought there was a better way. We thought there was a space between where the big four traditionally operated with large teams and large appointments and large implementation efforts that didn’t necessarily drive all the value that it could for the clients that it serviced. And then on the other end, you know, having technical folks that could help augment a solution in an SAP or an Oracle or some of the technologies that were known for ICM at the time, but they didn’t really provide a lot of the functional depth that mice required. So we saw a sweet spot in that space and that’s how we got started. There’s been a big evolution between that point and where we are today. And a number of things I’ve had to change that we’ve had to make adjustments.

Well, we’ll definitely, we’ll get into that. I mean, just regarding your positioning and what you truly want to be known for or what Voyant is known for today, was there a point in time that or something that you discovered, something that caused you to make the shift to focus on the market and provide the services that you provide today?

Well, I think it started with my experience in traditional consulting. I had to ask myself an existential question which was, is this the lifestyle that I really want for myself? Gathered a fair amount of expertise working in traditional consulting firms. I also worked for some of the software vendors that provided such services. And I had to ask myself the question, you know, where do I fit in this mix? Right? And I thought, hey, you know, I like to think that I’m a bit of a creative person and I follow my own drumbeat. And just going through that process, I found kindred spirits that could take me on a path to get there. It started with, you know, right after my mba, I discovered another fellow boutique founder that was operating in the same space and I decided to join PATS with that individual. That trained me into becoming a little bit more independent minded and the way that I approach solving problems for clients and to operate a boutique mindset. I did that for a couple of years and then I realized that, hey, I’m ready to graduate and do this with my own shingle. I found some other fellow minded people that saw the same problem that I did. They came from big four and you know, I was able to form what is today known as buoyant. We had a different name at the beginning. It was known as Compensation analytics, which is quite a mouthful when you think about it. Even then in crisping our value proposition for our clients. As we started to listen and understand to what our clients needed, we decided we needed a shorter, briefer name because compensation analytics is a little bit limiting.

Oftentimes you’ll hear people talk about the power of focus and compensation analytics sounds very focused. But you’re mentioning that the market feedback was maybe a shorter name. Talk about specifically why you move from compensation analytics to voind. And was that a hard decision or was it relatively straightforward to undertake?

Compensation analytics, I think was a little bit too narrow. It forced us to focus on where’s the real value at who is really our ICP Think about compensation. It is the end result of a root cause problem. And I think we recognize that the real value was really helping our clients move. They’re thinking around the problem, the root cause of what the challenge they were trying to solve was not in the tactical what do we actually calculate to pay somebody? It’s how do we design territories and build a quota that is actually going to drive the result we want. So that realization made us come to the conclusion this is a more valuable, interesting problem to solve for our clients. And we realized that, hey, if we can change our name to something that is a little bit more in general and buoyant is really supposed to be around clairvoyant, which is if we can be more predictive and have something that’s a little bit broader so we can handle a few more use cases as long as we can explain the value prop, that’s a better name for us. I mean, certainly it’s better for my fingers because it’s a lot shorter than compensation at all.

Was there a specific type of client or type of project that looking back, you should have stopped offering or taking on much earlier the business?

Yes, absolutely.

What, what was that?

I like the analogy. And, and I try to live by this. Right. And I. This is something that I’ve read and picked up on. This is my understanding of where I have to find my sweet spot as someone that’s operating a firm boutique. There are rabbits that you can go hunt, there’s deer you can go hunt, and there’s elephants you can go hunt. What we found is like when we started the business, we wanted to be just like Big four, let’s go on an elephant hunting expedition. Because there’s a lot of revenue in that. You know, those are, those are seven or eight figure deals. But we’re not equipped to really handle those types of clients. There’s a lot of escalations. You need large teams. There’s a lot of rigor and discipline in the way that you have to run those projects, not to mention the liability insurance you have to carry. As a, as a firm, we found that our life is better serving what we call deer, which is, you know, we find the right size of opportunities to hunt because it’s comfortable for us. Typically it’s going to be a really large organization that wants to run a project in an agile manner and get a result. Right. And they may view that as the first step in a bigger client journey. Or it could be a more mid sized enterprise account. You know something, you know, it may be a 1 billion to 5 billion dollar organization annually. Still significant problem to solve. But they wanted to, they want to think with more nimbleness and agility and use more modern cloud platforms to solve these problems. Those are generally better fits for us. And we realized that we had to focus on. The way you construct your team is totally different if you are servicing one type of client versus another.

