The biggest decision, one year later

Leah Neaderthal0:02

I mean, I spent so many years on this hamster wheel of promotion after promotion, and now we get to see what happens when you stop spending all your time selling something and start spending all your time actually improving something. And what we've seen is that the program gets better. Client Results get better. They get results faster, and it makes me happier. Welcome to the smart gets paid podcast with me. Leah Neaderthal, I help women land higher paying clients in their independent consulting businesses. But I've never been a salesperson. My background is in corporate marketing, and when I started my first consulting business, I learned pretty quickly that it's about 1000 times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell someone else's. So I taught myself how to do it, and I created the sales approach that I now share with my clients so they can feel more comfortable in the sales process, get more of the right clients and get paid way more for every client contract. So whether your client contracts are $5,000 $100,000 or more. If you want to work with more of the clients you love, do more of the work you love, and get paid more than you ever thought you could, then you're in the right place. Let's do it together. Thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to rate, review and share. Hey there. Thanks for joining me in this episode. I hope that wherever you are, wherever you're listening to this, I hope you're having a great week, making some good progress in your business, and also taking some time for yourself. So last year, around this time, I announced that I was making what was, at that point, the biggest decision in my business, and it's been just over a year since then, and so I wanted to come back and just share what happened and what I learned from that decision one year later. And there are lessons here that I know you can apply to your business too, even if you're not about to make a big transition or shifting how you work. So to sort of bring you up to speed, the decision I made was that I was going to retire the programs that I had been offering for years called signed, pack your pipeline and a couple others, and stop selling them as individual courses entirely, and I was going to instead create a new program called the academy, where I was going to teach a handful of consultants how to get more of the clients they want get paid way more for their work and run more profitable and more fulfilling businesses. And actually, I talked about it in Episode 31 which is called no surprise, the biggest decision in my business. So if you haven't listened to that, you might want to check it out. And I did that. I made this big change for a few reasons, as I talk about in that episode, Episode 31 after offering these courses for a few years, I had sort of fulfilled the online entrepreneur playbook, as it were. And if you can imagine, I'm using like online entrepreneur playbook and sort of air quotes, and if you've been running your business for a while, you've probably seen it kind of in the coaching space, right? Because the online entrepreneur playbook, says to sell what you know, in various courses for increasing amounts of money. And when you can do that, you can make a great living. You can have all these courses you're offering, whatever it's like the Holy Grail, right, the online entrepreneur playbook. And, of course, the philosophy being that once you do that, you sell all these courses, they sort of sell themselves. You make a great living, you know, like move to Bali. I don't know, but that's the online entrepreneur playbook. And after several years of doing that and sort of building that, I had achieved it like I had achieved the Holy Grail. I was doing what you're supposed to be doing, but I felt completely unfulfilled, because in pursuing this playbook, I had actually stopped solving the problem that I actually saw in the world. I had gotten away from the problem I actually wanted to solve when I even started my business, and the problem that I saw, which I had made it my mission to solve, was to help smart, ambitious women stop leaving money on the table by teaching them how to get the right consulting clients into their business consistently and how to get paid well for their work. Instead, I was solving small parts of the problem in pieces, following the online entrepreneur playbook that says you have to solve a little bit at a time for increasing amounts of money. I had the painkiller workshop, which is about how to create a painkiller. I had pack your pipeline, which is about how to get visible and get leads, and fill your pipeline using LinkedIn I had signed, which is essentially how to lead a sales process and close it. But because I had chopped up all these things, I wasn't actually solving the real problem. So I spent a lot of time thinking, and I decided to go back to the basics, because here's what I know to be true, to truly get consulting clients consistently and to get paid really well for your work so you can break through to that next revenue level in your consulting business and run a really profitable business. You can't do it by just knowing one or two parts of the process of. Actually what it takes

