We all like to think we’re special.
And you know what? We are!
There’s literally no one exactly like you on the planet. Never has been, never will be again.
Sure, someone else may have the same color of eyes or hair. Someone else may have the same cute overbite, or the same kind of dimple, or the exact same number of freckles as you.
Someone else may binge-watch any show with Aimee Lou Wood in it, like you do. Someone else may eat all of the M & Ms except the brown ones, like you. Someone else may refuse to walk across the street against the traffic light, even if there’s not a car in sight (you rule-follower, you).
But the combination of everything that makes you, you? That will never be duplicated.
And the same goes for your business.
Other consultants may speak on the same topics as you. Others may offer the same coaching and consulting packages. Others may have written similar books or provide similar materials to attendees at their workshops.
But no one teaches those topics exactly the way you do.
No one else presents with your exact style.
And no one has had the exact same experiences as you have–meaning that, even if you’re training on the same topic as some other consultant, the life experiences you bring to the material will always be uniquely your own.
But (and I apologize in advance if this brings you down a bit), when it comes to building your educational consulting business, you really aren’t that special.
Your Business Blueprint: The “Bones” Beneath the Surface
Now, don’t get triggered. I don’t mean that in a negative way.
It’s just that I ran my own consulting business for many years, I know literally hundreds of other consultants, and I’ve worked closely with many of them on their businesses.
And here’s the truth…
Almost all successful educational consulting businesses, while unique in their surface details, consist of the same basic elements underneath (the “bones” beneath that surface layer, so to speak).
And there are certain steps a consultant needs to take, in a certain order, that will vastly improve the chances that they will succeed.
Now, most consultants, in my experience, don’t understand this. They seem to think that whether they succeed or not is all somehow magic…or voo-doo…or simply the luck of the draw.
Not true.
You see, I’ve spent a couple of decades devouring one business book, one business course, one online business guru’s “model” after another. And when I synthesize all of that material, the commonalities are what rise to the surface.
Lately, I’ve been attempting to get all of that down on paper in a nice, succinct format. And the result is a repeatable framework–what I call the Consulting Business Blueprint.
Now, I haven’t published this material anywhere yet. In fact, it’s all sitting in a doc on my computer (though I do plan to get it “prettied up” and published in the near future as a free lead magnet).
I won’t go into all the details of the Blueprint here (it’s a lot), but I do want to share a quick overview today, and then I’ll dig into some of the details over my next few posts.
So, the basics…
The Five Stages of the Consulting Business Blueprint
There are five stages in the growth of any expert-based business. They are:
- Before You Build–In this foundational stage, you examine the vision of your life you want your business to support, identify your Mission (if you have one yet), decide on what you’ll Promise your clients, and name the Primary Role you’ll need to play to deliver on that Promise consistently.
- Positioning–In this stage, you lay the groundwork for everything else you’ll build. You establish your Persuasive Persona, identify your Ideal Client Avatar(s), do competitor research to identify and position yourself in a highly specific and differentiated niche, and create your core offer.
- Marketing and Sales–With your positioning nailed down, it’s time to drive traffic to your website and other platforms. You create content to establish yourself as an authority, network with people in your field, and build and nurture an in-house email list of raving fans.
- Scaling–With a growing audience, you now expand your offers to include other products or services and/or grow a team of people who can support you as you deliver the services or deliver the services for you. At this stage, you’ve built a mature, stable, highly-profitable business.
- Destination–Finally, you decide whether you want to keep things as they are and level off (Maintain), continue to scale your business (Expand) , or, if you wish, sell the business (Exit).
Like I said earlier, these are the key stages that all successful, expert-based businesses progress through.
And they should be done in a specific order. For example:
- Driving traffic to your site before you’ve nailed down your positioning just wastes most of that traffic.
- Creating products and trying to sell them before you’ve built an audience results in poor (if any) sales.
- Scaling your product or service offerings without marketing systems in place to bring eyeballs to them wastes the time and effort you put into developing them.
As the old saying goes, “there’s a time and place for everything.” And that’s certainly true when it comes to building your business.
Over the next few months, I’ll go into more detail on each of these stages.
As I do, I hope you find it helpful for identifying which stage your business is in at the moment and what you need to do next to take things to the next level.
And if you have questions at any point during this exploration of the Consulting Business Blueprint, don’t be shy.
Run those questions by me. You can hit me up in the Comments or reach me at willy@edconsultantmarketing.com.
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–By the end of this series of posts, you should have a pretty good idea about the steps you need to take to grow your business.
That said, there’s no way to put everything I know about business building into a blog post series.
And if you want the benefit of having a knowledgeable coach at your beck and call, someone who will support you and give you a well-timed kick in the butt when needed, then you should reach out to talk about our 1-on-1 business coaching services.
We’ll guide you step-by-step through the process of building your business so you can make the impact you’re meant to make on the world.
Sound like just the thing you’ve been looking for?