And why do you think you held on? If you held on too long before making that shift, what was holding you back from changing earlier?

Certainly there’s a mindset which is what?

Like what was that mindset?

Oh, the mindset is just graduating from thinking that more revenue is better. You want to measure your time by. It’s not what you make on the top line, it’s what you’re able to keep, it’s what you’re able to do predictably and it’s what your team is able to realistically deliver. Understanding those things is very important. And a boutique, you know, we often compete with big fours and so there’s a tendency to want to try to emulate some of the things that does. We have to do that, but we have to do it in a, in a bit more expert way and a bit more accelerated way.

You talk about predictability, which is, I think, something that many consulting business owners desire, but it feels quite elusive. What have you found is the most important dial that you can turn or, or lever that you can pull that has achieved predictability in your firm?

The roller coaster of revenue volatility is still real. I think that we have become more predictable over time. And there’s a couple of things that we’ve employed to achieve that predictability. One is how we go to market. I think we do an excellent job of having a partner network and understanding how to work with that partner network. And that partner network is. It is software vendors having multiple software vendor partnerships where we’re able to provide value and go to market with them effectively. It is also things like partnering with other consulting firms. So we will partner with big force because they value our expertise and it is valuable on some of their own transformations that they go to market with other boutiques as well, where we can complement what we do and we’re adjacent to each other in what we do. And when you have those lead sources, it’s pragmatic as a boutique operator because that gives you enough opportunity, in addition to just getting better at farming our own accounts and understanding that there’s opportunity to continue to advise and help our clients.

One of the challenges or issues that business owners often bring up when, you know, you talk about partnerships specifically being connected to, let’s say, a larger consulting firm that you’re getting some deal flow from or you’re being brought into opportunities, is the potential margin erosion. How have you dealt with that? How do you think about it? What have you put in place to ensure that if you are getting involved in other projects that aren’t directly with kind of the end client, but through another consulting firm that that doesn’t have a negative financial impact on your business,

you have to be careful with the company you keep. I would say that, you know, we have to be very judicious in those partnerships. Establish up front our charter. What are the rules of engagement? How are we going to make sure that you deal engagement Margins make sense. There’s a couple levers we can employ. You know, we are a global team, so we can use a combination of fixed price structures and a good set of assumptions that we are constantly governing to make sure that if our scope changes, if an understanding changes or if a milestone changes because of a variety of factors, that we have some protection and there’s a vehicle for us to actually create a bit of a change request and those engagements.

What do you think prevents most consultants from turning their expertise into a truly scalable business?

I think most people like to practice and this is something that I’ve had a hard time with. You bring a lot of expertise. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I am forcing myself more and more to operate on the business and not within the business. It means you have to find some trusted advisors that you can bring along in your organization and that you can also train. There has to be some templatization of the way we deliver projects in the form of documenting your methodology, making sure that people understand the way that we have to help our clients be successful. But there’s a lot of basic and blocking and tackling around that, you know, making sure that they understand deal margin, that they can control scope, that there is quality in the delivery. It takes time. It takes time to build that trust in and some of the colleagues that you work, work with and in developing and training people so that it’s an investment in the short run. But in the long run, it does give you the ability to scale your business and to focus on other aspects of working on your business.

I think many consultants are overwhelmed at times with the idea of building their team and everything you just talked about, right? And taking that knowledge and expertise that you have between your ears and then making sure that the rest of your team can deliver at the standard of excellence that you set. You as a founder, have expectations oftentimes, right? Your employees, your team may not even know those expectations. But certainly there’s generally a gap between what you see as being excellent and then being able to deliver right away. Is there anything that you’ve done as a company, either in your hiring process or in how you train your team and how you kind of delegate that you feel has made a significant difference in a positive way to get people to a place where they can deliver confidently and at the, you know, the level of expectation and kind of standard of, of excellence that you have in mind?

