Why Trust Beats Lead Generation for Consulting Growth

What if the fastest way to grow your consulting business isn’t better marketing, but deeper trust inside the relationships you already built? Mooly Beeri spent years leading large-scale software engineering organizations at Microsoft and Philips, but when he launched his own consulting firm, he discovered that no amount of outbound campaigns could replace the power of genuine connections.

After hiring and firing six lead generation agencies, losing two major clients in six months, and watching a viral LinkedIn campaign generate millions of impressions but zero revenue, Mooly rebuilt his entire consulting practice around disciplined relationship management. In this episode, he reveals why 90% of his revenue comes from past connections, how his diagnostic framework doubles as his most powerful lead magnet, and why offering free discovery work converts better than any sales pitch.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why six different lead generation agencies failed to bring in a single client and what finally worked instead

• The costly mistake of neglecting business development when large projects are keeping you busy

• How to manage client concentration risk so losing one contract doesn’t sink your business

• Why a visual diagnostic framework is the ultimate conversation starter and lead magnet for consulting firms

• How offering a free month of discovery work converts prospects into long-term clients

• The disciplined HubSpot-powered system Mooly uses to stay top of mind with hundreds of ideal clients

• Why chasing vanity metrics like LinkedIn impressions can distract you from what actually drives revenue

• How a subscription-based coaching model creates scalable delivery without heavy implementation work

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.

Mooly Beeri is a software engineering leader, consultant, and CEO of BetterSoftware.dev, a firm that helps large enterprises diagnose and fix underperforming software organizations. With senior roles at Microsoft and Philips, where he built the company’s first software center of excellence, Mooly developed the Engineering Optimization Framework, a diagnostic tool that benchmarks teams across the full development lifecycle.
Connect with Mooly Beeri
Discover more about BetterSoftware.dev

What if the fastest way to grow your consulting business isn’t better marketing, but deeper trust inside the relationships you already built? Mooly Beeri spent years inside global tech giants like Microsoft and Philips, leading large scale software engineering organizations. But when he launched his own consulting firm, he hit a wall most founders don’t expect. No pipeline, no built in demand and no projects falling into his lap. In this episode you’ll discover why six different lead generation agencies failed him. How losing two major clients in six months reshaped his entire approach to business development. And why 90% of his revenue today comes from something far simpler than funnels or outbound campaigns. If you’re building a high level consulting practice and want more stability, stronger positioning and clients who already trust you before the first call, well, this conversation will shift how you think about growth. So dig in and enjoy. Mooly. Welcome.

Thanks. Nice. It’s good to be here.

[01:39] – The Mindset Shift from Corporate Leader to Founder

Yeah, I’m looking forward to our conversation. You have a long track record of working inside of technology companies in senior roles. You’ve also been a founder before starting your consulting business, which we’ll talk a lot more about here today. Companies like Microsoft, Philips, I mean some very well known names. But let’s kind of go to and start this conversation. I’d love to know when you think about your first kind of six months or so as, as a founder in this consulting business, what kind of stood out to you? What surprised you about, you know, being a founder of a consulting business in comparison to being a leader of, you know, an engineering team or an engineering department inside of a larger organization?

Yeah, yeah. So I have worked many years in large corporates like Microsoft and Philips, as you had mentioned. And then when I spawned off my own business, I was actually, I didn’t even call it a consulting business. I was just trying to repeat the success I had inside the corporates, outside. And then it became very clear that it’s very difficult to get any clients. So I was used to the fact that business just came to me. I was literally sitting in my room in Philips when someone walked in and said, hey, can you help me build a software center of excellence? And I was like, yeah, this is my passion, let me do that for you. And then I was half expecting projects to fall into my lap at the same pace when I was starting to work independently.

