Your Consulting Business Can Feel Better

Have you ever hit a level of success that’s supposed to feel like freedom, and instead, it starts to feel like you’ve built yourself a job that you can’t escape? Well, that’s the tension that Elliot Begoun found himself in after building a seven-figure consulting business. He had the systems, the team, repeatable delivery, the whole thing. So from the outside, it looked like everything was dialed in. Internally, he was starting to feel depleted and, honestly, a bit bored.

Elliot’s story is powerful because he didn’t start out as a natural consultant. He climbed the corporate ladder, walked away, and had to learn how to build from zero. Then he went through multiple stages: solo to team, broad to niche, one-to-many to premium advisory. And eventually, he made a full-circle shift that changed everything.

In this episode you will learn:

• The hidden cost of building a “one-to-many” model that requires constant funnel feeding.

• How to reduce your client count without taking a significant revenue hit.

• The mindset shift required to move from a broad focus to a profitable, narrow niche.

• Why networking by “giving first” is more powerful than transactional pitching.

• How to redefine “scale” around lifestyle and alignment, not just top-line revenue.

• What to change when you want fewer clients, more depth, and more breathing room in your business.

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.

As a 35-year CPG industry veteran, Elliot Begoun is a contrarian, systems thinker, and lifelong student. He channels his passion into educating and empowering entrepreneurial leaders as a high-performance coach, advisor, and board member. As founder of TIG Brands, he champions ‘Tardigrades’: resilient, capital-efficient businesses built to last. Elliot hosts the TIG Talks podcast, and his work has been featured in The Huffington Post, SmartBrief, and New Hope. He is also a frequent speaker at industry events like BevNET Live.

Connect with Elliot Begoun

Discover more about TIG Brands

Alright, welcome, Elliot.

Always a pleasure, Michael. Glad to be here.

It’s great to have you here. And I’m really excited to talk about your journey today because I’ve had the pleasure of watching you go through what I would kind of call multiple stages. I know you refer to it in some ways as almost like a full circle, and we’ll get into describing what that looks like. But I feel lucky to call you a friend, a client, and you’re just an amazing person. You always bring a very special energy and perspective and insights, and you ask questions and share your thoughts that I think oftentimes can spark people to see things or think about things in ways they haven’t seen them or thought about them in that same way before. So that’s the plan today that I’d like to dig deeper into with you.

You’ve built a seven-figure business, and you started off, obviously, in the early days when we first met, you were just getting started in the world of consulting. Then you went from solo to building a team to making a big change, which I want to talk about, and I think some people might be surprised about the change that you made; others maybe not, but we’ll explore that. So before we kind of get into all that, I think it’s important that we set the stage for people in terms of who was Elliot when you first got started in consulting. Like, what was your background, and just explain the work that you were doing prior to getting into consulting.

[02:51] – Leaving Corporate and Starting From Zero

Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words. And I think you understated. You haven’t witnessed; you’ve been alongside. You’ve been coaching me and challenging me for that, and a lot of my success I feel very grateful to have been shaped by your coaching and support. So I want to make sure to call that out.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

Where was I before? I think I did what I grew up thinking I was supposed to do. I went to undergrad school, went to grad school, jumped on the corporate ladder, and started clawing my way up, and just finding myself with each new rung, further and further away from feeling fulfilled and like I was manifesting the best version of myself. But you get into that pretty quickly, that lifestyle you grow into it. And we had kids, and I remember vividly the moment, I was getting ready for work one day and sitting at the kitchen table, and my wife came up to me and said, “By the way, if you think you’re faking it, you’re not. You’re miserable. Time for you to go do something on your own.”

And I don’t think she really thought that I would listen to her, go in that day and do it, but I did. And then came back and, really, at that point, didn’t know what I was going to do. Right? I didn’t know what – I mean, I knew I wanted to be a consultant or a coach or so forth, but I didn’t have that in my mind. I didn’t have those tools, that skillset. I didn’t really have an idea to whom. I’d spent all my time in consumer-packaged goods, but was that limited to that? And so after floundering for a couple of weeks trying to figure that out, I had been listening to this podcast in its early, early iterations. This is over a decade ago now, which is staggering. And I reached out and got on a call with you, and the rest is history.

