Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. And this season, we're talking about consulting insights. One of the most insightful things I ever heard was a concept I'm going to be discussing with you today, called the five 1s. This isn't my original idea, it came from Clay Collins, who's the founder of a company called Lead Pages, who I've worked with and I'll speak and have heard present this idea before. I know a couple of other people talk about it, including Taki Moore, and me. I wanted to share with you this idea I’ve been sharing with my clients.

I had a client come to me recently to get started working. And one of the first things we looked at was her doing so many things that there's no traction in any of them for her clients. So she's around $300Kish and her revenues. By working with me, she's saying she wants to be on the path towards 2million. So this is a way of focusing your work so that you more quickly ascend up to a million and $2 million a year in your business.

Now, if you hear that and say, I don't need to make a million dollars, I just want you to know that's one of my pet peeves. That sentence, I don't need to make a million dollars. Nobody needs to make a million dollars. But you, as a consultant, have the opportunity to make a million dollars. First of all, it's not that much money if you're doing 100K engagements and you very well should be. Then it's 8 to 10 clients. So it's not that much work, and it means it's an indicator of how big a contribution you are able to make in the world. And I want you to make the biggest contribution that you can make. It doesn't mean you need to be working a lot of hours. It just means that you need to focus your work so that you can make the biggest contribution with the biggest number of people that you choose. It's really easy for that to become a million dollars, so don't limit yourself in something that might feel like it's hard or too big for you. This is the path to a million, and these are the the five ones that Clay Collins originally suggested that you follow.

So the first one of the five ones is a target audience. So too many consultants are focusing on like whoever will work with them. So I'm sure you've heard this said before when somebody says, Well, we work with coaches, consultants, experts, author, speakers like, et cetera, et cetera. Like how many more possible audiences could there be? You've also probably heard consultants who go into organizations, but they also work with individuals. So it's I work with like leaders, but also entrepreneurs and also small business owners, etc., etc., etc. So it goes on and on, and it makes it to be too much. When you're not focused on a single target audience, you're spending too much time on marketing because you've got to reach them all and your message is diluted because there's so many of them. People hear the message and they think, Oh, them and me too. And who else? So if you can really hone down your target audience to a single one. I love to do this as a perfect client profile and then extrapolate from them, who is the client that you've worked with, who you had the best experience with, what they got from you and was exactly what they needed and you were able to contribute your gifts. So who is that? If you were going to describe them, how would you describe them? What would they be? And that gives you an idea of how you can hone this down to a single target audience. This is one of the first things I do with my clients is say, stop targeting everybody and target who you really love and want to work with. So why don't we do that? Because we're afraid. I'm afraid. If I focus too much, I'm going to leave somebody out. You have got to trust that exactly who you're supposed to be working with. There's plenty of them. There's so many of them that if you were to actually focus and be specific, you would have more clients than you could handle. OK, so that is the first of the ones.

The second of the ones is one offer. Again, this is a case where I have had people come to me and say, I do coaching, consulting, I do leadership training, presentation skills, team building. Like, I could go on and on and run out of fingers. Don't do all the things. Choose the thing they offer where you get the biggest bang for your clients and market that thing. Every time I present this to someone, they go in resistance and they're like, Oh, what if I start? If I stop doing all that stuff, then I'm going to lose all these clients because I've done all these different things for all of these different clients. OK, realistically speaking, the first thing I want you to do is what I just said with target audience. I want you to figure out who you worked with that exactly what you did for them is exactly what you should be doing all the time. And then so that's the thing. That's the offer. Were the other things, is it possible to bundle them into this offer or are they just things that you should not do in general? So plenty of times there are things that you're doing because somebody asked you to do it, you know, like, I could do that, but it's not like the center of my gifts, all that stuff you have to cut out. Focus on the thing that you were born to do. That is your essential gift. Focus on that thing. And if there are other things that you do, you can do those once you're in the door market, the one offer. Talk about the one offer.

This is the way that you get away from doing 20 million different things. People will go to my website and they'll say, Oh, what about your mastermind program? How come I can't just like, there's no buy button for that. I'm like, You can't just buy it. So when you're putting things onto your website, market the one offer, this is the entry level thing, the thing that will get them to work with you. So many times consultants will have like this laundry list of like 12 different things that you can do as like to get in the door. If you're doing that, here's the problem; is that they see there's these 12 different things, and instead of thinking, “Oh, here's this menu and I'm going to choose from it,” they think, “I don't know what this person does.” Like, how do all these things fit together? Like, what's the unifying thread? They're not going to do that work. They're not going to connect those dots. So when I see consultants who have like, three to 20 things that they do that many offer things they can do for their clients. Then what happens is you are creating friction in getting known for what you want to be known for. So it's diluting your brand and it's causing all of your success to take longer.