Leah Neaderthal5:01

to get consulting clients. For example, if you know how to get visible on LinkedIn, but you don't know how to take that visibility and turn it into leads, then you're not going to solve your business development problem, right? This is actually why I won't teach LinkedIn as a standalone course anymore, because it just doesn't solve the real problem. And if you know how to get your ideal clients coming to you, whether it's through LinkedIn or referrals or other methods, but you don't know how to help them along a sales process and keep them engaged and help them say yes and sign on the dotted line, then you're also not going to solve your business development problem. And if you can get clients to say yes, but you're not getting paid as much as you could be getting paid. And by the way, nearly every woman I talk to is under charging for her work, even the ones who think they're doing fine, because you actually can be getting paid more for your work. But anyway, if you're getting clients, but you're not getting paid what you could be, then you're still leaving money on the table. And I'm no longer okay with just solving part of the problem, especially when all those parts are connected. So that's what prompted me to really look at how I was doing things and make the biggest change in my business, to close down those courses I was teaching and start over. And so now I'm able to solve the whole problem, because we can make sure that every part of the process is dialed in, those foundational pieces that need to be dialed in, even before you start doing business development, like your positioning or your messaging, your painkiller statement, through how you get leads and using strategies that bring the right potential clients into your orbit, all the way through the sales process, by getting your sales conversations dialed in and teaching you how to navigate a sales process inside of a company, all the way through dialing in your services, pricing for value, writing proposals that get signed, and getting those proposals over the finish line so that potential clients become paying clients. That's how you solve the problem that I see in the world, and I'm just not willing to accept anything less and solve small parts of it, because I realized it's not serving you. It's not serving my clients, and I have to tell you, making this decision and the changes in my business that came as a result of this decision, it was scary. I mean, the courses I was closing, these are what I'd made my name on, like I'd built my reputation on it. I'd had hundreds of people go through them, and walking away from that was it was scary, and it was also kind of sad. It was like saying goodbye to old friends. And it was also, I mean, let's be honest, I had no idea if it would work either. Like, it felt like I was taking a huge leap, but I believed with all my heart that it was the right move. So what did I actually do right? Like, what's different now in the way that we're doing things? So to talk about what's changed, we first have to talk about how it works, right? How things work now. So the Academy is a high touch, individualized, group coaching program that teaches you a complete system to get higher paying clients in your consulting business. And here's how it works at its most basic All right, when you join us, we assess where you are in your business, your goals, your clients, and then out of all the strategies in our portal and everything that's available to you, you get an individualized roadmap with the right strategies to implement in your business in the right order so that you can make the biggest impact the fastest so for example, if your immediate need is to fill your pipeline, your roadmap will start With strategies that help you do that. But if you're somebody else who you've been sending out proposals and people just aren't saying yes, then your roadmap will be tuned to solve that problem, and on and on and on. And then my team actually sends you the strategies that are on your roadmap so you have them at your fingertips and you can get started quickly. And of course, every strategy comes with the templates and the tools and the guides you need, so that you have a whole kit to help you implement that. First part of the roadmap is really for the first 60 to 90 days. And then every 60 days or so, we reassess, see where we are, where you are, and we craft the roadmap for the next cycle. But whatever's going on in your business and wherever you want to go, you're always working on the right next step for you. Okay, so that's one part of it, and then we pair that with coaching, which is how we start to apply those strategies that you're learning to the real world of your business and your actual sales process and your actual clients. There are two to three live coaching calls each week, live trainings every Thursday. We have a really active Slack community that I'm in all the time, and if there's an emergency, reach out to us, and we can help either by jumping on the phone or through another method. And in the coaching, you get sort of two types of coaching. You're getting feedback on what you're working on, like making sure your LinkedIn profile is dialed in, or reading a follow up email to make sure it sounds good before you send it out. And that's sort of one type of coaching to answer the question, Am I doing this right? But there's another type of coaching, which is real time sales coaching on the clients you're actually talking to, so that no matter what situation you're in or what challenge comes your way, you're going to know exactly what to do to navigate it successfully. So that's the second type of coaching that our clients get in the academy. And then all of that takes

