How to Attract High Ticket Consulting Clients Without a Reputation

[00:00:00][Applause] so we live in a very interesting time right now and it's at the same time terrifying and exciting and it's really all come to fruition in the past uh few years really the past 10 years uh most of you who've been in the workplace know that back in 2008 the economy really fell apart a lot of people lost their jobs and it was a really hard time for a lot of folks and we we look at the past eight years we think well the economy has recovered for quite a few people and things are better right but if you really look at the data that's not necessarily true now the data is meant to scare you into um opening your eyes and into some action but it's also made meant to make you realize that there's a tremendous opportunity out there for you that if you're not taken advantage of you may just get left behind it's never been more important to be entrepreneurial it's never been easier to do and one of the biggest opportunities because of that and people ask me this all the time if you were going to start all over Brad what would you do uh and I would do exactly what I did when I started all over which is I would consult and Consulting is a it's an interesting word it's loaded with all of these preconceived notions such as you know worldclass expert um highly credential phds mbas and all of this that uh somebody else is telling you you're worthy because that's what we see in the you know in the in the real world in the news and we think those are the only types of Consultants out there but the truth is uh anybody can be a consultant it depends depends on your expertise and I'm going to give you a little tip about how a you can be a a consultant tomorrow or today and as well as how you don't really have to be an expert uh speaking of that what what is an expert I mean you could think of an expert as somebody who knows more than somebody else on a topic and that's true if you're working with a business owner if you're working with an individual talking about their health if you know a little bit more than they do and you're able to contribute to their uh success to what they want you are officially Consulting now whether you get paid for that is up to you you simply ask for money now for a lot of people that's hard and I'm going to also give you another way to do that that's surprisingly easy but um first understand the trends are the trends are in effect you you need this information so a consultant is uh somebody who goes who helps a segment of the market and it doesn't matter if it's a business or an individual helps them solve a problem or fulfill a desire or a want and the interesting part is you don't have to be the one who fulfills the desire uh specifically yourself in fact you don't have to know everything as long as you know to where to find the people who do and a great case in point was years ago when I was working I had a corporate job uh working for a big financial company and I was bored I was wanting to do some other stuff make some extra income and I answered the ad in the back of a of a magazine it says be a commercial real estate or commercial property consultant and um do cost segregation studies now if you know what that was then you're ahead of me at the time I had no idea what it was but they said simply go out talk to commercial real estate owners ask him a few questions we'll do the rest said that sounds interesting so I did I didn't know anything about this I learned enough to talk about it I went out talked to commercial real estate owners and their CPAs and I said hey are you familiar with cost segregation are you doing it are you looking to save uh some money in taxes if not um I may have a solution that you'd be interested in let me make an introduction to um what we've got and let's set up a phone call so long story short I was out there selling or Consulting on information that I was not an expert in but I had the experts behind me so I would charge the commercial real estate owner a price that I marked up from the consulting company that did this I was not their employee I was totally independent and I made a probably about 50 or 60,000 extra dollars in my part-time simply by going out asking questions of business owners to see if they have a problem I might be able to solve and I did now that was great and this is kind of how I stumbled into Consulting after that I built a business doing online marketing and lead generation and all of this fun stuff that I realized is actually not always that fun there's a lot of moving Parts it's a lot of work and it can be very frustrating at times especially when you want to keep things simple um Consulting has been the simplest business model I've ever personally done and uh first tip is how you can start today if you have a job go to your boss tomorrow and say hey boss uh a couple questions I you know hope you don't mind me asking but just curious about the company what's what's going uh what's going on right now that is kind of challenging what's a nut you're trying to crack what is uh what's something that's been frustrating what's a what's a position you wish you could hire for that you know just can't quite afford yet what you're doing is you're probing for problems and you don't need to solve their problems you may not know they may say well our digital marketing efforts are not paying off right now why do you ask you might not be a digital marketing expt expert but you could find one you could uh Google digital marketing expert you could ask your friends on social media who do you know that's good at this you could you know call Brad gustano and see if this is something I can help and companies like this will give you money as a referral fee uh and it doesn't have to be your boss it can be your your uh best friend it can be people at poker Knight it can be people at you know at brunch it really doesn't matter what matters is that you're probing for questions because you can always solve these problems later on so boom you're