Michael, you know, we just made reference to the fact that it’s building a trusted set of advisors. You know, I would say that, you know, my lieutenants, quote, unquote, those are the directors at Buoyant or some of the other partners of Buoyant. They’ve been doing this with me for close to from six to 10 years, depending on you’re speaking with. We’ve learned through our collective scars together in the field. We built some training and we’ve built some frameworks for some of our technical delivery, for some of our discovery that allows us to onboard juniors and just become part of the process. So there’s no magic bullet for that. It’s just, it’s a lot of hard work. We still have a ways to go and just continuing to improve the way that we can do this. But those are some of the critical things that you have to go, right?

So you’ve touched a little bit on some of the challenges or obstacles that you’ve encountered to this point in your journey today. You know, global company, almost 50 or so, let’s say team members. What’s the challenge or the obstacle that you personally are spending the most time on right now? Hasan, like, where are you focused?

Michael, I’m sure this is not going to be a revelation to those of us who work in the technology space. We are in a brave new world. Is a lot going on. Obviously we do a lot of work with software, cloud providers. It is an interesting era. AI is obviously a big discussion. We weren’t going to escape this conversation without talking about AI. And, you know, it is relevant the way that we have to position our value, the way that organizations are expecting AI to be baked into what we do. And they will question along the times, exactly why are you having to provide so much oversight or powers? Because. Because they expect oftentimes that, you know, a lot of our work is really configuration oriented. And I have to constantly remind our team, it’s like, let’s elevate the value of our consulting service. We are strategic advisors, not just configurators. We know the landscape of revenue operations and we should be articulating that value constantly. Of course, AI can help you accelerate a build, but it won’t tell you what to build and it won’t necessarily give you an insight as to is this a process, is this data and is this an interaction that humans or Personas that have to sit in these spots at our clients and these are Personas that we deal with hundreds and hundreds of times over, are they going to find value in the solution? That insight and that knowledge is valuable. Right. And just making sure that we articulate that cleanly and clearly. There is pressure on consulting services today, but being ahead of that, making sure that clients understand the value that we provide is broader than just being able to configure a platform. It is the subject matter expertise we bring to the table as well.

With AI specifically, you know, some organizations are, or even small firms are using it mainly on the marketing side or the content side. Others are using it very heavily in the work they’re doing with clients. So specifically on delivery. And then others kind of say three buckets are using it in the operations of the business itself. Right now at Voyant, which of those buckets do you feel you’re heavily applying AI to and just any other thoughts you have about where you’re going to be looking to go in the future.

With AI, we are using AI to bolster and strengthen our discovery. We are using AI certainly where it makes sense to help with configuration. I want to be careful with that because, you know, interestingly enough, where it really adds a lot of value is just articulating our value and assisting with research. Does it help beat up some configuration? Sure. I think the real value is presenting our expertise in a way that doesn’t require as much bricklaying or scaffolding as they call it. Putting a deck together now is accelerated. Now we can focus on the quality of the content versus the actual assembly of the deck. The additional research we have to bring to bear to do some of this becomes a lot easier.

That makes sense. So you talked about partnerships and it sounds like, you know, you’ve set up partnerships with other consulting firms. You have partnerships through different software organizations. Beyond the partnership side, how are you finding and winning clients today? Is, is there anything else that you’re doing that you feel has, has worked quite well for the firm?

It’s consulting at the end of the day and it’s a people related business. A lot of my business has come through word of mouth and other references or people that I know that happen to be in places at clients where they can make a phone call and ask me hey, I have a problem with X which is related to Revop. We’ll have a conversation. So a fair amount of it does come from that. The partner network helps me with that because you know, obviously your references will only go so far. We have gotten some interest increasingly through LinkedIn and some of the expertise that we’re putting out there. You know, marketing is tricky.

