Let’s take a step back this week and talk about something other than buildinpublic.coach. Let’s talk mental health. Then we can get into a bit about my consulting practices, because that piece of life took a bit of an unexpected turn over the past few days.
Last week ended up being harder for me than anticipated. I was hit with a lot of anxiety in the middle of the week. Honestly, it’s not something I’ve had issues with lately. Overall, I’ve been pretty anxiety-free.
But not last week. There were a couple of days when it felt like I just had something sitting in the middle of my chest at all times. So I went back to basics and asked myself what I needed to do. It came down to two things:
I needed to journal. I haven’t done much of that lately, so I started writing my feelings down. Spent about 20 minutes doing so and it was remarkable how much that little bit helped. Don’t discount the power of simply writing your thoughts down.
I went for a few walks with the dog. Between the weather and work and everything, I hadn’t been very good about walking (or movement in general, if we’re completely honest).
Did I get much done on any of my projects? Nope. Have barely touched them over the last week. Didn’t reach out to the people I wanted to. Didn’t ship any features.
I did the minimum that I needed to and I got my YouTube videos recorded and edited. I started a couple of blogs, but wasn’t able to really get the words to start flowing.
But there was something good that came out of that: I had a prospective consulting client reach out and decide to move forward on working together after I had been sure that the deal wasn’t going to go anywhere. There had been silence for the past couple of weeks and I thought I blew it.
Let’s dig into that together, because I think there are a couple of interesting things I’ve learned from this.
The Consulting Process
We’ll start with a little bit of context: I put out a deal around the 4th of July where for $1000, I would meet with a client, learn about their business, write up a report, and meet with them again to go over the results. The focus was on where AI and automation could help them streamline their business processes.
I had someone offer to send my offering out as part of their newsletter and that resulted in about 100 visitors to the offer page, and nobody sent me any emails asking more about the offering, but 1 person simply put in their payment info and scheduled the first info.
Lesson number 1: Put a buy button online.
After I met with the client and learned more about their business and started going through the process of researching, writing, etc, I ended up adjusting the price on my site. I wasn’t charging enough for the amount of work I was putting in. But I wasn’t sure how it would go, honestly. It was my first time offering this sort of service, but it seemed really helpful from the client’s reaction. They were interested in moving forward and working together on more, so I told them I would come up with a couple of packages.
Now, I had no idea what their budget was. I knew they had enough to spend $1000 without even an intro call, and they owned a business, but beyond that, I wasn’t sure. So I came up with 3 offers:
A $2,500/month offering, a $5,000/month offering, and a $10,000/month offering. This part was tough, because I’m not used to any piece of this.
Lesson #2: Offer choices of scope
I’m used to trying to get people to sign up for something that’s $5-$20/month, and frankly, I’m not great at that. So I had to really step out of my comfort zone.
And I sent it out.
Then, silence for a week or so.
After pretty regular back-and-forth emails, this wasn’t particularly promising. So I ended up following up.
This is something else I’m not good at. If I don’t get a response, I’m much more likely to just give up and say “oh, well…”. But in this case, I decided to send a quick message with a thought that might help their business and ask if they had any thoughts on the offer.
Then I got a response: they were interested in the second package, but it was outside of their budget.
More information! That’s something extremely helpful!
Lesson 3: Keep the conversation going. The more information you have, the easier it is to know what you need to do to keep moving forward.
So I responded, asking if they would be able to work with the first price, because I would adjust things to make that work. And silence again. So I gave it almost a week, and followed up again. And I followed the pattern of the first time: send a piece of helpful information and said I wanted to check in with them. At this point, I asked what their budget was and said we could find a way to work with that.
And more silence.
That’s not terribly promising. At this point, I had pretty much given up on this deal happening.
But then I got an email a few days ago, giving me a budget number slightly above the smallest package offering, and a request to set up a meeting. So I pulled some ideas together, got a meeting scheduled, and made the deal happen. The payment for the first month hit my account last night and this means my business is slightly profitable for the first time ever.
Lesson 4: Silence isn’t necessarily the end.
For the record: I incorporated my LLC in 2020. That’s what I’ve been doing most of my work through, but I’ve never really had it making money. This means I’m able to take a breath finally.
And to be honest: that bit helped clear up the rest of the anxiety. That was part of the issue: I was trying to figure out how much I could offer for free for the new product to make sure I wasn’t spending more than I could comfortably do. I was starting to feel the pressure of what I’ve been spending without tangible results and it had led to a couple of fights with my wife.
Sometimes, it just takes one thing to make everything else a bit easier.
And that makes it easier to breathe.
Lesson 5: Sometimes, things will just end up working out. Celebrate those times.
Content Corner
A bit of a different recommendation this week: I think you should check out this episode of the Pathless Path with Paul Millerd.
I’ve always been curious about the idea of manifesting. I don’t think it’s something nearly as magical as some people want to believe, but I think there’s something there.
And in this episode, I learned a bit about what that is: specificity. If you spend time thinking about what you actually want the future to look like, you have a much better chance of making that happen. In fact, a lot of what Erin talked about aligned with one of my favorite books from the past year:
You should check both the book and the podcast out if you want to learn about building your future intentionally.
Finally, I’ll share the video I released yesterday:
Check out a few people who are building in public that I really enjoy following. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on this episode so far.
See you next week!