Hey, everyone. Sam Ovens here. Welcome to this training video. This one's called The Evolution of a Consultant. In this video we're going to talk through the different stages of evolution that a consultant goes through. We're going to start off by talking about the definition of a consultant and what a consultant really is because a lot of people have all these different views and opinions on what a consultant actually is. They're quite wrong. We're going to kind of get very clear on what a consultant actually is. Then we're going to talk about the different stages of evolution because you start off this journey doing consulting one way and as you develop more knowledge and as you learn more, you are able to evolve and you're able to use different models and you're able to really leverage your business right up. Most people thought that it was impossible to have a consulting business that had about 10 or 12 people and made like $18 million a year. Most people thought that was impossible. If you went and asked anyone, they would say that was impossible because most consulting businesses they charge per hour. It's people on seats. That's how consulting businesses grow. In order to have an $18 million consulting business, most people would tell you that you need like probably a few hundred people and you'd need to be massive. You'd have to be some massive corporate thing. That's not true. I'm going to show you the different stages of evolution as a consultant. I'm also going to show the definition of a consultant. This is going to bring a lot of clarity to people because I'm sure you've looked at people before and you've been like, "How did that person get there? What path did that person follow to get to where they are?" This video is going to help shed a lot of light on that. Here's what we're going to cover. The definition of a consultant. We'll start off with like what the public opinion is of consultant. The public opinion that society has is one thing, but the actual definition of a consultant is something else. I'm going to show you what that is and then I'm going to show you what makes the global economy tick and how value is created in this world. I found when I first got into business that I really had no idea how value was created. Why do people pay a certain amount of money for some things, but then they refuse to pay a dollar for anything else? They don't even want it for free. It's quite amazing. Some people will pay all the money they have for something, but then something else they don't even want it for free. You couldn't even pay them to have it. How does that that happen? I really needed to get my head around that before I could understand business and make any money. They don't teach this in school or college or in any other training program on the internet anywhere. In this training we're going to show you the fundamentals of value and how value is actually created in this world so that you can understand how the global economy ticks and you can take a place inside the global economy as a supplier and a seller of services so that you can actually start making some money for yourself. Then we're going to talk about why people hire consultants. Why do people hire consultants? Is it just some fluke chance thing or is there a reason? We need to understand this. If we are aiming to create consulting businesses and sell services to people, we really need to understand why people hire them. Why you can't fight the market and why swimming with it will make you rich? We're going to talk about the market and what it is. We're going to talk about why if you try and fight it, you're just going to end up drowning. People who fight the market, it doesn't matter how smart they are, it doesn't matter how much money they have. They're just being people with billions of dollars and they've been near the point of genius and they've tried to fight the market and they just get it handed to them. It doesn't matter. You cannot fight the market and I'm going to show you why you can't. However, if you get it right and you go with the market, if you swim with it, it'll make you rich. I'm going to show you exactly how you can start getting a sense for the market and trying to position your business as something that doesn't go against it, but something that really takes advantage of the flows with it so that your business is effortless. Then we're going to look at the evolutionary of stages of a consultant and the different models used at each stage. We're going to talk about how consultants get started. We're going to talk about how they evolve over time and how they use different models. We're going to talk about the different models of service delivery used because a consultant ... The traditional, classical definition of a consultant is someone who sits down and gives someone advice by speaking to them person to person. Those times are over. You don't have to be sitting next to the person. You don't have to be speaking to them anymore. Advice can be given in many different ways. I'm giving you advice right now via this video. This allows me to scale exponentially and this allows me to serve way more people. It allows me to really consult tens of thousands of people at one time without any effort on my behalf. I'm going to show you why this here, this training program which you've got, this is consulting. Just because the advice is delivered over electronically or over a video, it's no different than me delivering it in person. It's still giving advice. I'm going to show you the different stages of an evolution which a consultant goes through in order to go from being a complete novice, not knowing anything, all the way through to being a niche consultant who's got a niche and is a specialist, through to group coaching whether they're doing coaching and giving advice instead of doing the work for them, all the way through to selling online training programs and making hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm going to walk you through the evolutionary stages and the different models used at each stage. We're also going to talk about your journey and the journey that lies ahead for you as a consultant and what to expect along the way. When I show you the consultants journey, you'll be able to determine where you are in it right now. You might be just starting. You might be quite advanced already. You'll be able to determine where you are in the consultants journey. You'll be able to figure out what that next stage is and what things you need to achieve in order to keep evolving and keep growing and keep scaling up your business and evolving through the different stages. This is going to be a really eyeopening training because no one else has ever addressed any of this information here. It's quite new. Consulting has changed. It used to be a traditional sort of thing where people would become a consultant and they would sign up a client and then they'll drive over to their office and they'd sit next to them and they'd explain some stuff to them. Time's have changed. I've really shaken up this consulting industry the way I've set different rules for it. I'm going to show you the different rules in how consulting is going to change. You really want to understand these different rules if you want to be able to play the consulting game long-term because the old way is totally on its way out. It's already pretty much out. It's really important to understand this. Now let's start with the definition of a consultant. Here's some common misconceptions about consulting. If you were to go and ask the general public, the society and the public opinion on what is a consultant and what do they do, you would end up with a mixed sort of responses. The bias is really towards this, most people think that consultants have Harvard MBAs and they advice on corporate strategy. They've got fancy credentials and everything. They know a lot about business and they wear suits. They go and talk to different corporate companies and they advise on very complicated things. They also believe that they need loads of qualifications, degrees and certificates like all sorts of fancy things to put behind your name like MBA, MBC, MBLA, I don't know, whatever. They've got letters for everything these days. Just keep racking them up behind their name. That's what people think. You need a fancy office and lots of staff. You need one of these fancy Manhattan offices, all sorts of fancy people wearing suits and ties and things like that. You