a consultant if you know how to ask powerful questions and just probing questions you don't need to know the answer now the next step is people like oh that's great okay I understand maybe I'm an expert in something maybe I can find experts in this how do I get clients well I just told you one way which is ask questions uh another one is to ask people tell people what you're doing you could do this on social media or with your friends and say yeah my name is Brad castano uh obviously they probably know who you are but uh you're calling up a friend or somebody you know hey this is what I'm doing you know I'm working with with um companies helping them to grow their grow their business by showing them a better way to do X Y or Z and you're not asking them for business you're saying who do you know where should I go for more uh you know for people who may be able to help me out on this so simply by putting out there what you're doing and engaging people's brains to let them help you now they may be your perfect Prospect this has worked on me before where people came to me and said Brad I'm doing this and here's why and here's what here's what I'm looking to meet who do you know I said well heck I'd be a great Prospect here's here's some money somebody got $4,000 out of me for that and I was really grateful that they did otherwise I wouldn't have known what they were doing now those are the ways to start small and kind of get over these hurdles of uh do I have what it takes am I good enough for this do will people really pay me money you can baby step your way in but once you're ready to actually make a uh the next step into this into creating either a brand new business for yourself that you can run and provide a ton of Lifestyle Freedom Create Your Life by Design but you can also use this if you have a business you're selling information products you're selling services you're selling anything else a lot of times clients will want extra help and if you're not offering it to them then they're not going to pay you and what you'll be surprised at is oftentimes they'll pay a lot more money than they're paying for your service so you could sell a granted like you could sell a book on how to do X Y and Z for $100 and you can sell a coaching or a Consulting program for $5,000 and it actually could be similar information in there it's really surprising what people pay because they want the short cuts they want your help helping them out now there's a process that uh makes this easy and I I want to keep it simple for you so that you're not intimidated by well what would I have to do to actually set up a Consulting business well the very first thing you have to do if you're using my blueprint with it is you have to know who you're helping so you need to find who is my market segment so I'll just call this who who do I want to help do I want to help business owners like I do do I want to help people lose weight do I want to help people get better health do I want to help them find the love of their life man or woman or get over relationship problems really health wealth and relationships are you know everything kind of falls into that as the three biggest coaching Consulting uh areas but once I identify who I'm going to help and I'll tell you exactly how to do that in a shortcut in a mo moment you got to say how or what's what's my offer how do how am I going to help this person am I going to work with them one-on-one is it going to be group coaching is it going to be a live event how am I going to help uh transfer my knowledge to them and that's actually one of the easiest things but you know what am I going to do am I going to help them get more leads am I going to help them convert those leads am I going to help them sell better um but you have to know who how you have to know where where your Market is you know where to find them where do they congregate are they on Facebook are they on LinkedIn are they searching for answers on Google are they at local meetups but who are they how you going to help them where do you find them um the next thing you have to do is how do you attract them so we'll say one two three four so you need to attract them in to um ask request your help uh I don't go out and cold sell sale anybody on this and push my way in I simply make an offer to help somebody with a compelling or valuable piece of content that either solves a specific problem that they want solved or that it helps them um achieve something they want to achieve right now or I just provide them the framework much like I'm doing here the framework to A system that they can now get clarity on they go oh I see the bigger picture this is great so you're going to track them with um with value could be a web web inar it could be a case study could be really anything now after this attracts them with value you're going to get some people who see this read this or watch this and say you know I like this guy um this is exactly what I've wanted how can I get more help well that's where you offer to help them and you're going to offer to help them for free so this help can come in the form of a call let's jump on the phone so if you come to one of my webinars one of my white papers they'll say listen here's here's the framework of this here's how it works if you want my help I've set up some time to talk to people for free and we'll jump on the phone we'll do a triage assessment of what you need and is this going to be appropriate for you and if it is appropriate for you uh then you know I'll probably make an offer to help you but I'm only going to make an offer to help if you fit certain criteria um but worst case scenario you leave no harm done and we you know we part as friends or you've got a good great blueprint and you walk away with it on your own and you do it but more often than not um you know people who I talk to they love what I have to say and I kind of assume the role of a doctor prescribing a solution I ask them questions just like I told you to do a minute ago then I make prescribed