Michael Zipursky

Liam Curley: Michael Zipursky is the co-founder of Consulting Success, a coaching business that turns over multiple seven figures by helping consultants build and grow their own consulting firms. The business is driven by publishing insight. They have a weekly newsletter with more than 45,000 subscribers, a podcast with more than 400 episodes and several books. Some time ago a listener said to me, all these authorities you study went to a prestigious university or have Google or Apple on their CV. I've got none of that. Is it even possible for someone like me without an impressive CV to become an authority? Michael Zipursky had none of that. No elite degree or famous employer. He's not even had a proper job. So when you have none of those traditional credentials associated with being an authority, how do you become one?

Chapter 1 — Kankei Culture

Liam Curley: Michael was born in Toronto and moved to a communal kibbutz in Israel at the age of two.

Michael Zipursky: We lived there for four and a half years. My first language is Hebrew.

Liam Curley: From a young age he was exposed to different cultures, languages and religions. But when the family moved back to Canada, Michael, aged six, couldn't speak English.

Michael Zipursky: I had a strong accent I didn't like. I had to have a, you know, help to learn the language. And that may have been part of it or not, but I didn't read a book like zero books until the age of 15, give or take.

Liam Curley: The first book he did read aged 15 was Shogun. You don't read a book until you're 15. Why did you pick up Shogun?

Michael Zipursky: So this goes back to what I share with you, that I had grown up in an environment where there was a lot of Asian people. I was fascinated from my young age of, you know, growing up in the Middle East and always been interested in different cultures and religions and, you know, people from all around the world. I was always interested in business from a young age as well. And so I looked around and it was very clear that Japan was the number one economy in Asia. And. And I also was very drawn to martial arts from a young age. And the idea of respect and tradition just is so deep. So all those factors combined, I just started to become very interested in Japan as a country. And Shogun kind of stood out to me as like another world, right? It just, it was like, wow, this is really interesting going back. You have all those elements, right? You have the respect, you have the martial arts, you have the culture. And James Clavell, right? The, the main character that goes off to this foreign land and his journeys and almost imagining myself as, as that person.

Liam Curley: In addition to growing up around Asian people, a trip to Thailand midway through high school ignited a real fascination in Asian cultures. Up to this point, he put his energy into sports rather than study. He was on the rugby and athletics teams. Immediately after that trip, he quit all competitive sports clubs and dove into the arts. But he's playing catch up.

Michael Zipursky: I had an English teacher in college who said, you're like, you're terrible. Like he, he just, without saying, I think he pretty much accused me of, of plagiarism or cheating or something. He's like, there's no way that you could, could write this. And I was like, no, man. I just, I've been trying to work really hard at this.

Liam Curley: Michael's father is a twin. And growing up, Michael was really close to one of his cousins, Sam. When Michael moved back to Canada aged six with no friends, he spent a lot of time with Sam and they became like brothers. Two years before Michael goes to college, the two of them take a trip to Vietnam. For a couple of months, they visited small villages, spent time with local families and worked on the land with them. It's during this trip that they start talking about building a business together. Before Michael even starts college, they launched Fingertip Media, building websites for local companies. Sam was doing the design and some of the web development. Michael was doing the marketing and business development.

Michael Zipursky: Our clients were a real mix. We had a bagel shop, we had a venture capital firm, we had a printing business, an energy company off the top. I don't, I mean, so many years ago, I don't remember what the revenue was, but it was enough that we didn't need to think about doing anything else. I mean, so, so I was still in high school, actually, I wasn't yet even in college when we started that business. And it was great. Like, you know, we, we were making money and our cost, I mean, I was living at home. Cost of living was, was, was pretty, pretty minimal. But that was, it was very, very simple business. It was just an opportunity. As more and more people, businesses started to realise, like, oh, you know, this website Internet thing is, is maybe something I should jump onto.

Liam Curley: He had no coach or mentor and at 17, this was his first business. So he's learning by reading books, applying what he learns, making mistakes and modifying. I asked Michael what he was doing to win clients.

Michael Zipursky: It was leveraging our network. So who, who we knew. And so going back to that time, it's not just like, who do I know? It's, you know, who do my parents know? Who does my uncle or my aunt know? It's maybe going to some events in the city and meeting people there and who do they know? So one thing kind of leads to another. At that point I think Sam was also teaching at a local digital media kind of college or academy. And that exposed, you know, kind of got him in front of different people that one way or another led to opportunities.

Liam Curley: After two years of running Fingertip Media, whilst Michael is at high school, he and Sam decide to close that business and start a new one. Coincidentally, this is also the point when Michael starts college. They call the business Kankei Culture.

Michael Zipursky: Kankei is a Japanese word for relationship. We still were doing like website design development but we, we shifted into a lot more visual identity and branding work. So we started to do a lot more like logo designs, business cards, brochures. So it was beyond just the digital, it was now a lot, you know, print and even advertisements and things of that nature.

Liam Curley: So why did you decide to expand out of pure web development to broader design work?

Michael Zipursky: Yeah, it's a great question and I would be lying to you if I, if I told you that I remember the exact reason. I just, I don't. I remember that both Sam and I started to have a much greater appreciation for branding, visual design. We spent more time, you know, meeting people and connecting with, through for example like the, I think it's called AA if I'm not mistaken, AIGA, like the graphic design kind of community. I remember going to an event there and sitting at a table with Erik Spiekermann, a very well known German typographer and designer. We were looking at companies like Landor and just all these very well known, you know, Interbrand or these companies do like really amazing for, or at least to us back in the day, it was just amazing work. I don't know what they do these days, I haven't followed them but that was just really like we looked up to what people like that were doing and we saw an opportunity. You know, it was early days. Like we weren't, I wouldn't say very strategic. We were young guys just learning and experimenting and seeing what felt right. And if it didn't, we would make adjustments.