consult in person and travel all over the place meeting clients. You're constantly driving on the road, on airplanes, all sorts of stuff. They pretty much think a consultant is someone who works for a company like Boston Consulting Group or something like that. This has been the public opinion of what a consultant is, but it's distorted. This isn't actually what consulting is. This is just everyone's opinion or a perceived understanding of what consulting is. It's actually wrong. Let's look a the actual definition. Well, if you go and look at the actual definition of consulting, it kind of looks like this, engaged in the business of giving expert advice to people working in a specific field. It doesn't say anything about corporate, doesn't even say anything about business. It doesn't say anything about fancy degrees or certificates or wearing a suit or giving advice in person or anything. It just says engaged in giving expert advice to people on a specific field. That's what the definition is, but the distorted view of it is this thing here. Simply put, a consultant is somebody who gives advice to a specific group of people. That's what you could say. That's consulting. Let's break this down so we can really clearly understand this. A consultant is somebody who gives advice to a specific group of people. Somebody, well, this is you. The advice, this is what you're selling and in a specific group of people, well, this is who you're selling it to, a.k.a your niche. It's pretty simple. You've got three things. You've got somebody, advice and a group of people. Now the somebody is very simple. We can cross that one out. That's you. The advice, this is what you're going to be selling. In a group of people, this is who you're selling it to. All we need to really figure out if you're staring a consulting business is the advice and the group of people and then we've got it. That is how simple consulting is. Why do people buy advice? Let's tackle this next one. We've figured out somebody. This is you. Now let's figure out advice. This is what you're going to be selling. Why do people buy advice? We need to understand why people buy advice before we can determine what we're going to sell. Because a lot of people they want to start as a consultant and they don't even think for a minute like, "Why do people buy advice?" They just come up with some stuff and they're like, "I know I'm going to sell this." They never asked the question ask why do people buy advice. Maybe I should understand this first before I create this thing. Well, let's start with why people buy anything because this is going to be a big, big breakthrough moment for a lot of people because they don't teach you this in economics and they don't teach you this in school or on any other info products. They don't teach you this anywhere. It took me a long time to get a thorough understanding of why people buy. This is how most people see the global economy. When most people look outside their window and they look at the world and they wonder why people buy things and why people sell things and why some people end up rich and why some people end up poor, they pretty much think it just looks like this. Just a big tangle of stuff and they're like, "It's too complicated. I don't know how that works." They just ignore it. It's too much information for the brain to handle so people are just like I don't know. This is just how they see the global economy. It's time to start seeing the world the way I see it. It's time to put on what I'm going to call the glasses. When you put on the glasses, things are clearer. I'm going to teach you how I see the world and how I see the global economy. Because when I look outside my window and I look at things, things are clear. I know why people are doing things. I know why someone's buying that and I know why someone's selling that and I know why things are trending one way or things are trending another way. I know how to take a position in this marketplace as someone who's adding value and making money. This is a fundamental understanding which everyone needs to know if you're going to go into the marketplace and take a position. This is the way I see it. We've got these different circles and each one falls within another one. It starts off with the self. This is the person. We've got a singular person and then we've got their family. This is the first social circle that they're within. Let's say there's me. Well, I have a family which I'm in. Then my family, they have the their group of friends and then I have my group of friends from school or from whatever. That forms the next social circle, our family's friends and our friends. Then we have society which is the society we're in in these different countries, these different cities. Then within each country and each city there's different classes and there's different areas and there's different geographical locations. Depending on any one of those different things, you're going to fall within all sorts of different social circles. It kind of looks like this. Then each one of these things have different views and beliefs. We'll start off with the self. You yourself have different views and different beliefs on things. Like you think something's right and something's wrong or you lean towards one side on things whether that's what sort of music sounds good, what sort of art sounds good, how your hair should be, whether you're into Motocross or whether you're into classical ballet, all sorts of different stuff. All right? Every single person has different views and different beliefs on things. They think some things are right, some things are wrong and on different decisions they will lean on different sides. Then every single one of these different circles have kind of different sort of views and beliefs and different understandings of what's right and what's wrong. Each one of them will heavily influence your own. If your family sees things one way and has views and beliefs one way, that's going to have a heavy effect on you. I'm not saying they're the same. Quite often children within a family, they have slightly different views, but I'm saying that your family's views are going to have a big impact on what your views are. Then same with your friends. People generally find friends groups who have values and beliefs that are similar to their own. It would be quite hard to be friends with a friends group where you just got totally opposite views. Then society. That's kind of where you fall into society too. It's kind of people choose their locations and people choose all sorts of different things based on what they believe in and what they see as right and wrong. We've got all of these different things within each other and they all sort of affect each other. Different views of what's right, what's wrong and so on and so forth. You can understand this, right? It's pretty simple. Now if we drew a line through this in between like what's right, what's wrong because there's different varying degrees of things. People have different views and they kind of slant one way or they slant another way or we can kind of draw a line through each of these different ones and get an understanding of what someone's views are on something. We can do this at the self level, at the family level, at the friends level, at the society level. Then we've got the present which is how they see things right now. Right now in the present someone's views are a particular way. Now people don't just have views about the present. I mean people have views about how things should be right now, but they've also got views about how things happened in the past. Different people have different beliefs about the past. Some people think the history went one way. Some people think history went another way. Different people actually have different beliefs about how things were. If you don't believe me, just go ask people. Different people believe different things not just about right now, but about the past too. People believe different things about the future too. They believe in the future things will be kind of like this or things should be like this or things definitely shouldn't be like this. They have different views about how things should be and how things shouldn't be and how they think things will be. All sorts of different views. You've got to look at this like it's on the self level, the family level, the friends level and the society level. All sorts of different views and beliefs. What happens is the sum