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How ANYONE Can Start a 6 Figure Consulting Business

How ANYONE Can Start a 6 Figure Consulting Business

1% Better 4/13/23

Happy Thursday everyone! I just started a new habit that I think might be my favorite one yet. It’s a challenge I put out for myself (and am now putting out to you).

Every day for the next 30 days (and probably indefinitely) I’ll be taking on a writing challenge. I’m going to sit down with my laptop, go on do not disturb mode, turn off all dings and beeps, and just write for 30 minutes. I open up Notion, set a timer for 30, and start writing. A total brain dump. This will result in an atomic essay a day for 30 days.

I’m 3 days into this challenge and have loved every second of it. The essays have gotten my creativity flowing and inspired a ton of content. I’ve then been feeding these essays into ChatGPT and using the AI to generate outlines, tweets, and other insights I can reuse.

I challenge you to follow me on this journey. Interested in reading my first 3 essays? Essay 1, Essay 2, Essay 3.

I really think this challenge will be massive for increasing creativity, improving my writing, and just getting more high quality content out.

More about this challenge in an upcoming newsletter. In the meantime, if you take on this challenge yourself, feel free to reply to this email with your essays!

Anyway, onto the alpha…

1% Better Referral Program

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Send out your unique referral link below to start working your way to 3. A single tweet with the link should get you the requirement. I’ll be building out more rewards as time goes on for people with 5, 10, and 20+ referrals including actual physical goods.

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How ANYONE Can Start a 6 Figure Consulting Business

Setting up additional streams of revenue is so critical in times like this. We are living through a time of economic turmoil. While the job markets haven’t been impacted by the recession or inflation, there’s still a lot of uncertainty.

Over the past year I’ve set up a few additional streams of income on top of my Web 2 job. This includes newsletter sponsorships, my premium community, and a consulting business. The most straightforward of these streams to set up? The consulting gig.

ANYBODY can set up a consulting business and start generating revenue within the next 6-12 months. It doesn’t take any sort of special skill. It just takes a desire to learn and strategic thinking. The best part? YOU decide how much you want to scale it. If you just want to have it as a small income stream that takes up a couple of hours a week, you can do that. If you want to scale it into your full time gig and make significantly more, you can do that too.

Here is why I think everyone reading this newsletter should consider setting up a part time consulting gig and step by step how I did it myself:

Choose your specialty and study

First step is choosing what you want to build your business around. For me, my biggest passion is content creation. My content very quickly over the last year built me an audience, so I knew it was something I could package up and sell.

For you, this could be anything you’re interested in. I have a person in my community who was interested in video editing. Never done it before but knew he wanted to get into it. He spent 2 months taking courses and studying video editing with Premiere Pro before he got his first paid gig.

Choose a topic, start learning. There’s almost no topic on the planet you can’t learn for free on Youtube.

Do user research

When I started pursuing my social media/content consulting business, I started booking meetings with everyone in my network. Just quick 30 minute 1 on 1s. All I did during these 30 minutes was ask them the following questions:

What’s your goal when it comes to content?
What’s holding you back from achieving these goals?
What would it mean to accomplish these goals?

If you get someone on a call and ask them these three questions about your specialty, you will uncover INVALUABLE information. Into video editing? Get video creators on a call and ask them these questions. Into Web 3 marketing? Get founders on the call and ask them these questions. Into investing? Get traders on a call and ask them these questions.

Document all the challenges and lessons

By completing the last step, you’ve gained a ton of valuable information. I talked to about 50 people in the span of 3 weeks and had a monster Notion file with all my notes.

You want to take all your notes, and make a list of challenges, goals, and lessons learned. These are the major pain points you’re going to need to address when you start consulting.

For instance: I learned that almost all 50 people I talked to struggled with finding their voice when it comes to content. Now I can start building solutions for that challenge and then go to others and start selling it.

If you’re a video editing consultant, maybe you find out the main challenges people have are adding captions, color grading, and transitions.

Write down the challenges learned. Think about solutions for them.

Create content for those challenges

Now you need to start preparing the solutions for these challenges. For me, I started creating content and templates around finding your voice. I created worksheets to write down your interests and tease out what your unique viewpoints might be when it comes to content.

If you can go into consulting engagements prepared with solutions to challenges, you will immediately come off as professional.

There’s a lot of ways you can create content for solutions. They can be ebooks, documents, and PDFs. A lot of people use public Notion files they create, but I’ve just discovered an awesome tool called craft.do that I’ve been using for solutions.