Liam Curley: Fingertip Media had a digital feel to it both in terms of the name and the aesthetic of the brand. They were boxed in and a rebrand to Kankei Culture would unbox them.

Michael Zipursky: If you say Kankei Culture to somebody they don't like, they don't even know what it is right. Which created for us in our minds at that time an opportunity to explain our story or our beliefs, which is that kankei is the Japanese word for relationship. Essentially we've called the company relationship culture because we believe that relationships are so integral to the success of any project or of any business and it worked well. The direction we also wanted to go was international. I think we knew pretty early on that this wasn't going to be something that just resided only in Vancouver and only working with local businesses. We did want to work with people around the world and one of the reasons why we started this business or started to kind of think about the direction I think maybe it hadn't actually happened yet but we were very clear on like the path is we wanted to build something that could run online or that could allow us to be more kind of location independent.

Liam Curley: Two years into college, Michael is preparing for his third year to study in Japan as an exchange student which had been the plan when he started college.

Michael Zipursky: I was in Toronto visiting my uncle and aunt and spending time there and I sent off a bunch of emails to graphic design firms in Japan knowing that I was going to be going to Japan and spending a year there.

Liam Curley: Those emails are written in English and the response rate wasn't high. But he gets two meaningful replies, both of whom agree to meet with Michael when he arrives in Japan. One of those is from Shinnoske Sugisaki who is a very well known owner of a graphic design firm.

Michael Zipursky: I think the email was something along the lines of I'm a Canadian owner of this design firm or co founder at this small shop where we're doing visual design brand identity work. I'm coming to Japan, I would love to meet, you know, you and share some ideas. Like it wasn't sales focused, it wasn't about let's do work together. I think again this is many years ago, I mean this is almost two decades ago. But what I would recall, or what I believe I said was that I'd just love to meet you, like I think you're doing some great work and I'm going to be in your city and I would love to connect and I probably again, you know, I sent maybe 25, 30 of these emails. I found some online database or directory and I just sent emails to everyone that I could find. I also recognised that most of them probably would have no idea what I was saying because like they wouldn't feel comfortable responding in English at that point. My Japanese, I mean I could speak, I could read and write to a degree but I certainly wasn't sending that email in Japanese, it was in English. I may have put in a few words in Japanese, just to kind of break the ice, if you will.

Liam Curley: This didn't come as a surprise to Sam. Michael had always planned to have this exchange year.

Michael Zipursky: Sam knew and we talked about that I was going to be doing that and I couldn't dedicate full time to running the business because I was still in university. But I spent every moment outside of when I was at school, which was actually not very often.

Liam Curley: He gets to Japan and meets those two business owners he connected with via email. He meets the first who's a nice guy, but there's no connection. Then he meets Shinnoske-san.

Michael Zipursky: When I went to meet Shinnoske, it was just like, well this, this is my brother from another. Like, you know, just we got a connection right away and I knew that we would do some things together. I didn't know what yet and I didn't know the scale and scope of it. But in classic, you know, relationship building style or any country where relationships are really at the forefront, it's not transactions, you know, you take a long term mindset. Shinnoske-san was the one that opened so many doors for me and for our business.

Liam Curley: Michael won business back in Canada by building relationships and he did the same in Japan. Here he is speaking with Brad Costanzo on Bacon Wrapped Business.

Michael Zipursky: I was in a hole in the wall izakaya, like a little Japanese bar rubbing shoulders with people that were twice my age just because I wanted to learn from them. And so I immersed myself and really geeked out on learning more about the culture, the language. And that created very strong relationships which led to introductions and referrals and opening up a world of possibilities that otherwise would have been very challenging for me.

Liam Curley: Shinnoske-san introduces Michael to Moriya-san. Moriya-san was the managing director of the Nikkei ad agency, one of the biggest ad agencies in Japan.

Michael Zipursky: There's the Nikkei Shimbun or the Nikkei Newspaper, so kind of the business focused newspaper of Japan, the largest one and they have an advertising agency. So yeah, Shinnoske connected me with Moriya. Have you ever seen Lost in Translation, the Bill Murray movie? When he's in Japan, there's a scene, I think it's early in the movie where he's in this bar. I think he's in, I believe he's in Tokyo, but like a very high floor on this bar overlooking the cities, drinking whiskey, making whiskey commercial. That was the environment that they took me to. So, you know, imagine I'm early 20s and young guy, everyone is older than me. Shinnoske takes me to meet Moriya-san at the top of this hotel. We have a nice, you know, beer or whatever it might be. And it was like that scene, it was just wow. Like this is. I was very grateful to be there and just to see the interest that these wiser older gentlemen had in just a small early startup like myself.

Liam Curley: Why did Shinnoske-san introduce you to Moriya-san and take you there?