Yeah, I mean this is a challenge I think so many people have. Right. When you are working inside of a large or just very well established organization. I mean the product, everything that’s being sold. Right. It’s not about you and it often will come to you. But when you have your own business, it’s a, it’s a very different mindset and very different reality that now you are the product and that requires, you know, building relationships around that or promotion around that. So how did you start to navigate that? I mean, what, when you kind of had that realization, what was the first one or two things that you did to overcome that and start actually growing the business?

[03:33] – Network Outreach vs. Lead Generation Agencies

I was basically trying two different angles and I’ve done quite a lot on both of them. One is try to use my network as much as I could. So start getting in touch with all the, my previous connections, try to understand where do they land now, do they need the type of service that I was known for providing. And so that’s one angle and we can expand on that if you want. And also what I did was to start hiring, go to market agencies to bombard the market with lead generation and schemes and mass outreach programs and so on, which worked really bad.

So it didn’t work well.

It taught me a lot. But, but it did work in the sense that it didn’t bring any business. But so I’ve, I’ve, over the years I’ve hired and fired probably six or seven agencies of that sort. And through that process I’ve learned quite a lot because I had to, I had to come up with my own messaging and my ICP and the marketing materials and so on. So it, it helped crystallize what I’m doing and making it more visible and, and, and better articulated. But it didn’t bring any business.

[05:33] – The Cost of Neglecting Business Development

So we’re going to, I want to kind of go deeper into that in a few minutes because I think there’s, there’s probably some very important lessons there that’s maybe, you know, one, you can call it a mistake. I think the way you described it, just in terms of you learn lessons from it is a much better way, a healthier way to, to view that early on in your business or even, you know, over the last couple of years. Is there another mistake? Learning opportunity, something that you tried that maybe didn’t work as well as you would have liked it to. That stands out that you know, looking back, you maybe would think to yourself now, knowing what I know I would, I would have handled that very differently.

One mistake that I regret is that when I landed my first couple of large projects, I neglected business development almost completely. And I was, I was content. I, I had great business, I had great income, I had great projects, I was having fun and So I was gradually focusing more and more of my attention on a couple of large clients. And then in, in a span of six months, I lost both of them. And then I ended up being with no, no income and actually also no funnel. And so now regardless of how much work we have going on, I always spend, I don’t know, 30, 40% of my time, personal time, on business development. And I’m always, I’m trying always to treat every day as an opportunity to try to get more, more business because it, it, it can all end up, end immediately or without any.

What you’re bringing up is such an important reminder, hopefully for everybody because we’ve had clients that are, you know, running even, you know, seven figure or multiple seven figure businesses. They’re doing very, very well or you know, a solo consultant doing high six figures. And this issue is usually, you know, most common not when somebody is struggling, it’s when things are actually going well, you take your eye off of and you know what actually work to get you to where you are. And so I think now that that realization or that lesson that you’ve, you’ve learned about the importance of doesn’t matter how successful you are, how much you have going on, that you always need to be working on business development in whatever form that that might be. And I do want to go deeper into that in terms of what does business development look like for you? How do you get clients in the early days? How are you getting clients today? But before we do that, you talked about these, you had these two kind of large projects which consumed all of your attention. Therefore you weren’t working on growing the business during that time. And then six months later those projects came to a stop. Was that it was an unexpected stop, meaning that they ended before you thought that they would or did the projects naturally like what happened in that scenario. So that just to give you a bit more context and help them to maybe see some, you know, similar situations for themselves.

[08:02] – Managing Client Concentration Risk

Most of my clients are large enterprise companies and they work with yearly budgets and they usually don’t like to commit to more than a single year. And you usually have a sponsor within the company who owns some budget. They’re very usually, they, they’re happy with what you’re doing for them and they say, yeah, of course we’re going to renew for the next year. It’s not a problem. It’s in the budget, it’s in the plan, it’s in the final budget file, it’s in the short list of the last projects we have. For approval. And then some company directive comes in to cut all budgets by 20%, 30%, whatever. And then they politely apologize and say, well, we hope we can do business with you next year. But then comes November, December and so on. And then you’re, you’re without the project. So. And that happens quite often. And it’s fine if you have, if you’re not extremely dependent on one or two of those. So I always say if you have 10 projects ongoing, they have their own life cycle. They can come and go as they please. You’re not overly stressed over when whether one of them continues or stops and so on, they have a natural cycle and you’re not too dependent on them. If you have only one and they don’t renew, then yeah, of course you’re back to being unemployed.

