67: Building a Consulting Firm with Carey Rome

[3:52]: It doesn’t matter if you’re doing really well or you’re doing really poorly. If you have to have someone tell you, your business is at risk.

[8:08]: I decided to go to Starbucks to celebrate my launching of my business. I’m walking up the steps because I couldn’t find the elevator. And I’m walking up the steps. And I trip and I spill coffee all over the place.

[16:03]: And now I’ve got a cash flow problem, because I have to have to pay real people, 13 people, starting all at once, traveling every week, which gets expensive. And then I had to float that for 65 or 70 days until I got paid.

[29:56]: Yeah, I would say, find a way to document your expertise in a product of some sort. And don’t sell it based on time. Sell it based on the value that you deliver from that product or service.

[35:16]: Then one day that client looks up and says, I can’t believe we’re paying Estie this much money! We can hire someone full time for that. And then they say, “Hey Estie, it’s been great. You know what, probably at the end of the next two weeks, we probably need to end this.”

[44:33]: I went to larger companies saying. “Surely you do this, well, give me a little guidance on what I’m developing.” And as it turns out, they said, “Actually, we do that very, very poorly. We need that.” So now I’ve got a struggle as it were. I have developed a minimal viable product, and what I need to develop is an enterprise solution.