[05:09] – Why Going Too Broad Creates Fractional Jobs

Well, let’s then explore those early days when you started your own business. What were you initially doing? Just describe because you went from being in a senior-level position inside the corporate world to starting your own consulting and advisory type of business. What was the work that you were actually doing originally, because you weren’t as focused as you are today? So just talk a little bit about what that looked like.

Yeah, the work I was doing, ironically to some degree, is similar work, articulated completely differently because I didn’t know what I was doing, and also much more broadly applied to a bigger customer and ideal client target. And really the work I had defined that I was doing, which I no longer even remotely talk about, was more like the traditional – what every former corporate person who has no skills coming out of the business does is talk about leadership.

And really what I was doing was trying to holistically look at businesses and help ask the business and its leaders the right questions to unlock it, but I didn’t have that language. They didn’t have that language, so it started on leadership. And I cast the net wide because, to me, at that stage in the process, it just made more sense. If you cast a bigger net, you have more opportunities to ensnare some clients. So, I looked up one day and I realized I had a logistics company, I had a sheriff’s office, I had a university. I did have a couple of CPG companies, but it quickly became I was trying to learn a new business, a new vernacular. It was like all these first days on the job. There was no benefit of cross-pollination or no repeat, and basically, I just worked myself into fractional jobs.

At that time, what was the vision or the goals you had for the business? Not what they are today, but in the early days, what did you really feel success was for you that you were trying to create?

In the early days, honestly, it was very, very myopic. It was just “replace my income.” You know, just get back to homeostasis with a little bit more independence and not being beholden to any other company or person. And that was it. It wasn’t visionary, it wasn’t impact-oriented, it wasn’t mission-oriented. All of those things came later once I realized I learned how to do it. I learned how to go make- go fish for my own food, so to speak. Once I did that, then I could step back and start thinking with more intentionality about where I wanted to fish and what kind of fish I wanted to catch.

So I’m going to kind of push the fast-forward button, and we’re going to zoom forward quite a bit in this story. You were on the podcast years back where we did a deeper dive into, I’d say, those early, the first three, four, five years or so of your business. So I want to encourage people, you guys can check that out. Go to consultingsuccess.com or wherever. Just type Elliot’s name in, Elliot Begoun, and you’ll find that earlier episode. But within those, you know, kind of first, let’s say, three, four, five, six years of the business, was there an inflection point where you really started to see things take off? Because I remember, Elliot, you sharing that you reached that first milestone of, “I’ve replaced my income. Things are going quite well,” sooner than maybe you initially anticipated. But I want to know beyond that, the inflection point where you really felt, “This can go to a whole new level.” When did that happen, or why do you think it happened? What was going on in the business when you reached that point?

[09:30] – Niche Down and Win in One Ecosystem

I think there’s a – it’s a great question. I think there are a few things. One was just beginning to gain confidence, having developed that muscle of being able to go out and get business and do it in my way, which was really important to me. You and I have had lots of conversations; I’m a very reluctant self-promoter. It’s not what I’m comfortable doing. I really much rather engage with people in a more heart-centered and long-tail process of bringing them on board. But once I kind of, once I realized, “I know how to do that now. I’ve got that,” and the business started to get bigger, I also was doing it at the same time where our industry, natural products within consumer-packaged goods, so this is products you put in and on your bodies, was taking off. There was a lot of money coming in, a lot of venture money coming in at that moment in time, and I was well-placed to try to help guide these companies to that money and then help them use that money smartly.

And so two things I realized quickly was that by narrowing, by really, really niching, and that way my voice became much louder in a narrower environment – the old “bigger fish in a smaller pond” type scenario – and also if you find an ecosystem where there is a place where everybody seems to be going to the same information sources, the same events, the same publications, listening to the same podcast, you can begin to build yourself within that ecosystem, and the ecosystem does the work of amplifying your message. So all those things kind of came together at the same time, and I said, “I’m going all-in CPG because this is a big opportunity and there’s nobody really working with these earlier-stage businesses.” And so then the question was, “How do we do that?”

[11:47] – Network by Giving First, Not Pitching

So before we kind of talk about how you went from that stage and built to that seven-figure level and really look at your thoughts about growth, I want to go and just have you share a little bit more about that. You talked about going to events. I know you were very active in writing. You focused a lot on connecting with people. Is there anything looking back that you feel maybe you would have done differently or you wish you would have done more of or less of that would have helped the growth of the business or for you to attract the kind of clients that you really were going after?

