Consulting Success with Michael Zipursky

Consulting is one of my favorite topics because it's also one of the ways I make my living, working with clients that range from small business owners to executives of much larger companies.

That's why I was excited to bring today's guest on and discuss some of the strategies he employs in working with clients and how he advises others to do the same.

To learn more about Michael Zipursky and get more tips on how to grow your consulting business, visit http://consultingsuccess.com/.

We discuss:

• Foundation of marketing and getting clients for consultants and service professionals
• ROI positioning of pricing and fees to earn higher rates
• Why Mindset matters most
• and much more

Consulting Success with Michael Zipursky

We're going to talk about consulting. I get a lot of questions all the time from some of my audience because I don't often talk a lot about my own exact business model. I don't make a pitch to you to sell you anything typically. I oftentimes simply work with companies, brands and influencers to not only consult them on their business, their brand strategy and their growth.

Of course, sometimes I have been known to buy a company and make some acquisitions and do some other creative transactions, but I don't often talk too terribly deeply about the practice of consulting. It has been an amazing business model for me ever since I sold my publishing business years ago.

I immediately realized I did not want to go to become a brand–new startup business owner again because starting up a business is super hard and it takes a long time. I've got a lot of skills that I like to leverage and help other people grow their business.  

I like to be in that pivot point where they can leverage my knowledge and we can all get results a lot quicker. For the past years, Costanzo Marketing Group was founded. People pay me very handsomely to help create strategic road maps and tactical implementation plans for how they can grow their business.

I have learned a lot of this through trial and error and gut instincts. I've taken courses, I've been coached but a lot of this has been to get out there, see if you can offer value and help people. It has led to a tremendous business for me and I love it. In this episode, I have got the founder of ConsultingSuccess.com, Michael Zipursky. 

Michael is also the author of the Amazon bestseller, The Elite Consulting Mind. He's advised organizations such as the Financial Times, Dow Jones, RBC, Omron and many more and help them launch products into global markets as well as helping over 180 consultants from around the world in over 50 industries at six and seven figures to their annual revenues.

He's here to enlighten you and share some sizzling hot tips with me as well on how we can use some of the things that have worked for him and his clients to grow our own consulting businesses. If you are a consultant now, if you sell your time and your advice for money, you want to pay super close attention. If you aren't and whether you have your own product, whether you're trying to get into business.

Whether you're working for a job and you're not excited about, but you think that there may be a better way to create some consulting success for yourself, this is also something you're going to want to pay close attention to. Michael and I are going to share what's been working for us. Michael, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. 

Brad, thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to be with you. 

You're up in Vancouver. Have you lived there most of your life? 

I call Vancouver home base but in 2017, I was out of the country for about five months mostly traveling with my wife and daughter. I'm able to work from anywhere as long as I have an internet connection, so that was nice. We spent quite a bit of time in Europe, Japan and other places but this 2019, so far we've tried to stay a little bit closer to home. Now that we're getting into a nice season, it's always nice to be here when the sun is out. 

Prior to starting ConsultingSuccess.com and helping to show other people how to get started and how to grow their business and scale it as a consultant, what was your entry into the world of consulting? How did you get started? 

 

I have no formal training as a consultant. I learned from the school of hard knocks. I started my first consulting business many years ago. At that time, it was in web development design, helping clients in the early days of the internet. We built that business. Things went very well with that.

When I say we, I'm referring to my cousin, Sam, who is still my business partner now. We've built and sold several businesses over the years, but that was the first one. From there, we went on and created another business. It was called Kankei Culture. Kankei in Japanese means relationship.

We're very big believers in building relationships and especially if your clients are other businesses and larger organizations, the mindset of establishing a relationship is extremely important over the internet marketing approach, which can be a little bit different. That was what we did. 

I ended up going over to Japan and opened up the branch office for that. We built up a business that came back to North America. I started another consulting business called Relagy Marketing. It stands for Relationship Strategy. That business was focused on helping professional service firms like law firms, other consulting firms, financial advisors and so forth to generate more leads.

Through all of this and around the time when I was heading from Japan back to North America, I thought, “Why not start sharing my own experiences of what I was doing at the front lines building consulting businesses?”