This is why, coming back to what you just mentioned before, it’s so important to always making sure that you’re working on building that pipeline, doing business development. And I think the way that you just described how many large organizations work, right, it’s, you might get an initial signal that they want to do business with you and it seems like it’s moving in the right direction. But at any moment something can change. And in a large organization, it’s, you know, very, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to do much about that unless you have a relationship with, for example, you know, the CEO or you know, somebody at the highest levels. But even then at times, right, the board can, can influence things. So for a large organization, a change of, you know, half a million dollar contract or $1 million contract with is really not a big deal for them. But for a small consulting business, it’s, you know, it can be, it can feel like everything. And so I think that’s just a really important reminder. I’m glad that you’re bringing it up so that everybody who’s, who’s listening to this right now, you know, take a look at your client concentration. Do you have a client concentration issue? Right. You want to create enough diversification and have enough, you know, numbers of clients and especially pipelines so that if anything does change, because things always can change and you want to be prepared for the unexpected, that’s what ultimately will, will make you not only more successful long term, but it’ll also, you know, leave you feeling more, more clear, more confident, less stressed. Right. Less anxiety and all those things that can come up if you’re not prepared for it. So let’s, let’s, before we get back into the marketing Stuff. I want to talk a little bit more about your methodology because you developed something that you call the engineering Optimization framework. And I’m going to pull it up here because I want everyone to be able to see it and just have you kind of talk through it. So give me one quick second here. So I think we’re looking at it right now. Mooly, can you just maybe describe, like, why did you create this? What, what first, like what are we looking at? And what was the problem that you were looking to solve by creating this framework?

[11:35] – Building a Diagnostic Framework That Sells for You

This was created many years back, maybe 10 years back, when I was asked to build a center of excellence for the first software center of excellence for Philips for the corporate. And then I had to. Philips at the time was built from many different acquisitions and many different small software entities. All of them were thinking, hey, Philips acquired us, so we’re definitely the best. And so our processes and methodology etc are the ones that should prevail in the Philips environment. And of course the CTO and CEO at the time had this mass of different technologies and different approaches to software development and they wanted some way to benchmark them one against the other and try to understand what should be the way of developing software across the entire core. So myself, with a couple of other talented people set up to find some way of benchmarking all different aspects of software, one against the other. And this is a corporate where at the time it had very varied software. So software that goes into espresso machines, software that goes into vacuum cleaners, software that goes into CT scanners, MRI scanners, runs complete hospitals and so on. So very diverse portfolio. And so we went back to the basis basics of software and this is the software development life cycle, the ISO standard which you see here. And we created this framework which basically ranks the effectiveness of an engineering organization across the entire spend of the software development lifecycle. In other words, with this one view, you can understand how well is a software team operating, regardless of the tech stack, regardless of the tools that they have, doesn’t matter which programming language they use, and so on. And it all boils down to single effectiveness KPI, which you can use in order to benchmark the team, then of course, more importantly to improve them over time.

And how are you using this today? So I understand, I mean you developed this with colleagues at Philips. What role does this play in your business today? Is this something you use for content? Is it only something that you talk about when you’re working with a paying client? Is it part of your marketing or sales process? Just kind of share how this is being applied or used today?

Sure. This is very central to the business today. When we go in, our business helps large scale software projects that suffer from either delays or high cost or customer escalations. And we help the engineering leaders fix that. And the way we help them is first do this analysis and get this heat map for their organization and then we know where the problem is and then we start fixing one problem at a time with the organizations by let’s make it very simple. Taking all the red stuff and making it yellow and then taking on the yellow and making it green. And so this heat map is our tool to continuously measure, adapt and show the organization how it’s improving over time.

