Steve Gordon: It's hard to sell something that's very expensive
and completely intangible that your clients don't understand.
David Shriner-Cahn: Welcome to Smashing the Plateau.
We help consultants, coaches, entrepreneurs, and small business
owners build their business after a long career as an employee professional.
We believe you should be able to do what you love and get paid
what you're worth ,consistently.
I'm your host David Shriner-Cahn.
Today on Smashing the Plateau, I'm speaking with the CEO and founder of
The Unstoppable CEO, Steve Gordon.
In today's episode, you will learn how a book can accelerate the
growth of your consulting business.
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Now let's welcome back Steve Gordon.
Bestselling author and marketing expert steve Gordon gives you the blueprint for
writing your own million dollar book in days, not months or years, and shows you
how to use your book to boldly win the best clients and command premium fees.
Steve, welcome back to the show.
Steve Gordon: David, thanks for having me.
David Shriner-Cahn: So I can't believe that it's been five years since you were
on Smashing the Plateau back in 2017.
You and I were both podcasting back then.
We're still podcasting.
Now that says something about either our lunacy or, or our
perseverance, or maybe both.
Steve Gordon: Pig headed, determination.
David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah, and it was a great episode.
Then we're going to get into that in a little bit.
I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background that will
clue people in on how you became an expert on writing a book.
Steve Gordon: So I've been working with, and in myself, professional services for.
more years than I want to admit at this point, but let's just say I'm
past the two decade mark and heading towards the three decade mark.
And I started my career in an engineering firm and bought that firm after I'd
been there for about four years out of college and learned really quickly that
it's hard to sell something that's very expensive and completely intangible
that your clients don't understand.
And, I left that firm 12 years ago and started helping, other
professionals with their marketing.
And one of the very first things that I wanted to do was write a book.
established my own authority and expertise.
And at the time I found that to be really difficult.
It took, took a couple of years to actually get it done.
I threw two book drafts in the garbage on the way to getting one done.
And when I finally published my first book in 2014, it changed everything.
Really almost overnight.
I had a one and a half person, local marketing consulting firm at the
time, and really didn't have any clients outside of our local area.
And we went in about a week, during the launch from being that local one
and a half person marketing firm to, having clients reaching out to us from
literally all over the world and it changed our business virtually overnight.
And we doubled that year.
We doubled the year after we've grown ever since.
And since then I've written five books and we've reversed, engineered
a process to do it really quickly.
And now we've helped dozens of other professionals do the same thing.
David Shriner-Cahn: So you've had, a major shift in your business.
In particular, since you've written your book and now that has become
something that you focus on.
Your audience hasn't really changed a whole lot is what I'm hearing, but what
you're offering for them has changed.
Steve Gordon: It's grown.
So in my first book, which is called Unstoppable Referrals, I talked about
this referral process that we had been developing with our clients at
the time where we would use what we called a referral kit, which is, might
take a number of different forms.
It might be a presentation that you go to your clients and you
offer through them or your referral partners and you offer through them.
That might be a white paper.
It might be, at the time we were doing, audio CDs, believe it or not.
And we had a client who was using a book and it turned out that the
book was really, the most effective of all of the forms that we tried.
And when I wrote my book and applied all those same principles and realized
not only is it the most effective, it's the most effective by 10 X, our
clients started seeing that and they started asking us, Hey, you've had
so, so much success with your book.
I'd really, I've always been thinking about writing one.
Could you help me write one?
And I resisted for a long time because it was tough to get that first book out.
And I wasn't quite sure we had the process down enough to do it for anybody
else, but I kept getting asked and I kept getting asked and it really is
the lynchpin for our referral strategy.
So now we lead with, Hey, let's create your book because that's
going to make every other bit of marketing that you do better.
And we also then will teach them the referral strategy on the back.
David Shriner-Cahn: So tell me a little bit about this process to create a book
and how you've really simplified it.
