Building a Recurring Revenue Consulting Business [audio] | Hacker News Reader

Building a Recurring Revenue Consulting Business [audio]

freelancetransformation.com

94 pointstomhoward20 comments

This is really fantastic (just got done with listening to it). Highlights include:

1) Why/how to price productized services at $500+ per month, and what this implies for your target customer and delivery methods.

2) Delivery specifics: AppAftercare has N clients for M principal consultants where N >> M. Each consultant is principal with regard to a client portfolio, rather than e.g: striping incoming requests across all available consultants. This means incoming requests generally handled by someone intimately familiar with codebase at issue.

3) Einar's brief sketch on how he does prospecting, which is the single most impressive part of a very impressive business. Briefly, he algorithmically identifies signals which suggest that a client is uniquely in the market for the product, scalably identifies decisionmaker contact details, and then cold pitches them with an 80/20 email where 80% is templated and 20% is client-specific value. After closing the new client all services are actually provided through the team.

Capsule summary: a great way to spend your hour if you consult. Even assuming one does no productized consulting the prospecting discussion alone (approximately last 3rd of interview) is more than worth your time.

Bookmarked the podcast to have a listen later today. I've managed to productize my consulting which has worked well for me in terms of sales conversions and engagements etc. Ive been unable to identify a recurring revenue stream however. My consulting work is all strategy based. Im paid to think rather than do, whereas most others I have spoken to do some form of execution as well. Do you think there's a way for me to come up with some sort of recurring revenue model?

Hey Khuram, just took a look at your website and I think there might be an angle where you can charge a monthly retainer for KPI analysis and recommendations.

Strategizing about growth is just the first step, you also need to put in place the appropriate analytics to be able to measure it.

You can help your clients sift through what's really important, what needs to be improved, etc. A lot of the tools today allow for the collection of unlimited amount of data but it's pretty meaningless if you can't decipher and act on it. Just my 2c.

Hi Hristian,

Thanks so much for the suggestion. I think you might totally be onto something here. I've had a number of recent clients ask me to take a look at their analytics for them. I could definitely turn that into a recurring revenue model.

Would love to chat further with you about some ideas I have, would you be up for a quick chat via skype or email? I may be able to pass you business as well anyhow.

Thanks again.

Hi Khuram,

I've just emailed you about setting up a time to talk.

Looking forward to it.

Yes. I have seen models where all the "ongoing execution" is "hang out on slack and answer questions at $1000/month"

Yes a special case, but realize that information and ongoing access to expertise is a significant value add

Thanks for the headsup Einar. I'm definitely going to explore this further. Your podcast was incredibly insightful.

..and just a random thought for ongoing - could you wire up a white label version of eg cyfe.com and have that be the ongoing service?

Yes, I think -- broadly speaking -- this is where I need to focus. Help the clients with looking at their data coming in, make sure the right questions are asked of that data, and then help them make strategic decisions going forward.

Hey, I just took a look at your website and what you do, it's quite cool. Do you get any finance questions? Like how to set up a P&L and Balance Sheet, cost tracking, cash, etc.? In my world, those are all part of a growth strategy.

Thanks for the suggestion. Sadly, I don't get asked about finance at all. Most of the clients I work with tend of have that nailed down quite well. As per the other suggestions, I think KPIs is the way for me to go.

Hey Khuram, I'm very interested in what you're doing, it's something I'd want to do as well! I love strategy but havent figured out how to leverage my knowledge/skill to get started there. Are you available for chat via email or Skype?

Hi Ergest,

Yes, I would love to chat. Always looking for new people to work with, or help. Please do shoot me an email at kam[at]krmmalik.com , and I'll send you my calendar so we can schedule a time to chat.

Thanks for the really insightful breakdown, added link to this in the show notes.

Thanks Patrick - a couple of shameless self promotional links I mention in the podcast: productizedconsulting.com (free course) as well as outreachsignals.com

The latter is a new recurring revenue service I just launched where the aim is to be super transparent about how I'm selling and closing each customer - see blog.outreachsignals.com - potentially of interest to people.

I broke down the audio to find the pieces you mentioned: http://clarify.io/try-it-now/?id=7f833e66216a43dea4af21eef43...

Search for "prospecting" to find some great bits.

Wow that's an amazing service. Thanks for this.

How does the site find where the words are spoken?

We use speech recognition to extract the words and keep track of their individual timestamps. Here's a high level explanation:

http://clarify.io/how-clarify-works

Direct link to audio: http://traffic.libsyn.com/freelancetransformation/FT_009_-_B...

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