And as you’ve gone through it, have, have you spotted any patterns that you’re able to say, you know, when you walk into a prospective client conversation that because you’ve seen it come up over and over again, you kind of know what to look for? Has that also been something that has shown up for you? The patterns of what most organizations tend to have? And I’m just wondering how you might kind of approach that.

Yeah, if you think about the software today, actually almost every company in the world has some dependency on software and that is unrelated to software companies. So the company providing electricity to your house depends on software. The company selling you airplane tickets depends on software. And all of these companies, they would like to ship world class software, but on the other hand, they’re not software experts, they’re not hiring the software experts of the world. They go to work in Google or Amazon or what have you, and then there is a huge dependency on software, but it’s not managed in, by the standards that are prevailing in the world leaders around software. And so what, what we do is basically bring these world class practices into the reality of companies that are not experts in producing world class software.

[17:11] – Free Discovery Work as a Client Conversion Strategy

Do you feel that having the framework, especially a visual framework like this is very beneficial to your business? And you know, would you kind of position as, or think about it as a requirement for any consulting firm or is there a situation where you think maybe this is not a requirement or something that not everyone necessarily needs?

For me it’s, it’s a, it’s a requirement. It’s, it’s, it’s a very essential tool, very essential lead magnet. It’s one of those things where people see this and say, hey, I want to see how this works for my company. I’m interested in this heat map. Can I get one for my business as well? And so for Me, that’s conversation starter, that’s a door opener. And honestly, we can elaborate on that if you’d like. But actually, for any new client, I would do this analysis to get to the first heat map for free. I’m basically saying you want to know what your initial status is. You got it, Just let me in, I’ll do it for you for free and you’ll have it. And hopefully you’ll enjoy the discovery process so much that you would like to work with us also to improve it and not only to give you the diagnosis.

Let’s talk a little bit more about that and how you might kind of think through that. You know, I’m, I’m assuming you don’t just open that invitation up to, to anyone. There are some criteria that you’re looking for in order to make sure that your time or your, you know, your team’s time will be spent wisely in doing that, that discovery. So what are you looking for? How are you deciding whether you’re going to take that time to actually do this for somebody at no cost?

Well, maybe this will sound a bit strange, but for me, of course there are some qualifying criteria for clients. I mean, it needs to be a large enough company with enough software engineers. I mean, we help large scale software projects. So you need to be running a large scale software to a certain extent. So I don’t know, 100 people or more. But then if you’re interested and you’d like to know your initial stage in diagnosis, we basically say the first month of work that we usually do for new clients for one of your teams, we will do for free. There are no strings attached, really. And this is, for us, it’s a win, win because for us, it’s a great discovery process. We get to get in, we get to ask all the questions, we get to understand all the problems in detail. And so when we present our findings after this first month, these findings match exactly to the exact problems the company has. And we have the exact recipe on how to solve it because we know everything after this one month. And for the client, it’s also good. They get their discovery, they know where they are, and yeah, we don’t win all of those. Sometimes we do the discovery and they say, yeah, that’s nice, we will fix it ourselves, that’s fine. Many times they try to fix it themselves. And then after a year they come back and say, well, we tried. Can you, can you do another diagnosis for us or can you now help us with your own capabilities? Because we don’t think we’ve improved enough or fast enough, etc.

[20:58] – Why 90% of Revenue Comes from Past Connections

So when we come, if we come then back to the earlier conversation around how you’re getting clients. Is is this one of the main approaches in terms of using the framework and kind of that first month of call it a trial or a discovery or is there something else that you are finding is the most effective in today’s market really to create those conversations with ideal clients?