Steve Gordon: So the first two attempts that I had to write a book were
probably like what most people do.
they want to do it and they have some general ideas and maybe you've
got a rough outline and I would sit down to write and I'd be all full
of caffeine and excitement and.
be off to the races and I'd get through a chapter or two.
And then somewhere along the lines, things would just take a left turn
and I'd look at the, that what I'd written the next day and go, where
am I going with this I'm lost now.
And that was a wall for me.
And so I heard a podcast interview back in, it was late 2013.
I started writing that first book in January of 2014.
And I can't remember who was being interviewed, but he described his
process and how he broke down his book.
And I thought, oh, okay, that's perfect.
That's what I need.
So I went and broke down and outlined what became Unstoppable Referrals
in about six hours in one day.
And I was able to outline it to such a great level of detail that when I
started writing, I never had an issue looking at a blank page with that
little annoying blinking cursor that wants to, wants to take you under.
And that was really the difference.
So I got up every day before the family was up and I wrote for an hour and every
time I did that, I'd open the laptop and the next prompt was right there.
And one of the real keys was, using questions.
So we, the way we do it now with clients is we typically help them
organize about a 10 chapter book.
And, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 15, but give or take 10 chapters.
And inside each chapter, we use the rule of three.
So there's three main points.
And again, these are hard and fast rules, but they're guidelines.
And then in inside each of those main points, we have them lay
out three questions to ask.
And when they get down to that level of detail.
And, but the fact that we're using questions really
helps the brain keep going.
And that is what speeds up the writing.
And so my record for writing a book is eight hours.
I wrote a book that's just shy of a hundred pages and eight hours using
this method and our clients routinely who aren't professional writers,
who most of them would tell you.
I'm not that comfortable writing.
They'll come in.
And in about 30 minutes a day, over the course of 30 days,
they'll have their book finished.
The first draft will be done.
It'll be ready to edit and publish.
Wow.
David Shriner-Cahn: And what kinds of results.
Do these folks get once they get the, and is this their first book typically?
Steve Gordon: For most of them, it's their first book.
We do have a number, a growing number of clients who are coming back for their
second or third or fourth book with us.
But for most of them, it's their first book.
And most businesses only need one.
One book will transform your business.
And the results obviously vary greatly by the type of business they are.
But almost universally, what we see is they get this initial sort of bump
in the marketplace because it's an exciting thing to publish a book.
Most business owners have thought about it at one point or another, and
they, when we talk to people, they constantly are telling us, oh yeah,
I've had this on my bucket list for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years.
And when you go out to your network and say, Hey, I just wrote a
book I'm really excited about it.
I would really appreciate your help in getting the word out.
People get really excited.
It gives them some good dues to go share about you and they
really want to get behind it.
So that typically will lead to, the first wave of new clients
coming in for our authors.
In that first batch.
And it's really exciting to see we'll have people text me and they'll say,
Hey, I just shared my book for the first time and you won't believe it.
I've got five people that are willing to share it, or, I
shared it with somebody who.
I know I should have been a client of ours for years.
And, now he really understands what we do and we're meeting to
talk about how we can help him.
So it's fun to watch when those sorts of things happen.
David Shriner-Cahn: Steve, how long are folks commonly in business
before they write a book like this?
Steve Gordon: Most of the people we work with are, they've been in business
for at least a few years, but we've actually got, three, now we have used
this process to launch their business.
we're working with an educational consultant out of California.
And, she was a teacher who wanted to move into the private sector, start
her own consulting business and worked with her to get her book written.
She launched it last November and within a month she had
received national media coverage.
She's been mentioned in national media, had a couple of feature articles
on her since then, and went from no business to a thriving now consulting
practice in, in less than a year.
So it really works at all stages.
David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah.
so for somebody who may be a longtime employee, somebody who's mid to high
level, who has been in the workforce for 20, 25 or 30 years or more, and they
either decide they want to transition into consulting, or they've been pushed
out of their job and they decide that they don't want to do that anymore.
They want a consulting business.
How soon should they think about a book?
Steve Gordon: I think if you're going out to do consulting in an area where
you already have expertise because of your role and in your corporate job,
I think one of the very first things that you should do is write the book.