Not only the things that were working but also things that weren't working in the hopes that others could benefit from my missteps as well as my successes. That's how Consulting Success was born. There was no real monetization plan. It was about sharing of ideas and it has taken off since then. 

Most of the consulting you've been doing has been primarily on marketing growth. There are all types of consulting out there. You can be a consultant on anything that somebody needs help on, but your specialty particular has been on marketing, branding and customer acquisition. 

It’s lead generation and back in the day, there was a bit more focus on strategy or brand strategy and design. That was one of our businesses. We had a lot in that area. We have clients we work with who are literally in every industry that you can imagine.

The only distinction that I'll make is that we only work with what we call expert consultants. These are people that are serving other businesses or established organizations. We don't work with life coaches, spiritual healers or others that are serving the B2C market. 

Let's talk about your sweet spot when you're working with a company. Obviously, there are small companies doing a few hundred thousand dollars a year who are getting started. There are companies doing millions or tens of millions of dollars and even higher per year.

Did you have a sweet spot of the type of consulting clients that you work with as far as the size of the business goes?  

In my earlier days, when I was running a more formal consulting business over the last eighteen years, I have built several of them. Most of our clients, the majority of my time was spent working with billion-dollar organizations like Panasonic, Dow Jones, Financial Times, Royal Bank and a whole bunch of others that people may not have heard of because they're very B2B players.

If you're in that space, you would certainly know them. That was a lot of my upbringing in the consulting world. That's where I honed my chops and learned what I know. 

As a consultant, focus on helping the buyer to see the outcome. Click To Tweet

How did you get your foot in the door with those big companies? 

It’s through relationships. When I went and ended up in Japan, a lot of people say, “How could you reach the president or get into the board room of a company like Panasonic?” It’s a very large printing company that he used to print like the cases for BlackBerry and stuff like that and the wood paneling in high-end cars. It's all relationships.

I would go out and I would find a way to meet with someone. In my specific situation, it was reaching out to other owners and principals of graphic design firms and ad agencies. I would connect with them. I would build relationships with them.

While all the other foreigners may have been off typically at the foreign bars in the evenings chatting about their days and teaching English and their experiences, I was in a hole in the wall Izakaya. It’s a little Japanese bar and I was rubbing shoulders with people that were twice my age because I want to learn from them.

I immersed myself and geeked out on learning more about the culture, the language, and that created very strong relationships, which led to introductions and referrals and opening up a world of possibilities that otherwise would have been very challenging for me. 

These were companies who are already doing probably business with the companies that you wanted to get access to. That was your entrance. 

That's how it started for sure. From there, the name started to become known and it then spread throughout Asia. People who wanted to get assistance with growing their brand or market share or getting their products into an English–speaking country would hear about us and come our way. 

How would you position it, whether it was then or now, when you're talking to a potential gatekeeper? Let's say you're talking with the owner of a graphics company or somebody like that who's maybe doing business and has a relationship with the big potential target that you want. How would you position them to make the introduction and to tee you up for the intro? 

I wouldn't. My focus was not on trying to get the introduction. My focus was on building a relationship with them. My observation and my advice to anyone in this position would be to focus on identifying people who you feel could be strategic, and this is one way. We're not even talking about direct outreach and getting in front of others in terms of lead generation.

This is if you want to build a referral or introduction network that can get you into places that otherwise you'd have a hard time getting into. In my case, with the owner of a graphic design firm or an ad agency, it would be, “I'd love to meet with you, learn more about what you're doing and share some experiences.” That conversation would go well or it wouldn't go well.

In many cases it went very well. They would suggest, “You need to meet this person.” That would be to a meeting on a 50th floor in downtown Osaka overlooking the city, sitting at a bar, talking with some other executive who I never would have unless by chance, run into. Now, we're talking about things and it brewed from there. 

This is great because I'm actually on your website and in some of your bullet points and you have multiple things. You have a course, you have coaching but inside one of your courses you've got some great bullet points such that you will learn this and this.

These are providing me some fantastic questions for you. I found that and I see this right here, which is how to land contracts with big companies.