Leah Neaderthal9:58

place in our amazing. Community of women who run independent consulting businesses. These women are amazing, and I'm gonna talk about that in a second, actually, but I think to understand how this decision has really played out for context, we have to look at how I used to do things before I made this decision to close all my programs and how things are now. And there are tons of ways things are different, but I think for the purpose of this discussion, we can look at this from sort of a high level. It used to be that the courses I offered were linear. Everyone went through them the same way and learned the same things in the same order, no matter where they were in their business or what specific problem they were facing. I mean, you know, it's like most programs out there. It was just sort of one size fits all now in the academy, because we have all the tools and strategies, everything I've ever taught, basically, and the new tools and strategies that we're creating today, and we have all that at our disposal, we can create an individualized roadmap for each client that lays out the right strategies to implement in the right order, to address your most important issues in the order they need to be solved to help you be the most successful, the fastest. So instead of a one size fits all approach, each person's roadmap is a unique curriculum that fits their business, their clients and how they want to grow their business. It's not like a choose your own adventure. It's really more a unique prescription for your business. So at a high level, that's how the learning is different, and the coaching is really different too. So the way it used to be with the typical online entrepreneur playbook I was running, one of the dirty little secrets about that is that it's all about limiting coaching access and limiting help, and it's designed to get you to pay for more, spend more so that you get more access. But I started to not be okay with what felt to me like I was withholding help, right and withholding coaching just because you didn't purchase the right bonus or buy up to the right level. Because to really be successful, here it takes two types of coaching. There's coaching on what you're learning. I mentioned that before, sort of answers the question, Am I doing this right? And the way things used to be, I could do that right as long as you were in the program. And of course, you know, most programs, if they offer coaching, they do some version of that. But there's that second type of coaching that's necessary to be successful, to actually use what you're learning in the real world of your clients. And it's that real time sales coaching on the clients you're actually talking to. It's the coaching that answers the question, what do I do in this situation when I take these strategies and bring them into the real world of my clients? And you know, how do I navigate this situation in a way that's good for myself and for my client? Because we all know that in the real life world of your clients, there are a lot of factors at play, and being able to talk through those scenarios you're facing and those situations, and really, you know, get a handle on those factors and tell you exactly what to do to navigate it or move things forward the way things used to be. I couldn't do any of that because maybe, you know, the program ended, or you didn't buy up to some sort of special coaching thing. And the way I'm doing things now I can, and those are the types of questions that I'm helping my clients through every day. So for example, somebody's getting pushback on something from an existing client, and we have to look at all those personalities involved and what's been talked about so far, and so many other factors before, I couldn't do that, and now I can, and I don't have to hold back. You know, this program is really high touch, which is exactly what I wanted to be able to give my clients. So if the trainings and the strategies are how we help you learn, then the coaching is how we help you use those strategies with your actual clients, and that's how we help you win. And because we can actually dive into those situations. There's a whole lot more winning, which we're going to talk about that in a few minutes. So at a high level, that's what's different. Instead of a one size fits all approach, it's individualized to where you are in your business, your clients, and how you want to grow. And then, instead of what felt like holding back coaching, I'm able to help my students with the two types of coaching necessary to be successful, making sure you can learn and implement the strategies and that they're going to work, and then making sure that they actually work in the real world of your clients. I mean, there's a lot more that's different that we don't really have time to go into here, but if you apply at Smart gets paid.com We'll tell you all about it. So what have we seen since making this big decision and moving to this program and this type of format, well, remember, I made this decision because I wanted to truly solve the problem I saw in the world. So we have