Yeah. Offering this free proof of concept to someone who doesn’t know me doesn’t yield business. Okay. Because I think you know this better than me. But at the end of the day, when someone buys consulting, they buy the ability to trust you. And someone who doesn’t know you, it will take years before they trust you. Or maybe not years, but a long time before they’re willing to trust you. So that’s a good way of getting into an organization once someone already opens the door. And opening the door is almost always through past connections. So I have a very large network, probably 10,000 connections which I’ve grown over the years and I keep touch in touch with individuals there. I’m curious about where they’ve gone and when they’ve moved to a different position. And a lot of my business really I haven’t done the math, but probably more than 90% is colleagues that I worked with in the past and moved to a different company and had said well, can you come and do the same thing you did in this previous company? In my new company now and then to introduce into the new company we do this proof of concept and free month work and so on. Yeah.

So two things I want to just highlight there. I mean the first is you mentioned working with 5, 6, 7 different agencies over the years on lead generation. Right. And not getting the results that you had hoped for, which is something that we hear very often and you know, a reason why people reach out to us and often to get help to grow their business because they’ve tried all these things and but you really kind of touched on why many of those things don’t work. It’s because they’re just sending messages to people that they have no relationship with. They don’t trust them. And I obviously I haven’t seen the messages that you had sent in the past, but it’s quite common for those messages to come across as being kind of overly promotional or salesy or one sided there you can tell that the person you know sent the same message to hundreds of other people. And so that that makes sense. I think that part about Trust. Now what I want to go a little bit deeper into is you’re talking about that most of your business, if not all of it, comes through your network, which is very common in the consulting space. But I’m wondering, Mooly, is, is your approach like I know, I think I saw on LinkedIn, you have 10,000 plus connections. Is it just every day you wake up and you think about kind of going through that list, deciding to contact a few people. So is it just kind of an organic, very free flowing, knowing, yeah, I’m going to check in with my network or do you have a system and a plan for how many people you’re going to reach out to every day, every week, every month, Certain messaging that you use, like how intentional is it compared to kind of how organic is it?

[24:04] – A Disciplined System for Relationship-Based Growth

Yeah, it’s a highly disciplined system. Nothing organic about it. I mean, if I see a notification about someone I know started a new job, yeah, I’ll say congratulations, etc. But usually also I have an offline list of all of my connections. Some of them are already in my HubSpot because I’ve done some, I’ve had some exchanges and so every time I have an exchange with someone, the exchange ends with a task in HubSpot that will pop up at what I think is the appropriate time and then I will reach out to them again. The content of this reach out will be a little bit free form and kind of depends on the context. If that specific week we have developed like a self assessment module and someone’s names popped up, then I’ll send him a note, hey, there is a self assessment model. Do you want to. The important thing is not the content of the message, but staying in someone’s mind, staying in their awareness. So when they say I’ve got this software problem, let’s go, let’s go talk to Mooly because yeah, he’s the software guy. I don’t remember what he’s doing, but I remember he’s doing software thingies. So let’s, let’s, let’s talk to him. So every conversation that is existing is in HubSpot and the larger pool of people that are, let’s say in the more slow reach out, then I have a quarterly task where I have this offline list of all my main connections, the one that are ICPs and the one that are, I think are worth pursuing. I’m not reaching out to 10,000, right? And out of the 10,000 there are probably a few hundreds which are my ICP and, and then for each one of those, once a quarter I will reach out. Like, no, nothing more than, do you have a few minutes to talk? And I just want to get on the phone with them and have a conversation. And without, without not anything to sell. Just, I just want to have a conversation with them. And if I can get into an actual call with them, very often they will bring up something that they need help with. So I’m not reaching out with, hey, is now a good time for me to sell you this specific offer? And so on. Because if you do that 99% of the time, my experience, they will say, no, no, this is not the right time. We’ll reach out to you when it’s the right time. And it never happens. So I’m just reaching out to have a conversation.

