So I wanted to spend a little time today talking about that, what exactly is a transformational engagement? Well, the origin of it is in very much the opposite. When I first started as a consultant, I was super frustrated because I would go in and do some sort of project, most consultants work on a project basis, so whether it's from six months to kind of like ongoing, they work on these projects and it's about solving a very specific problem, which is fine. But my frustration was that when I would solve these problems, I would go away and come back and say, hey, can I follow up with you? I just hear how things are going and a lot of times the organizations would be like, what? We've moved on, we've actually kind of forgot about that, in short it didn't get implemented. So, my fault for not staying on long enough to do this, but the clients would drop the ball and wouldn't implement it.

So either organizational priorities changed or maybe it was just too hard and they didn't want to admit that to me that implementing the work wasn't happening. So I was not going to stand for that and a little while later, I began to create offers and conduct my work in such a way that I could better ensure that the results of the work that the client and I did together would stick. So how do you get client results to stick?

We're going to talk about that today. The other thing that I want to talk about is this syndrome of revenue rollercoaster. So many consultants experience this when they do project work because they go in for the short term. A lot of times while they're working on a short term assignment,they forget to do any marketing and so when they're done with that assignment, they have to scramble to find new clients and that results in a revenue rollercoaster, which means a lot of revenues one month, not so much the next backup, the next month and down and this kind of instability in revenue flow, the transformational engagement is something that can solve all of these at once, allowing you to do your best work for the clients and helping you to have sustainable revenue flow. So one of my clients came to me a few years ago and said, here's my situation. I go in and work with a client. I'll do a 15 thousand dollar engagement, I go away, they'll call me back for thirty thousand, and then I go away and then I come back for 25 and so over the course of the year, they might do several engagements for that client, but they're kind of disjointed, I call those transactional. So the great thing is you have some client loyalty in there, but the downside is you don't get to really see how the projects weave together and how they contribute to the larger objectives of the company.

What I asked my clients to do is, sit down with a client when they are sharing with you what a situation is and before you say, sure, we can come in and laser beam, focus on the specific problem, and give you a solution to it in eight weeks. First ask, do you mind if we zoom out and take a look at your objectives, where you want to go with your company so we can see how this particular project would fit into the overall company objectives? Now, very often a client will be surprised and delighted by a question like that and wants to share with you that overall company objective and allow you to weave your own vision into how you can help them to achieve that. So once my clients started doing that, they were able to say, instead of coming in and doing several small projects in a row, how about we zoom out? We create a plan for how our work can help you to achieve your goals and then we begin to work long term with the clients. So, for example, a year and help them to not just complete the work that we've given them, but to actually implement and ensure the implementation of it sticks, thereby getting them transformational results.

That's the difference between a transaction and transformation and I’ve once said that real organizational change takes a minimum of a year to happen. I have clients who are selling in three to five-year engagements and longer because they're working on these kinds of problems that are deep-seated issues with companies that take a long time to solve. Now, I have a mentor who says that if there's any problem that a company has, it takes longer than 30 days to solve it. Well, you know, that's a real problem but 30 days is how long it can take to find a solution to a problem, but to actually implement the plans that are going to work that solution throughout the organization, that takes a lot longer. So I might decide, well, you know, we lack middle management or we need to retain our high potential people. Well, we can put in place a plan. We can figure out how to do that. But implementing that plan and making that happen is going to take a minimum of a year. That is the opportunity and transformational engagement and what I hope it does for you to shift the way you look at your work from coming in and quick solving problems to coming in and providing strategically relevant long term results to your clients.