Yeah, for sure. One, of course, was to trust myself more and be more self-confident. I mean it’s, it’s hard. You can tell yourself a narrative about the work you’re doing and make peace with that narrative, but in my case, part of the roots of that narrative was an avoidance of maybe accepting where I was and feeling like I am a master of my trade and that I truly am a thought leader. And it’s taken me a dozen years to get comfortable saying that and knowing that I’m saying that with no shred of arrogance, just having done it and learned. So I wish I had that earlier confidence, but I don’t know how I could have gotten it without doing the work.

I think the other thing I would have done differently is realize the power of networking in a different way. Networking always felt kind of uncomfortable for me, but once I realized that I could flip it and reframe networking from the mindset of going places trying to get something out of it, to try to extract, and reframe it as, “Just put me in situations where I can share and give with no expectations of reciprocity,” that’s when the business really started to change. When I could just show up and share what I knew, not looking for a direct quid pro quo type relationship, but just do that, that was such a powerful tool because then people just started asking me to come or wanting my time because I would share that, and that sharing in and of itself was what created not only relationships with clients but relationships with incredible referral partners.

Was that also a tactical decision in terms of which events or conferences you went to and where you were? And so here, I’ll back up for a second. What I’m wondering is sometimes people have that mindset of, “I’m just going to give, and I’m going to meet as many people as I can. I’m going to network as much as I can.” But a challenge that often presents itself is they realize that they’re spending time with a lot of other people like themselves and not necessarily getting in front of the actual ideal client. So I’m wondering, what was your experience, and what did that actually look like to make sure that you are giving freely but that there’s going to be a connection, without necessarily expectations, that will benefit you in the business?

I was pretty intentional about that. Again, one is being involved in that ecosystem, but two, I was very selective with the type of events. I wanted to be in events where I could have conversations with the ideal clients in a way where I can share knowledge. So in my case, it was natural product trade shows and pitch events and things along those lines. And those are still the same events that I go to today, but no longer really needing to do that, really more so just to enjoy seeing all the people and all the folks. But narrowing it down, because you can get swept away. That’s the benefit of having more of a precision strategy, I think, around who your ideal client is and where they go and where they are. We talk the same with our clients, that you want to understand where your clients are experiencing the challenge that they’re facing or the unmet need that they’re looking for and get as close to that point as possible and just be on message. And that’s really what I tried to do.

You also mentioned confidence, and I want to have you share, if you can, an example of what did that actually look like before you leaned into and felt the confidence to say, “This is, I’m a thought leader. I know this space.” Because there are a lot of people that are struggling with that same challenge today. Even though they’re running successful businesses, there’s an element of them that they’re not fully confident or they’re hesitating. So can you give us the, “Here’s what I looked like before,” or, “Here’s a situation where maybe I didn’t have confidence, and so this was the result or the actions that I took or didn’t take,” and after leaning more into the confidence, “Here’s what I did that was different.”

The lack of confidence, I think what it did is it kept me further down-market, earlier stage than necessary. And my narrative was, “Well, nobody’s ministering to them. Nobody’s working with them. They need it.” But in truth, it was because it felt safer there. I felt like there was a big enough delta between my knowledge and their knowledge that I felt secure in that. But it came with its own challenges in the fact that we had to – and I’m sure we’ll talk about that – we had to build a model that allowed for it because down-market meant that on a per-client basis, they couldn’t pay as much. And so you had to build a model to allow for many of them to equate to the revenue targets that you want. So that was a part of it as well. And I think it took me time to be confident enough to feel like now, when I’m seated at the table in a board meeting with people that have amazing CVs, I don’t suffer the imposter syndrome I did, and I feel very much an equal in my position there.

[18:26] – The Hidden Cost of Scaling With More Clients

So before we get to what the business looks like today, I want to still sit with you in that place where you were working with some clients maybe in the higher levels, but definitely you had a bunch of clients that were earlier stage, as you called it. So you’re reaching a million dollars plus in the business. The word “scaling,” the word “growth,” what were you thinking about? What did that look like for you at that time?