Michael Zipursky: Yeah. Often ask myself this question, Liam, because I spent a lot of time with people who were older than I was, were more successful than I was, you know, had more money, made more money, like, you know, why are they spending time with, you know, with me? And what I realised pretty quickly was that while they had all these things that I didn't have, I had something that they didn't have. I had some unique experiences and insights and perspectives that they valued and it wasn't in terms of transactional value type of thing, but they were genuinely interested in what I was doing or how I was seeing things. So our focus at Kankei Culture and through a lot of the work that we did with Shinnoske and other firms and we actually created an alliance called Ovida Alliance. But the work that we were doing, we weren't going to Japan saying, hey, we can help you to create ads or websites or brochures or, you know, branding materials for Japanese companies operating in Japan. That's not what we did. Our focus was we want to work with Japanese organisations that want to communicate more effectively, market more effectively, sell more effectively on the global stage, specifically where you're working in an English speaking country. Because we had knowledge of that, that's something that again, they didn't have. So our conversations, whether it was going to a coffee shop, whether it was going to a bar, whether it was going for food and drinks, the conversations were always like cultural conversations about why do you. This, why do you. Why, you know, why do you do that over there? And well, over here we do this way and like we're just telling stories it was just a real relationship. We talked about business, but we, we also just talked about culture and, and life and different perspectives and experiences.

Liam Curley: Did you enter Japan with that value proposition in mind?

Michael Zipursky: Yes. I don't know how well we communicated that up front, but I think we did a pretty good job of being intentional with that. To answer your question more directly, we knew from day one that when I was going to Japan, I was not going to be coming to Japan, trying to say, I know how to do what you're already doing. Better than you. I have made that mistake in other markets as I can share another story with you on that. But no, it was, I'm going to listen to what you're saying in whatever environment I'm in and if it feels or if it seems like you want to do something or if you're already doing something in these other markets then I can share like you know, we can share some insights with you or we can add a value for you. And that at that time was a really strong kind of value proposition because there were some, I mean some of the larger firms certainly had a presence in let's say a place like Tokyo. But there were and still are many, many multi billion dollar organisations, never mind kind of mid market that were in other cities like Osaka or Kyoto. And there's some, I mean very, very large firms. And so I was based in Osaka, I still went to Tokyo for business quite often. But yeah, there was just so much opportunity of these companies that wanted to communicate more effectively to English speaking markets but they didn't have anyone on staff and they didn't even know who to turn to. So us connecting with somebody like Moriya-san, which we did a lot, or Shinnoske-san, which we did a lot, meant that their offerings now became more valuable because they could now bring somebody in who otherwise they wouldn't have had access to. So it was just a really nice complementary approach where I was brought into situations that there's no way I would have ever been, been, you know, brought to, to go and sit down and you know, at a boardroom in the, in Panasonic, like there's just, there's no way that a 20 something year old guy is just going to show up there. Doesn't matter how good my Japanese is. But at the same time there was real value for Shinnoske and Moriya and others that we worked with to be able to provide a value add or provide new perspectives to either existing clients, past clients or prospective clients because now they can add more value. There's another reason for them to create a meeting, another reason for them to talk about other ways of adding value or additional services and so forth.

Liam Curley: There's a few observations I want to tie together here. The first is that expertise is relative, meaning Michael put himself into a position where he had more expertise and knowledge in communicating with English speaking markets than his Japanese counterparts did. And I say counterparts, they weren't really counterparts. They were significantly more experienced with much more success at this point in their careers than Michael. But he had more experience and knowledge of the English language and English speaking culture than they did. And that knowledge had commercial value to them. He had expertise in communication and branding, which he had developed previously with Fingertip Media. But at this point he's still at college and if you compare him to communications and branding experts back in North America, he didn't have much of a track record. But in this situation it didn't matter because Shinnoske-san and Moriya-san didn't have relationships with those experienced practitioners back in North America. They had a relationship with Michael. They trusted him and rightly believed that his level of expertise was sufficient to deliver the results that they were looking for. The other thing I want to draw your attention to is this recurring pattern I'm finding where an individual identifies a market intentionally or unintentionally, in which their expertise is rare. That's what happens here with Michael, but it's happened in other episodes too. Nancy Duarte and her husband Mark entered a market in San Francisco in the 1980s where their ability, enthusiasm to draw and design on a Macintosh was rare. Other graphic designers were working in analogue and wouldn't touch the Mac, even though tech clients wanted digital design. In another episode, Marty Neumeier developed the expertise to design software packaging more effectively than any of his competitors in the market, again in San Francisco, where that expertise was rare and valuable. So in the case of building a business that's driven by being recognised as an authority, there's a clear advantage in having expertise or knowledge that is rare in the market in which you choose to operate. Michael does that in Japan. Nancy Duarte did that with tech presentations and Marty Neumeier did it with software packaging. The way to find that differentiation can be literally by moving from one market where your skills are common to to another market where they're uncommon. It can be by adopting new technology before others in a particular market are willing or able to adopt that technology, or it can be by recognising a certain skill or task in a market which is underserved but extremely valuable. Getting back to Michael's story, amongst everything that was happening with his business, it's easy to forget that he is still studying at college while all this was happening. He'd leave home at 5am, get the bullet train out of Osaka to the university, do yesterday's homework before the teachers arrive, attend his classes until noon, get a couple of burgers from McDonald's, then head back to downtown Osaka to work with clients until 7pm, go home and work on the business until about midnight and then do all the same again the next day. Business is going so well that he asks himself, should I just stay here in Japan rather than go back to Canada and complete my degree? What does university have to offer? He asks his parents for their opinions.

Michael Zipursky: They both said, it's up to you, Michael, but I would suggest that you come back and just finish your degree and then you go right back to Japan if you want. So I thought about that and said, that makes sense. I'll come back and get it done. And then I just went right back to Japan.