Does this flow into it or are there some other things that you recommend right now for somebody who's got good consulting chops and they want to level up their game and get ahold of some of those bigger budgets? What would you recommend somebody does? 

Do you mean in terms of strategies? 

Sure, to land those bigger consulting contracts as opposed to go into the small companies? Small companies are great. I do a lot of work with smaller companies because I know a lot of them. I get access to a lot of them and I know I can do a couple of things and move the needle. At the same time, a lot of times smaller companies are much more price-sensitive.

They don't have as big of budgets. I've worked with some much bigger companies and billionaires and people like this and it's a lot more fun when a company has got a bigger budget, even though sometimes it takes them longer to make decisions. What are some of the few other ways that you suggest landing these bigger contracts? 

 

Number one, you’ve got to get very clear on who your ideal client actually is. Just saying that you want to find bigger clients is not going to be the most effective approach. Get really clear, specifically what industry are you targeting? What company? Within that company, who is the decision–maker that you need to get in front of that they're going to have the budget and the authority to be able to say yes to you?

The next step that you want to take is to make sure that your messaging is going to resonate with them, understanding, “What is the problem that they have right now? What is on their mind? What will compel them to take action?” A lot of consultants make the mistake of trying to lead with what we call inputs. It's like, “This is what I do,” but buyers don't care about what you do. 

They care about what they get.  

They care about the output. Figuring out what is the output, the outcome, the value of the result that the buyer wants is important because it allows you then to create the right messaging. Once you have that, now you can start to actually reach out to them and there are many different ways to do this. LinkedIn is one that you can get lists.

There are different approaches to this, but the main thing is you need to become visible. The challenge for most consultants isn't that they lack skill. It's that they are not on the radar of their ideal clients. From an Air Force perspective or in the military perspective, you want to fly under the radar. In consulting, you want to do the exact opposite and you want to get on the radar of everyone that you possibly can. 

In terms of who are your ideal clients, you want to figure out who they are and then actually take steps to get in front of them in the most direct, efficient and effective way possible. For some, that might be speaking. For others, it might be doing through LinkedIn. For others, it might be a slightly different approach, but you want to get in front of those people and you want to start to build a relationship with them.

If we talk about LinkedIn as one example, you can target them very specifically. You can connect with them. You can then start to build a relationship on LinkedIn with them through some conversation. From there, take it offline in terms of a conversation or an in–person meeting. 

Mixing into all of that, it’s not about the focus on making a sale or having a conversation. You definitely also want to be thinking about how you can position yourself as a real authority and expert. That might be by providing some materials or valuable information that your ideal client will appreciate, help you to establish your credibility and your authority.

Going into the conversation and even helping you to get the conversation, that's going to improve your chances of being able to move things forward a lot faster. 

Have there been ways that you've gotten on people's radar that have been more effective for you than others? Obviously, speaking is a fantastic way to do it. 

I do like this question because there's a big belief in the marketplace and this is my observation that there's one best way to do things. I'm a big believer that is actually not the case. I believe that and my observation is that depending on your current situation and there are a lot of different variables, there may be a different strategy that is more effective for you as opposed to others.

I was speaking with a well-known sales expert. This guy is a road warrior. He gets out and he speaks. He doesn't have to do anything else. He does other things, but for him, speaking is what generates the vast majority of his business. He can continue doing that and it's working well for him. 

For someone else, speaking is not going to be the best route because maybe they have family obligations or it scares them like crazy and there are other things they could do. For us at Consulting Success, one thing that has worked well has been content. We've been playing the long-term game for quite a bit of time now. We've put out a lot of valuable information to help consultants to grow their business.

That in turn helps us to get a lot of people coming to our website to get those free resources. That's the content game. That's the inbound game and inbound can work. The flip side of that is outbound and outbound, you can typically see results much faster because content or inbound takes more time to create ahead of time and then you land the conversation.

You have someone reaching out to you. With outbound, you can actually start to connect with people and have conversations much faster because you don't need to take the time to create as much content. The challenge on the outbound side is that when you do that, the prospect is typically a little bit colder and so it takes a bit more time.