Like so many entrepreneurs, I think I equated scale with size and scope and top-line revenue. And so I wanted to build – and also, to me, scale was about, in some respects, resilience to a degree, in the fact that I didn’t want any one client representing a disproportionate amount of the revenue. That seemed safer to me. And so to me, it was about trying to build a machine, a repeatable machine, yet do it with as little complexity or as few people as possible because I really didn’t want to be spending my time managing a big business or a company. So scale was the number of clients, the amount of revenue, all of those kinds of things.

And that aspect of the business became fairly repeatable and pretty good. The part of the business that I didn’t build in resilience or repeatability was me. And it became very depletive and, to some degree, quite honestly, boring because I was just regurgitating the same kind of thing day in and day out, and I wasn’t really doing the kind of work that I felt was as impactful.

So from an external perspective, if somebody was looking at what you had built at that time, you were creating more systems. You had a model that allowed you to work with more clients at one time. There was, you know, parts of less and less of you required to service those clients. Revenue was growing. But internally, you were feeling like something wasn’t sitting right with you.

You articulated it perfectly. I think we did all the things you would look to do in that case. We built a learning management system, we built a good funnel, we built things that allowed me to follow the Pareto law and spend very little of my time creating one-offs and do everything in waves. But so on paper to the outsider, it looked exactly how it would be designed. Yet, for the first time since I started my business, I would think about Sundays and go, “Man, I’m not really, really jazzed about going to work tomorrow.” And that scared me.

You and I have talked about this, and I say it all the time. There are a lot of challenges to building your own business and running your own business. We glamorize it, but it’s- you have to really be intentional about all aspects of it. But one thing you have to be mindful of is that ultimately, you get to design the place you go to work every day. And if you don’t design it the way you want to, then suddenly you’re still, whether you’re self-employed or not, you still wind up being a slave to a business because it designed itself.

It’s almost like you’ve created this machine that the bigger it gets, the more you need to feed it. And if the work inside of that machine or your connection to it is not one that gives you that fulfillment or enjoyment, then by definition of it becoming bigger and needing more fuel, we could say, that also means that there’s just so much more that needs to be done on a regular basis to keep it at that level or growing. And so with your model prior, you had the collective, or this side of the business that catered toward more of the early-stage clients, then you also had your one-to-one advisory type work. But all of that would need marketing, operations, delivery, to kind of make sure that each of those was working. Can you just talk a little bit about what you actually needed to do to ensure that both of those were getting fed? What was working for you? What wasn’t working for you? I’m just trying to get a sense, and for everybody, how complex did things become or how simple were they before? What was the experience there?

Well, the key there was that you had to keep filling the funnel because there was attrition. So it was a flywheel that you had to keep running, which means you got to be doing a lot of marketing efforts, you’ve got to be very visible in events, you’ve got to be recruiting the next wave all of the time. And at the end of the day, I was spending more of my day doing things like that and less of my day doing the things that excited me and where I felt like I’d have an impact.

So that’s one huge realization. There are still a lot of people that would likely resonate with that, feel they’re maybe in a similar place right now, or could see themselves getting to that place, like they’re moving towards it. But there are also many who have had that and continue to just sit with it. And I think probably one of the most common reasons why people don’t make a change is because they look at the business and they feel like financially, they’re doing quite well. They’ve spent the years to build to that point. Does it make sense to kind of give up or take a relatively drastic shift in their mind? Walk us through what ultimately changed your view on this, or how did you get to a place where you decided that it was time to, number one, be more intentional or really think this through, and then ultimately decide to make that change? How did that process or that experience go for you?

[25:16] – Recalibrate When Money Shifts and Purpose Grows

Yeah, there are a few facts. Certainly, to me, the inertia of status quo is something that we all have to be cognizant of. The easiest thing to do is nothing, and there’s a lot of pressure, especially when the results are still okay, to choose that path of least resistance. In my case, it was kind of, again, a confluence of factors. One I mentioned already was that I was finding myself becoming less and less excited or satisfied with the work I was doing, and that bothered me. That really did bother me.

The second reality was that those tailwinds that I was talking about earlier, where a lot of money was flowing into our space, right around COVID and post-COVID, that all changed, and we had the equivalent of our dot-com bubble burst, when it became abundantly clear that the market was overinflated and that there were many, many companies with really no economic viability. And so the money dried up for everybody, even those that didn’t. And I was always the contrarian in that market because I’ve always been focused on building real businesses. We have our antithetical mascot to the unicorn: the tardigrade, all that stuff. But still, the ecosystem was taking a hit, so that was the second.