Liam Curley: Afterwards, Michael returns to Japan after graduating and picks up where he left off. Often he was brought in and billed via the ad agency, but other times he would receive a contract directly from the client.

Michael Zipursky: A lot of the work that we did, I'd say the majority of the work that we were doing at Kankei Culture in Japan was development in terms of actually creating things. Brochures, advertisements, websites, marketing materials, all that. But there were several projects where, for example, we partnered with Shinnoske's firm or others and they were doing all the design. So as an example, we worked on a large project for Panasonic to redesign their batteries. Brand new packaging, brand new, all that. And Shinnoske's firm did all of the actual design work. But Kankei Culture was part of that project to provide perspectives, insights, ideas, strategy on how you know that battery, that design, the direction they want to go. How will that play in English speaking markets? So that, that was. There was no actually implementation, if you will, for that. That was just pure kind of strategy and consulting work.

Liam Curley: And then my guess would be the implementation, the design work itself, when you were doing that would have been for English speaking market.

Michael Zipursky: Correct. We never designed or worked on something specifically for the Japanese market. So for example, you know, we did a project with Financial Times and that was a bunch of advertising that went in the Financial Times. But it was the Financial Times Japan that it went into. Right. And it was investor relations work for a company that. So we created that, but it wasn't for the quote unquote Japanese market. I mean, certainly a Japanese person could have read it, but it would have been in English. So yeah, we, we never created in Japanese. We always created in anything we were doing. It was English. So if it was, we did a project for Sumitomo for one of their semiconductor divisions and it was a website, but it was just again, the English side, we didn't touch the Japanese side.

Liam Curley: At the height of the business in Japan and it's still just Sam and Michael, no employees. They're turning over hundreds of thousands of dollars 20 years ago, both in their early 20s. But it wasn't all success.

Michael Zipursky: So there's a lot of lessons that I learned in Japan. I remember one scenario where we were working with a multi billion dollar Japanese organisation. We were developing advertisements for trade journals and publications that they wanted to advertise in for their technology project. And I was based in Osaka. I got a call early in the morning from our Japanese, our partner on the project that was the managing director of an ad agency and he never calls in the morning. We would meet in person or be later in the day or be well for drinks in the evening, that kind of thing. So I knew something was, was off. But he said, we got, I just got a call from this client. They're very unhappy. They saw an ad that used the, the same image as the image that was used in their ad. And I was like, huh? Okay. We didn't talk about like exclusivity. We used some form of a stock image that was obviously paid for. I didn't see it as that big of a deal, but he said, I need you to, we need to meet and we need to go over this together because the client is very upset. Now for people listening to that or like anyone hearing it, it probably doesn't sound like a big deal, but I remember as I started thinking more about and kind of waking up, my stomach was just turning, like I did not feel good. I was early 20s. The managing director of the ad agency was probably in his late 50s. At that time. The client was also 50s or 60s. I was a young, you know, a young kid. I only knew what I knew, but I knew that this was not a good situation and I knew that people were unhappy. So looking back, it's like, yeah, it wasn't just. Wasn't really a big thing. But for me, in that moment, it was scary. And we ended up jumping on a Shinkansen, the bullet train, going from Osaka to Tokyo, meeting the client, spending four or five hours just talking about it. By the end of it, everything was fine, like we had worked it out. The lesson of that taught me Liam was number one, that usually anytime you feel anxiety, fear, you're kind of like in the eye of the storm. It's acute because you're in that moment, but as time passes and you look back, generally the things that we feel so sensitive about aren't really that big of a deal. And that's essentially what makes you stronger, more successful as an entrepreneur and why people say that the more rounds that you have in the game, the better that you become. It's. That's the experience part of it. So that. That I learned. The other thing that I learned is the power of relationships. It just reinforced. Right. You know, we spent. It wasn't the money of getting a bullet train ticket that you know that exact moment and going up there. And it wasn't the time. It was the fact that we did it right. It was the fact that we took action right away. We sat down with that client, we talked about, I mean, nothing important for four or five hours, which is actually quite common in Japanese meetings. There's a lot of wasted time, but we emerged from that with the relationship salvaged, and that client continued to be a client for. For quite some time.

Liam Curley: Michael was often making mistakes like this, some bigger, some smaller, which is completely unavoidable if you're trying to achieve anything that you've never achieved before. But the mistakes were never existential. They were never so big that it was game over. Which meant because he could keep going, he would eventually land on a compounding effect of staying in the game.

Michael Zipursky: I mean, one of my views on business is that as long as you can stay in the game and you keep improving the power of compounding. I think Warren Buffett was one of the people to talk about this. But compounding is the, whatever he calls it, eighth wonder of the world. It's very powerful. And so often people stop doing what they're doing or they give up, or they make a hard turn to something else because they hit those bumps in the road and they're not prepared. They get knocked down and they don't get back up.

Liam Curley: Michael spends around six years in Japan. After returning the second time, he has a girlfriend the whole time, Rika, who is Japanese and would become his wife. After six years together in Japan, they both decide to move to Canada together. You've mentioned yourself. Business is booming, is growing, and you decide to move back. Presumably there's family reasons or personal.

