The Consulting Almanack of Nigel Green
1/ Good consultants leave
“The thing about good consultants is they always leave. They have to. If a consultant doesn't leave, how are you measuring the impact that they're providing to the business? At some point, there has to be an end of the consulting agreement where you teach them what you came to teach them. That's the whole point. Otherwise, you're just an employee.”
- Nigel Green
2/ Don’t cheat your craft
Nigel references Cal Newport and So Good They Can’t Ignore You. The notion that you’re cheating your craft if all you do is ‘do the work’ Monday to Friday, year-round. To become an elite advisor in your niche, solving the particular problem that you solve, is to take frequent pauses to observe, take stock, and develop informed, considered opinions on essential decisions your clients have to make.
Now, through November and December, Nigel does that. Stepping away from most client work to reflect.
3/ Chip away at commitments
Nigel notes that many entrepreneurs want more and our modern Western society celebrates individuals and businesses that generate more dollars yearly. Nigel has leaned into doing the opposite:
“Paul Jarvis wrote a book called Company of One and he said one of the most effective things you can do is put an upper threshold on what you're willing to do in a year. And maybe that's number of clients, maybe that's a revenue number, maybe it's an income number. And then when you get there, having the discipline to say, that's enough for now… And so I've been practising that for a few years, and what I found is that it forces me to be more creative in how I get there.”
- Nigel Green
Nigel's constantly thinking about maximising return on effort and time because he has that top-line figure that's the maximum. He's not trying to earn more; he's trying to earn that money, deliver optimal value to clients, and do it with less time and energy.
He chips away at his commitments. That’s also how he makes more money.
“I don't do my clients work for them. I don't come to meetings that they just say, we're having a meeting and we want you here… I've found a delicate way to say, don't invite me to your standing Monday or standing Wednesday. I'm not coming… And if they say, hey, can you send me this report? Or what do we need to report on? … [I’ll say] let's find a resource that you have that's probably more capable of doing it than me.”
- Nigel Green
4/ There are three ways to grow your business
First, raise your price. Nigel points to ways companies raise prices without customers knowing. When a candy bar manufacturer maintains prices but reduces the size of the bar by 10%, they raised prices. When TAKK released a sustainable electric toothbrush with replaceable heads on subscription, they effectively raised the price of a toothbrush because you, the customer, wouldn’t buy a toothbrush head as frequently as they send them (nor would you pay to repair a toothbrush).
Second is getting more customers, which is obvious, but few companies (consultants or otherwise) have a clear Go-To-Market plan or map of their ideal customer and how they make buying decisions on the things that you, the seller, sell. Many just fall into the trap of 'business is good enough', catching whatever comes into the net as it arrives (usually via referrals and word of mouth).
Third, sell your existing clients something else. They’re probably getting an ancillary service elsewhere that you could offer.
So, if you raise your price, have a plan to win customers, and introduce one or two new services to existing clients, “you can 3x a business pretty quickly.”
5/ Save your best time for you
“My best hours, my freshest time, when I'm thinking the most clearly, I spend that time working on my business and not giving it away to the clients that are paying me.”
- Nigel Green
If you have no pipeline, are reactive, or feel out of control in your business, it's because you're selling your best time.
The only person thinking about your business growth is you, and if you’re not spending time on it, no one is (and when that happens, how can you expect to grow).
Austin Kleon discusses this, too, about how he saves his best hours for himself:
“A lot of people come to me, and they're like, God, I'm just so tired when I get home. How do you [do it]? I'm like, well, I never worked when I got home… I got up in the morning and worked before I went to work and then … I already juiced it, and they couldn't take it from me.”
- Austin Kleon
If you want to build your brand, make sales calls, build your network, and post on LinkedIn, save your best time for yourself.
6/ Work less, earn more
Nigel shared a LinkedIn post saying, “When I started working less, I earned more.”
According to Nigel, this route is available to anyone. Work less, earn more. Nigel references Parkinson’s Law:
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
- Parkinson's Law, Cyril Northcote Parkinson.
Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time you allocate to it.
Give yourself a day for a task; it takes a day. Give yourself a week; it takes a week. Not because the work changed, but because we changed how we approached it.
“Most people work 60 hours a week, not out of necessity, but because they just give it that amount of time… For whatever reason: the hustle culture, inefficiency, there are a lot of reasons they do it.”
- Nigel Green
Source: My Interview with Nigel Green
Nigel’s Uncle Dale (a former VP of sales leading 400 reps) was a key influencer and mentor in Nigel’s life. When Nigel first became a consultant, wrestling with needing to work but wanting to be home with his family, his Uncle Dale said, “Man, you work for yourself. Why would you ever work a Friday?”