You need to invest more time in the relationship to be able to move them further down to want to have a conversation and to have a meaningful conversation with you. 

When it comes to consulting, there are various degrees of consulting. There is giving advice and then there is advice plus implementation and then there's sometimes just implementation. If somebody may already know what they want, it could be simple and tactical as, “I need somebody to run Facebook ads.”

You’re a Facebook advertising consultant. They know what they want. You come in and you do it more of a service/vendor in my opinion than a true consultant per se. When you were running your business, take me through some of the typical things.

How much implementation of the things were you doing versus giving them the strategy? It may have changed over time. I know mine has. 

It definitely changed over time. Starting off in the early days of my career as a consultant and building consulting businesses, it was very much focused on implementation. I think that's an important and a good place for most people to go if they're new to it because you get to learn firsthand, you get to develop your skillset.

If you already have a real clear skill set, your expertise is there, then you're able to provide higher–level advice. If you've never actually done what you're suggesting that people do, that's probably not a good approach to take. That's where implementation can help.

My career as I did it was more implementation than it was very high-level strategic advice. We then built models where certain things would be high-level strategic advice, others would be implementation or others would be advisory, advising and overseeing teams implementing on our recommendations. 

Consulting is not just about making a sale or having a conversation. It’s also how you position yourself as a real authority and expert. Click To Tweet

This is something I adopted a long time ago and I told my clients, colleagues and other people who sell by the hour. In some cases, that's okay but in most cases I discourage people from billing hourly. I'd love to hear some more of your thoughts on that as well as going into some of the ways that you suggest people structure their fees.

You and I, we're are both in business marketing, growth consultants. What's your take on hourly fees versus the ways that you recommend people do it more effectively? 

Hourly fees are terrible for a lot of different reasons, but mainly because you're putting an income cap, a ceiling on a day. The other negatives of that are that as you start to want to increase your fees, buyers become very sensitive to that. If you talk about units of time, a buyer will always do the math and try and figure out, “I'm paying three sessions. That means that each session costs this much. That's a lot.” 

You're having the wrong conversation because buyers don't actually care about time. The only thing they care about time is how quickly they can start seeing results and outcome.

You want to be focused as a consultant on helping the buyer to see the outcome, the value and the result that they're going to get. Not worry as much about the time that it's going to take you to provide that as long as you're able to provide that in a time that fits within how soon they want to start seeing results.  

There are all the administrative hassles of trying to track time and so forth. A much better approach is to structure your offerings and services around the ROI that you're going to provide for your clients. One of the things that we teach our clients is the concept called ROI Positioning, which is essentially about figuring out what is the real value and ROI that your client is going to get from the services and the advice that you're going to provide.

You’re then doing a little bit of math and a little bit equation so you can provide them with a very positive ROI. Typically, it can be anywhere from five to seven times what they're going to invest with you. They should be getting an ROI of five to seven times on top of that. 

It's easy for me to say it right now, but of course there's a lot that comes before that. It's like sales. Making a sale is not hard and we could talk about that very quickly, but it's everything that leads up to making the sale that influences whether or not that sale is made. It's the same thing when it comes to fees.

People can understand how to structure ROI positioning and ROI and value into their fees. They can get that, but getting that is not enough. You have to actually figure out how are you going to have the right conversation, which we call a meaningful consulting sales conversation where you're asking buyers the right questions.

We were able to identify the true value, the problems and the cost of inaction as well as the future and the desired state that they're going to have and the value that will be created there. Putting that all together and then ensuring that they see it and that they're bought into, that return makes sense for them and then fees at that level becomes much easier. 

Have you personally ever done much consulting either for equity or profit or rev share on many deals or performance–based consulting? Sometimes it's a combination of a retainer plus a percentage of revenue or profit. 

 

The answer is yes. I'll give you a few different perspectives on this. I have a drawer full of paper that was supposed to be worth millions and millions of dollars because in the early days it's a reminder to me. It's something that I share with clients for years. It's a reminder that the paper's worth is paper. There's no real value there.

