The MindShift Podcast

How to Scale a Consulting Business with Alzay Calhoun

1/19/23 3:06 PM

4 Minutes Read

Episode 74

Alzay Calhoun has been a business coach since 2008 and helps owners of boutique consulting firms scale without stress. Imagine fewer proposals, easier sales calls, better-behaved clients, and more days off. These are the results he works hard to create for his clients. He also runs a popular YouTube channel offering insights on the process.

It is all based around a single idea:

Permanently elevate the training standard for how to build a consulting practice. We transform intelligent, technically oriented, stalled leaders of consulting firms into insightful, inspired, business architects.

He believes having a purpose for your business is mandatory. For experienced business people, terms like mission, vision, and strategic plan are met with an eye roll and heavy sigh. They are often disregarded because they feel fanciful…like a big waste of time. His commitment is to work alongside you to help create strategies that will give real and practical direction for your company, not just soft ideas that sound good on paper.

And if you don’t believe this, tune into this episode.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full Episode:

Alzay shares his menu and choosing one item philosophy
The thought process to begin consultanting business
The one thing holding his clients back

Episode Highlights

Alzay tells us about his story, business, and what he does to help people each day

- Having an MBA in business, Alzay started his business.
- With a fortune 500 client, he thought he was doing well.
- Alzay says his life got better when his plans got simpler.
- He takes his clients down to ideas that leverage money.

How did Alzay get involved in the world of consulting?

- Running a consulting business and coaching are not the same.
- Coaching isn’t throwing ideas at people.
- What is exactly going on, and how do we fix it tomorrow?

Who Alzay coaches and the target audience he serves

- Alzay chooses to work with consultants.
- It’s easiest to serve people like us.
- Being a consultant is about your thoughts.

How Alzay defines productizing his business

- You have a “PhD”, you are an expert in your area
- We have to find a way to make that brilliance more palatable to someone else.
- Understandable scope, time, price.

How does someone begin the thought process if you aren’t a consultant yet

- First words you need to hear – slowly.
- Step 1 is a matter of empathy.
- What is the highest stack of problems on their desk?

If you look at a menu, you can only choose one item

- In our Ph.D. of thinking, we give our clients options.
- Don’t offer them 19 choices when they don’t recognize any of them.
- Empathy, a projection of their situation.
- One is simpler to manage than two.

Blind acquisition, the process Alzay teaches, and the channel he prefers

- Three pillar systems: Client acquisition, client service, and client retention.
- If you get those things right, everything else is easier to manage.
- Client acquisition is not a marketing hack but a process to put in place.

What is the number one thing that Alzay sees holding his clients back

- New consultants look at client acquistion.
- Consultants who’ve been in the game longer look at client service.

Do people get stuck in service

- What brings people to the fork in the road of I need help now.
- You realize that you don’t have predictability or control over the business.
- You get forced into poor behaviors because you don’t know how to make your business predictable.
- Get the picture of predictability before we deploy or throw ourselves into client acquisition of any client service.

What would Alzay change if he could in the world of coaching and consulting

- The assumption of what you have a PhD in is inherently valuable – just because you have it to offer doesn’t mean he wants to receive it.
- We have been sold the idea that folks buy courses and I can sell them.
- Creating content around your expertise has to be valuable to the person you’re talking to.

To the consultant who doesn’t have it figured out

- The fatigue of all these things is very real.
- When you’re tired, you make bad choices.
- If the picture of client acquisition, service, and retention is making basic sense, one of your pillars is underdeveloped.

The one thing Alzay wants to be remembered by

- “That I tried to leave it better than I found it.”

3 Powerful Quotes from this Episode

Your Message is palatable

15:24 – “…we have to find a way to make that brilliance more palatable to someone else… Otherwise, we’re flying over people’s heads, and they’ll never Connect, I’ll never understand, they’ll never buy, they’ll never value what we do. You ever had somebody buy what you do, they pay the good money and still don’t value it. “

Visualizing productizing

20:35 – “The way I kind of help folks visualize this, is look at his desk, go to his office, and look at his desk and look at all of what’s on his desk, and see what on his desk you can take off of it.”

One is easier to manage

27:39 – “One is simpler to manage than two. Now I don’t have children. But what I’ve heard is that having one child is easier to manage than having two children. So inside our own business, because our products are our children, our services are our children. So if we just have one service that’s easier for us to manage, easier for us to understand, easier for us to deploy and deliver, easier for us to manage and maintain, easier for us to build a clientele around from the management of our own business. One is simpler than two and definitely simpler than 19.“

About Alzay Calhoun

Alzay Calhoun is a highly sought-after consultant and coach to businesses big and small. His passion is to permanently elevate the training standard for how to build a consulting practice. His strategies transform intelligent, technically oriented, stalled leaders of consulting firms into insightful, inspired business architects. He wants to help you translate your expertise into an experience your clients can consume.

He is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School MBA program. His entire professional career involves the “strategic work” using proven systems to help business leaders make better decisions. And a resume that includes the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, Coca-Cola, and the Morehouse College Entrepreneurship Center.