[28:30] – Choosing Relationships Over Vanity Metrics

And that makes a lot, a lot of sense. But I think for many people, Mooly, when they hear that, they’re a little bit conflicted because their mind is telling them I need to be intentional about making an offer. I need to make sure that the market knows the exact problem that I solve and the solution that I have to that. And so they tend to lead with a message around, here’s what I can do, here’s the problem I solve, right? Here’s my offering. You’re saying that in your experience that’s not what you do because you don’t want to be coming across as salesy. It tends to lead to people putting up their, their guard. Right. And not wanting to have that conversation. So your approach is, call it much more of a longer term relationship building approach where you’re not leading with a solution to a problem, you’re leading with a relationship and a conversation. But the challenge for many, right, is that that feels, and in many cases it might seem like it can take longer to bear the fruit that you want in terms of, you know, growing the pipeline and, and moving sales forward. What’s your experience been around that and, and how do you think about that? And I’m wondering also, like, has your, has your thinking changed about that kind of progression or has it always been that way?

I’ll start with the last question. My thinking has changed a lot over the years and I’ve definitely started off by trying to get my framework in front of people as much as possible. And it has changed and I think it’s finally working now in the sense that you have to realize people don’t care what you can do and people don’t care what your solution is, and they don’t care about your capabilities and they don’t care that you’re available and that you’re now looking for. They don’t care if they’ll speak to you is because they have a problem and they want a sounding word. They want to tell you about something they’re troubled about. And so the telling someone that you have a framework or you have a system or you have, look, I did this great thing for Mercedes, okay? I don’t care. I’m stuck in this mess right now at my job and I don’t know how to get out of it. So you have to get to the point where you’re relevant for them. You’re just, you’re existing there as someone who’s, who can, who they can talk to, they can vet their problems. And can I give you an example or you. Yeah. So I, I, five years ago I had interviewed for position in the company and then ended up being one of my, my clients as, as a consultant. But the CEO interviewed me, was kind of impressed with my profile. And then a couple months after I joined, he left to a different company. And now two months ago he pops up again on LinkedIn and he says, Mooly, are you still doing this software thing? Because we have some problems in my new company and now in a completely different domain, completely different industry, an industry I’ve never worked with. Okay, but he has a software problem and he’s like thinking mentally through his notebook and who do I know about software? Ah, this guy is posting on LinkedIn. This guy. I, I interviewed him. Yeah, yeah, I’m, I’m going to reach out and, and now they’re, they’re, they’re starting as a client for us. So for me this is how it works. Maybe it’s not a recipe for everyone, but for me this is how it works.

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[34:55] – The Wake-Up Call That Changed Everything

Was there a transition that you needed to make from the time where you were trying a bunch of things that maybe weren’t working? And then I’m really wondering about, like that, that mindset shift Mooly between trying to get business going and doing promotion to recognizing. No, I need to take a different approach. I need to slow things down. I need to really focus much more on the relationships, knowing that it might actually take longer to generate business, but long term it would be more successful because there’s almost like a leap of faith that you need to take. You have to kind of, you know, some people might say, you know, burn, cut the ropes, right? Burn the ships. Like, there’s no going back. This is a new way of doing things. How did you overcome that? Was there a project you had that gave you the cash flow so that you could be kind of braver and, and go for this change or what? What ultimately kind of was a turning point and how did you overcome that?

Yeah, so I was getting more and more frustrated with this lead generation and the wake up call for me was actually when I teamed up with a really great content generation team that was able to generate a mass of interest on LinkedIn. I mean like million impression posts and thousands and thousands of likes and comments and, and I was busy that night, night and day trying to catch up with all the different interactions and so on. And, and of course I was also paying this marketing agency. But then at some point I realized all of my busy hours are spent on noise in LinkedIn and these guys were good in what they do. Okay. And so they, they were able to make the problem so severe for me that it became apparent that I can spend my entire life answering to comments on LinkedIn and yeah, but no business is going to come out of that. And so what happened is I,