average of all of these different views and beliefs ... If we were to take all these different views and beliefs and kind of take the sum average and draw a line trajectory through it and put it out into the future, overtime we can kind of get a point, we can kind of get an understanding for where this is going to fall, where people want things. If we were to look at a social group and get a sum average of all of their different views, we can figure this out. Now I'm not saying that this thing is 100% accurate. This is used for estimating. We can kind of get an understanding of where people want things and where people desire things to be in the future. We can call this like the current self and the desired self. We are somebody as right now. We can get a view on where things are. Then we can get a view of where someone wants things to be in the future. We call this the current self and the desired self because all the person really ... What makes the person get up and do what they do each day is because it's heavily affected on how someone thinks things are and how someone wants them to be because a person's going to get up everyday and they're going to behave in accordance to how they think things are and they're going to be actively trying to make things become how they want them to be. Simply put, people are just trying to become their desired self everyday. They've got their current self and their desired self. Whatever that is they're trying to make it happen. These are heavily affected on all sorts of different social circles, yourself, your family, your friends and society. Different people fall within different things and this is kind of how these beliefs and these desires come about. Because someone who lives in say China in some village somewhere, they're going to have a totally different view of things and a totally different desired self than someone who lives in California. It's important to understand this because it helps you understand what influences people and what influences different niches and everything because not everyone wants the same thing. If we do this, we can get a good kind of understanding of the current self and the desired self for different people in society. There's always a gap between these two things. I call this the gap and it's also known as desire and demand. Because if you've ever wondered what causes or creates ... Why does some people want things? I always used to wonder why does some people want to spend $100,000 on a stereo and then why do some people want to spend $100,000 on their teeth and make them so white and perfect? Why do some people want to spend 100 grand on a car? Why do some people just want to give away 100 grand and they don't want anything with it? Some pretty different behavior, right? If you look outside and you look at ... People do different things. How can people have such totally different behaviors and such totally different desires and everything? Well, it's because people have their current self and their desired self and everyday they are simply trying to bridge that gap. They're trying to grow into and become their desired self. That gap in between the two things is what creates all desire and all demand. People wake up everyday and they buy things and they do things and they consume things and they take action. This is what drives people is they want to become their desired self. The entire global economy ticks on people waking up each morning and trying to buy a version of their desired self. This thing which they put in here I call them vehicles. What I mean by this is people use vehicles to try and get themself from their current self to their desired self. People are looking for vehicles to take them from where they are now to where they want to be in terms of their self image. People have their current situation and their desired situation and they're just trying to get to their desired situation. We call them vehicles, things which are used to help get them there. Smart businessman figure out what the gaps are and then create and sell vehicles to help people achieve their desires. This is what smart businessman do. They don't just fluke it and they don't just think like, "Oh, I'm going to sell this thing because someone else is selling it." Selling something because someone else is selling it is that monkey see monkey do sort of logic, right? It's never going to end to making much money. If you sell something because someone else is selling it, you ain't going to make much money. The sum average of that over a period of time is going to be zero. You have to learn to look at the market and get an understanding and a feeling for a particular niche. How are things trending for them? What is their current situation? What is their desired situation? Get a really good understanding of that and sell a vehicle to help people achieve their desires. This is what makes the global economy tick. Or reduced to it's simple form if you want me to make it just as plain simple as it could possibly be, find out what people want and then sell it to them. Most people they go out into the market and they look at what people are selling and they think, "Which one should I sell?" Totally mad. They go and look at what people are selling and they're like, "Which one could I copy? This one. This one doesn't look like very hard to copy so I'll copy this one. This one doesn't look very hard to copy. I'll copy this one." It's totally mad. They're looking at the wrong thing. You'll want to look at what the market wants and then sell them that. Don't look at what people are selling the market and then sell that too because quite often the person who is selling that thing could have gotten it wrong or you're not going to understand everything about it and you're going to get it wrong. People need to learn to look at the market. Find out what they want and then sell it to them. It's so simple and it can be so easy, but people kind of get things muddled up. You want to look at it like this. Someone has their current self which is who they are now, how they see themself. Then pretty much every human being on the face of the planet has a desired self which is who they want to be. It's natural for human beings to desire something which is more than who they are. Everyone who is in their situation now, they want something more and I'm sure you can agree with this because you bought this program because you want to have a better understanding of things. You want to be able to make more money. You want to be able to quit your job or have more time freedom. You want to live a better life. People have desires and they have a desired self. All people are doing in the economy is buying a better version of themself. This can be all sorts of different things because for some people they might want a bit of experience when they listen to Mozart at home on their couch. For other people they might want to make a difference for children in Cambodia. For some other people they might want to be as bulky and as muscular as humanly possible. They might want to look like The Hulk. Not everyone has the same desired self. Everyone has different desires. That's why it's so important to pick a niche. When you pick your niche, you need to figure out the current situation and then the desired situation. What we use to help people bridge this gap is our advice. This is where your advice goes. Let's talk about the big three reasons why people buy consultants. You've got someone in their current self and then you've got someone in their desired self. Well, reason number one why they would hire a consultant because you might be thinking, "Well, wouldn't they just get to their desired self on their own? Why would they need any help doing that?" That's a good question. Well, three reasons. Number one is inability to get there on their own. Someone might have their current situation and they might have their desired situation, but they might have tried to achieve it but they haven't been able to. Someone might want to lose weight and they try it. They go to the gym. They try different diets. They buy different running shoes. They try different things. They just can't seem to get it, right? Reason number one is inability to get there on their own. People have tried and they failed. They're unable to get there on their own. People in business. If someone's desired self is to make 100 million and their current self is only making 100 grand, you could say, "Well, why doesn't that person just do it on