The mistake that a lot of entry-level or novice consultants make is they get excited by that idea and they trade their time for future potential and it's only a potential return. The problem, however, is that most deals, even the best venture capitalists have a very low hit rate in terms of success. If you are giving up 100% of your time and trading that for a piece of equity, then you can't get that back. 

My suggestion to people around equity if you're going to do that because it can work out very well is number one, don't do it when you're working with someone for the first time. It's important that you establish a relationship with that person first because you're putting a lot of trust into them. They have all of the control.

You could be working for them for three months and working hard to try and get them a result. One day they might decide, “We're going to pack things up. This product line isn't working for us. We're going to change.” You don't control that and now everything you hope to get out of that relationship and the work that you've done is gone. 

A better approach is to first of all ensure that you understand who they are, that you have a good working relationship. It doesn't have to be a big one, but do at least one project with them to ensure that there's a good cultural fit and relationship. You can look at an equity or performance type of deal.

When you look at that, ensure that you're not taking on 100% of the risks and that both parties have skin in the game. Meaning that you should be receiving a minimum amount of payment every month or at a set schedule and on top of that, the performance or the equity component. That way you should set up so that if for some reason you never see any of that upside that you're hoping for, you still feel good about the engagement, you still feel that it was profitable for you.

It’s not as high in profit as it could have otherwise been if it was 100% structured as a project, but you still feel good about it and then you have the upside potential that may or may not come. That's the cherry on the top. 

It falls right in line with a lot of this stuff I've done in the past. There's an issue that I was actually dealing with a client and it's funny. I did a project and it was performance-based, but this was easy because this was one aspect of their business that they weren't doing at all. I added a brand-new profit center to their business and we're splitting the gross profit 50/50 and it's been fantastic.

I was looking at it saying, “There's a lot more than I can do with your company.” There’s a litany of things that they're not doing and we could triple the size of the company in the next year if we did that. I'm sitting here thinking, “How would be the best way to structure this deal?” 

One of the things is they've got declining revenues. They're on a downtrend over the past twelve months. I'll use some broad numbers here. These are not exact numbers, but let's say they were doing about $300,000 in revenue per month. It’s a healthy profit margin. That's the average. That's the baseline. In the past, I've done some stuff where it's worked out.

I said, “I'll come in. I'll help you and you pay me 10% or 20% of anything over the baseline that we do.” They're like, “That's cool.” The problem is when you've got a decreasing trend and let's say in November, December, the holidays, they may have done $450,000 in sales but then recently they may be doing $150,000 or $175,000 in sales. 

Right now, those things all average out to about $300,000. If I came in and if I said, “Anything over the past twelve-month average, which is $300,000, you give me an X percentage.” If I did that now, I've got almost double their sales next month to hit my baseline.

I'm sitting here thinking, “What would be a better way to structure this to where it is performance-based as opposed to fees?” I love performance-based consulting, especially when I know that I can hit it out of the park.

This has been a nut that I'm trying to crack in working with a company who's got declining revenues and creating a baseline for performance-based consulting. This may be a much deeper question, but it made me think about it when we were talking. If you don't have an answer that's quite all right. 

The first thing may be to ponder a little bit would be can you structure an initial project with them where the goal of that project is to stem and stop the bleeding with a performance component? Figure out what is the value of stopping that bleeding for them by helping to see if they don't stop it, what kind of losses are they going to be facing over an annual twelve to eighteen-month type of period?

Figure out what your fee would be to help them to stop that, but also have some built-in performance into it so that you don't have to stop and say, “Now, we're good. Bye, Brad,” and figure out a way to add a little bit on top to that. That would be step one.

Step two would then be now we've got you back to where you want to be, the blood has stopped, how do we start to improve performance? Now you had that secondary project, which has a greater percentage or greater portion, being performance. Is that something you've considered?  

Making a sale is not hard. It's everything that leads up to making that sale that influences whether that sale is made. Click To Tweet

It's not as eloquently as you've put it, so that's great. It's one of those things where it's almost like doing a triage. If somebody is in a bad accident or something, the first thing you want to do is go stop the bleeding and stabilize the patient. I have zero medical experience, but I've seen TV shows about emergencies.