was trying out the approach. Also listed in David A. Fields’ book of looking through your contacts. And that time I was fixed on trying to get on a discussion with people who are responsible for software excellence in their companies. And I was really spending most of my time trying to get into a conversation with these guys. And I was scanning my contact list and suddenly I stumble upon one guy whom I know very well. We’re actually friends. I mean, we haven’t spoken for maybe 15 years, but we have traveled abroad together for work, we have eaten in restaurants together. We haven’t spoken in 15 years. And this guy is now the head of Software excellence for Nvidia. Okay, like the largest company on the planet and the head of software excellence whom I would probably kill to get a conversation with. And then I bring him up and this guy is now making lunch for his daughter and he’s talking to me while making lunch to his daughter because we haven’t spoken in a while. And okay, Nvidia is not, is still not my client, but not yet. But this was for me a wake up call because the effort I spent on trying to get people who don’t know me to actually have a conversation was immense. While the people who do know me are progressing through their career and getting to better and better positions and are becoming the ideal clients for me.

I think it’s a very good reminder for people to avoid focusing on vanity metrics. Very often you’re chasing more interaction or impressions or views on your posts or more likes, you know, more, more, more is rarely the, the solution, right? It’s, it’s a value over volume, right? Quality over quantity. In the consulting business, if you’re running maybe A, A, B, 2C business to consumer type of business, then, then yeah, more and more is great. But for the vast majority of consulting firms out there, even if you got, you know, 50 clients at one time because your marketing just worked, but you couldn’t handle it and you probably wouldn’t want to handle it, right? So I think this is an important reminder for everyone who’s joining us right now to look at what are you actually focusing on and what are you optimizing for? Because what we’ve certainly seen with so many clients that we worked with over the years is that as we kind of audit and go deeper into all the assets that they have in place, all of the experience and expertise, and that in so many cases there is great opportunity, like sitting right there in front of them, but they’ve just not been able to see it because like that common saying, right? You can’t read the label from inside the bottle, right? We all have this. This is why I think the most successful people in all aspects of life don’t try and accomplish everything themselves. They have coaches, they have mentors, they have people that are external to what they’re doing, giving them new perspectives and helping to see those things. So I think that’s a really great reminder. And so another question I have for you on this Mooly is now knowing what you know, how do you balance doing the work with clients or the delivery as opposed to the business development? Just walk us through what that looks like in terms of work that you do or anyone that you have in terms of team members, full time contractors, Just explain kind of what that looks like today.

[40:51] – Scaling Delivery with Coaching and Subscriptions

So in terms of the delivery, I’m doing some of it myself and I have two guys, contractors that are working with me. And that depends on the volume, depends on the number of clients that we have at any given point in time. Business development is all me. It’s all done by me. The delivery itself is, well, it’s easy. Okay. I mean, I’ve worked personally with so many software teams across so many different perspectives that now within an hour of discussing with the software team, I know what needs to be done and I know how to solve their pain and I can probably put them on the right track quite quickly. So to be honest, the delivery is, is where, where we’re having most of the fun. But this is also the relatively, the easy part because it’s, it’s. I’ve worked now with, I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds of, of teams each with 1, 200 software engineers. So I’ve probably worked with tens of thousands of software engineers across the globe in different companies. So this is relatively easy to solve the problems. Business development is always a challenge. It’s also where I feel like I still have a lot to learn. So this is where I focus a lot of my tension. And yeah, and so the, the, the more clients we win, we have a nice scalable model in terms of getting more coaches into the, into the mix. And so that’s relatively set for scale.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit? So you know, you win the business mainly based on you being very intentional and having, as you said, a very disciplined approach to networking, creating conversations. In many cases, you’ll do that initial discovery offer where you’ll work with, as long as it’s the right kind of organization, you know, up for a month to really take them through that. The result is they can very clearly kind of see a scorecard of how well they’re doing in different areas and then you develop a plan based on that if they want to move forward of how you can help them, and then you and two other team members will actually work with the client. Is, is that advisory based the main focus? Are you doing implementation? Because you also mentioned coaching. So can you break down a little bit more of how are you actually working with, with your clients? On the delivery side, it’s all consulting.