Leah Neaderthal14:28

to look at the results from you know, are we solving the problem better? And what we're finding is that when you give people a unique roadmap for their business, you pair it with coaching to make sure it's implemented well, and you help them close the clients they're actually talking to. They get more clients and they get paid way more. Last year, just about every woman in the academy signed a contract that was her biggest and most profitable contract to date. What we're seeing is that women are getting more and better client opportunities. They actually know how to close those opportunities right? Remember, you know, I had split up those two things before about getting leads and closing the leads, like a client of ours who turned one email using our shoulder tap strategy into a six figure engagement, or actually, a member who did some of my other programs and made a lot of progress has made even more progress here, and she signed her biggest client ever to date, women are signing bigger contracts that get them paid more. They're structuring in their work so that they're actually getting paid more for the same work or less, and they're signing clients faster. So to me, this is all a win, because together, we're solving the real problem of helping women land more of the right clients and get paid more money, not the fake problem of how to create and sell more courses. So okay, what have I learned in this process and over the last year? That's what I want to share with you now. And even if you work with your clients in a direct service or a consulting capacity, there's still something for you in the learning here that you can apply to your business. All right, so there are three big things I've learned. First, when you stop trying to create new things and sell those things, you can make the things you do have even better. So the way I was doing things before, I was following that online entrepreneur playbook, so I was creating new programs and selling multiple programs. And one little secret about offering multiple programs is that you're always launching. You're always either ramping up to or promoting leading up to when a course starts. And that promotion process can take four to six weeks each time. And there were some years in there where my team and I launched like eight times a year, you guys, this is crazy, but there was one time where I was leading three signed cohorts at once, because signed was a 10 week program. And I think one cohort was on week eight, one was on week five, and then one was on week two. And I remember I showed up to one class and I was like, Okay, here we are for week five. And they were like, we're on week two. And that's not the only time that it was just like, too much at a time. At the beginning of covid around March, April 2020, I had a signed cohort running for 10 weeks. And when that launch ended, we immediately started a launch for a pack your pipeline accelerator, which was a live version of my LinkedIn course. And then, because of the timing on that launch, I was eventually leading a 21 day intensive accelerator in the middle of, like, on top of this 10 week program, you guys, it was nuts. And also remember it was like the beginning of covid, like, it was insane, but we were constantly in this, like, pack your pipeline signed promotional cycle, and then creating another smaller program called the painkiller workshop, and then another even smaller program, which maybe all this doesn't sound like a lot to you, but when you're in it, it is brutal and it's exhausting. But now, when you only offer one thing, you don't spend all your time launching, and when you stop trying to launch and sell things and create new things all the time. You can make the things you do have even better. So even though it's just been a year, we've made a ton of improvements. We brought on a copy coach, Sue Holloway, who's providing feedback on the copy that our students are writing in their emails and LinkedIn posts and LinkedIn profiles. We migrated all of that legacy content onto a new platform. So our academy portal makes it a lot easier to learn the strategies and implement them, and because we moved to a new portal, and I could actually organize it the way we needed now, now there's space for things that I've wanted to share for years, but literally never had a space to put them in because they didn't fit the specific, linear, one size, all curriculum. So if you're wondering, we used to use teachable and now we're on a platform called up coach. So now you guys, there are guides. I've written templates, I've created webinars. I've done stuff that has sat on my desktop for years, like there's this training called the awkwardness mantra, or how to lead a killer webinar how to hire a VA like so much that I never had a place to put it, and now it's in our portal and clients have access to it. We made a whole new onboarding process so you can get up to speed in the program quickly. We added maternity leave and family leave in response to the things that our clients needed. There are more opportunities for support, like rapid, personalized reviews of things like your