Just content like you’re publishing on LinkedIn,

it’s our content, you know, it’s tricky. Results is really a combination of all these things. It’s working with the partners, it’s having the content. It’s hard for me to attribute exactly what caused us to get a deal landed, but I do think it’s a combination of all those things you have to do all of it.

So let me just challenge that for a second. If let’s say you only had the time, the resources to choose one of those paths and your mandate was to bring on X number of new clients, what’s the first thing that you would do or you would tell your team to do to create that result?

Ah, you’re saving some of the tougher question or the we get deeper into this conversation. I see. Michael. No, no. If I had to choose one of those paths, I would build an endearing relationship with a software partner that was headed on an upward trajectory. That co selling motion and that partnership is really valuable so because then you know, we are riding a larger organization’s infrastructure. They have marketing reach, they have word of mouth reach, that is and they have, they have reps that sell.

That’s a good one. In order to and for you to grow the business to the size and scale that it is today. What is one or two things that you had to kind of give up or stop doing hasan that you feel in hindsight maybe you held on for too long.

I would have incubated some other partnerships sooner and I would have marketed more aggressively sooner. I would have built more marketing and content related systems much sooner than I did. There’s a natural evolution to software relationships where you will hit a trough of or a plateau, a trout disillusionment or a plateau in the market. Maybe it is because this is the first significant business that I’ve ever started. I didn’t have the wherewithal to necessarily recognize when that moment was going to arise. And because we were busy right how to really incubate the next set of endeavors or partnerships at the right time. I would say that if I look back, it’s like you always have to be mindful of while the going is good. Start incubating some of the other practice areas that you need to develop. Develop your adjacent service offerings that complement what you do because that gives you more to offer to your client base. And I would say don’t go too heavily into what you have to diversify what you’re doing as well. You know, I think if you are too dangerously reliant on one client or one software partner, that can be challenging as well.

How has your pricing changed over the years and what would you attribute the change to in terms of what caused the change?

We started like most consultancies, we were a TNM based shop. We do a lot more fixed fee today than we do TNM because clients want outcomes. They don’t want to be measured on a clock. We don’t want to be in the business of having to justify every hour that we spend that becomes a administrative burden. We want to talk about outcomes. We are getting more aggressive about outcome based fees. Other things that we do is even referral fees could be good. You know, sometimes it’s about positioning another consulting firm’s work and because you’re providing them an introduction or a milieu or working with them to enhance the value of the service that they provide, there can be a success for your finders fee in that as well.

Did you face any challenges? You said TNM for those may not be familiar. So time and materials right into more of an outcome project based approach to your pricing. Were there any challenges in making that transition? So if somebody’s right now joining us and they’re thinking well I’m still time material, I’m still mainly hourly. But I keep hearing or thinking or knowing that I should maybe make a shift towards something more. It’s project based, value based, outcome based, how would you counsel them or what would you tell them? Has been your experience in navigating that change.

Standardize your delivery as much as you can so that it’s predictable, so that you are not facing the risk of a bespoke engagement that is critical to that you’re not going to be able to, to do fixed fees predictably, reliably. And listen, we’ve learned everything the hard way. We’ve tried it all. You know, I’ve been doing business for 15 years. You know, we’ve had fixed fees where we did not make a lot of margin. In fact, you know, in some cases, yeah, I’ve had clients who’ve not paid because I won’t get into any more discussion about that. But you know, we deliver the services, you’re going to run into that you’re going to face those instances. It can be intimidating for a practitioner that wants to make sure that they’re paid for their time. But ultimately, clients care about outcomes. And so if you can make it predictable and you have confidence in doing it, as you get some success at tnm, I would argue start evolving it. You know, maybe it becomes, you charge in milestones so that you can chunk out the delivery a bit more and start to experiment with fixed fees or outcome based pricing and then evolve it more to, hey, when we deliver an outcome, we’re going to charge a fixed fee. What you’ll find is there’s probably more margin in it if you do it well and you do it with some templates and methodology. Yeah, but that’s an evolution. It takes time to get to that point.

Yeah, no, we definitely stand with many clients as well that making that shift is something that almost every person said, I wish I would have done earlier. But as you’re mentioning as well, it’s not an overnight change that people need to make. So how do you think about protecting, you know, margins and kind of managing the financial side of, of the business? Because you referenced earlier.