their own?" Well, that's great, great to say that, but I mean how are they going to figure that one out? They need help. Reason number two is they want to get there faster. People want to achieve things as quickly as possible. Really smart people and people who are intelligent they understand that if they try and do things on their own, that they're going to miss the mark because they haven't done them before. If I'm trying to grow my business from this stage to that stage and I go about trying to do that, I know that I'm going to make a whole bunch of mistakes and I know it's a lot smarter to just go and hire someone who's done that and they're going to show me how to do it. People use reason number two is people want to get there faster. Reason number three is they want a proven system, map or advice from somebody who's done it. They want someone who has been through that transformation. If someone was a certain weight and now they're this weight, they want someone who can help them achieve that and they know. Someone that understands the obstacles and the process and everything that's involved. Brittany who I was talking about before who has BeatingBingeEating.com, she had issues with binge eating and she's totally open with it. That's how she positions herself in her market. Because she was able to get herself through it, she developed her own proven system and everything, well, now she helps others with it. She has a proven system instead of someone just trying to do it on their own. These are the three reasons why people hire consultants is one, inability to get there on their own, two, they want to get there faster and three, they want a proven system, map or advice from someone who's done it. Now I want to talk about why my first three businesses failed and how I abruptly changed my fortune for the better. Actually let's call this the most important business lesson I have ever learned and I don't think anything will ever beat it. This is the most important thing I ever learned and I want to make sure I never, ever, ever forget this because it is so important. You want to pay close attention to this. Here's why my first business has failed and here's why most other people fail. Most people fail because they come up with ideas which they think are cool or which they think people might want. They think that in order to have a cool business, you need an idea. Go and ask most people why they haven't started their own business. Just go on and ask someone. Be like, "Hey man, how come you don't start your own business? Why don't you quit your job and start a business?" Well, I guarantee you most people will say, "I don't have an idea. Everything's already been done before. I had an idea once and I looked it up on Google and some guy was already doing it. I had the idea for Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Instagram, but then some people just stole the ideas and did them." This is what people say. They think they need an idea and they think that there are no ideas left and that all ideas are done. They think in order to create a business that they need some unique idea. Something which has never been done before. They think about something that's never been done before or they think about imitating something that has been done and giving it a unique twist or they just blindly follow their passion without anything else. They're like, "Well, I really like cupcakes so I'm going to sell those. I really like surfing so I'm going to teach people how to surf." This is how people do things. They literally just think, "I'll follow my passion or I'll copy this other person or I need to come up with some random unique idea which no one else has ever done." Here's the problem with that, it's all about you. These are selfish ways to come up with ideas for businesses. You're looking at yourself and what you think everyone else wants. How can you know what everyone else wants without getting inside everyone else's heads? How can you just sit on your couch at home and figure out what everyone wants? That's pretty selfish. That's just really you coming up with what you want and then thinking everyone else in the world is like you or following your passion. You're like, "Well, I really like cupcakes so everyone else will really like cupcakes." That's still all about you. Copying someone else, that's pretty much still about you because you don't understand, you didn't ever go to the market. You just think, "Oh well, I can do that." It's all about you. When you make it all about you, it always fails. Then one day I read this sentence. It was in this book and I read this sentence and like a light bulb just came off me. I was like, "Oh my God. I know why things haven't been working. I know why things had been so hard for me." Here's the sentence. Let's get to the heart of the matter. The power, the force, the overwhelming urge to own that makes advertising work comes from the market itself and not from the copy. Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copywriter's task, not to create this mass desire but to channel it and direct it. Now let me explain this to you a little bit. Copy is what they call like marketing. When you write ads, the advertising words which are in an ad, that's called copy, ad copy. This here is talking about that the overwhelming urge to own something, to buy something, to buy a service, to buy a product, it comes from the market itself and it doesn't come from the advertising. It's saying that advertising can't create desire. You can't use advertising to make someone want something unless that desire was already there with them. All advertising does is it just channels that desire from the market onto a particular product. The desire has to already exist and then the ad just channels that desire down. This was a massive breakthrough for me because I was thinking, "Yeah. No wonder all my other things haven't worked because I just came up with something which I thought everyone wanted and then I went out and tried to advertise it and then I wondered why no one else wanted it. I tried to get real creative with my ads and no one wanted it." Most people, most consultants out there, most business owners they're like, "Facebook ads doesn't work or Google ads doesn't work. This doesn't work or my niche doesn't work." It's because you haven't figured out the desire properly. You haven't found something in the market. You haven't found a force in the market and channeled it properly. You can't just go to the market with some random thing and then use some fancy advertising to convince people that they want it. Most of the power of advertising comes from the desire, not from the ad. This was a massive breakthrough moment for me. Here's a recipe for disaster. Most people come up with ideas which they think people will want and then they spend their time convincing the people that they want it which they don't. This is what most people do. Most people sit down at their desk and they're like, "Mm." They wreck their brain. What do people want? They try to answer that question. How on earth can you answer what people want when you are not people? You can only answer what you want and you're not people. It's fundamentally flawed. You can't sit down at your desk and figure out what people want because you're not people. You're a person. If you do that, whatever idea you come up with in your own head, it's going to be wrong and then you're going to go out to the market and then you're going to try and convince them to want something which they don't want and it's not going to work. It doesn't matter if you have a billion dollars behind you. It doesn't matter if you have the best Madison Avenue ad agency behind you, a billion dollars, the best investors, the executive board of directors, it doesn't matter what you have. If you go and do this, it won't work. Here's a recipe for success. Find out what people actually want. Understand it better than they do themselves and then sell it to them with ease. Instead of sitting down at your desk and trying to wreck your own brain for what people want, why don't we actually go ask them? Why don't we go and talk to the people and see what their problems are, see what their desires are, see what they want and get a really clear understanding of what these people want and such a clear understanding that we know it better than they do. Then once we understand what they want, why don't we figure out how to get them what they want? When we craft an offer, why