That was in 2019, and Nigel has only worked ten Fridays since then.
Suddenly, the game became, “How much money can I make in as little time as possible?”
How do you drop your hours and subsequently start earning more money?
“Quality not quantity is the name of the game for … a company of one person. And so scale is about that return on effort. And so what it's forced me to do was like, if I'm losing a day of billable hours, I’ve got to make it up in my rate on the other four days. So I simultaneously started raising my prices … so I started onboarding clients at a higher rate.”
- Nigel Green
Source: My Interview with Nigel Green
7/ The alternative way to increase earnings (that no one talks about)
As a one-person business, the advice seems to be that if you want to increase earnings, you increase your prices, but then beyond that, you productise to scale. That's why Nigel built the $79 course.
What’s the business worth when Nigel is generating $1 million in revenue with 80% profit margin, selling his reputation and expertise?
Very little.
What if you don’t want to productise or scale? What if you feel you’ve hit the ceiling of the level at which you can raise your prices?
There’s an unspoken, simple way to increase earnings.
“What I enjoy about the healthy profits is I can suck loads of cash out of this business that otherwise I could have spent buying traffic, or to point to a course, or to pay to be on a stage and go sell an offering on that stage. I made the choice to suck all the cash out of the business and go put it into other assets that scale.”
- Nigel Green
Source: My Interview with Nigel Green
He invests his capital in his portfolio. They aren’t ‘very sexy’, but they produce equity and value in Nigel’s portfolio. And Nigel points out, few influencers or authorities reference this. There’s an alternative to spending $10,000 on LinkedIn ads to promote your productised services (plus the time and energy to build that system), and it’s a much less time and energy route to invest that $10,000 in other assets.
“Do I want to go sell a million dollars worth of this course or do I really just want to take a hundred thousand dollars of cash out of this business and go put it in this other investment that's got a cap rate of 5x, I'm going to get all my money back in 12 to 18 months, and then I get all this equity and appreciation. There are so many other assets that perform better than a course or perform better than Nigel Green on a stage selling a high ticket offering that I have access to that make the idea of being at Business Mastery or at 10X [Growth Conference] not so sexy.”
- Nigel Green
Source: My Interview with Nigel Green
8/ You have to win the Super Bowl
“I want to caution anyone that reads or hears this case study... I never set out to be Nigel, the authority on sales leadership. All I wanted to do was lead my sales team the best that I could. And I believe that if I went into that thinking about being an expert or being an influencer, … I would have made so many bad decisions along the way that would have compromised me [from becoming] a really good sales leader for my sales team.”
- Nigel Green
Source: My Interview with Nigel Green
Nigel has three successful exits as a sales leader. The Private Equity Firms, and sales authorities respect Nigel stem from the fact that, as Nigel puts it, he won the Super Bowl.
“You can't be Tom Brady unless you win a Super Bowl, you have to first win the Super Bowl… You can't be an expert without being an expert and people won't pay you the amount of money that you think you're going to get or that I enjoy without the Super Bowl ring.”
- Nigel Green
Source: My Interview with Nigel Green
First, the fact that he's led sales teams to those three exits informs his expertise in building and leading sales teams.
Second, it proves he knows how to build a sales team to an exit.
Third, he's achieved something many other people would love to achieve (sales-led growth leading to market traction and a multiple increase on a company's valuation) that others are pursuing and have the budget to invest. If a current exit is worth $30 million and Nigel has a track record of building sales teams to double that valuation, what's a one-day workshop with Nigel worth? They're not buying the workshop—they're placing a $30,000 bet that one day with Nigel (plus his prep work to dissect your sales process) will materially impact the business' sales success and increase the valuation at exit by significantly more than $30,000.
That’s the often ignored piece of the puzzle.
As Nigel puts it, many aim to build a $1 million one-person firm:
“That is not a good goal. The goal should be, be so valuable at your job that you are irreplaceable. That's the goal… I wouldn't’ be able to do this if I hadn't spent, from the age of 23 to 31, working my ass off without even thinking about the end. It was just the means. It was just, I want to be so good at my job. And it was driven by fear, it was driven by not wanting to be irrelevant, it was driven by not having … [a] backup plan… [You can’t] skip the step of doing something really valuable in the marketplace… [because] everybody knows you're not real and … that runs its course at some point, whether it runs its course, and you get exposed or it runs its course and you realize you're a phoney and you’re a hack and you didn't really do it.”
- Nigel Green
Source: My Interview with Nigel Green
