Hi, I'm Samantha Hartley and this is the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast, welcome back. Today I'm going to be talking about building your business by getting results for your clients. This season is about business growth strategies and this is kind of an unexpected, unusual one but it's also kind of like the obvious and central one, right? You want to be able to get results to your clients for them.

Years ago, I was in the third year of consulting. I was taking a marketing class. One of the assignments was to write down some success stories. And I was horrified to realize that I didn't have any success stories. And the reason I didn't have them was because the kind of work that I'd been doing and the clients for whom I'd been doing them, they kind of didn't conclude. My clients weren't unhappy but they didn't really implement the work and when I followed up with them to find out how things were going, they would say, oh, well, ah, you know yeah, thanks, that was great our priorities have changed, we're working on this right now. And so I didn't have a closure like an ending on any of my success stories, so that was really frustrating and eye-opening and really about that time, I started to dedicate myself to ensuring that if I started a project, it was going to have a happy ending, have a success at the end of it.

And so that caused me to learn a lot about what it really takes to get results. It's so important to have them in your business, probably the things that you know about me or what I'm known for in case you don't know me, I'm known for helping people add $100,000 to their business in a single offer, like doing $100K offers. I'm known for the proposal that somebody had, she wanted to ask $400,000 and I helped her turn it into an $800,000 engagement and get a yes to that overnight. I had a client who added $600,000 in the first year working with me, the one who was charging $5,000 for things and now has just sold in a $6,000 per month engagement. I could go on and on, I'm talking about the results that I'm getting for my clients and that my clients are getting through working with me. And that builds my business, you know that does more than almost any marketing messaging that I can do and that is the thing that people want to hear about and that's going to be true for you as well. And I have talked to other consultants who have had this issue and that their success stories you know a story is a beginning, middle and an end their stories don't have an end and sometimes it's because they concluded their work and then they left and the work needed time to produce the results and then either they didn't follow up or they followed up and like my client's priorities had changed, they'd moved on. Or in some cases, the consultant doesn't feel like they can go back in and say, hey, how did that work out or how much did you end up saving or whatever would be the conclusion of that? So that is also a problem that I'm going to address today. So very specific, three points I'm going to give you today about how to get better results through your business.

First thing you're going to do is that you are going to set yourself up for success, like we need to be our own advocate in this and you need to put yourself in an environment for success and one of the first ways that you do that is by working with the right clients, you want to work exclusively with perfect clients because client selection is going to be the determiner of whether you get a good result or not. So the first thing that you need to do is assess. Is this someone who is going to help me to get results? Do they have a track record of implementation? Does the situation look chaotic and like a mess, or does this look like a situation that I can come into and produce results with them?

So those are the things that I'm asking in my intake and a lot of my clients, when I tell them this, are at first surprised that I will not accept a client who I don't believe is going to be successful with me. It's just ethics, right? But a lot of people still feel like I probably can, I should definitely take them or I should take all the clients I want to try, at least make a contribution. I think it's important to be very discerning about who you accept as a client and ensure that at minimum, you think that they're going to be able to be better off after this than they were before and specifically to get a really good result from you.

The second thing that you need to do is to work within your strengths, there's always the ongoing debate about whether we play to our strengths or show up our weaknesses and things like that in the work that you do in your business you really want to focus on your strengths. These are places where you have a proven track record, and if you want to expand that by doing new work, sometimes you can take a one off project, a potential project and test that out, but you are going to have to be even more discerning in that case to make sure that you're going to be able to get some kind of results there then you may find out I don't want to do that kind of work, and it wasn't actually all that fun or it doesn't get a result, and then you'll know that that time investment that you put into there was yielded a no answer. So that's why I think it's really important to work in the area of strength for you.

And one of the strengths that you can have is a signature system that we've talked about before. Signature systems are proprietary process. When you work in your strength and you work with your signature system, you know from your side that you're almost guaranteed to get a successful result. So that takes discipline and it's the kind of thing that we learn after years and years of doing this. And if you're younger in your business than I am, then I want you to not have to learn that over the arc that I did, begin by doing the work that when you go in there, you could do it with your eyes closed and it would get a good result. Set yourself up for success and you will find there is less stress and more success in your business.

Next, you want to set the client up for success, so how do we do that? I have had controversial conversations many times with people about this, but do not let the client buy something that is not what they need, it may seem crazy. I'm sure you're thinking, well, who would ever do that? A lot of times the client will hear about your thing and come to you and say, Oh, that's what I want and then if you have an intake process or a discovery process, you might find that's actually not what they need. So it's really important at that point to have the conversation. I don't think that you need this; I think that you need this instead. So the client comes to you and says we need to recruit 50 people. It would be easy to fulfill that order, right? Just go and do the thing that the client has said but in your discovery process, you actually determine that they're not ready for the 50 people and they need a talent strategy to figure out where those people are going to go and what they're going to do. And if you just bring in the 50, that probably the whole thing is going to collapse in on them. But they really want it and they're really sure, what do you do? So it's my belief that you need to give the client what they need and don't let them buy something that isn't going to serve them. People may be not at the level to receive as an organization or as an individual what you offer, so don't let them purchase that.

