Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Made in the UK for HR consultants worldwide. You're listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Hello, James here and welcome to this week's podcast and the first podcast of 2025. In this week's main event, I'm going to guide you through a seven step action plan to help you scale your consultancy beyond 500k and make 2025 your best year yet. And in this week's Thought of the Week, I'm going to talk to you about micro addictions and what you need to do to knock them on the head.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: So let's jump straight in this week's main event.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Happy New Year everyone. I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be an awesome year and I hope you have the same vibes for you and your consultancy. As you may or may not know, I moved to Bali last year and fully embraced the lifestyle, culture and spirituality over here. And to that end, I decided to spend New Year's Eve a little differently this year. Rather than going out to a party or something and getting drunk, we went to a traditional intention setting Balinese fire ceremony. Think lots of bells ringing, chanting offerings, flower petals being thrown over you and a very hot fire. At the end of each year. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I'd like to achieve and how I want to live life. And I work hard to create some very clear intentions. It's definitely a process I go through every year and it can be really challenging. But this year's planning was actually quite easy and at the ceremony we had the chance to write our intentions down onto a piece of paper. The priest then blessed our intentions before we threw them into the fire at midnight while literally thousands of fireworks were going off around us from the surrounding villages. It was honestly such a cool experience and it was great to wake up hangover free and feeling crystal clear and having clarity on what I want to do this year. Since I started working with HR consultants, my mission statement has always been to help you get new clients and create a life you love. And when I begin working with clients, creating clarity on what you want to achieve is always our starting point because it is so, so important.
So as we start 2025, I want to renew that commitment to you and help you start the year with crystal clear clarity on what your action should be. That's why in this podcast episode, I'm going to share with you the steps successful consultants have taken to scale their businesses beyond 500k. And I want you to include these steps within your own 2025 action plan. So let's get started. Step one is to create clear goals. So your life vision should always come first and your business is there to provide you with the personal and financial freedom you wanted when you first started out. Your business should not trap you inside working crazy hours and being underpaid for the work that you're doing. Which is sadly where most consultants I speak to get stuck. The most successful consultants I know have a very clear life vision. They know what they want from life, they know what they need from the business in order to achieve it and they do not allow themselves to lose this clarity. Step two is to stop trading your time and create packages. Most consultants get stuck selling their time and they go into a business and just try and sell this big chunk of HR on a retained basis. But in my opinion, and this is a really bad way to sell HR and this caps your earning ability and the scalability of your consultancy. The successful consultants I speak to know that this is a trap. They know that they can earn way more money by packaging up their services in different ways. So they have HR software packages, they have peace of mind packages, they have recruitment packages, they have an HR audit package and they have a nice mix of revenue, so passive, subscription time based and one off. They also know that they can value stack different packages on top of one another to increase clients average spend. And they know that by creating packages they can more easily delegate the work to other people. Which leads us nicely onto step three and that's to create the right people plan for your consultancy. So as part of your day job you've created lots of different people plans for your clients over the years. But when was the last time you looked at your own consultancy to see if you've got the right people in the right places? So you sit at director level, yet you're maybe spending a lot of your time delivering work at admin advisory and management levels. So this is massively reducing your blended rate and you aren't making as much money as you should be as a result. The successful consultants I know understand this and they delegate the work to someone that sits at the right level, therefore optimizing their blended rate and profit in alignment with the work that's coming in. So once you've packaged up your services in the right way and you've got the right people delivering the work, it's time for you to then free yourself from client delivery. And this, this is step four. So this is one of the most important things you can do as a consultancy owner, as this gives you the time and energy you need to be the face of the business and drive it forward. All of the successful consultants I know have done this. As a result, they've been able to quickly scale the business while giving them the personal and financial freedom they originally wanted when they started all of those years ago. Once you've given yourself the time to focus to work on the business, you can then focus on growing your consultancy's revenue. And there are three ways to increase revenue. The first is to get new clients. The second is to get existing clients to spend more with you. And the third is to get existing clients to spend more with you. More often. Getting new clients is the hardest way for you to grow revenue. And that's why I always advise to get started by selling more to existing clients and increasing their spend, which is step five. So one of the quickest and easiest things that you can do is increase your pricing. So a lot of consultancies I know are massively undercharging. So, so have the confidence to look at your prices and increase them to where they should be. Another thing you could do is look at your pay as you go clients and get them onto your peace of mind subscription based package. As a strategic partner, you should be meeting with your clients on a regular basis to consult with them on their goals. And this is a great opportunity for you to up and cross sell additional services to them. Successful consultancies I know understand the importance of account management and they'll spend a lot of time account managing their clients in the correct way to increase average spending. Once you're managing your existing clients in the right way, you can then move your attention to marketing. And this brings us nicely onto step six. And that's to market your consultancy on a consistent basis even if you're super busy. Why? Because this keeps your brand awareness