Michael Zipursky: Yeah, I mean, so that decision was 100% not related to business. And I look back at times thinking, you know, like, maybe I should have approached that differently, because there's a lot that we could have done with that business. Like we could have sold that business. We could. There's so much that we could have done, but there was just a lot of things going on personally that were creating a lot. Like, it was in a very stressful environment. Not for myself as much as it was for Rika, but we were just thinking about and anyone that's kind of worked in Japan will understand that, especially back in those days. Still today though, the expectations around work and what they call zangyo or overtime and so what we kind of calculated. Liam, just to kind of give you a sense, when we moved to North America, Rika started working at a forestry company. For every month that she was working in Canada, she was having about one week of additional time off compared to one month of working in Japan just because of the commute and the overtime and you're getting paid more. But it was really just like thinking what's best for us from a lifestyle perspective. What's going to be the healthiest for us in terms of mental, physical, well being and also thinking about our future. So yeah, it was really a decision not based on business at all. It was based on just our lifestyles and what we thought would be the most sustainable and healthiest.

Liam Curley: Okay, so you come back, what happens with Kankei Culture? Does that just disappear?

Michael Zipursky: Yeah, we just pretty much let it, let it naturally wind down.

Liam Curley: People thought Michael was crazy to leave Japan considering how successful he was. He looks back with a little regret. Not that he left but that he didn't sell the company which clearly had value. But when he returns to Canada, he's not done building businesses.

Chapter 2 — Relagy

Liam Curley: When Michael and Sam wrap up Kankei Culture and Michael moves back to Vancouver, Sam goes in the other direction.

Michael Zipursky: So Sam and I kind of went off in different directions after Kankei Culture. Not because of any issue. It was a natural case. Sam was now in Japan. I was now going to be heading back to Vancouver. He got a job working at a newspaper, running their, their marketing and kind of advertise advertising related sales.

Liam Curley: Michael arrives home and decides to start a new business. And you start. I'm not going to try and say the name. I'll let you say the name.

Michael Zipursky: Relagy. Yeah, so we got some funny names. So, so Relagy yeah stood for relationship strategy. That was a lead generation focused consulting firm that I started. So Sam and I, I, I looking back I'm not sure why we made the decision to not continue working on Kankei Culture. I think part of it may have been just oh actually no, I think one of the reasons as I think more about this now around that time I'd started studying and becoming much more interested in direct marketing and in the idea that design is extremely powerful, branding is very powerful. But very often it's so hard for us to attribute results to what we're doing. And so as I studied a lot more about copywriting and about direct response and direct marketing. I just saw lead generation as being something that's really important, especially to professional services firms. So when I came back to Vancouver, this is where I decided to start a new company called Relagy Marketing and targeted and worked with professional services firms. So we had law firms, we had other consulting firms, investment firms, insurance companies. We are just really helping them to generate leads.

Liam Curley: What exactly were you doing for them?

Michael Zipursky: So everything from ads in newspapers or media like that magazines to online Google AdWords, pay per click advertising to setting up opt in lead magnet landing pages and then all the strategy around that. So direct mail all also, you know, help with the direct mail letters. Anything that we that could help somebody to generate leads.

Liam Curley: And you could measure everything there.

Michael Zipursky: We did our best, you know, to do that. Yeah, we could very clearly say, hey, like you know, we're running, we sent this number of letters in this campaign and here's the number of registrations and here's the number of sales that came in from that or the revenue. So for me personally that was, you know, validating or it's just something that I'd like to actually be able to go, okay, we did this and this was the result that we saw as opposed to before you can create a website and go like wow, this is really, really nice or we could put an ad out but very often these were more brand like the goal was not to generate an instant result. Right. And so there was always a bit of a gap. And so with the newer focus that I had with Relagy, it was for me personally easier to close that gap or to feel more kind of confident and comfortable. The work that we were doing was really having a positive impact.

Liam Curley: So the question that's coming up for me is you were successful with Kankei Culture and you didn't have that kind of direct, measurable impact. Did anything happen or was it purely reading the copywriting books where you felt that you needed to change that?

Michael Zipursky: I don't remember any single event or light bulb moment that caused that change. I think it was probably an accumulation of a lot of reading and studying and testing and trying different, different things. And probably also the combination of knowing want to be leaving Japan. We had a good thing here. It did its thing in my mind. It's time for a change. Sam's going to go off, do something different. Like we were just ready for, for something a little bit different after running that business for five, six, seven years. And that was the really, you know, the impetus for it.

Liam Curley: Had you done any direct copy before or was this something that you were kind of learning fast on the job type thing?

Michael Zipursky: Yeah, no, man, I hadn't done any with Kankei Culture. It was. The first real work was with Relagy Marketing, where I would pick up a client and I would start to apply. What I, you know, I learned, like, that's one thing that for me, people often wonder, well, you know, you must have worked at some large firm and gained experience there, worked all these different jobs and. No, that wasn't the case at all. Just I studied a lot in terms of reading, not as a kid, you know, I didn't actually start reading at all until I was probably 15 years old or 16 years old and didn't even read a book. But when I started to get into all this, I just, yeah, I read and I read and I read and then I would just apply and I would kind of learn from what's working and what isn't working and found that to be a pretty, pretty good way to go about things.

Liam Curley: I want to draw your attention to something.

Michael Zipursky: I've never actually worked full time for a company in my whole life. Like, it's just always been, as you kind of heard the story. It's just been businesses, just trial and error.

Liam Curley: Up to this point, Michael has had all this success and never even had a proper job. He's just kept starting businesses. He still has never been employed as far as I'm aware. And he's in this place where he's built and sold companies. He's running a company now, as we'll discuss later, that's doing multiple seven figures.

Michael Zipursky: Not only have I not gone to a famous university, I mean, I did so UBC is probably one of the top universities in Canada, but I only went there for one year at the end, like, you know, it wasn't. I bypassed or cheated the system because I came in as an exchange or through a college first. I didn't go directly into UBC. I did not have the grades for that. I didn't actually start studying until almost grade 11.