Leah Neaderthal19:24

LinkedIn profile or proposals. And we created our academy roadmap where we map the journey and all the strategies necessary to truly start to get higher paying clients. This roadmap guides everything we do with our clients and ensures that we're all focused on a single goal for each student, helping them land more of the clients they love and get paid way more for it. I mean, I spent so many years on this hamster wheel of promotion after promotion, and now we get to see what happens when you stop spending all your time selling something and start spending all your time actually improving something. And what we've. Seen is that the program gets better. Client Results get better. They get results faster, and it makes me happier. Here's how I see this playing out in the consulting business. I talk to a lot of women who are looking for the thing that will sell, right? You know, this service, or set of services that people will buy, and they keep creating new things or sketching out new things in Google Docs or whatever, and they want to find that silver bullet of what will sell. But I've always said that anything will sell if you sell it, and then when you do, spend that time making the thing that you offer better. So how do you streamline it and make it easier for you to deliver. How do you add more value to your clients in a way that's low lift for you, so that your clients can get better results? How do you take a hard look at what's actually necessary to solve the problem and what needs to be added and also what needs to be cut? Because really, there's no one service that will sell. Any service can sell. If you sell it, the way to make it more profitable is to make it easier for you to deliver increase the value and the price over time. And the way you do that is not by creating more, it's by making what you offer better, all right? So that's the first thing. The second thing I've learned is that when you can really hear what people need, right and the problems they're having, you can serve them in a way they actually need so in the way things were before, in that constant promotion cycle, I had no space to respond to what my clients needed by, say, creating strategies and tools and templates that would solve the problems they were telling me they had. I mean, I just had no mental or creative space. And then, of course, I mentioned, I literally had nowhere to put these tools because the curriculum was so linear and rigid, and as a result, there was stuff I had wanted to teach for years, and I never really had the ability to do it. This is stuff that people were telling me they needed, because they were asking me how to do it, and I would answer it in coaching calls, but never had the space to create the strategy and the templates and essentially the kit that would help them be successful. And now I do, and I can address it quickly. So around the end of last year, we did a survey of our clients, what's the thing that you're dying to learn about for your business, right like, what's the thing that would solve the biggest problem for you right now? And we took those results, and then we use those results to create our upcoming curriculum from it, and we also hear the questions that people are asking now, like in coaching calls and in our community, and I can either teach to it or bring in someone to teach it in our expert in residence program. So that's how you get a training like client signaling, which is a really powerful strategy to market in a way that your ideal clients will know you're for them. That's how we get trainings and guest speakers for navigating the jungle around how to navigate the world of your clients, so you can actually get your work sold in. And that's how we're spending a whole month on money mindset, which we're bringing in an expert in residence to lead. And there's so much more, and it's so gratifying to finally be able to give clients the learning and the tools they need so that they can be successful. So the way I see that playing out in consulting businesses is that I talk to a lot of women who spend a lot of time thinking, thinking about how to speak in their clients voice, how to message their work, how to structure their services in a way that clients can buy and that will help them get the results. And it's just a lot of thinking, but the real answers to those questions are actually out there. They're in conversations with your potential clients. They're in the things that your actual clients are saying about what they need. So the way I see this helping consulting businesses is to stop

Leah Neaderthal23:36

thinking about it so much in your own echo chamber. Get out and talk to people, because when you're really listening, your clients will tell you what they need to solve the problem. And bonus, once you create it for one client, it's done, it's created, and you can offer it to future clients too, so that they can see better results as well. And the last thing I learned is that when you're not spread out over a lot of things, and you're focused on serving your clients in one way, you can give more of yourself. So when you're running that online entrepreneur playbook I mentioned, you have to limit access to you, the coach. And it's not just about your capacity, because you're spending so much time creating or promoting. It's the whole premise. You're constantly trying to move people up to pay you more so that they can get more access to you. What that means is that for years, I had to watch in the groups that were part of the programs that I was running, as I saw people that I had already worked with struggle with issues and questions that I could answer for them and I could help them fix, but I had to hold back because they were past the extended support point, or they were no longer paying me. And if you think that sounds mean, I mean, just ask yourself what you would do. And I had created some longer term support options, but it really didn't cover everyone, so I was finding it hard to help the people who really needed it. And all of that is because that online entrepreneur playbook and limiting support is. So I'm gonna go on a little bit of a soapbox here. This is actually why you see some bad behavior in the coaching space, like coaches who tell you, if you tried their system, or you tried a part of it and it didn't work, and they tell you it's because of your mindset, right? Have you ever experienced that? It makes me so mad when you say this isn't working, and they tell you it's because of your mindset, because really, if something that you've taught somebody isn't working, it's not because of their mindset, it's because they're probably just not doing it right. And that is completely fixable, usually just by taking a look at what they've done, diagnosing why it's not working and making some suggestions to fix it. I mean, it can probably be solved in like a loom video, but if you're following this online entrepreneur playbook, like so many coaches are, and you're keeping people at arm's length, and you're not willing to get in there and help so that your clients can actually be successful, the only thing that you can do is essentially make it their problem and tell them that it's their mindset right, instead of your problem, which is that something's not right and you have the ability to fix it. I know that's a little bit of a soapbox. Thank you for humoring me, but it just kills me when I hear that. So back to the point here. The point is that what I've learned in the last year is that when you're not committed to keeping clients at arm's length, you can give more of yourself and you can help your clients be more successful. So instead of being at arm's length, my team and I stay really close to the members. We meet every week to talk about how everyone's doing. Are they green, where they're doing fine, super clear. Moving forward. Are they yellow? Like, you know, maybe working through some stuff, having some trouble, but, you know, generally moving ahead. Or are they red? Like, do they really need some help? Is this an emergency and we can respond as necessary. It shows our clients that they're not alone, and it helps them become more successful. And as a coach, it feels so much better. The way I see this playing out with consultants is about boundaries. I see a lot of women who are providing great service for their clients and almost to a person over delivering, but they're not charging enough so that they get resentful of their clients because they've given so much, and they feel like they have to sort of pull back, right and not give as much, even though they know that's what the client needs. That's why I'm such a big fan of value based pricing for consulting, where you charge and get paid for the value to the company of solving the problem that they came to you to solve, because when you do value based pricing, and you're not counting hours or minutes and the meter is not running or you're not under charging for your work, if a client reaches out to you for a quick phone call, you can take it because that five minutes would only take five minutes of your time, but it can solve a huge problem for your client. When you're not using value based pricing, you feel like you have to hold back. But when you do use value based pricing, you can give more of yourself in a way that feels good and help your clients become more successful. So that's what I've learned through this major change and running my business this way over the past year or so. But in all of this, there are some things that haven't changed. Well, first, the community hasn't changed. If you've ever worked with me, you know that this community of women is so incredible, the women who find me, the women who join our community, they are smart, they're dynamic, they're running real consulting businesses, and frankly, you know, they're grown ups, like they want to have a business and have a life. I've been in so many women business owner groups over the years. I mean, maybe you have two that are filled with women who just, like, aren't your people. Maybe it's because they're selling B to C or selling an online course, and any sort of advice or guidance is really geared towards those B to C businesses. Maybe they're running