Send DMs to potential clients. Start charging nothing

Now that you understand you’ve studied up on your topic, understand your target audience’s challenges, and have prepared some solutions, it’s time to get some clients.

In order to start making life changing money, you’re first going to need to build a reputation. When I first started doing social media and content consulting, I took on clients for free. I just wanted to practice and further understand people’s challenges.

The ultimate goal though of these free engagements is to get a testimonial. These could be written or video. A lot of ways to do this, but I like to use testimonial.to . There’s a free version available where you can send a link to clients and it collects testimonials.

The more testimonials and practice you get with free clients, the more you’ll be able to charge later on.

My target client for my business was Web 3 projects. I noticed a big gap in the market when it came to content skills with NFT projects. Many projects would have low quality social media content, but have an incredible urgency to get attention before they start selling their product.

My winning strategy was DMing these projects with a few example tweets or threads that I wrote for them that they could post. Most projects loved that I did this and agreed to an hour call.

Do this same thing. Do work for free to attract clients, then make the ask for their time.

Start charging a little more

Now that you’ve started building your reputation with free clients, you can start to ask for some money. If you set up testimonials the right way, you can now DM potential clients with your example content PLUS the testimonials.

Start small. I asked for 100-200 dollars per hour for my first several consulting engagements.

If you start getting a lot of bites, raise the price for each new engagement. If interest starts slowing down, lower the price. Keep the price dynamic based on the amount of demand.

LONG TERM STRATEGY: Repackage the content and sell it

Here’s a way to supercharge your revenue in the future: collect and save all the content you make in your consulting business. Repackage it and sell it as digital products like books and courses.

This is super high leverage because you only need to create the content once then you can sell it infinite times.

Once your consulting business grows, this can be an excellent strategy to layering on way more income. This is the next step in my consulting business journey.

Conclusion

Adding an additional stream of income is so critical for your financial safety, especially during volatile times. EVERYONE has a 6 figure services business in between their ears. In just 1 year I’ve built not only a consulting business from scratch, but also a social media business and newsletter.

You have the opportunity to do the same. What would an additional $20k, $50k, or $100k a year mean to you. A couple of months of work can put you on the same path. Trust me, I’ve done it myself.

AI Tip: Ask ChatGPT To Build You A Learning Plan For Your Consulting Business

Ready to take action on this newsletter? Here’s a prompt you can steal that will have ChatGPT build you an exact learning plan so that in 2 months you can be ready to start consulting on a specific subject:

I'm considering starting a {topic} consulting business. I'd like to help my clients {main goal}. Please build me a 2 month learning plan that will get me to a professional level when it comes to {topic} so I can then start a consulting business

Example Prompt:

I'm considering starting a social media consulting business. I'd like to help my clients improve their social media content and gain more followers. Please build me a 2 month learning plan that will get me to a professional level when it comes to social media content so I can then start a consulting business

Example Output:

1% Club Update

If you’re not in the 1% Club yet, you are missing out on the best private community for builders and creators on the internet.

This week we’ve had some incredible mastermind sessions in the Discord. Here is this week’s schedule:

Every day: Digital shared workspace (I’m in there every day answering questions)

Monday: Twitter Workshop w/ Greg Lunt

Tuesday: Mental Health Club Call w/ Lonewolf

Wednesday: Accountability Call w/ J0nga (weekly)

Thursday: Performance Coaching w/ Sterling Long

Thursday: Community Building w/ Eclipse

Our members enjoy daily mastermind calls, direct access to top creators in voice chats, and exclusive perks such as live and recorded masterclasses, quarterly 1-on-1 sessions, and a digital coworking space guaranteed to boost your productivity.

The heart of the 1% Club lies in our work sessions – an all-day every-day, collaborative voice chat transforming the way entrepreneurs work together.

If you’re not in the Club yet, join 680 others by signing up below. I promise it’ll be an investment in yourself you won’t regret. If you find you’re not getting value from it, I’ll personally refund you the membership fee. Hit the button below to enter the club:

Take care and have an excellent weekend!

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How ANYONE Can Start a 6 Figure Consulting Business

1% Better 4/13/23

Contents:

1% Better Referral Program

SPONSORED: Disowned Gods

How ANYONE Can Start a 6 Figure Consulting Business

AI Tip: Ask ChatGPT To Build You A Learning Plan For Your Consulting Business

1% Club Update

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