Liam Curley: Several of the authorities I've covered in previous episodes have famous logos on their resume. Whether that's a famous university they studied at, a famous company they work for or a famous stage they've spoken on. Michael didn't have any of that, I would argue, probably doesn't have any of that today. Which just goes to show that these famous logos are not essential to becoming an authority in your field and building a business based on authority. They absolutely help, but they're not prerequisites.

Michael Zipursky: And also what I realised is that similar to in Japan, when I would be talking to business owners locally, even though they would be running a successful business, I knew something that they didn't know. Right. Like their focus wasn't lead generation. And so that's where I started recognising again, well, if this is something that they need help with and if I can help them with it, you know, I get to add value. Finding ways to add value has always been kind of at the core of any business that we've had.

Liam Curley: And it's a similar thing to you did with Fingertip, right? You picked up the books to figure out how to build the business and then you kind of did the same here with copywriting. Direct marketing.

Michael Zipursky: Yeah, copywriting, direct response, direct marketing. I mean, just studying the classics, you know, the greats of those times or many years before.

Liam Curley: Do you remember how you got your first two or three clients in this new iteration with Relagy?

Michael Zipursky: Yeah, yeah I do actually. So first two or three came from again, networking connections. One was actually a neighbour or lived close by, another was the friend of a family friend and met him at a lunch event or something at somebody's house. And so yeah, they were both just connections.

Liam Curley: Was there anyone like I help anyone with lead gen or was it particular businesses?

Michael Zipursky: No, it was really focused on professional services and I played around with a few different positioning approaches or kind of, you know, messaging for that, but that's really what it was. And most of the conversations start off with like, hey, you know, what do you do? And oh, you know, I help professional services firms with their marketing and to generate more, more leads and to attract more, more clients, something like that. And for most of those people, they didn't have anybody dedicated to do that or they might have a marketing person but they weren't really an expert or they weren't trained. It's like they just kind of maybe took a communications class or something along those lines and you know, found themselves there. But they didn't really understand marketing or didn't have any experience attracting clients consistently or dealing with advertising or pay per click or things of that nature. So they're very easy, easy conversations. Many of them still required a lot of follow up, right. And staying on top of people or just continue to check in. But when the time was right and they were ready, then we would sit down and find a way to work together.

Liam Curley: Michael started two of his businesses, Fingertip Media and Relagy, in very similar fashion. He used books to learn how to do a thing. The book is the starting point of the knowledge. So he's reading in the case of Relagy all the classics on copywriting. He's taking what he learns and, and applying it to work on his own business and with clients. In the doing, he's learning even more than he could have done with the books alone. He's got the courage to try and deliver services he's not been formally trained on. He's not waiting for permission. It's going to be uncomfortable because he's going to make mistakes. But provided the mistakes aren't existential, he learns from them, gets better the next time. Repeat. On the subject of discomfort, there's one client in particular that Michael had who was a real pain in the backside. But he did teach some significant lessons that would open Michael's eyes to a new opportunity.

Michael Zipursky: He actually owned a consulting firm. He had locations in Canada, in the U.S. and you know, he was a pain in the backside to work with, but he was also quite brilliant. And every time I would go to meet with him, I would feel a little bit uncomfortable because he was so direct. You know, he didn't, his approach was on an approach that I, I would use with people and he was very opinionated. But we did, we, you know, we were able to do good work for him and he was also a longer term client. And that to me was a few lessons inside of that. One is that generally if you have a bad feeling about somebody, generally my experience is probably better not to take that business. But I also feel that if you don't say yes to something that you think might be interesting, like I looked at that as an opportunity to learn. I, I felt that there was probably something by saying yes to working with this client, that even if it was a challenging situation, that I would learn from it. So was his style my style? No. But was he brilliant? Yes. Could I learn from his experience and would that make, you know, me and the company stronger? Yes.

Liam Curley: You said that he was brilliant and you hoped and you thought you could learn from him what was brilliant about him. What did you think you'd learn or hope to learn?

Michael Zipursky: He had a lot more experience in business than, than I did in terms of both, you know, his age and what he had built. The size and scope of his company was much larger than the company that I had at that time. The way he thought about business was very powerful. He was actually the first person that ever told me that for every month that he worked, he would take one week off, like let that sink in for a moment, right? Every month that he worked he would take one week off. A lot of people talk about something like that, but but few do it. He did it and that kind of blew my mind. I was like, huh, how do you do that? And you're running a successful business. Like that's interesting. That was it.

Liam Curley: Up to this point in the story, the business has always been Michael and sometimes Sam. They've worked with contractors, but they haven't had employees. Everything went through them. Much of the work was done by them, which led to a great deal of success. But it also leads to a ceiling, relatively speaking, a low one, on how big a business they could build. The interaction with this pain in the backside client opens Michael's eyes to the possibility of scale, of maintaining or increasing revenue and reducing the amount of time he spends in the business, which would have been a pretty familiar concept from a business perspective, but perhaps not from a service business perspective. He'll take that thinking to a conversation at a barbecue that informs the next stage of his story.

Chapter 3 — Consulting Success

Liam Curley: About 18 months after wrapping up Kankei Culture, Michael and Sam get back together again in person at a family barbecue at their aunt's house.

Michael Zipursky: We both are excited about this idea of being able to live and work from anywhere in the world.

Liam Curley: Michael is running Relagy, Sam is working in Japan for an English language publication.

