How to Command 50-200% Higher Fees to Scale your Consulting Agency – in Just 7 Minutes with Mandi Ellefson

Related Links and Resources:

It’s www.handsoffceo.com/scaleology. It's a great resource on how to use value-based pricing to be able to double your fees. You can download that, and learn from yourself exactly how to attract the kind of clients that will happily pay twice as much your average fee is.

Summary:

Mandi Ellefson is the founder of Hands-Off CEO™. She and her team scale million-dollar consulting agencies, with less reliance on the CEO. First, she helps them generate more cash to scale with an irresistible offer that's easier to sell, and that attracts clients that pay 50-200% higher fees– in 90 days or less. Then, she helps the CEO free up time to focus up to half of their work week on accelerating profits.

Her clients have added 5 figures of net profit every month, added millions of dollars in sales, and some have exited the day-to-day so they can scale growth or even sell the business.

Mandi is a published author and host of the Hands-Off CEO™ Podcast.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:55 Mandi’s ideal Client: Our ideal clients are consulting agencies that are 6 or 7 figures and that they have some cutting-edge level of service that they provide for their clients, and they're just looking to scale it.

2:17 Problem Mandi helps solve: When you have a customized service, it's based on your own expertise. And the challenges are that there are only a certain number of hours in the day, so in order to scale, what they're really doing is not scaling or growing; their hours grow and their stress grows. And the only way that they can continue to make more income is to work more hours. So, that's the problem that we solve, that's the problem that they're running into.

3:03 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Mandi: They might be working 50-60 hours per week or more, they might be at a place where they've seen stagnant growth for years. A lot of people came to us after they had been banging their heads against the wall for three years or so. Realizing that their company hasn't been growing and in fact, if they really look at the trend and were honest with themselves, they're actually back-sliding a little bit, they're actually retracting. Another thing that they might come to us is that they're at a point where they're growing so quickly that they can't actually fulfill all the work. They might be at a place where they are looking around, they're really busy but they're working with clients that aren't necessarily the best quality clients but they have to take what's coming in the door to keep the lights on, to keep the payroll going. They are at this point where they don't have time to go out and find more growth. There are all these opportunities but they're kind of stuck working in the business because they just need to keep the flight where it's going.

4:15 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Mandi and her solution: There's a lot of us trying advice out there like "oh, just work on the business instead of in the business" all those BS. Yes, it's true but at the same time, how do you actually do that. And the biggest problem that I see is that it's not properly financed to grow. There is a point where there's not enough profitability. That's why the CEO has to be stuck so much in the business because you actually can't afford to hire more people to do it. And even if you can hire more people to do it, there's just not enough resources of time and money. You really need to get those sorted out. First thing that we do with our clients is we help them free at least 10 extra hours in the first week working together. It feels amazing, it's a lot of things like a heavy load that you're carrying around like client management, meetings, these different things that you have to do, and you'd like to let go of it but you just don't know how. Those are some of the quick easy things that we do to be able to free them with 10 extra hours. Usually it's closer to 20 but 10 is the base level that we can guarantee.

5:36 Mandi’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): The first thing that you want to be doing is really focusing on the outcome that you can provide for your clients. A lot of scaling advice out there is totally wrong in most of its circumstances is that you just want to go out and productize your services. You want to be able to make it very simple to deliver without the owner. That seems reasonable but the problem with that is you turn your services into a commodity. Now you're competing with high-end prices with about the same results as the companies that are coming in from India and the Philippines. These other countries, you are competing with the whole world with just these tactics. So, what you really want to be doing is looking at how we can apply this service that we have to a specific problem set and deliver a specific guaranteeable outcome.

6:39 Mandi’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): It's handsoffceo.com/scaleology, my team put that together. It's a great resource on how to use value-based pricing to be able to double your fees. You can download that, and learn from yourself exactly how to attract the kind of clients that will happily pay twice as much your average fee is.

7:27 How can sustainability help on scaling? The things that I see that happens a lot is that when you're trying to scale, you get focused on scaling as opposed to sustainability. The first thing that you want to be focusing on is sustainability and really making your businesses as profitable as possible so you'll have the cash flow, the runaway to be able to hire the people and then when you have the service product that delivers consistently that's really an amazing outcome. Then you scale that. That's how you scale a multi-million dollar consulting agency that's custom, it's high-ticket, and really valuable in your market.