You want to set them up for success, which means and I think this begins in the sales process, a lot of times people will offer options. And we talked about this in the proposals episode, if you're offering all these different kinds of options, it's like, is that really what the client needs? I don't want to ever be in the offering process, confuse them or allow them to purchase something that isn't right for them. So if the choices are A, B and C and they choose C and you think crap, that's on you, don't allow them to choose something that either you don't want to fulfill or they don't need. It's not the right fit for them, make sure that your offers and options ensure that the client, no matter what they choose, makes a decision that's right for them. If they choose no, that's fine but if they choose to move forward with you, it's got to be clear what's going to be the right thing for them.

The second thing that you need to do to set your client up for success is to set and manage expectations. And this happens from the very beginning, right? I think it happens from the very first phone call. I've talked about how, on your first call, discovery call with your client, you really want to lead from the very beginning. You need to say, here's how this call is going to go and when you are in the proposal process, you're like, here's what we're agreeing to do and I want to make sure this is where you're really setting those expectations you talk through those joint accountabilities. I closed a $60,000 engagement with a 12 million dollar client one time by saying to them, listen, I can't work with many clients each year. So if I'm going to work with you, what I'd really like for you to commit to is to implement this so that we get results because I'd like to make it a case study, our work together. I really want to make sure that our work concludes with a success story. Is that something that you can commit to? Everybody was delighted to hear that, so we all knew the expectation was set that we're going to be successful.

And then the last thing that we need to do is that we need to then lead, coach, manage that client and the process towards that positive result. Now, this is probably something that you're really good at but a lot of times we can get pulled off by boundaries issues or personalities issues you know, it's almost always the people things and sometimes it's things out of our control, logistical things, force majeure, pandemics, all kinds of unexpected things. But in general, when you are at your best on your best day, you know that you can be coaching and leading your client and keeping them focused on that outcome, like why are we doing this and what are we doing? And what needs to be done in order to achieve that. So set your client as well up for success.

And the last thing is going to sound a little bit contradictory. I spoke once about this quote that I love the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind without your head exploding. I think that is how it goes. So two opposing things can be true at the same time they can both be true at the same time, so I want you to be committed to getting a result for your client and also, the third thing that I want you to do here is I want you to let go of the outcome because we can only have so much control. I saw this beautifully demonstrated years ago on an episode of The Dog Whisperer. This is the guy, Cesar Millan, who goes into people's homes and works with their dogs and he went into the home of this very young celebrity couple to work with them and their dog. And I'd seen all the episodes of the show so I kind of knew his demeanor when he was working with people and he was always you know, energetic and engaged and you know just he had a certain kind of level of commitment when he was working with them and he had a few things that he did with this couple and after that, what I noticed that he had a kind of laissez-faire attitude about things like “ I know you could do that.” And I realized what had happened was he knew they weren't going to do any of this. They just wanted to be on his TV show; they weren't going to do any of this. And so he will still give them the advice that they should do. But he had a very different level of belief in their ability to execute it than I had seen on other episodes when he was talking with people who really seemed committed to getting results for their dog. That stood out to me because I have seen and experienced clients who I realized at a certain point that they weren't as committed to getting the result as I was. And this is again, I'm teaching something that I don't want you to take 20 years to learn. We cannot be more committed to the result than the client is. You cannot want it more than they do, we cannot want it for them more than they want it for themselves.

So in the proposal episode, when I talked about the idea of Joint Accountabilities, it's like, here's all the things that I'm committed to, here's all the things that I'll be accountable for. And this is all the stuff that you, the client, are accountable for and it's kind of like there's this line and I'm going to be all in right up to that line, but I can't come over that line because that's the client's job. And I think at a certain point in a project, you'll realize, I hope you don't mean, you may encounter this, which is that you want it more than they do and they thought they wanted it or organizational priorities have changed or whatever. And at that point, what I think is detrimental and soul crushing for us is to try to go in and give some of our level of commitment to the client ok.

So you're going to set yourself up for success by choosing the right people to work with and by doing the right things for them. You are going to set them up for success by letting them choose what is right for them, what's in their highest good and the highest good of all concerned. And then you're going to let it go, you're going to let it go because what's going to happen is going to happen, you're going to do your best, you're going to intend that they do their best. And that, my friends, is how you're going to get much better results in your business and when you do get those results, be strategically visible with them, which means you're going to promote them. And that is the topic for next week and I'm so excited to talk to you about that. I will see you then. Wishing you a profitable and joyful consultancy.