Leah Neaderthal28:35

their business as a hobby, or they just don't have the aspirations you have about your business. And then there are the business owners that, like, just got out of B School five minutes ago. Minutes ago, or, I don't know, they just got their Brooke Castillo coaching certification last week. And it's like coaches who coach coaches, who coach coaches. I'm not saying that any of these are bad, but the honest truth is that when you're running a consulting business and you're selling your expertise into companies for 10s or hundreds of 1000s of dollars, the honest truth is that the women in most general entrepreneur groups, they're just not your peers. They're not going the same direction you're going, and that's not a value judgment, it's just true. That's why the community we've built through my previous programs and now in the academy is such a special place. Women say I finally found my people, and that hasn't changed. What also hasn't changed is a fundamental part of my approach, which is you have to learn a lot of new things if you're going to do this, but you also have to unlearn a lot of things, which is why, even as we're adding new trainings about strategies that are working, or approaches, it's not just about adding it's about exploring what needs to be unlearned. One perfect example of this is in a tool called the awkwardness mantra, which is a strategy that lets you resist the urge from jumping in and speaking during a pause in a conversation with a potential client. It's a really simple but really powerful strategy. So to create your awkwardness mantra, we have to first look at why. You feel the need to jump in and speak when things feel a little awkward, and when we were working on this together as a group, oh my God, it was incredible what women uncovered and what they shared. One woman shared that she's the oldest of her siblings, and she always felt this really strong responsibility to make sure that things were okay for the younger ones. And so that same feeling still comes up now, even in her late 40s. And so things like that are really important through this process. It's never just about here are a bunch of new strategies. We always have to look at what might be playing out that needs to be addressed. I'll be honest, and I have to say, not everything went perfectly in this transition. Not everything went the way I had hoped, right or the way I planned it, and I want to share that with you too, because I feel like there's so much I don't know toxic success in the coaching industry. Like, if toxic positivity is the focus on positivity over everything else, without acknowledging the hard stuff, then I feel like toxic success in the coaching industry is what happens when you only tell the good stuff and you hide the hard stuff. And I don't think that's fair to you and anybody else, so I want to share this stuff with you that didn't work, that didn't go well. First is some clients didn't come with me on this transition. I lost some of the clients that I loved, who I've been working with for a while. So when I first started the academy, there were some old trainings that just needed to be refreshed and updated for the current day. And so I focused on that at the beginning, and several months later, we created the roadmap that now provides the full journey for our clients. But because some of those clients that I loved had already learned some of those fundamentals, they felt like maybe this isn't for them, and we parted ways. And you know, clients stop working with you when they run out of future. And because I was bringing some old trainings up to code, I couldn't create a future for those clients fast enough. So we said goodbye, I wish them well, I'm cheering them on. But it was still sad for me to lose some of the clients I really loved. Another thing that didn't go well. I guess it's kind of a, you know, good bad thing is I learned a lot about the type of consultant who we can truly help the most, the women in that messy middle when that first wave of clients and referrals slows down, and you actually have to get proactive about getting business. So that, of course, was a good thing, right? Getting even clearer on our ideal clients. But we learned it the hard way, because we had some people come into the program who were just too early and missing some of that experience that you gain in those first one to two years. So we found that we couldn't help them be successful fast enough, and that was a tough lesson. And finally, another thing that didn't go well is I had to say goodbye to some team members. In the past few years, I had actually staffed up quite a bit, because when you're running what is essentially a promotions factory, you need a lot of people, but when you're in the business of improving what's working and streamlining your operations, you don't need as many people. You can run a leaner business. So I had to say goodbye to two of my team members, which was really sad. So not everything worked perfectly. And if we're going to talk about what went well, we also have to talk about what didn't. And there were some lows, but we learned. But there's one other client that needs to be factored in here, and that's me, because I'm part of this too, and I have to tell you one thing I didn't mention when I first talked about this shift was okay, yes, it was primarily about wanting to truly help my clients solve the whole problem that I saw in the world. But there was something else that was happening behind the scenes