And then the third was a couple of my clients were pulling more of my time because they had persevered and begun to grow. And as I was working with them in those moments, and that was starting to be involved very deeply with them, either at the board level or very deeply with them in M&A activity and things like that, I found myself, one, very excited by the work, and two, doing the best work I’ve ever done. And the way I was saying “the best work I’ve ever done” is like, I knew that I was actually positively impacting these people’s lives, and impact is a big driver for me.

And so it just took some time to get off that merry-go-round, that inertia of status quo, and step back and say, “Wait a second. This is a moment to recalibrate.” Again, why would I not? And I guess I would add the fourth, and that is I’m almost 60 years old, and I don’t really have an intent to retire. But now with three grandkids and all of those kinds of things, I do have an awareness of making sure that I really am better balanced in terms of what I do because I want to keep working for as long as the world will allow me to work, but I don’t want to work at the same pace and the same level of stress that I was 10 years ago. It’s probably not good for longevity.

So all of those things came and forced me to kind of reassess, and fortunately, I found somehow, I found the courage to do it, and I’m very thankful.

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[30:20] – Move Upmarket Without Losing Revenue

Some people might be thinking that because you made the decision to focus more deeply by moving up-market, as we could call it, shifting away from earlier-stage clients – and we’ll talk a little bit more about the details of the changes that you made – but they might be thinking, “Okay, well that means that Elliot made a choice, based on everything that he’s saying, to make a lot less money.” Can you just talk about what you’ve actually experienced, what’s happened in the business since you’ve made these changes in terms of what had to go into the business: costs, team size, profitability, just anything that you’re able to help people to see, “Here’s what can happen, and here’s what you’ve experienced when you actually start to make these changes.”

I anticipated there to be a step back in revenues for some period of time. The truth of the matter is that never happened, really, because one, looking at the revenue on the small side, one of the things that was always a reality for us is what we charge versus what we actually got paid for. There was a reasonable delta there. We were always chasing people for money, always having to have that conversation. And these larger clients, even though their fees were larger, they were also much- it was just much more systematic, and there wasn’t any of that, so from a cash perspective.

But I didn’t do it like a light switch. I didn’t say, “I’m going to fire all of the small clients and I’m going to wait and go find the big ones.” What I did is I said to myself, “We’re not going to bring on any new ones, no new clients that are below our new, what we now define as our ideal client. We’ll continue to support them while we continue to build on the other side. And it’ll be a busier year or two if we can get there. Then we’ll just manage it basically through normal attrition.”

It went much faster than I expected it to, to be honest with you, because again, it was a reinforcement of the fact that I was telling myself a narrative. And when I put myself out there to the larger, the 35-plus years in this industry, the credibility that had really showed me what its value was, and it made the pivot very easy.

But it was also – and I want to point this out, Michael – it was a really important decision as well from a long-term perspective, because when I was building to scale and trying to build repeatable systems and online content and all of those kinds of things, there was a mindset like, “Maybe this is a sellable business.” When I flipped it to be really impact-driven, motivating me, more of a lifestyle business, I knew that I was giving up that potential, more than likely, because the business was now so inextricably linked with me. But that was a very fine trade-off with me. It wasn’t- I don’t think I would have monetized the sale that much. I also think that online learning, a lot of that stuff has become so ubiquitous, at least in our category, that there wasn’t much value to it. So, but it was, I had a check with that too, and I think it’s important as you look, if anyone’s looking and trying to evaluate, you have to evaluate all of those things. There’s nothing wrong with what I was doing before and what I’m doing now. One wasn’t right or wrong, one wasn’t better or worse. It was one was less aligned with what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be versus the other.

I think to add to that, it’s not just one or the other because even though your new model is really you being much more involved, working with higher-level, call them more premium clients, if you will, you’ve found ways to engage with clients where you’re getting paid on an ongoing retainer basis at different levels, but you also, in some cases, have equity in these companies or opportunities that, while it’s not you selling your business, when they sell their businesses – and I know that you’ve had experiences like this – it can create very significant financial gains for you.

I just flipped it, and it became less about me trying to build my retirement necessarily around, or my theoretical financial, not my intellectual, to the selling of my business, to making sure that I participated in the upside of helping our clients unlock the latent enterprise value in their businesses, so through equity or change of control premiums, things like that.