My dad is like that. He’s like, “These are the biggest weakest points. These are the things that are losing you money. Let's go stop the bleeding.” If I'm able to do that, that's obviously worth X amount over this time period and we can come to an agreement of what that would be worth. I do like that. Stabilize before you create this average baseline.  

That was a weird conundrum that I hadn’t worked with because it was a turnaround situation. I'm good at turning things around, but I didn't want to screw myself.

At the same time when somebody's got decreasing earnings, especially in a trend, the one thing they don't have is a big budget to toss out consulting fees because they're worried every single month they're making less money. They're worried about where's the next dollar going to come from. Those are very real issues.

Personally, my favorite companies to work for and work with are people who maybe they've plateaued and they don't know how to get unstuck from their plateau. 

They're busy. They're leaving a bunch of low hanging fruit lying around that they're not doing. Those are easy ones to come in. I always tell them one of my little strategies. If I am asking for fees, I'll ask them what are some of the things they're doing right now, especially some of the things they’re doing right now that aren't working for them. I get them to pinpoint things.

This is an example I haven't used in a long time. I have actually never used this with an exact client. Some businesses still use Yellow Pages. They spend thousands of dollars, sometimes $15,000, $20,000 a month. They still have Yellow Pages ad because they think they still need it. 

In other cases, I've done this where sometimes they’re direct mail, sometimes magazine ads or whatever. I ask them, “Is that working for you?” They go, “Not really.” “Why do you keep on doing it?” “I don't know. We feel like we need to.”

I'll ask them, “I'm not asking you to spend new money. I'm asking you to redeploy those marketing dollars that aren't producing a return and try it over here. Let's see what this work.” You've got nothing to lose because that other stuff isn't working either.

As often as I can, I'm looking for opportunities to get them to think about redeploying their marketing dollars to something more productive as opposed to reaching in their pocket and spending new money. That's been effective for me. What have been some of the consulting models, whether it was yours or whether it was some clients that you've worked with that have made you go, “That is a fantastic gig?” 

My favorite ones are when companies call me in to give them strategic advice and they struck big checks. Those are fun and they keep me on retainer to make sure that things are going well. There's very little implementation. I've gotten paid very handsomely to do discovery for clients as well.

I say, “I don't even know if I can help you, but you've got to write me a check and we're going to do discovery. If you want me to continue on this basis, we can go down that road.” Have there been any consulting models or individuals that have got something dialed in that is a great example? 

There are many of them that we're helping our clients to improve upon. Different approaches work for different people. We have some clients who enjoy the approach to retainers. There are two different kinds of retainers for those who may not be familiar. There's pay for work or pay for access as we call them, pay for work being where essentially it's like an ongoing contract that you have.

You're doing a certain specified work each month for the client. Pay for access is where the client has peace of mind that you're on their side. They can give you a call or email at any time and they know that you're going to be able to respond to them in a short period of time, help them out and provide them with that strategic counsel and advice. 

The pay for access approach to retainers is one that a lot of people love and that can typically last for quite a bit of a period of time. However, some people find that there are downsides to that. One of them being that as that relationship progresses, it can be even a year or two down the road that you start to be treated and almost become like part of the company.

Your advice isn't respected as much as it used to be. Oftentimes, you may not be called upon as much as you used to be either. You feel that you're not providing as much value to the client as you did previously for others. It's very common.  

Another approach is productizing your consulting services so that you have a lot more leverage. You're able to work with more clients at a lower level of intensity and involvement but your model, process and systems are so well–defined. You have the right support around them that you're able to essentially run your clients through them and provide them with a very consistent, positive outcome.

That's a good model for growth, especially if you're a consultant that's building a consulting firm where you're eyeing an exit. You want to sell your firm at some point, looking for ways to productize it and to create value that does not only rely on you or relies less on you is a good approach to take. 

The book that John Warrillow has, Built to Sell, is a perfect example. If you haven't read it, it's a perfect example of productizing a service model and getting it to where it is sellable and it actually frees up your time. Are there any other productized service examples that you can think of offhand? Other people who have taken their service and productized it? 