don't we figure out some services or product or whatever to help people get that and then why don't we just sell it to them? It's a lot easier. This is where people go wrong. People come up with something in their own head and then they're just gobsmacked as to why people don't want it when it's all pretty obvious. You can't fight the market. If you try and fight the market, you'll always going to lose. If you swim against it, you will drown and it's so important that you understand that. If you ride it, you will have the time of your life. I'm not kidding. You will have a seriously good time. When I fought the market, I had three failed businesses back to back. I had my job board, failure. I had my office lunch delivery business, failure. I had this loyalty card app for cafes, failure. Bam, bam, bam. Just nonstop rejection, nonstop failure and lost all sorts of money. I spent 12 hours a day spinning my tires. I didn't get anywhere and it's because I cooked up these ideas in my own head. I thought what do people want? I figured it out and then I found out I was wrong because I'm not people. I selfishly looked in myself for what people wanted. It was as easy in going out and looking at people and talking to people and figuring out what they actually want. Then when I actually started going with the market instead of against it, I started making a fortune. The more accurately I understood the market and their desires, the more money I actually made. This is what it's all about. It's about picking a niche. It's about understanding that niche, understanding the current situation and the desired situation better than they do themselves and having a relentless never ending pursuit and hunger for more clarity on an understanding for that niche. Just because you're making a million dollars doesn't mean that you now forget. You still go and look at what that niche needs. What is their current situation? What is their desired situation? You want to keep selling something better and better to help them bridge that gap. If you ride it, if you go with the market, you will have the time of your life and your money will just be flying in. Somebody. This is you. Advice. This is what you're selling. The group of people. This is who you're selling it to, a.k.a your niche. We understand why people want advice, but how do we go about giving it to them? We've gone through understanding why people want advice. People want advice because they want to go from their current situation to their desired situation. They want to do it fast and they want to do it using a proven process. They want to do it with the guidance of someone else because they've tried to do it on their own before and it didn't work. We've got the why, but now we need to know how. If we understand why, how do we give people this advice? How do we package it up? How do we know how much to give? Do we give people 50 thesis textbooks or do we go over to someone's office and spend a year with them? How do we deliver the advice? Well, the how we refer to as our model. This is what we refer to as our model. Here are some different consulting service delivery models. Once you know what your niche's current situation is and then what their desired situation is, we need to give them some advice to help them get there. There's all sorts of different ways we can deliver that advice and here's what they are. There's done-for-you. This is when you actually deliver the services yourself. If you're helping accountants get more customers, then you are doing this for them. You're setting up their landing pages. You're setting up their Facebook ads. You're setting up everything for them and you're doing it for them. You're actually delivering the services yourself. Now you could do this yourself or you could use staff or contractors to do the work for you like you could use other people or you could outsource it, whatever. This it called done-for-you. This is when you're doing the work yourself. Then there's done-with-you and this is when you're doing some of the work and giving the clients some of the work. You're kind of dividing it up. You're saying, "Hey look, you're going to be doing this stuff. I'm going to be doing this stuff." This is a different way of delivering services. You might say, "You're going to come up with all of the website copy. You're going to come up with all of the images and everything. You're going to come up with the copy for the ads. You're going to build out the landing pages and stuff and then we're going to be running the ad campaign management for you." You're kind of dividing it up. done-with-you. It's you doing some. Client's doing some. Then there's 1on1 coaching. This is advising the client on what to do on a 1on1 setting. You could be going to visit the client in person, sitting down and having a conversation with them. You're saying, "Look, here's what you're going to be doing. I want you to try this. I want you to try that," and then the client is going away from that meeting and doing all of it themself. You're not actually doing any of the work. You're actually advising them on what work they're going to do and then they're going to do it. You could do 1on1 coaching in person. You could do it on Skype. You could do it on the phone. It doesn't matter. There's different ways to do it, but it's 1on1. Instead of doing, you're advising. Then there's group coaching. This is advising a group of clients on what to do at the same time. Instead of doing it 1on1, you could do it in groups. You could sign up like 10 people, 20 people, have them all in one group and then have calls. You can have a call every week and all these people could jump on this call and ask different questions. It would kind of be like a group of people being coached at the same time. It doesn't have to be done 1on1. You can do it in groups because people have similarities with other people. If you're teaching a group of people how to lose weight, they might get more benefit of being in a group than they might being by themself because other group members might have a problem and they're like, "Oh, I've got their problem too," or other group members might have figured out a solution to a problem and they're like, "How'd you figure that one out?" Sometimes you can do things in groups. This is when you advice a group of clients on what to do at the same time. Then there's online programs which just when you'll create an online training like the one which you're doing right now, Consulting Accelerator, and then letting the clients learn themselves. This is totally hands off. Instead of doing the work for the person, they're doing all of the work themself. Instead of advising the person 1on1 or advising the person in a group, you're advising them in a prerecorded online training. You're letting the client do it all themself. Totally hands off. These are some different consulting service delivery models. Here are what I call the Evolutionary Stages of a Consultant. How do consultants evolve over time? Where do they start out and what are the sort of stages? How do they develop and evolve? How do you go from doing done-for-you services where you're like literally doing all the work for your client to the point where you create an online program and the client's doing all of the work themselves? How do go from one side to the other? These are the Evolutionary Stages of a Consultant. This is how it works. You start out with done-for-you and then you go through the different stages and you end up evolving into online programs. The reason why you start with done-for-you is because it's the most desirable and it's the easiest to sell. What most people want is they want someone to do all of the work for them. If you have a problem and you want it fixed, most people want someone to do all of it for them. You're like, "Hey man, can you do all these for me?" If someone's like, "Yeah," then you're like, "Awesome." That's what most people want. They want someone to do all the work for them. This is what makes it the easiest to sell which is why it's the best place to get started. If you're a consultant and you're just getting started, done-for-you is where you want to start because this is where you learn things. When you're doing the work for someone, you learn how it's done and you learn how to do it and all of that stuff. It's the easiest to sell which means it's the easiest way to start getting some clients and the easiest way to start making some money. However, it has trouble scaling. It has