ticking over and this keeps your pipeline topped up at all times. And the big consultancies I know have learned from their mistakes. They've actually said to me, james, I've learned from that mistake. And that's why I always will consistently market my consultancy in the future. So in the past they've been super busy, they haven't done any marketing, then they go through a quiet patch and then they regret not doing anything. And this is where the HR marketing box comes in. So it's an online content library full of ready to use content and ideas to help you increase your brand awareness and get new clients. It saves you loads of time. It's a thousand times cheaper than hiring your own content writer and it saves you the stress of writing all of your own content. And now we can move on to our final and seventh step, which is to get expert support. So you're an expert HR consultant, yet when you become a consultancy owner, you're required to become a finance expert, a marketing expert, a sales expert, a software expert. You have to develop all of these skills and that's why you need to learn from specialists. So one of the biggest hacks you can do is find guidance and mentorship from experts in their field and let them support your growth. And that brings us the end of the proven growth formula for building a successful consultancy and what your action plan should be for 2025. So let me wrap up by summarizing these steps again. Step one is to have a clear life vision. Step two is to move away from a time based model and package up HR in the right way. And that's where my video program how to Package up and Sell HR to make More Money will come in to help you. Step three is to create a people plan for your consultancy. Step four is to free yourself from client delivery. Step five is to sell more to existing clients. Step six is to market your consultancy consistently, even when you're busy. And step seven is to get expert help when you need it. So when thinking about what your goals are for 2025, be sure to include these steps in there. And if you need any help, you know where I am.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: James is 30 thought of the Week.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: In this week's Thought of the Week, I want to talk to you about micro addictions and how they might be stopping you from making 2025 your best year yet. As business owners, you and I know that you have to operate at a very high level of efficiency, which most people don't understand. And over the past few years, I forced myself to look at my behaviors to see if they're helping or hindering me in life. As someone with adhd, this is even more magnified and challenging as we're constantly dopamine chasing. And over the holiday period I read the book Dopamine Detox, which is actually a really cool book and I highly recommend it. It reminded me that we're all on the hunt for dopamine. And in today's social media and tech world, it's very easy for us to develop micro addictions. And labeling certain behaviors as such actually provides you with the wake up call you might need to break free from them. So micro addictions are small, repetitive behaviors or habits that we do compulsively throughout the day. They're not as extreme as traditional addictions, but they operate on a similar principle, providing small hits of dopamine that keep us coming back for more. Whether it's checking Instagram every 10 minutes, snacking when you're not hungry, or constantly checking your work emails in bed, micro addictions can suck up loads of our time, overstimulate us, heighten cortisol and turn us into unproductive, moody messes.
So what do you need to do to stop this from happening? Well, the first is to complete self inquiry and I love that term. I read this in a book earlier on as well and recognize the micro addictions that you may have. So are you constantly snacking? Are you constantly checking your emails? Are you spending too much time on LinkedIn and other social media platforms? Once you've highlighted the micro addictions that you're suffering from, you can then set boundaries with yourself. So I completely deleted all social media accounts over a year ago now, apart from LinkedIn for work, because I was spending way too much time on them and actually found them really triggering. I've also blocked Daily Mail from my phone. Yes, I know who reads Daily Mail, but for some reason I was hooked on their terrible, terrible fear mongering headlines. Honestly, Daily Mail is such trash, isn't it? I've also set timers on my work emails and LinkedIn so I can't scroll on them past a certain time. I've also deleted YouTube app because I was getting sucked into their short form content. Honestly, it's like I've deleted social media and then I've just kind of seeked the similar behavior elsewhere, which is natural I suppose.
But yeah, it definitely made me look at what I was doing with fresh eyes again and I was like, okay, this is micro addiction actually. This is stopping me from being productive, this is stopping me from being present and all of these things. Once you've created boundaries for yourself, you should then replace the micro addiction with microhabits and microhabits that serve you. So I downloaded Blink List instead, which is like a book summary app. So when I want to take 20 minutes out, I just lay down, shut my eyes and listen to a book summary, which I'm loving. When you want to just take five minutes, the thing that you do is pick up your phone and start scrolling. Well, that's what it was like for me anyway. And actually that's not giving you the rest that you need. It's only fueling that kind of dopamine hunt, which is exhausting in itself. So yeah, love the book app is educating me, giving me fresh perspectives and giving me lots of content ideas, which is sick. And then I also downloaded a journaling app which I'm loving too. Journaling may seem a bit woohoo, but I actually find it really, really useful and furry mind decluttering, which I like. So I've always kept a paper diary which is like my grateful diary. So at the end of each day I write the things that made me happy and the connections that I've had and all of the things that I kind of want to focus on. So I decided to digitalize this this year so I can add photos and videos to each day, which is super cool. And then I'm going to AI summary it at the end of the year, which I'm really really excited about. So that's enough about what I'm doing. Let me just summarize why I included this within this week's Thought of the Week. So maybe you have micro addictions that are stopping you from living your best life. And because this is kind of a new year themed podcast, I wanted to bring that to your attention gently and lovingly. And I hope that this Thought of the week will raise your awareness of those micro addictions if you have them, allowing you to set boundaries and replace those addictions with microhabits that will help you to achieve your dreams.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: You've been listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast, helping you to get new clients and create a life you love.
