Consulting Services—Have You Thought of These?

There are some obvious services you provide as a consultant and some not-so-obvious ones. With a little creativity, you can use your consulting infrastructure to make additional money in between other projects and when you travel. Presented here are several ideas including private seminars, teleconferences, coaching, roundtables, critiques, and mystery caller services.

Private Seminars
Private seminars are presentations you make to an individual company or organization just for their individual members, employees, or staff. Many of the companies you will be working with will be large enough that they may want to bring you in-house to do a seminar like this. Although there may be no product sales possibilities, this becomes a great additional source of revenue for you as a consultant.

To prepare for a private seminar, you just take your existing public seminar information and customize it to the individual client. There is no need to spend hours customizing, but you should make it seem like you did enough to make them feel like you did some real work.

Your fee schedule should list prices for half day and full day in-house seminars. It should be in-line with your daily consulting rates. It is appropriate to charge 10 or 15 percent less, depending on how much you like doing private seminars.

Every private seminar you do should be geared to giving the audience a lot of great, useable information, as well as setting the stage and the need for additional seminars aimed at the same group. In your post-seminar evaluation form include a section that asks the group what other topics they would like to see covered in a similar format. This way you can go back to the person who originally booked you and document why their staff needs you to come back.

Teleconferences
Teleconferences offer another great way to earn money consulting without leaving your home or office. The teleconference is a great add-on product. It is easy to do and you can generate revenue from a one- or two-hour meeting. And you can do it in your underwear in the privacy of your own home!

Here is how it works. You promote a teleconference to either your existing customers or to your prospects. If you market it to a group of existing customers, you can try and offer them a very specific seminar topic at a fairly high price range. If you offer the right topic, it would not be unreasonable to get people to pay $99 for a 60- to 90-minute meeting. In some markets you can get even more.

A terrific resource for teleconferences is freeconferencecall.com. They offer free and low-cost audio and data conferencing. Each conference call can have as many as 96 participants, and can last up to six hours. Call 1-877-482-5838 for additional information and current rates. Tell them I referred you.

Monthly/Weekly Coaching
Coaching occurs when you get people together, usually on a weekly or monthly basis, and help them meet their goals. It’s different than a teleseminar in that it is more personal and interactive between you and the participants. It is usually time- and cost-effective to do the coaching via telephone. This will also allow you to get paid the greatest amount for the least amount of time spent on the phone. To do group coaching, you will need what is called a “bridge line” to host these calls.

I suggest you price your coaching high enough to effectively select those who are truly interested in your services. After all, only those who are really interested will call you when they know you’re charging a lot of money for your time.

Roundtables in Cities You Visit
A roundtable is a small meeting (usually under 15 people) of existing or new customers. You typically promote it primarily to your existing customer base. Getting existing customers to show up for small group meetings in their own city isn’t difficult. It is also inexpensive to market. If anyone other than your existing customer base signs up, it will be a bonus.

Use roundtables to maximize your revenue when you travel. Let’s say you have to be in Chicago to meet with a client on a Tuesday. If you get to Chicago by noon on Monday, why not set up a roundtable for Monday from 4 to 6 PM? If you have 15 people show up and pay $300 each, you’ll make an additional $4,500 for two hours of work with very little risk.

If you are dealing with clients who are believers in your abilities, you should be able to send them a very simple letter letting them know you will be in town. The key is to keep the group small and exclusive. Let them know that the group will be 15 people or less. They will gladly pay to “sit at the feet of the master,” meet with other businesses in the group, listen to the latest information, and ask direct questions.

Critiques
A great way to increase the value of your products without spending a dime is with something called a critique coupon. The critique coupon is a small sheet of paper that is included with all of the products you sell that entitles your buyer to send a piece of promotional material or other item for you to evaluate and return to them.

For a little bit of your time, you can substantially increase the value of your package. It may take you ten minutes to do the critique and you increased the value of your package by $150. Not $150 in bogus value, but in true value as perceived by your customers. You can even send them an actual invoice marked “fee waived” or “courtesy review” to further impress them with the value of what you’ve done for them.

Make sure and respond to the critiques sent immediately. There is nothing more frustrating to your clients than not responding as quickly as you can. If it takes you two months to get back to them, the coupon will do more harm than good.

You can streamline the process by developing a template for many of your often requested critiques. For example, I receive a lot of requests to critique yellow page ads in a number of my niche markets. I developed a template to assist with my critique. This makes it much simpler for me to respond to critique requests once they are sent to me.

Mystery Caller
Another service that you can provide for customers as a consultant is to do what is referred to as “mystery calls.” This is where you call and sometimes record (but your client must get their employees to consent to it) the calls you make to their organization for the purpose of assessing the skills and talents of their employees over the phone.

When I perform this service, I send the company contact a cassette recording of the call with a critique at the end of the tape. Company owners are usually open to this kind of service because (in many cases) they know how poorly their phones are handled.

Typically, I charge anywhere between $75 to $100 per call. Each call usually takes less than 10 minutes including the critique.

Market Through Associations

Industry associations and professional organizations serve as your main springboard for your consulting business. These organizations are a collecting point for your prospects and provide a forum for personal contact marketing (networking).

