My Consulting Practice
I maintain a small consulting practice which I limit to 40 hours a month.
Great sales presentations are still required in certain corporate sales, however, the world of Social Media has moved it to “get to the point” method. Here is my “get to the point” sales presentation.
The typical project I do is bringing a business from its current place as an small established small business to the level of being a house hold name like Zig Ziglar or Tom Hopkins.
In every small business there is two people with the same name owning it. It doesn’t matter if there is one part time person or their are 100 employees.
In my case its Zale Tabakman and there is “Zale Tabakman”.
In your case there is you – the person and and their is “YouBizCo” the business. In most small companies the “YouBizCo” and You are indistinguishable. While your strength of character and personality grew the business – the fact their is only two of you has created the problem. I know you don’t have time to work on the business because you are too busy running the business.
This is a fallacy and massively is effecting your ability to grow the business. The sooner you recognize and deal with the difference, the sooner your company will grow.
The first thing we do is separate the two parts and understand the strengths of each part.
The challenge for you is that “YouBizCo” is currently generating revenue by charging per hour for your time. No matte what your company is doing – if the company can’t operate without you, then you are being paid for your time.
You are not making money when you are sleeping. The short term challenge is how to meet the greater goal while at the same time letting you create revenues when you are sleeping, on you are fencing, cycling or out running.
Zig and Tom have achieved their level through the number of books and tapes that have been published and sold. These are their assets. Each of these assets a) generates revenue and b) adds to their reputation every time somebody reads their content.
In fact – Dale Carnegie has been dead for many years – but “Dale Carnegie” is generating profits day-in and day-out.
This is what “YouBizCo” needs to create.
The Internet makes it possible to reach this level faster than Zig or Tom did it, because of the Internet’s ability to communicate to a wider audience with so many different forms of media. The main challenge to address is that their are many people trying to achieve similar goals to “YouBizCo”.
There is enough business and opportunities available that this doesn’t necessarily represent financial competition as it does represent information overload for the target audience.
To achieve your goal we need to leverage the different aspects of the Internet Social Media.
Here are some of the Social Media assets and what they are REALLY composed of:
- Amazon.com – Printed books, text
- Itunes – Sound
- Podcasting – Sound
- Itube – Video
- Blog – Text
- Yahoo and Google Groups
- LinkedIn.com – 1:1 relationships
- LinkedIn Answers (LinkedIn.com) – Textual answers
- Download video
- Teleseminars
- Online seminars
What are some of the ways to measure the success of
- Number of different assets generating revenue
- Days spent speaking
- Number of people on e-mail list
- Alexa rank
- Incoming links to David’s Blog
- LinkedIn.com connections
The important parts of the whole project is that you must integrate all different ways do doing business. So for example, teaching a class generates
- The class,
- An audio series,
- A video series.
Segments of each can be used in all the different forms. Creating transcripts of the video and then editing it up becomes blog text which can be chapters in a book which can be used in LinkedIn Answers which can be used as a podcast which can be used as comments on somebody else’s blog.
My approach is straight forward and follows classic marketing theory.
Target a specific niche market that enables “YouBizCo” to become the big fish in a relatively small pond. Once the pond has been completed, find the pond next to it, and then keep consuming the different ponds. As we take over ponds, the amount and number of different assets will become substantial. Each feeding revenue.
Unless their are goals or immediate activities that I am not aware of, I suggest we start with a fixed weekly calls and follow-up with e-mails for the first several weeks until we establish a working pattern and then see where to go from their.
Here are some things we need to deal with at first blush:
- You have a number of different sites, Which seems to me to hurt the “YouBizCo” brand and will definitely hurt in the Social Media world
- There are a number of different programs on going, but no consistent story
- There is no content on your blog, and its not consistent.
The initial plan will be to establish some short term deliverables which will develop a few initial assets that can be deployed.
Once they are out there – we can decide how to use the assets and create bigger and more valuable ones.
I am too expensive for most of the execution. I write great sales letters, but, so do others at a much less price. so I act as project manager and have others to do the execution.
For example -
- I have a video partner here just outside of Toronto. In two days – we can shoot a dozen 2-5 minute videos that can be put on your blog and tossed onto YouTube. They do the editing – and it looks a professional show. As long as you can create content and speak off the cuff you will be great. For example, one series can be you walking outside. Another in front of a white board. A couple of thousand + your travel expenses here and two days. That content can be released once a week for twelve weeks. So at the end of three months you have twelves video blog entries and a twelve slots on YouTube. The same content can be used for video advertisements in your video series. (You were planning a video series weren’t you?)
- Articles can be written by others for about $50/hr. I have editors and local web people. Depending on how complicated a web site that is needed.
- For larger projects – I have a business partner that can create the blog and maintain it. They access experts in your field to write content and so its a win-win. When ‘the expert” writes – they do it under their own name, For your articles – you will discuss on the phone the content, and a ghost writer will create it for you. The partner will create a custom WordPress site, adding the SEO magic, so that you are in the google top ten for certain key words. For this the charges are 1,500/month and up depending on how extensive a Social Media program you want.
- Click here if you want to learn how to develop new clients in the Greater Toronto Region
- Click here to see my offer for Toronto Based Professional Services Firms
I charge $250US/hour and expect a $5,000US/month retainer. I have a higher day rate if you require me to travel.
Contact me when you are ready to move to the next level.