One of the ways that I first did this was in working with a small community bank who had asked me to come in and help them. Normally, I would have done an 8 -12week project where we come up with a brand plan, a marketing plan. I show them how to implement it and then I go and I'd seen enough of these where I didn't feel like they were thriving during the implementation phase that I said, how about instead of that, I will stay with you for a year. I'll work with you for a year. So while we discover what the plan is and implement that plan the investment will be sixty thousand dollars. This was several years ago, but even then, for the client, that was a sticker shock of an investment. What I found out later was that I had a competitor who was putting in a bid for that same work, who had offered to do it for fifteen thousand dollars, what the bank president told me later was when we saw their price compared to your price. We realized that they hadn't really understood the scope and the magnitude of this work. So if you're ever wondering whether the low price always wins or if you think that proposing work the way you think is the right way to do it is going to cause you to lose a proposal. Just keep in mind that story, because I've seen many times that a robust offer making it clear to the client that you understand the challenge isn't actually how to get them done. That wins over low bidders very often. So as you're looking at your own business, I want you to consider what are the ways in which the current work you're doing is transactional and how you can transform that into offering transformational engagements to your clients. Now, it doesn't mean you never offer any smaller packages, we can always have, you know, ways that the client can work with us for a shorter term so that we can each have an experience of each other. A lot of times that can be an assessment phase where you can again solve the problem, show them what the problem is, show them what the scope of resolving that would be before you offer to do the transformational aspect of the work. So I want to share the results a couple of my clients have had with us. One of my clients went from charging one hundred twenty-five dollars an hour to offering transformational engagements and what I helped her to do was exactly what we're talking about. Go in and say, where do you want to take the company? How do your people in her case, she's working on people issues? How do your people contribute to this now? What do you want to see happen to them? And then she offers this year-long plan to get them there that she will help them to implement and then she does that and those engagements have ranged in the beginning from sixty thousand all the way now to they're running about fifty thousand dollars per month. So you can see that the magnitude of the work is much more. What I appreciate so much about that is that you coming off of the revenue rollercoaster makes you a better version of yourself, right?

You as the consultant don't need to be worried so much about revenues and you're being honored for the work that you're doing, which is this transformational work. The client is getting results that stick, getting longer-lasting outcomes because the way you're structuring the work is providing them the support that they really need and all of us not pretending that they can achieve those results simply by having the plan in hand. So I like things that are in the highest good of all concerned and in this case, it supports you to do your best work with a scope of an engagement that really allows you to dig and get work done and it helps them get the lasting results. This client has also done something else, when she and I looked at the ways that her clients needed to work and the goals they had and how they needed to implement them. What this client has done is, well we looked at her clients in the way that she needs to work with them and in order to help them achieve what they're trying to achieve and she's beginning to create signature systems, proprietary processes that she uses with them to achieve these results.

Now, the first system that she discovered while working with her clients is now codified and she's had another two that have resulted from that and so the way that she's working now is to basically roll out these systems within her clients, and that can take anywhere from three to five years. The interesting way that this happens in a pitch meeting is to say based on where you want to take your company, what I would propose that we do is over the next three to five years, do this and specifically in year one, what we would do is this, you see how we take the timeline of this from a very short project to saying over the arc of the next three to five years, here's what's going to happen, even if the client doesn't say yes to the whole five year thing at once, it's easier for them to say yes to a one-year thing, and you've put the one-year thing in the context of the longer term.

Talking with clients about transformational engagements, helps them to actually engage in a conversation that is more strategic. It's more connected to their overall business goals and it's a realistic conversation because it displays to them your knowledge of how long these things really take and what kind of effort it really takes. A lot of times it will snap an organization back to its senses when they realize, this can't be done in the timeline we think it can be done and this isn't a six-month project. This is actually, you know, a new way of working for our business, a new set of behaviors that we as an organization need to internalize. I'm recording these episodes during the pandemic, and I hope that they'll live on to a time when we don't have to be worried about these things but a lot of consultants are feeling constriction during this time period and they may say, well, this is going to be this would be great when the economy's back to normal but right now, nobody's working this way. What I want you to know is that if you have a service that is relevant and timely and solves a problem that they have right now, they will say yes to a transformational engagement example of clients who are I.T. consultants and they were having huge problems because they were billing by the hour, which is very common for that profession and they were therefore never able to really plan out their work accordingly and what they did was they went back to the clients, they said, listen, right now we're building you all this and it's making it difficult for us to plan our work. Sometimes you need a lot of people. Sometimes you need fewer people, can we just zoom out and talk to you about what your goals are overall so that we can put in place a plan to deliver that to you when the client gave them that information, my clients put together exactly how they're going to help them achieve that and sold them a four hundred eighty thousand dollars one year engagement.

That's during the pandemic so, I want you to know, don't put external constraints on yourself. Think about what's the biggest transformation? That my client needs right now, what are they really needing? And how can I give that to them so that they're supported in really getting those results and having them be long-lasting? This is a great way to secure your business, to make it more sustainable and deliver better results to your clients while keeping yourself off of the revenue rollercoaster. If you would like to know more about creating transformational engagements for your business. Feel free to get in touch with me and until next time, I'm Samantha Hartley wishing you a profitable, joyful consulting business.