Solutions like well I don't solve their problems but I said well what if you did this and that and you think this would work here's what I might do in that situation and I get them nodding in agreement doesn't always happen sometimes they're like no I can't do that for X Y or Z reason and like right maybe I can't help you and that's fine in fact of all the people that I talk to here about one and three goes on to work with me and the other two out of three go on to uh you know some of them have become friends they follow me and occasionally um you know they reach back out for help in the future but I only talk to people that I want to talk to here and the way I do that is before they get here I ask them a quick little fill out a survey they fill out a survey they tell me about them if I don't want to talk to them if they don't meet my criteria for my perfect client I don't even get on the phone with them so you see this actually helps you get over the fear of talking to people that a you can't help or that b you know are just going to waste your time but that is a uh this is a great area where they qualify themselves here help for free do the phone call that's exactly what we just talked about on the call prescribe the solutions here offer more help for money it's very simple who are they how are you going to help them where are they how do you attract them with something valuable how do you help them for free first just to qualify them get them on the phone to finish out the qualification and then make the invitation to enroll them not even sell them but enroll them into your offer to help them for more money now by the way this can be done I do this in business but this can be done in all types of fields one of of my one of my best clients a guy named Adam came to me uh a couple years ago and he said you know I he teaches lifestyle dating social skills and he said you know I've been working with a lot of lower-end clients are just not paying me what I'm worth how do I get more clients and I told them well one of the biggest problems is you're selling your time for dollars and you shouldn't sell your time for dollars you should really switch this up to sell based on the value of the result you're getting and he went out and instead of making like $1,000 dollar a client he turned around and within that first month he got a client to pay him $344,000 for the exact same stuff he used to teach for $1,000 because he kind of understood now how to sell based on the value it provides and that's really what a consultant does because people aren't buying your information they're buying your confidence in your ability to get them the results they want and you build that confidence by talking to the right people by following the right process so if you're doing Health Consulting same thing people pay 50 bucks for a gym membership 100 bucks an hour for a personal trainer but they'll pay $10,000 to the person who they believe can tell them exactly what to eat what not to eat and how to move uh you'd really be surprised at what's possible out there the best part about this is it's very few moving Parts you don't need to talk to a lot of uh prospects and people this can be done um you know with a few thousand website clicks to your offer versus hundreds of thousands when you're trying to sell a product in fact you don't even need to a uh a website to do this when I first started off I simply started asking people questions about um their business how I could help occasionally I had an idea I offered to help them and they said would you do this for me or would you do this with me I'll pay you and boom I became a highly referred out consultant until I decided I wanted to make this a little bit more uh automated so I set up the system built what you see here and you know it really is this simple now it's not always easy it takes a little bit of time to figure out who your Market is how you're GNA help them where you g to track them how you gonna find the people but that's what I typically do with clients and I let them know that it's a u it's a it's a service that I love working with people who who believe they have the opportunity to help others and the desire to help others but just don't quite know where to start like they feel like if you give me the ball I'll run with it but you got to tell me which way to go you got to block for me that's what I do with a lot of my clients now if you want my personal blueprint on this I'm happy to provide you help at absolutely no charge actually just like this see I'm you know following what I preach I'm happy to jump on the phone with you and see if there's anything that I can help you with to give you a second opinion on the strategies that you're either following and I'm happy to tell you like listen I don't think you've got a good idea or I'm happy to tell you that I think you've got a great idea if you make these tweaks and and do this it's going to work a lot better so if you like my help it's very simple you can simply visit strategic partnerprogram domcom I could uh write it out right here with my chicken scribble handwriting and you can see where to go you can simply go to strategic partner program.com check it out I'll explain how I'll help you if I'll help you and uh if you want to take my advice get on the phone with me and see if this is right for you uh I I think it'd be a really wise decision um if you have any other questions you know how to reach me by the way if you like what I've been telling you but this isn't quite your your uh bag and you're like this is interesting but not really my fit but you like what I have to say you can also follow me on my podcast it's a hit podcast on iTunes it's called bacon wrapped business sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits so you can I'm not going to write that down but bacon wrapped bus.com you can find it on iTunes and the web and I'm Brad castano I hope this has been really helpful for you let me know if you want any other help here at strategic partner program.com