There is no implementation or code or tools being deployed. We, every team that’s under support gets a weekly coaching session where we identify from the heat map that you showed earlier, we identify one pain point that is hurting the team the most and we focus on solving that. That means giving the team specific homework, devising a plan, sharing best practices from other experiences that we had and helping the team solve that thing. And then once it’s solved, and sometimes it takes a couple of meetings to solve it, we measure the impact, we mark it in the heat map as it’s now moved to the next level and we repeat the same process with another one of these competencies which is in bad shape. So in essence, if you think about the Agile mindset or Agile Manifesto, it’s basically choose a problem, fix it, move to the next problem. So we’re working with the teams in the same mindset, except that we don’t choose the problems randomly, we choose them from our discovery session. And so the teams are always guaranteed that they’re putting their mind and focus on the things that matter the most. And that also means that when the improvements come, it’s also very visible because we’re always, we start every coaching session with the question, what’s the biggest problem you have in the project right now? And then we solve that. And so, and we do this iteratively.

What happens? And this, maybe this has never happened, but I would imagine that it’s come up where you’re talking to a client or potential client and they say, yeah, this sounds a great Mooly, but we don’t want to just work on one problem at a time. We want to work on a much faster pace. We want to solve three problems. Or now you’re saying this is going to take us 12 months or 24 months, we want to get this done in eight months. How do you deal with that? Do you say that’s not how we work and here’s why we have this process. Do you just bring on more people and so you can work on more problems? Do you increase the time? What, what’s your way of handling that kind of situation?

It usually doesn’t come up because the problem most of the clients have is that they don’t know what the biggest problem is in the organization. And what they actually do because they don’t know is try to improve everything at once. And so you will see, if you go into a large software team, you’ll see the architect is saying, we need to refactor everything. The test manager says we need to change our test automation. The development manager says we need to do different unit testing. And so everyone tries to improve everything at once measurable. And also the improvement budget is being spent between too many initiatives and all of them are too little to actually notice the impact. So usually when we say, stop this mess, let’s focus. This is the biggest problem you have. If they, if they think they have a bigger problem, that’s fine, we can, we can have a discussion. But once we see a big problem, we, and we solve it within weeks. It’s not going to take years to solve. So I’ve had a team, I have had a team in Mercedes where they were struggling with an inflow of defects which was quite high for what they were expecting. And they didn’t find a good way of calming that down. And we did our analysis and we came up with the root cause for their problem. And within three months we have reduced their defect inflow by 90%. And so actually we had, to a certain extent, we had another problem. When we’re overly successful, sometimes they will say, well, that’s good enough, thank you very much. Because we work on a subscription basis, so there is no upfront fee. We only ask the clients to pay if they’re happy with the result. So we go by Sprint or monthly fee. And as long as they’re happy with the improvements, they keep us and they can disengage at any point in time.

All right, well, Mooly, I want to be conscious of our, of our time here in the calendar. And I want to thank you so much for coming on. I mean, there’s a lot more that we could talk about and dig into, but as we spoke before, we’ll, you know, we’ll have to look at having a further conversation as time goes forward. So thank you again for coming on. For people who want to learn more about you, about your company, where’s the best place for them to go?

Well, you always Find me on LinkedIn. Our company is called Better Software. Very easy to remember. So if you go to bettersoftware.dev you’ll see us. And we also have a page on LinkedIn. So either either of those or find me on LinkedIn. I’m very responsive to any message. So.

Yeah. Well, thank you again, Mooly, for coming on. We’ll have all that linked up in the show notes at consultingsuccess.com and thank you and everyone. Have a great day.

Thank you very much. Thank you for hosting me.