Leah Neaderthal33:32

as a result of the way I'd been running my business and serving clients. Before, I was completely and utterly exhausted. I was so incredibly burned out from launching and promoting and the hamster wheel I was on. It affected my health. It affected my ability to show up for my clients. It affected my marriage, and it made me wonder if I should just call it quits, like there were some really dark times in there. And now that I made the decision to change how I'm running my business, and we're one year in, I'm so much happier, like I can't even tell you, I feel lighter, I can breathe. I feel optimistic. I have space to be more creative. I spend more time in my zone of genius, and I can spend more time where I get energy, which is with my clients. Honestly, it's been a complete 180 and so I got to count that as a success too. So that's what's happened since the biggest change in my business one year in, you know, this format, I didn't know if it would work, and I was taking a leap. And now one year in, we know that it does. It works for everyone involved. Our clients are winning. They're making progress, and they're winning faster. My team is working. I'm happier as scary as this was when we did it. I'm so glad we made this change. So I want to thank a few people in this I want to thank my team for helping bring the academy to life, and all the ways you've supported me and. Clients. In this first year, I want to thank my clients for trusting me and my team to help you build your consulting business, and for doing the work right, for putting in the work and making the changes and sharing your results, which inspire us every day, and for sharing your feedback, which we're using every single day to make the academy the best place to learn, the best place to grow your business, and the best place to be if you're an independent consultant, and of course, getting personal here, I want to thank my wife for trusting me as I took this leap of faith and for your incredible support. So that's it. That's where we are a year in I hope that what I've shared here has given you some ideas that you can bring into your business. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll be back in a couple weeks with another episode of the smart gets paid podcast. Thanks. Hey. Everything we're talking about in this episode is part of the system. Women like you are learning in the academy. In the Academy, we help women consultants install the two systems. Every B to B consultant needs a marketing system to consistently attract the right clients, and a sales system to lead a sales process to a yes and get paid more for every contract. So even if you've only gotten clients through referrals or word of mouth in the academy, you'll learn how to attract and sign clients outside your network, how to lead a sales process with confidence, and how to get paid for your value, not your time, and there's no cold calling or cold emailing involved, no changing your services or making a course, and you won't use any pushy sales tactics. That's just not our vibe. So if you like what you've heard here, the academy may be your right next step to learn how you can get these two systems in your consulting business and make progress faster and with fewer roadblocks. Head to smart gets paid.com/academy and apply and we can chat about next steps. All right, see you over there. Transcribed by https://otter.ai