First, you need to figure out how many associations are in your field. How do you do this? Enter the key word or words from your industry into your favorite Internet search engine. In most cases, with enough surfing, you will find all the associations that exist. While you’re at it, find all the trade magazines in the industry. Also, talk to everyone you meet in the industry to find the top organizations.

For example, when I go to any search engine on the Internet and pull up the key words “self-storage,” usually the first item I see is the Self-storage Association (SSA). Do the same with your target market/industry.

After you find your target associations, make contact with these folks. Volunteer to help out and see if you can get to speak at their events.

Identify Industry Leaders

As you involve yourself in an industry with the goal of selling information products, the first thing you should do is identify the industry leaders. Why? First, you want to do research for your product development. Second, you may want to approach these folks to see if you can get them to endorse your products. Third, if they really like what you have to sell (and like you personally), you may even be able to get them to sell your products for you.

How do you find the industry leaders? Begin by going through the trade publications. Look for names that keep appearing. Who is writing articles on a regular basis? Who is advertising regularly? Ask the association bigwigs to recommend whom you should talk to. When I first got involved in the self-storage industry, I found the gurus pretty easily. I walked around the trade shows and read all the trade publications. I also purchased all the information products I saw advertised in the trade publications. This helped me identify every guru in the industry. Then I contacted them and learned as much as I could.

If you are entering an industry you know very little about, you can run classified ads seeking industry experts. You may be surprised at how many “experts” respond! If I ran one, my ad for self-storage experts would read something like this: “Storage marketing experts sought for lucrative consulting project.” You will get enough responses that you will be able to screen for the ideal interview subject. If you decide not to interview some of the respondents, be careful not to alienate any of them at the beginning because they may be helpful to you later.

Once you collect these names, you need to approach these individuals directly. Call, e-mail, or write to them. Introduce yourself and try to befriend them. You want to try and rally these people to your side. Often, these folks aren’t expert marketers and feel honored just to be asked for their opinion. You want to learn as much information as you possibly can about the industry. Formulate a key set of questions that you want answered before you call them. Ask them about their biggest fears. What are they most concerned about? What keeps them up at night?

Why do you want this information? It will tell you exactly what products you need to develop and give you a blueprint for what you need to produce. You’ll also get an idea whether these folks will make good dealer/affiliates for your products. You may even want to co-produce products with some experts. If they’ve got specific knowledge that you think will sell, consider asking them to help you develop the content in exchange for a piece of the pie. This saves you a lot of time because they’ll do most of the content development for you. All you’ll have to do is pay them a certain percentage of sales for each of the products that they help develop.

Appoint Yourself King or Queen

If you are interested in making the most money in the shortest amount of time as a consultant, you have no time for subtlety. So, assuming you have the knowledge to back it up, do what I did in the self-storage industry. Go in and appoint yourself “king.” This is almost as good as owning your own island and turning it into a country.

Be brash and announce yourself as “the expert.” This will mean that in any of the ads or promotional materials you produce, you will list yourself as the “top” this or that in the field. For example, if you are an engineer, you will become the “top civil engineer in the pipe fitting business.” My very first ad in the self-storage field stated that I was the top marketing expert in that industry. How could I dare do this? Because I was able to support the claim. I was an expert marketer and I had a general knowledge of the self-storage industry. I did my homework and I knew I could back up my claims. Additionally, up till then, no one else had claimed the title, so I won by default.

You may feel funny about going into an industry and wearing the king’s crown without having been born to royal parents. However, keep in mind that many currently accepted experts have done exactly that. If you doubt this is true, find a copy of Robert Ringer’s Winning Through Intimidation. Read his section on something he refers to as the “Leap Frog Principle.”

If you don’t do what I suggest, someone else will. Someone may have already claimed the crown for your niche. Take a close look at the current top consultant in your field and you will probably see that he or she did something similar when they first entered the market. If the top crown is taken, you can either take on the king or queen directly or find a sub-niche and declare yourself king or queen of that province.

Consulting is Not a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

If you are looking to make a quick buck, consulting isn’t the business for you and my system will not help you. However, if you are looking to build a consulting empire over the long haul, you’ve come to the right place. The reason is that my system requires you to build a solid base of customers. It may take a while, but once built, it will continue to pay you dividends almost indefinitely. It will also become a saleable entity. You and this system will only succeed if you are ethical. You can probably make a little bit of money quickly by taking advantage of people, but you won’t make big money in the long run.

My system requires you to produce great materials that have major value for all of your clients, large or small. This requires a little more work on the front end, but pays off handsomely over time. The reason this works is that people either buy “up the dollar chain” or “down the dollar chain.” Some people will get involved with you by spending $19.95 on your book, but this is only the beginning of your relationship with them. After they are happy with your book, they will then invest in your $99 e-zine. Happy with this, they will purchase your audio tapes from a live seminar for $297, and so on.

It can also work the other way. They will show up at a seminar and spend $297. They will then give you an additional check for $777 for your “big product” package. Then later they buy your book for $19.95. However, it is rare that people spend the big bucks with you before spending some small money first. Thus, you need to have quality material developed all the way down to the $9.95 report. If you screw up and don’t deliver quality content and value at that price point, they will not go any farther. So, don’t blow your opportunity with poorly developed products.

Even when people buy the more expensive products first, they will buy all of your cheaper products if you give them many times more than their money’s worth. The key is to get them into your funnel as a customer at any level, and then trade them up the ladder over time.