You mentioned, so when we were at one of the Consulting Success Mastermind events in, actually, Mexico City – we’ve had a couple there now, but the most recent one – you mentioned something about, “I wanted less of something and more of something else” in your business.

My mantra.

Exactly. So I want you to deliver it, not me. So just share what the mantra is and kind of where it came from and what does it really mean.

[36:12] – Do More Meaningful Work but Less of It

My mantra is really important to me, and I repeat it all the time. And that was, what I wanted in this change, what I wanted to do is I wanted to do more meaningful work, but less of it. And what I mean by that is that I wanted to do work where I was feeling like I was consistently putting impact over income. I mean, just really, I wanted to feel like I was doing stuff that really mattered, mattered to the clients I was working with. Fortunately, my clients are all doing work that is either improving human health or climate health or some other social wellbeing, etc. So I felt like by empowering them, I was also doing good in that way.

But I also intentionally wanted to do less of it, which means that I needed to really find and hone the ideal client and be very narrow on it and be more comfortable charging more for that work so that I could do less of it. And I was thinking about that today before getting on the podcast. If I go back 10 years ago in this business, 12 years ago when I started, something like that, almost 13 now, I used to have a few calls, a few meetings, and I would find myself with time I could go out and take a walk and listen to a podcast. I would say the last eight or so years, literally my day would be from the time I flipped on the computer until the time I flipped it off, I was pretty much on non-stop calls, especially pandemic-onward on Zoom calls and so forth. And now that I’ve switched the model and moved with following this mantra, I realize that almost every day in the middle of the day, I’m out walking the dog, listening to a podcast again. So it’s a good reminder that that’s working, not just the revenue side of it, but the lifestyle side of it as well.

[38:16] – Reduce Risk With Relationship-Driven Marketing

As we’re talking right now, to some it might feel like this was an easy decision and everything went smooth. As you said, the revenue didn’t- there was no negative impact. Your profits have increased, if anything. You still have a small but great team in place. You’re doing more of the work that you truly enjoy. There’s more leverage. But what was the hard part? Talk me through the tension. What were the elements that for you were really hard as you kind of thought through this and maybe had you holding on to this for longer than you would have liked to, or just what did you find to be the most challenging aspects that you were wrestling with that were hard to give up?

A few. For sure, one thing that was hard was going back to the problem I originally was trying to solve: building the one-to-many model, which was, now again, I have clients that each of them represent a significant chunk of the revenue. And as a chronic worrier, you take that with you to bed every night. And so that was both a blocker to me making the move and something that I had to figure out before I fully did the move so that I wouldn’t be living with that.

Let me just interrupt for one second and clarify that for everyone. So if we went back to the old model, if you had the two parts of your business, the earlier stage and then clients that were more established, how many total clients might you be working with in a period of 12 months, and what does that look like today?

So I had the two sides of the business, but even the one-to-one side was down-market in comparison to where I am today. So we were typically 25 or so in the one-to-one program and 50 to 150, depending, in the one-to-many program, which took very little of my time. Where we will be this year is probably around a dozen total.

So I just wanted to bring that up because some people might have thought, “Oh, you have significantly fewer clients. You’re talking about the risk of client concentration and one or two clients go away.” Some people have this, they think about that in terms of maybe working with only two, three, four clients. But you’re still talking about 10 or 12.

Yeah, I still have relatively decent diversity. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if any one client represented more than 25% of my income. I just wouldn’t do it. But 10 to 12 is a pretty significant- and probably of those 10 to 12, there’s probably a half dozen that are even higher than the other. Eventually, those half dozen will be, the goal is somewhere between 8 and 10, all high-value. But I had to make peace with that. But I also had to – and you and I have talked a lot about this – I had to rethink what the marketing engine looked like. No longer was I necessarily trying to fill the top of the funnel to get people to matriculate on board, and it needed to be a big number. What I wanted to do now was I wanted to establish relationships with ideal clients that I might nurture and work for a year, two years, three years to keep them close, to support them, to give to them in those ways, so that when one client did roll off, I would have this fertile ground already in place to pull from. And I felt that if I always had a one-to-one relationship with one active client, one nurture client in there, then I feel like I’ll be completely fine.