some pros and some cons. The pros are it's desirable and it's easy to sell. The cons are at a certain number of clients, you kind of get maxed out. Once you have say 30, 40, 50 done-for-you clients, because you're doing so much work, you can't really take on more clients. The done-for-you model sort of reaches its limits. It reaches it's limits at a particular point. That's when you evolve into the done-with-you which is when you kind of divi up the some. You give the client some. You take some. That allows you to serve more clients. However, it makes the pitch not as desirable because on the other end of the spectrum is online programs. This is like the one which I'm teaching to you right now. These are the least desirable and the hardest to sell. Why? Because the person has to do all the work themself and they have to go through and teach themself too. If someone does done-for-you, it's just like someone's doing all the work for you, right? An online program is the least desirable and it's the hardest to sell, but the positive of it is that it can really scale because you're not doing the work for everyone. You can really sell a lot of it. You don't really have limits like you do with done-for-you. Where most people go wrong is they try and get into online programs immediately. I see people and they come into a niche and they just jump right into an online program. They're like, "Oh, I'm going to teach ..." Imagine someone coming in and trying to teach people how to start a consulting business without actually knowing how to start a consulting business or without doing it themself or without teaching other people how to do it. It would not only be impossible, it would also be fraud. You can't go in and say how to start a consulting business if you haven't taught anyone like how to start a consulting business. You need to work through these stages. What I did myself is I started out in done-for-you. I started out helping local businesses with their websites and online marketing. I used different contractors. I used different people and I did the work for them. That's how I learned. I learned how things worked. Then as I got more evolved, I moved into done-with-you. We split up the work. Then when I got really good at things, I was able to advice. All of a sudden I noticed that people were willing to pay me purely for my advice and I didn't actually have to do any work anymore. When you don't know that much, people only see value in your work. When you start getting really knowledgeable on something, people see value in your advice. They are willing to do the work themselves. When your advice is really good, people are willing to get in a group with other people. When your advice isn't that good, people want 1on1 because they want a special experience. When your advice gets really good, people go into a group. Then when your advice gets really, really good, people are willing go through a program, an online training program. Where people go wrong is they try and do an online program first. Trust me, that ain't going to work. I've seen it time and time and time again. Someone comes in and they're like, "Sam, my online program isn't working and it teaches people how to sell." I'm like, "Well, would you look at this? Someone can't sell their online program on how to sell." I'm like, "Well, how do you know how to sell things if you can't sell things?" You see we end up with this problem. When you can't sell your online program, it often means that your online program isn't very good. When your online program isn't very good, it probably means that you haven't gone through these evolutionary stages. There's no such thing as an online program that's good unless someone goes through these stages. You have to learn it. The best way to learn it is to do it yourself first. Do the done-for-you. Actually deliver the services. Get hands on with the client. Talk with them. Learn things. See what happens and then evolve through the different stages. This is how you should do it. Now let's talk about the evolving consultants journey. This is pretty much the same stages of evolution. However, we're talking about ... I break it down and I show you the different income levels at different stages and also the different models. Most consultants start out as what I call a generalist consultant. Now a generalist consultant is pretty much a consultant who doesn't have a niche. They're pretty much doing anything for anyone. They're really a glorified human body for hire. If someone doesn't have a niche, then they're a consultant to anyone, I mean they're pretty much like a handyman. They're pretty much like someone who's just available for anything. It's like, "I've got a fridge. Can you help me move it downstairs?" If doesn't have a niche, then that's pretty much what they're asking for. This is what a lot of people set up and they're like, "I'm a business consultant." Okay. What sort of business consultant? "I just help people with businesses." Okay. Well, can you help me move this fridge downstairs because this fridge is in my business and I need it downstairs. That's the sort of stuff that generalist consultants get hit with. Then they wonder why people demand all sorts of different stuff from them. Then they wonder why that their clients bully them and their clients expect the world of them. They don't like what they're doing and they wonder why they can't charge much money for things. They wonder why everything. It's because they're generalists. A generalist consultant. This is what I used to be. Most people start out as a generalist consultant. There's no harm in starting out here. The key is there's no harm in doing any of these stages. The key is just learning how to evolve because everyone goes through them. You just got to learn how to evolve. In the generalist consultant stage, you're doing done-for-you services, DFY. You're typically making less than 100 grand a year. Then we have the next stage of evolution on the consultants journey which is niche consultant. This is when you're still doing done-for-you work. You're still doing the work for people, but now you have a niche. Now you've got a focus and a specialty. Now people stop asking you to move the fridge downstairs. They stop asking you to help them clean up the driveway at the office. They stop asking you to do random things because all of a sudden you're an expert at something. You don't end up with all sorts of random different clients. You end up with a group of clients in a particular niche. I started out as a generalist consultant doing pretty much anything for anyone. Then I focused on service businesses. I help service businesses get more clients. I was working with a range of different services. It's still not very niche, but it was more niche than anyone. Then the next stage is niche mastery, done-with-you or 1on1. This is when you're using a different model, done-with-you or 1on1. Niche mastery is when you have a focus on one niche and you've totally figured everything out. You know this niche better than anyone else. You have this thing locked down. You typically get to the stage after you've done a lot of work with one niche. After you've worked with a whole bunch of different clients in a particular niche, you get really good at it. Then when you're really good at it, that is when you've got niche mastery. Now all of a sudden people are willing to pay you for your advice or they're willing to do the work with you. They're willing to take half of the work and you can take half of the work. When you evolve to this stage, you're typically making in between 400 grand and 600 grand. Then you've got proof of concept which is the next stage. This is when you've totally understood this niche so much. You've worked with this niche for so long and you've solved their problems for so long that you understand a system or a process or a way to solve things. You can develop what I call a proof a concept. A proof of concept is like a ... What's a good way to describe it? It's like intellectual property. It's like different frameworks, different processes that you can give to someone and they can go through that and they will get a result. It's like creating best practice or something. The Consulting Accelerator Program is kind of like proof of concept of how to start your own consulting business. It's intellectual property which I developed over years and got it really refined. This here is when you can go up to that next stage and that's when you're doing done-with-you