Michael Zipursky: I think we both knew that at some point we would do something together again. We just didn't know, we just weren't talking about it. Sam was doing his thing, I was doing my thing. We were both successful in terms of we were having a good lifestyle, we were making money. There was no clear, oh, I need to make a change. But as we just talked more about it, we were always in touch. Technology was changing, right? Like we could now see a very clear path to like, well, why can't. Isn't there a way we could do something online to also to back up. Sam was, in his kind of spare time, he was experimenting with creating websites and putting AdSense ads on them. Remember that stuff way back in the day. So he was kind of getting some coaching in that area from somebody he was playing around and we just got us thinking more like imagine if we could. And he wasn't making a lot of money from that. It was just, it was early stages but that kind of sparked this. There must be something that we could do online that would allow us to live and work kind of, you know, anywhere or just travel a lot more often because we've always been really big on being able to travel and see the world. So that's really what happened that day at that barbecue. We just talked about it and what we realised that we went through and we need to do something together. Let's think about what we could do online. Fast forward a bit of time from there as we looked at all the different potential industries and things that we could do. What we arrived on was where do we have the most kind of experience at this point in our lives? And it was running consulting businesses or consulting related businesses. So we thought about what if we just started sharing information online and see how that goes, right? Let's tell our stories, let's tell or share kind of what we've learned in terms of the good, the bad, the ugly. Our goal was to help accelerate other people's success so they could avoid the mistakes that we'd made in running consulting businesses, because we'd made a lot at that point, but we've also had some success, so let's share that. And so we did. It was just. There was no business initially, Liam, it was running. I was still doing my thing, my other business. Sam was doing his job. We started this up as a little kind of side project, but pretty quickly what we saw is that we had a growing kind of number of people coming to the website.

Liam Curley: Because you've said before there was no. Well, I think I've picked you up saying there was no monetization plan. But you did mention AdSense there was that in your thinking as. Or really wasn't?

Michael Zipursky: Not really, because I think AdSense sucks. I mean, just like it's a distraction, it's not a good user experience. So we figured out pretty quickly that we weren't going to build anything meaningful in terms of scale and revenue potential with AdSense. On Consulting Success. We ran the numbers, we looked at it and so when we first launched, we had no real plan. We just thought, let's see what happens. We may have tested a bit of AdSense at the beginning. I don't remember clearly about that, but I know that very early on we were clear that this was not. This was not going to be an AdSense kind of ad play type of business. We wanted this to be some form of education, some form of training. We didn't yet know that it would really become coaching as the main focus of the business.

Liam Curley: You figure out that you're going to make the content on how to build a consulting business. Is there like a hypothesis, attract the right people, will figure out what to sell later?

Michael Zipursky: Pretty much. Keep in mind, throughout all this, both Sam and I are devouring other content and learning from others. That's just how we started it was we put something out there, we saw what resonated, we focused more on that.

Liam Curley: Michael and Sam would write on a range of different topics related to building a consulting business inspired by different sources. Here's Michael speaking with Ahmad Munawar on Forecast.

Michael Zipursky: It was just, you know, here's a story and I would share a story of how I had a meeting with someone and what I learned from that meeting. Or I would talk about my approach to consulting proposals, or I would talk about some, you know, lesson that I learned from making a mistake and how I thought others could avoid it. Or I would talk about some type of marketing tactic or strategy that I found to be really helpful or an observation about the marketplace and how that might impact others.

Liam Curley: Michael and Sam attracted their first readers through organic search. As the business matured, they expanded into YouTube, podcasting, books and workshops. But the underlying following they developed came from Google. Do you remember the first moment where you received some sort of signal from someone in the audience, or the audience in general, where you thought, okay, we're on something here.

Michael Zipursky: Yeah, there's multiple signals along the way. I think if I was to look at it of like chapters in a book, the first one was that people actually started to engage with the content. So seeing a lot of comments on the blog post, right, where people were saying, like, this is really great, I hadn't thought of this. That was the first signal that we actually have. Like, it's not just robots searching the website, it's real people and they're appreciating what we're sharing, they're resonating with it. You know, they keep coming back. That was signal number one. Signal number two was that people actually started to opt in and become part of our mailing list. And so very quickly we were building this mailing list, you know, adding at one point hundreds of people per month and kind of going, going from there. Another signal was when we offered our first course. And our first course, I'm thinking back to it, it was PDFs in a zip folder, if that makes sense to you. You know, very old school delivery model. And I remember, you know, it's kind of like the dream of every online entrepreneur that you wake up and you have emails in your inbox that show sale, sale, sale, and it wasn't a lot of money, right, for each one at that time. But knowing like, oh, this is, this is pretty cool now Keep in mind, at the early stages of that business, I still had another consulting business that I was running. It wasn't yet the full time thing, but as time went on it became clear, like, there's, there's something here that we could probably do a lot more with.

Liam Curley: First version of that course sells for $49, but they increased the price first to $199, then to 299 and then 399.

Michael Zipursky: Fast forward a bit more and people who had gone through that were saying like, yeah, this has been really helpful. Website traffic is growing. Like it's just kind of taking on a bit of a life of its own. And we're feeding it with more, more content and more stories, articles, things of that nature. And then people said, this is really great, you know, I took your course. It's really helped me a lot to make more money. I'm charging more, I'm landing more clients, I started my business, but whatever. Can I work more closely with you guys? Do you do any coaching? And we're like, no, we don't, we don't do coaching, but maybe we'll put something together.