Right.

It’s not just about your top line, it’s about what you take home. And for many business owners in this space, their focus in the early days is very much on the revenue and they’re not paying as much attention to the margins and, and the finances in the business. What lessons have you, have you learned there, Hassan? I know you can’t cover all of them, but just maybe, you know, know one or two that stand out as harder.

Michael, as we get deeper into the conversation, that’s great. No, these are, these are good ones. What I would say is, number one, you have to have a long view. I used to think in terms of deal margins, I don’t think in terms of deal margins anymore. I think in terms of annual margins, I think in terms of three year horizons, you have to have a long view. You know, you’re going to have to understand that some projects are going to be learning lessons and you may not make a lot of revenue on a particular engagement, but that’s going to feed growing your business in some way. Whether that’s, hey, I’m training people and they’re going to ultimately be able to do the work in place of myself. That might mean that a deal margin is not as good, but that means that you’re, you know, you may lose a battle to win the war, so to speak. Right. That you’re making an investment in your business. Right. There’s too many of those examples for me to even bring up right now. But yeah, that, that’s one thing I would say. Another thing is just being more conscious of where you bring people in to help you. Sometimes it’s tempting to say, I’m going to hire this expensive expert, but you got to be careful. Sometimes you’ll get more mileage out of actually training younger consultants that are hungry and are going to be more willing to adapt to the way you do things than to partner with people that may be tough to justify their value.

Is there a framework or a filter that you use to make that decision? When you’re going to bring somebody new on to the firm, how do you think about should this be a more senior hire? They’re going to pay a lot more, but they have higher level expertise compared to.

They have to bring something really different to the firm than what we have today. If it’s too adjacent or it’s too ambiguous, I’ve done this. If the role is too ambiguous and I don’t understand the value that they’re going to generate very clearly, I’ve done that and it hasn’t worked out in my favor many times. Right. So I’ve learned that you have to really be clear about. It’s got to be really explicit when you bring up an expert consultant to help or you bring a contractor on to help you, it’s got the value of that has to be very apparent before you start that engagement. Yeah.

What have you found has been the most effective way of managing your team’s performance? So, I mean, most people are familiar with either OKRs or KPIs. Is there an approach, a philosophy, some kind of guiding principles that you use at Voint to ensure that all team members are making significant progress towards what success looks like or what their KPIs are? Just anything you kind of share around that structure would be great.

We do have formal performance reviews. I would say that we still deploy formal performance reviews, but I’M actually getting away from the formality of performance reviews and getting to more real time feedback. When you are a boutique, most of your goals have to be team based. We used to do things like we would measure people on utilization. I learned that utilization is actually not a great measure of performance.

Why is that? Why like in your experience, why is it not a good measure subject to

the whims of whether you happen to be engaged in a project or not? It’s not really indicating, uh, they’re oftentimes there are brilliant consultants who may not have high utilization because they’re between projects. Meanwhile, there are consultants that are keeping the lights on and they’re getting the job done. But are they really building something that is a valuable asset for the future? Not necessarily so. Sometimes it’s more important to measure the value of a bench project that’s going to lead to something bigger for the firm than measure whether you happen to be utilized or not. So, you know, I’ve moved to more team based fold. You know, are you helping out and doing things and building our culture and is the team hitting certain metrics and KPIs?

I’ve been thinking about the push, pull or the tension between urgency and patience. As an entrepreneur, we often have and feel a lot of urgency. Like we’re clear on what we want to accomplish. We’re often clear on like what we feel needs to be done in order to accomplish that. And there’s a sense of like we’re not as a team moving as quickly as we could be or should be to achieve that. Yet almost all studies and like when you read books and you look at successful people. Right. It’s the power of patience and compounding over time that creates the greatest successes that are sustainable and so forth. How do you approach that? Is that something that you’ve. You’ve kind of thought about? Hasan? I’m just wondering. Yeah. How you kind of manage internally that tension between urgency and patience.