or 1on1 and you're typically making in between 600 grand or 800 grand. Typically you can't get to these stages until you've got proof of concept. Then you've got coaching. This is when you fully move through into coaching. This is when you've escaped done-for-you and done-with-you. You're no longer doing the work for anybody. You're totally evolved out of doing the work. Now people come to you purely for advice and they know when they come see you that you're not doing any of the work. They know you're just going to advice. We call that 1on1 coaching. It's when you're kind of moving on into this next stage. When you're in that stage, you're typically making in between 800 grand and a million. Then we've got the group coaching. This is when you've gotten even more evolved and you understand your proof of concept so well, you understand your niche so well that people are willing to go on the group with other people and share you and share your advice. The reason why they're willing to share you is because your advice is so damn good. Now sure everyone wants 1on1, but the really good people you can't get 1on1 because you can't afford them. If I was to do 1on1, I would want more than 6 grand an hour. It gets pretty expensive. It's probably better to buy my online training program because it's got like how many hours of me in it, right? As you get better and as your advice gets more powerful and more potent, people are willing to use different ways to get your advice because it doesn't become affordable to hire you 1on1. I mean it wouldn't be very smart for someone to hire me to help them carry their fridge downstairs because it would cost more than 6 grand an hour. That's why the generalist consultant gets asks to take the fridge downstairs because they're pretty much just a glorified human body for hire. The person who's got proof of concept, the person who's mastered it to the point of group coaching, man, people will fly around the world to just listen to you in a crowd, in an audience. That's because your advice has gotten sharp and has gotten dangerous. It can only get that way by going through these different stages. People don't just all of a sudden popup out of nowhere and have a dangerous eye of their market and they have a dangerous understanding of things. That just doesn't happen by chance. People go through the stages. Then you've got at the top of the stages of evolution, online programs. This isn't when you're not coaching at all. You're not coaching people. You're not advising anyone. You're creating a training. Your intellectual property and your advice has become so valuable and so unique that you're able to record videos and package it up and sell it as a training and people are willing to listen to it and do it themselves and pay money for it. The only way people will do that is if it is really, really, really good. If the generalist consultant packages his information into an online program, no one's going to buy that. Imagine putting into a program, how to take your fridge downstairs. Packaging that into a training program. How much money do you think someone's going to pay for that? Someone isn't even going to watch that because that's not even worth watching. That's the problem that people end up with. They don't master anything and then they go and put it into a program and then they wonder why it doesn't sell or they don't go through these stages. If you want to understand why I'm able to put my information into an online program and why it's able to sell so well, it's because I have gone through every single one of these stages. I was the person who had to help people take their fridge downstairs. I was the person who did all of these lame jobs. I'm pretty sure I got caught up at one point and one of my clients asked me if I could take a barbecue, like an outdoor barbecue, over to his office. That's the sort of stuff you get asked to do when you're pretty much someone who does anything, right? This is how it works. This is how you go through these different stages. There's no real shortcuts through here. You've got to work through them. The good news is is this program shows you how to pretty much become niche mastery and proof of concept stage. This program shows you how to quickly accelerate through here. The key is is to pick a niche. I'm guessing most people they aren't even a generalist consultant. I'm guessing most people are either a generalist consultant or they aren't even a consultant at all or people are a niche consultant, but they haven't really mastered it. We're going to really show you how to master it, how to pick a niche and how to evolve through until that third level there, niche mastery. Another thing which is really important to understand is that remember how we talked about public opinion and how most people think a consultant is someone that gives complex advice and wears a suit and sits down across the table from someone and tells them how to do stuff? Well, the current public opinion says that consulting is different from coaching and that info products are different from coaching and consulting. A lot of people would say that what I do and what this is here, what this program is, a lot of people and the public they say that isn't consulting. That's training programs or that's online information products. They might put any sort of any different label on it. They will say that that isn't consulting. They will say what Sam is doing isn't consulting, but remember what the definition of a consultant was? I'm here today to tell you that public opinion is wrong. They're all the same thing. All of these different things are addressing the same problem and aiding the same transformation. Simply different levels of mastery and different models of distribution. When I started out as a generalist consultant, when I became a niche consultant helping service businesses, I'm still doing the same thing up here in online programs. However, it's just the model. The advice I'm giving would be the same advice I would give to someone if I was to sit down with them in a room. The world's gotten confused. Society's gotten confused. They think just because the model of distribution is different that what we're doing here isn't consulting. It is consulting. It fits the definition. It's public opinion and society that is wrong and this which is right. Think about that as you're going through because people don't pay you for the model of distribution. People pay you for the result which you're getting for them. People pay you to help them go from their current situation to their desired situation. You really need to get that into your head. Let's talk about your journey through these different stages of evolution. Consulting Accelerator, which is the program you're in right now, it really helps you go through these first three stages. It helps you get started if you're brand new. It helps you work through the stages of generalist consulting. It helps you become a niche consultant. We really want to just totally skip the generalist consultant stage all together. I help a lot of people do that. We try and get you to pick a niche and we try and get you to solve a particular problem. We can shortcut generalist consultant real quick and get you right there into niche consultant. Then we work on getting you into a niche consulting master. Those are the stages which we cover in Consulting Accelerator. Pretty much how to go from zero up to where you're making like 400 grand to 600 grand a year. Then in the next stages, forming that proof of concept, how do you get real crystal clear on that proof of concept? How do you develop really razor-sharp intellectual property that people pay money for? How do you get out of done-for-you into done-with-you? How do you escape done-with-you completely and get into group coaching? How do you get into the advising instead of doing? Because in the first stage we're doing. In the second stage, we're advising and our client is doing. To help with these next three stages, I have a program called Uplevel Consulting. Uplevel Consulting basically shows you how to escape done-for-you and done-with-you and evolve into someone who is really, really tight proof of concept, really good intellectual property and who is able to make that jump up into someone who is an advisor instead of a doer. That's that Uplevel Consulting is all about. In the third stage of evolution which is the online programs, that is the Quantum Mastermind. That is another training program