It's going to leap-fund you ahead, maybe five, even 10 years
from where you would've been.
Otherwise you're going to be perceived in the market as an
authority and an expert right away.
And you, and I both know this transition from having a, a regular
job and a regular paycheck into the entrepreneurial world into consulting
is a tough transition for people.
And I, a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's, you now have all
of these options for what you should do with your day and your time.
And when you're in a job, you've got guardrails.
When you come out into a consulting practice that you're trying to build,
and you're trying to get clients as the kind of first order of the day.
There are easily a thousand things you could choose to do.
And, most of them won't give you the level of authority that having a book will give.
And, the book will allow you to focus your efforts around that.
It'll allow you to let the book go and promote you, instead of you
going and trying to sell people and working with you, it'll go do
that hard work out in front of you.
David Shriner-Cahn: How hard is it to write a book when you haven't
really decided on exactly what kind of niche you're going to serve?
Because one of the challenges I see with new consultants is they have
built up their expertise over decades.
They have pretty broad expertise, in a discipline.
So there are a lot of different kinds of problems they could solve.
There are different kinds of ideal clients that they could pursue.
And they're often really challenged to go narrow and pick one to focus on.
Is that a challenge for writing a book before you've really
established much of a practice.
Steve Gordon: We work with people who've been in business for
decades and they still haven't made those critical decision.
They're still working with any client that comes along.
So don't know that it necessarily is unique to people who are new
to consulting, but I do think it's an important decision to make.
It's one of the things that when we have a client come in.
One of the first conversations we're going to have is, who are we really
serving and how narrow can we make that?
And I will tell you that it's hard to make that market too narrow
for most consulting practices.
And you think about most consultants they're going to work with anywhere
from five to 50 clients in a year, on average, maybe there are a few, that'll
have a few more than that, but we're not talking about needing to go out
and find 10,000 people to work with.
And so that, that gives you a unique advantage compared to a lot of businesses.
You almost can't create a market too small to serve.
So I've got a financial consultant that we work with.
We've done four books with him.
And, when we started working together, his main market was anyone
who was preparing for retirement.
And then, within that he had a sub niche of people who were members
of the state retirement system here in Florida, where were both based.
And then he of sub-nitched that down to professors at one of the universities
in the city where he's located.
That's maybe 10,000 people total.
And since doing that, he's had four record years in a row with a total
universe of prospects of 10,000 people.
You can't get it too small.
David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah.
That's assuming that they have the interest, the need, the resources.
Sure.
And the willingness to pay you.
Steve Gordon: You it's gotta be a viable market.
It's gotta be a group of people who would normally buy the type of thing
that you're offering, but you've gotta work really hard to get it too small.
David Shriner-Cahn: Steve, are there things that consultants and
people selling their expertise?
Can do in advance of deciding to write a book, that'll make the process easier.
Steve Gordon: So I think the number one thing to have, and I think this
is really foundational to starting the business, but it also is vital to
writing the book you need to have what I call your opinionated worldview.
And what I mean by that is, when most people start a business, they start it
because they believe that there is, some problem out there in the world and that
they have a unique approach to solving it.
And, I've had consultants push back on this and say, I do it like everybody
else does it, but yes, that may be true.
But most of the time there's a twist that is uniquely yours.
And it's often that twist that you're building the whole business around.
And yeah, you want to have this reason why we exist Thinking done coming into it.
I think that's really important to have
David Shriner-Cahn: What's your unique worldview for your business?
Steve Gordon: My, my unique worldview is that selling
professional services is different.
That the way that most of us are taught to market and sell works really well if
you're selling a product, but when what you're selling is your own expertise,
you have to take a different approach.
Most of the sales techniques that work really well for products actually,
erode trust if you're selling yourself.
It's very hard to use some of those sales tactics and then go jump in the
phone booth and come back out in your Superman Cape to save the day as the
super consultant and have the person that you just arm wrestled to the sell,
with all your fancy closing lines and scripts and all this other stuff that
people teach and then have them accept your advice as a trusted advisor.