It’s a balancing act. I tend to be patient. Again, that’s where I’ll go back to. You have to have a long view of things. Consultants are going to make mistakes because we’re human after all. Right. I think the client situations are challenging. They demand a lot. That’s why we’ve moved to real time feedback, because we want to be corrective in the moment. That’s when you learn the most. But it is, you know, it is a challenge. You have to understand that sometimes it takes a couple of projects for the lessons that you want to have learned to really Be digestible for the consultant. If that carries on for three years, that’s a different story. Right. That’s why during the performance review, we’ll capture where the consultant has done really a nice job with things. There’s always opportunities for improvement and then we’ll track that over time. Time. But that real time feedback is important because we do want to see that correct happening. So it’s a balancing act. It’s a bit of both.

Have you ever experienced in the 15 years of the business’s life to this point, a period where the business had plateaued or the business was not growing in the way that you expected that it would or wanted it to?

Absolutely. I think there’s probably two flat cells I can speak to. The first plateau occurs when you exhaust your friends and family and your existing network. And I’m sure, Michael, this is something you probably hear about all the time. It’s like you start, you have success, you’re too busy delivering and you haven’t paid enough attention to have I set up the partnerships. Is there enough awareness about who we are to really well and grow? We went through that probably, you know, we started 15 years ago, we probably went through that 10 years ago. Fortunately, that was also a patience game. We had to figure out how to refuel the plane while we’re still flying. And then, you know, there was another plateau when one of our main software providers was acquired by private equity. And so that was about four years ago now. And so we had to shift our focus and priorities and change some of the way that we were structured to respond to some of that evolution in the market. So you’re going to run into that. If you’re in business for over a decade, one piece of advice is it’s normal. Don’t get frustrated by it. It’s just part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur and running your own business. It’s a natural part of the cycle. Use your resourcefulness and be honest about where you are with things. You know, you have to make a lot of honest calls. Shifting your priorities, changing your staffing mix, changing your focus. It can feel frustrating at times, but you have to go into it with a pragmatic approach. And you’re always curious and you’re always learning because you may have to pivot and do something different.

I was going to ask you this later, but I might as well ask it right now. Every entrepreneur gets to a place where, and often this will be multiple times, you know, where you either question the future of your business or you just feel you Know you’ve been punched in the gut and it’s not a. Not a pleasant experience to have. Yet. The most successful entrepreneurs are the ones that get back up. They keep going. And I’m wondering for you, Hassan, what’s your belief? How do you deal with those situations that are tough, they’re not fun, they feel negative. Right. They’re challenging. What keeps you going? What’s your mindset? What’s your belief system? How do you make sure that you’re not out and you’re able to continue moving forward?

I love what I do. That’s fundamental. Like, I love being a consultant. I love practitioning as a consultant, love solving for my client challenges, and I enjoy working with them, my clients. I enjoy coaching my team. I think I’ve developed an excellent team. I think we have the grit of having done delivery for a long period of time and we deliver excellent results. Our reference ability is extremely high. Those are the things when you get the, you know, when you get praise from a partner, when you get praise from a client, when you see for the size of firm that we are, you know, our client logos are mostly Fortune 500. That is extremely gratifying to see what we’ve been able to accomplish, which is why you have to have that long view. I would come back to you, like, you’ve always got to enjoy what you’re doing if you love what you do. And that sounds cliche, it might be like the movie, One Battle after Another. You know, it’s Leo DiCaprio and it’s like, you know, nothing’s really a series of that. You’ve got to just be ready to take on the challenges that come with delivering excellent work for demanding clients and then all the other mechanics and the, and the politics and the people management that comes with that.

So I just took a look at the clock and I want to be conscious of our, of our time and respect that time that we have in the calendar. So I’m going to wrap it up here. I really appreciate you coming on. I want to make sure that people can learn more about you and about the work that VO is doing. Where’s the best place for them to go?

Www.voinkgroup.com we do have a website and of course you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Those would be the best place to engage us.

Wonderful. We’ll link that up in the show notes. Hassan, again, thanks so much for joining.

Thank you so much, Michael. Appreciate it.