which I have where we really show people how to take things up to that next level. Typically how it works is if people are zero to 100 grand, they typically buy Consulting Accelerator. Then people who want to get up into seven figures, people who are typically making 100 grand or close to a 100 grand and they want to get to seven figures, that's when we do that in UpLevel. Quantum is when someone's already making seven figures or real close to seven figures and they really want to take things just sky high. They want to crank things right up. Just totally open the throttle. That is Quantum Mastermind. This shows you the different stages of evolution and the journey which you're going to go through. I've told you how I went through these different stages. Well, I want to give you another example. Something like Beachbody, right? Beachbody is an online product which shows people how to get a fit body, right? It's a really successful training program which I'm pretty sure you can do online or you can plug it into your TV. I'm pretty sure they sell DVDs too. We're talking like hundreds and millions. Beachbody makes hundreds of millions of dollars. Well, how do you think Beachbody got their product? How do you think they got to the point where they could sell an online program and make hundreds of millions? Well, I went and did all my research and it turns out that the person who started that started out as a generalist consultant. They started out as someone who was just interested in fitness and then became kind of like a personal trainer. They were a personal trainer for like 20 bucks an hour. They're at a local gym. People would pay them 20 bucks an hour and they'd teach them how to workout. Then they picked a niche. The niche was like developing lean muscle or something. They had a different type of workout which they taught people. Now they were able to charge more money because they were a specialist. All of a sudden they had a niche. They weren't just helping anyone workout. They were helping a particular type of person workout. They were able to increase their prices from $20 an hour up to about $60 an hour. Then they had niche mastery. They totally figured out how to master this niche and they came up with their own sort of training. Then they were able to go into group training. Instead of now teaching one person 1on1, this personal trainer would coach two people at once. If you wanted to do personal training with him, you had to go to the gym with a buddy and it was like $100 an hour. Then the next stage is proof of concept. This is when this guy was like, "Wow. I've really figured something out here. This works." He took the time to really write it down. Give things names. He was like, "Okay. We call this one the ab crunch whatever and then we do six strips of this and then." He mapped it out and turned it into a written documented process. Then he was able to go into classes, like fitness classes, which is kind of like group coaching. Then he was able to hold classes. He'd do like three a day, one at 9 a.m., one at 12 p.m. and then one at say 7 p.m. at night. They were classes and up to 30 people at a time could come and attend and you paid per class. Now his advice was so good that he was able to teach people in a group. When he didn't have a proof of concept and stuff, no one would go and listen to him in a group. They wanted to hire him 1on1. Then we got really good and then when people were starting to attend his groups, the lines were out the door, right? He could no longer do enough classes in a day to help people because it didn't matter how many classes he did, there were more people that wanted his advice. He maxed out the limits of himself teaching people. Then what he did is he turned it into an online program. He recorded videos. He created the whole process just like the Consulting Accelerator. Then he started selling that program and that program just went nuts. It sells hundreds of millions of dollars of it every single year. That's how this happens. If you wonder how Tony Robbins is able to get people to pay him lots of money for his online programs, it's because he started out as a generalist consultant and then he worked his way up through this process. There's no short cutting it. You just can't come in and decide to sell online programs. You have to go through the different stages of evolution. Hopefully this brings some clarity to you on how this works and it shows you the journey that's ahead for you. It shows you that throughout these different stages of evolution, I have different programs which help you each step of the way. Accelerator, its focused is on this first stage of evolution. Uplevel is on this next stage and Quantum is on really cranking up that final stage. When you log into the platform and you look at the programs, you'll see that you have access to Consulting Accelerator. That is the program which you have purchased and that's the program which you're watching right now. You'll see your training programs and it says Accelerator, Uplevel and Quantum. You can see that you've got access to Accelerator. Uplevel it says learn more and Quantum it says learn more. When you're ready to go through those next stages of evolution, you can just click learn more and you can learn more about the programs and you can learn more about what's involved. When you are ready for those ones, we can walk you through those and keep helping you evolve. Because once you've evolved through evolution stage 1.0, you're going to want to go into Uplevel and then you're going to want to go into Quantum. The way things work, it changes at each stage. You're in the right stage right now in Accelerator and then when that times comes you want to upgrade through those different versions. For now let's conclude today's lesson. Let's kind of wrap up what we've talked about. We talked about the misconceptions that most people have about consulting. We talked about how most people think that consulting is giving complicated business advice and wearing a suit and working for a company like Boston Consulting Group with lots of degrees and lots of certificates. Well, it's not. A consultant is actually just somebody who helps someone go from their current situation to their desired situation. They solve problems and aid a transformation. You want to really just get clear on this. A consultant is someone who helps someone go from their current situation to their desired situation and their advice is the vehicle that helps bridge that gap. The most important lesson you will ever learn in business, it's certainly was the most important lesson I've ever learned and it still is, only sell what the market wants and needs. Never fight the market by trying to convince them to want something they don't want. It's going to be an uphill battle. You're going to run out of money. You're going to run out of energy. You're just going to completely conk out. Don't try it. Go with the market. Never fight it. Then we talked about the different models consultants can offer to clients to help them solve their problems and make a transformation. The different models of service delivery. We talked about done-for-you, done-with-you. We talked about coaching, group coaching. Then we talked about proof of concept and going into that final stage which is online programs. Then we talked about the evolutionary stages of consulting from done-for-you all the way through to selling online programs and how it's all simply by mastering one niche and one transformation. The secret to this game is to pick a niche and stick to it. When you stick to a niche and overtime you get really, really good at it. It's impossible to be the best in the world at a range of different things. What most people don't understand is it's surprisingly easy to be the best in the world at something specific. You definitely want to pick a niche and you definitely want to stick to it and evolve through those different stages because at each stage of evolution things get easier for you and you start making a lot more money. That's when things get a lot more fun. You don't want to be that generalist consultant who gets asked by their clients to help carry the fridge downstairs or help move the barbecue from his house to his office. Believe me, there's nothing more degrading than that. You know how to escape that and you know how that is caused. That's it for today's lesson. I hope everyone enjoyed and I'll see you in the next training right now. Thanks for watching.