And you've gotta take a different approach.
and that's really everything that we do comes from that place of
equipping consultants to, to be able to make that very different
type of sale and make it easier.
and more simply.
David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah.
How closely aligned is the process you're describing to consultative sales, where
you're as the salesperson, you're just helping a prospect, solve a problem.
Steve Gordon: I really think that the book is the sort of the tip of the sphere in
that, one of the reasons that we lean on that tool so heavily is that for a lot
of the people that we work with, putting on the salesperson hat, isn't their first
desire when they wake up in the morning, it's not what they see themselves as.
And what the book allows them to do, and of course there are
other formats you could do.
You could do this in a presentation, you could do it in other formats.
We just find that the book carries so much more authority with it and is easier to
share than any other thing that we found.
But the book allows you to take all of your best thinking around how you solve
a particular problem for a particular type of person and package it in a way
that's very easy for people to share.
It's no risk to the prospects, because there's no scary salesman,
that's going to jump out of the pages and make 'em buy something.
And it gives you the space to make your entire case.
And so one of the things that we walk all of our clients through is we're.
We're laying out the book, as we want to start with, what is the
problem that the people you're trying to serve are grappling with.
And not only that, what are the consequences of it?
Because they may have an inkling of some of the consequences because
they may be experiencing them.
But you, as the expert know that if they don't address this, they're a big,
scary monsters right around the corner.
And they need to know about that.
So we need to tell 'em those things that builds trust.
Then we need to lay.
Your approach to solving the problem, we call it your unique mechanism.
And this is I always like to equate it to the Wizard of Oz.
you've just been, dumped by the tornado, into this strange place and you want to
get home and everybody tells you, you have to follow the yellow brick road.
Your unique mechanism is the yellow brick road, and that's going to end
at this beautiful gleaming gemed, Emerald city, which is going to
be your gateway to your future.
And so at the end of the book, we want to paint that picture of what's possible
for that person, once you've transformed them and take them on that journey.
When you're able to do that, you can do things that are typically
hard for most consultants.
That is, you can address all of the objections that commonly come up in sales
conversations all up front in the book.
You can address all the questions that come up.
You can address all of the ways clients sabotage themselves as consultants.
We know all the time that we can, lead the horse to water, but we
can't always make them drink.
And we can point out all of the places where they're going to,
they're going to blow themselves up.
If they don't follow our advice.
All of.
Increases their trust in you.
It increases their relationship with you and all of that can
be done before you ever meet.
Which means when they show up, you have the experience of them
basically trying to sell you on why you should take 'em as a client.
And that's an easy sales conversation to have.
David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah, it is very different.
Steve, I want to, first of all, congratulate you on what you've done with
your own business is pretty remarkable.
And congratulations also on serving folks, that can really benefit by having a book.
If somebody wants to go deeper with anything we've discussed, access any of
the resources you might have available, or get in touch with you, where would
be the best place for them to go.
Steve Gordon: Yes, David, what we've done.
We've set up a page where they can get a copy of my latest book, which
is called the million dollar book, which will lay out our whole system
for how you can write your own seven figure business book that will,
attract the kind of clients you want.
And, I'd love to make a copy available to anybody listening, for free.
They can go to themilliondollarbook.org, themilliondollarbook.org/smashing,
and they can get a copy there.
And, Again, completely free.
We want to get that out to as many people as we can so that it'll help as
many consultants as it possibly can.
David Shriner-Cahn: My guest today has been the CEO and founder of
unstoppable CEO, Steve Gordon.
Steve, I want to thank you again for coming back and joining us.
Steve Gordon: David.
Thank you.
It's been a lot of fun.
David Shriner-Cahn: When you visit the Smashing the Plateau website at
smashingtheplateau.com, you'll find a summary of each episode, along with
the links we mentioned on the show.
On today's episode with Steve Gordon, we learned how a book can accelerate
the growth of your consulting business.
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