It feels scary to take those 20 things off of your website and to put one offer on there. One thing that you do, but remember, it's one thing with these three components, so it makes sense. It's one way that you get the result. It's one outcome. And then you can do these things. If you focus it on what the client will get so that your offer is, I'll help you create better teams or improve productivity or that the outcome is the offer, then you can pile in more stuff into it, but do not talk about all that. Talk about the thing that you want to get known for. And if that is, for example, creating better teams, more effective teams, you know, find your branded language for what that is and then that is the offer. All of these individual components, talk about that once you're in a sales conversation. But when you're getting there, hone in on what that single specific thing is, OK, that offer the result that you get for your clients. If you get that down to one thing, then what happens is you will quickly be known as the person who gets that result. You'll find you'll get more referrals, you'll get better clients because they'll come to you for that thing, and you'll have less confusion.

If you've done 20 things for past clients, then they don't know what to bring you in for again or what to refer you to someone for. Would it be the favorite thing that you did for them? Would it be the thing that got the best result? Like, there's too much for them to do, too much thinking required. When you have one offer, you are known for that to your audience more quickly, and guess what, in the future you can expand. But for now, just the one offer.

So we've talked about one audience, one offer. Those are the first two ones. The third one, this is a little complicated, is its conversion mechanism conversion tool.

How do you take people from a prospect to a client? And for most consultants, this is with a sales call. It can be a series of meetings at their office, which is a long form sales conversation. But in general, it's a conversation with you to find out if they want to hire you. So that is the thing that you're driving to. What does that mean? How can they buy the offer? They can buy it by having a conversation with you. So all of your marketing needs to send people to one thing, which is a sales conversation. You might have webinars and trainings and sales pages and your website and all these other conversion tools. Remember that everything has a single intention, which is to get people on the phone with you.

It makes it very clear for your potential clients when they know that that is the way, and it makes it so much easier for you in your marketing where you're not like, it's not get this lead magnet or go visit this or sign up for our training or whatever. Those are all things that you're doing with the intention of getting someone on a call. OK. So that to me, clarifies what your marketing is doing. The job of all of this stuff is driving to a call. That's the third one.

The fourth one is a channel. They'll say traffic in some cases, but it basically means where are you getting in front of your potential clients? So is this LinkedIn? It probably is. It can be with referral partners, it can be through networking events, it might be speaking, but in general, what you want to do is dedicate your marketing efforts to the place where you know that your clients come from. I say it this way because I have a lot of people who will be doing some stuff on LinkedIn and then they start to get busy with clients. And so their LinkedIn kind of gets neglected and then the client work is coming to a conclusion and then they're like, Oh my gosh, now, I have to quickly get my LinkedIn going up again. And that isn't really how LinkedIn works, as we know you have to be consistent on your social platforms. Or they get tons of referral business and then they get busy and then the referrals start to die down and they're like, How come that happened? So referrals need to be not an accident, they need to be a strategy. And if that's how you get business, then you need to nurture that channel, nurture the people who are sending you referrals and turn that into something that is predictable and not accidental. If you want to be completely present on social media, then get onto LinkedIn and be consistent on it. So figure out where your business is coming from.

Speaking: if you are someone who gets all your business from the five times that you spoke last year, then make sure you are dedicating your marketing efforts to getting you speaking engagements. Again, I find that people have things that succeed, and then they let those things go like either we expect to keep succeeding or we get bored of that channel and go to something else. Know where your leads come from and focus on maintaining and maximizing that channel. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't be present on LinkedIn while you're doing your speaking things. But don't let your energy fall off of nurturing that single channel. So a channel of where leads come to you is the fourth one and the fifth one.

The fifth one is one year. If it's one target audience, one offer one sales mechanism or conversion tool, one channel. The fifth one is one year. Focus on all of those things just for a year. You know that if you put your effort on to those things and you said, No, no, no, no new offers or no, no, no, I'm not going to expand my target audience. No, no, no. Somebody wants to invite me to come and speak for somebody who isn't my audience. I'm going to say no to everything except for doing this. Keep your eyes on your own paper, run your own race and do this stuff all for one year. You know you are going to see massive changes and improvements in your business.

So in my world, people will say, do the five ones until you hit a million dollars. So it's not just a year unless you're going to hit a million within that year. So focus yourself. And that requires discipline and that requires commitment to what's going on. And I think it requires also some confidence that what you're doing is the right thing. So that last one, I think, is really important. You can have a peer group who supports you or I would highly advise you to get a coach who can direct you in the right activities and support you as you're on the path to that.

As you know, this is something I help my clients with. They are consultants who are looking to multiply their revenues on the path towards $2 million and multiplying their revenues by focusing on transformational engagements for perfect clients, so exactly what we are talking about here in the five ones. So if you'd like support in doing that, I'd love to help you. You're welcome to reach out through any of my channels. And in general, if you can commit to doing these five ones in your business, what you're going to see is expected predictable success that comes when you focus with this kind of discipline. With that, I am wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.