There are many. We have clients who are rolling with that model right now. We just put out a course actually on how to productize consulting services that people are enjoying and helping them to do that. It's a model that for a lot of people is very interesting, but they don't know how to wrap their head around it. It's not for everyone.

Some people do enjoy working with a small group of clients in a very intimate and intense way where they're charging significantly higher fees because of their level of involvement and intensity with them. For others who want to create more leverage and have a business that has more asset value and doesn't require as much of their personal time, the productization approach can work well.

It can work for any type of consulting business as long as you are open and flexible to figuring that out. It can be deployed in any industry, anywhere around the world. 

This has been fantastic. There are a lot of people out there who say they teach consulting and they're not really. I can tell that you've actually got the chops. You've done this. You've got the true B2B stuff and not just coaching coaches on how to coach coaches on coaching coaches and calling yourself a consultant.

With that being said, for people who are either existing consultants or looking to start to break into this and looking for a good a resource, you've got these resources and it's both in a coaching program. You said you have online courses over at ConsultingSuccess.com.

What do you suggest is the best way for somebody to dive in, get started, understand your methodology and leverage some of the experience that you've created? 

If you go to our website, you can enter your email to get a free 51-page Consulting Blueprint. It’s a bit of a foundation with some popular consulting topics. You'll get entered into some emails that I send out where I share my journey of building a consulting business and working with billion-dollar clients and successes, failures and lessons learned.

If you're looking for some strategies and tips from the real world of consulting, that's a great place to get started. The cost makes it very manageable because it's free. If you are looking for other information, you can also check out the Consulting Success Podcast. We do have a self-study program as well as the coaching programs that we run for consultants that are committed to greater growth. 

I enjoyed this time, Michael. You've given some fantastic insights and every single person reading can benefit from this in one way or another because we are moving towards, quickly, what they call the gig economy where there is a lot less full–time employment.

A lot of bigger companies are enlisting the help of outside consultants for projects as opposed to having full–time employees. There are a million reasons to do so. It makes a lot of financial sense. That creates a danger if you're thinking about staying in your job, but it also creates a tremendous opportunity when you learn how to package up your knowledge and your expertise or go learn a new expertise and then learn how to package that up. 

You’ll then be able to provide your skill sets and your consulting services to all types of companies, which gives you an extra layer of protection and not being subjected to potential layoffs, downsizing or anything else like that.

Consulting is booming and even getting much bigger industry worldwide. I love the fact that you're at the forefront of this and helping people light the path on their way to consulting success.

If people want to get ahold of you directly, are there any social media profiles you'd like them to follow? Maybe a direct email address if they've got any questions, it's totally up to you or maybe they just go to Consulting Success and follow the yellow brick road. 

They can certainly go to ConsultingSuccess.com, but anyone that wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, you can find me there at Michael Zipursky or Twitter, Facebook and other usual spots. Feel free to reach out. I always welcome questions or comments. If I can point you in the right direction, I’d be happy to.  

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I hope this has been a tremendously valuable episode for you. I should say epi-sizzle for you. I know it has been for me. I love this stuff. I've been doing consulting for years. I highly recommend it. It's one of the easiest ways to create a business without undergoing a million of the other moving parts of starting something else.

Go in, utilize your expertise, get paid for it, be the lever, let somebody else leverage you and leverage your knowledge while you leverage the infrastructure that they've built and you can make a tremendous income. I look forward to hearing your emails.

If you have any questions, shoot them over to me at AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com and leave a review on iTunes. When you do, it makes me happy. When I'm happy, I do better shows. When I do better shows, you get better shows. That being said, Michael, thank you again for being on the show. I look forward to continuing the relationship in the future. 

Thanks so much. 

Tune in for the next episode. See you next time. 

Important Links:

• Costanzo Marketing Group 
• ConsultingSuccess.com 
• The Elite Consulting Mind 
• Built to Sell 
• Consulting Success Podcast 
• Michael Zipursky – LinkedIn 
• Twitter – Michael Zipursky 
• Facebook – Michael Zipursky 
• AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com 
• Bacon Wrapped Business Podcast on iTunes  

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