And the truth of the matter is I love that because it’s basically a license to build a friendship, a license to get to really enjoy knowing somebody and building a relationship without feeling like you’re- every call needs to be moving them towards a transaction because there’s no interest in that yet by either side. So trying to do that in a- rework our entire marketing so that it is about long-tail and is about cultivation and aligned with what we do, so that also I’m vetting them out and them us, that if we do work together, it is going to be great working together. It is going to be impactful. It is going to result in both sides feeling really good about it. So it’s a very nice structure to me.

Is there anything that now that you’ve made this shift in terms of your focus, but anything that you feel or you’re noticing yourself still reflecting on, still thinking about, that might be beneficial for others? Questions you’re asking yourself, exercises you’re going through, just anything that even though you’ve now reached this level of greater clarity and focus and you’ve moved up-market to work more closely with a smaller group of higher-value clients, that you still find yourself kind of working through or considering?

I don’t think I know what I’m doing any more than I did before, and I think that’s okay. I’m constantly asking myself the question, “What should I be doing that I’m not? What should I stop doing that I am?” Those are questions I ask. I also think of Steven Pressfield’s book all the time, The War of Art, where I try to identify where I’m facing resistance in certain things. And there are things that I need to continue to push and get better and systematize and get across, but I don’t have the same kind of urgency. I used to remember the amount of hours and time I would just spend on my website copy, and I almost have to be reminded to go there and refresh things and do it now because I just don’t pay attention to any of that stuff any longer, but it’s still confirmational marketing.

But I’m always asking myself that question: Am I really working with who I want to? Are there others I should be working with? Is there something I’m doing that I shouldn’t be doing? That type of stuff, because I find it both important for the business, but I also find it exciting to contemplate.

Well, Elliot, I want to thank you for coming on. I know there’s a lot more that we can go into, but this is, I think, a great start to share some of what you’ve gone through with others because as I’ve told you – and you mentioned this as well in our conversation today – this is not about saying that scaling, growing, and building a bigger team and more revenue and more systems is a bad thing. And it’s not to say that the model that you have right now is the right thing. It’s all about figuring out what’s the model for every individual founder and then leaning into it. And I’ve watched as you’ve wrestled with some of these decisions. You’ve been very thoughtful about what you want to create, and ultimately, you’ve taken the steps, even though sometimes they can feel a little bit scary. And as you’ve brought up, you can feel resistance to them, but the results you’ve seen from those, I think, just reaffirms that you’ve made the right choices for now. And I love that you’re bringing up the importance of constantly reflecting on this and that it’s not about finding the one answer and being done with it. It’s an ongoing part of that journey to ensure that you really continue to have the business and the life that you truly want. So thank you for that.

[46:26] – Redefine Scale Around Lifestyle and Alignment

Well, two things I’ll say to that. Thank you. One is that I really do feel that that’s the antidote to the, the antidote to the status quo, is to be curious, you know, to continue to ask yourself, “Should I be doing something different?” But the other thing I want to say is that, again – and this is my shameless plug for you, but I mean it with heartfelt sincerity – I didn’t do this by myself. I mean, you and I have been alongside together, and not just you and I, but the other folks in our community. I mean, we were laughing before. I’m meeting for dinner with one of your other clients who’s become a dear friend. They’re my thinking partners too, and I think it’s really important that we have it.

And one of the things that really helped shape where I am now is an article you put out where you asked, “If you put the triangle with the axis points of the top being income and the two bases being business and lifestyle, what if we tipped it and put lifestyle on top?” And I really think that was a great articulation of what I did. I decided to flip it and say, “I want to build this lifestyle where I get up and do really, really meaningful work and feel like I’m adding value but still can travel the world with my wife and spend time with my grandkids. So how do I build the business and the income to allow for that?” And that’s my version now of scale, is how do I maximize and optimize that? That’s how I choose to define scale for my business now.

Beautiful. For those that want to learn more about you, your company, the work that you’re doing, where’s the best place for them to go?

You can certainly go to the website at www.tigbrands.com, but as I just said, there probably needs to be some updates there. Not really. And then the other would be, check me out on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliotbegoun/, and I’m always happy to answer questions or engage. Just reach out.

All right, well, we’ll link all that up in the show notes over at consultingsuccess.com. Elliot, thank you so much again for coming on.

Anytime, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Important Links:

Elliot Begoun
TIG Brands
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
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