The Consultants 🤯

Happy Saturday!

Today will be short. A bit more big picture. (Scratch that, as you’ll see below, I wasn’t sure where this would go)

• Let’s say there are 300,000,000 people in the US.

• 300,000 financial advisors

• 500 advisortech companies

• 144* consultants

*there are many more, but my list—it’ll have just 144

The money flows from the people to the advisors,

and from there → to the advisortech and consultants

Maybe it looks like this (thank you Canva)… with some money also flowing directly from the advisors to the consultants.

The flag doesn’t have any particular purpose, but I felt the mountain needed a flag. The flag represents success. For everybody.

I also feel like some insights can be gained from this. I shall brain-storm:

• Advisors purchase tech and hire consultants to help them win and service more of the people, and do it better.

• The dark mountain in the background is the ops-people, nothing happens without them.

• Perhaps The Consultants could serve as “distributors” for the advisortech. Some already do.

I came across a compliance consultant recently who had picked one main compliance tool and were helping to distribute it to their clients. It gives them both an advantage.

If you select your tech by first working with a consultant, you can leverage their expertise and hopefully end up with better tech AND better implementation. Tech without implementation is kinda useless.

• Consultants often also “consult” on specific advisortech, which I think advisortech companies should leverage. Find some consultants with expertise with your tech, or groom some.

• The Consultants that work along-side a tech company, and not within it can often provide more perspective on how advisors actually operate.

Enter the Finfluencer-Consultants

Those with audiences, that also consult. They can be leveraged in many ways:

• brand awareness, GTM, AND

• implementation

Even better, 1-to-many implementation.

Consultants that work with 1 firm at a time are missing out on some key benefits:

• Peer-to-peer brainstorming, support, best practices

• Proven systems (working 1-to-many requires repeatable systems, which often work better than 1-to-1 customized ones) And they’re more scalable both for the consultant and the firms that work with them.

Where am I going with all this? I’m not totally sure yet, tbh. But I can feel it’s going to somehow end up at Skool. :)

Audiences, courses, 1-to-many, peer-to-peer support, consultant-advisortech partnerships…

There’s leverage in these proven systems. Let’s check out a graph. I saw this in a course by Seven Figure Creators, I don’t remember where they got it from, but it’s cool:

1. Across the horizontal axis, we have number of customers or clients

2. Across the vertical axis, we have average revenue per client

If you work at an hourly or salaried job, you have 1 client, aka Full-time employment. The dollars per client are typically the highest, because all your time is spent for one client. Great focused effort, but impossible to scale, and very limited opportunities to collaborate with others. Let’s use the CFO of a company for example.

Next, we have Freelancing or oftentimes called “Fractional” work, working for more than one client at a time doing the same work, but with the increased freedom of working for yourself and also lower revenue per client. This is typically where someone that works for themself goes first. Let’s use a Fractional CFO for example.

Most consultants fall into this category. They’ve stepped away from a full-time gig and are working for multiple companies, spreading their expertise around, but it’s not super scalable.

Next is “Productized Consulting” which is how freelancers or advisors can scale without adding the complexities of building large teams. Offering their consulting or financial planning expertise in a 1-to-many model BY standardizing the offering. Courses, communities, cohorts, group coaching, masterminds… and the like.

Skool is a perfect platform for building an offering like this.

But now let’s jump down the graph to where AdvisorTech falls. B2B SaaS.

Lower cost per client, need more clients. Also, super scalable, takes very little increased cost to add more clients. Mostly costs come from increased support, more servers, more Red Bull.

But I would say a HUGE problem for advisortech is implementation, churn, getting advisors and their teams to fully use the product, thereby continuing to pay for it.

This is where consultant-advisortech partnerships can thrive.

• AdvisorTech is good at making software

• Consultants are good at helping advisors implement it

• Skool is good at hosting these peer-to-peer support communities where advisors, engineers, and consultants can all hang out and help each other with chat, live group calls, courses, templates, you-name-it

This is where “Productized consulting” and “B2B SaaS” can meet in the middle and provide:

The Info-product

Combining expertise, software, and the course/community structure to help advisors… wait for it….

Win and serve more of the 300,000,000. Better.

Ok, I think I figured out where I was going with this ⬆️

Here’s that chart again, because I think it will make waaaay more sense now:

And well, we all know about Social networks

• billions of users

• advertisers are the clients

• and you are the product

Let’s not go there.

Let’s stay in the middle, with some:

• Productized consulting (The Consultants)

• Info-products (Joint communities between Consultants and AdvisorTech)

• and B2B SaaS (AdvisorTech)

Hope this was interesting.

Until next time,

Joe

P.S. Should have the full list of 144 Experts coming next. Advisors and AdvisorTech… this is for you. And its also for The Consultants.

I guess its for everybody.

P.S.S. Don’t forget to check out Skool.

P.S.S.S. I’m building one of these joint communities at Conneqtor.org. Reach out if you’d like to participate.