Liam Curley: This is one of the advantages that comes with building authority and the following. Michael and Sam are putting material out relevant to consultants who want to build their consulting businesses. Consultants subscribe to email, read the material weekly, get to know and like how Michael and Sam think, and in time, respond to those emails by telling Michael and Sam what they want to buy, how they want to buy it, what the experience should look like. If you're an unknown, that kind of information and opportunity doesn't come to you. You have to go out to the market and ask the market what it wants. And that's a lot harder than it sounds. First, finding the right people in the right situation and context and then encouraging them to spend time with you and tell you their dreams and desires. When you have a following, people come to you and often ask for an engagement or a product that you don't even offer. And when the authority hears that enough times, they can then go and build that offer designed with the clients who want to buy it. Which is what Michael and Sam are about to do. It's what Ryan Hawk did in a previous episode. It's what Carl Richards did in a previous episode. Before we go into details on that, as you've probably taken away so far in this episode, Michael and Sam like starting and growing businesses. What I've not shared yet is that they were growing two other businesses simultaneously to Consulting Success.

Michael Zipursky: I had some distractions as well, though, Liam. I don't know if you, if you saw this or not, but I had two other businesses that were running while we were also building Consulting Success.

Liam Curley: Can you tell me a bit about those?

Michael Zipursky: Yeah. So one was a jewellery business, which is a wild story because Sam and I were thinking, you know, we have this experience running now an online business. We've been studying Internet marketing. There's probably a business out there that has a great product but doesn't have the knowledge or experience that we have now in running an online business. And so we found someone that ran a kind of a custom jewellery store. We knew nothing about jewellery. We had no passion, no interest in jewellery at all. But we just thought we could make this bigger than it was. And we found someone. We bought into the business, they handled everything around the product and we took on everything around the marketing of it. And we worked to grow that business and we did an okay job. But we realised over maybe a year and a half or so that this isn't something that we, we want to do long term. We didn't, we didn't feel we could add the value that we initially thought that we could. And so we all, all three of us as partners decided that we would sell that business. And so, and so we did. The other one was called FreshGigs.ca. It was a job board, I think it's still around today, but it was a job board. And we really positioned that as the job board for marketing creative professionals, which actually spun out of a bigger idea that we had many, you know, years earlier, which was to create almost like a, you know, a Facebook or a LinkedIn, but like a social network, but just for marketing creative professionals. And so we invested tens of thousands of dollars, had a great firm, you know, do all the development for us and add all the bells and whistles and features that we thought would make this thing amazing. Except we forgot one really important thing which was to actually ask the market what they wanted and what they cared about. So when we went to start doing some of that after already investing all this, we learned very quickly that the market, like what they really wanted was just the job. They just wanted opportunities. So we transitioned that business and focused on that. We built it up to be one of the top marketing creative professional kind of job boards in Canada. And then it was acquired by Tiny.

Liam Curley: Tiny is a long term holding company majority owned and co founded by Andrew Wilkinson. Tiny owned a number of other Internet businesses in a similar space, like Dribbble, the portfolio site for designers and We Work Remotely, one of the biggest remote job boards in the world. Tiny were buying up niche job boards.

Michael Zipursky: So that business was acquired. And what was interesting, my wife was we were sitting in our old apartment many, many years ago when this, when we were running these three businesses and she said to me one day, like, why? Why do you guys run three businesses? I was like, diversification, diversification, you know. But I thought more about it. I was like, huh? Because she said, well, what if you just really focus on one of them? And I was thinking that's a really, you know, a really smart comment because you're right. We have the jewellery business. We're not passionate about it at all. This job business feels like it has a lot of potential. But I really felt I had started to feel like this was, you know, a child. Me and the job board FreshGigs.ca was a child that we as parents weren't supporting it, like we weren't helping to realise its full potential because Consulting Success was really starting to take off around that time. So it was, it was all just kind of like it was doing fine, but it could do so much more. It just made sense for us to start. So first the jewellery business we sold and then the job board was acquired and that allowed us to really focus fully on Consulting Success.

Liam Curley: So Michael and Sam wrap up the two other businesses to focus entirely on Consulting Success and results follow. They went from $5,000 a month, then 10, then 20. But in Michael's words, it still felt like they hadn't cracked it yet. Something I've not mentioned is that since starting Kankei Culture, Michael and Sam have been really big on hiring coaches.

Michael Zipursky: In every business that we've been part of over the years, which has been several. We've always. Not always, but from a very early time we have invested in working with coaches, mentors, people that we thought were a step two, three or four ahead of where we were. We recognised that the fastest way to get to where we want to go is not just to try and figure out everything by ourselves. If someone's walk that path before making that investment will tend to yield a greater return than whatever we put into it.

Liam Curley: What kind of coaches were you working with along the way to when Consulting Success becomes you add the coaching.

Michael Zipursky: So a range. One was really focused in market research and starting profitable online businesses. Another one was all on webinars and how to sell from online presentations. Another was specifically around running kind of online, call them like coaching, essentially like group coaching or coaching related, like how do you run that kind of business online, but for a lot of different industries.

Liam Curley: Around this time, when they hit $20,000 per month, they invest in a coaching and mastermind programme. I've got a quote here, this is from you. It finally felt like we were realising our potential. I think this is after you moved to the coaching model. It hit me that we already had all the elements of success for a long time. We just didn't have the clarity of the right model for us. So there's a few questions I want to ask on that quote. First question is, you said it hit me that we already had the elements of success for a long time. What would you say those elements of success were that you already had?

Michael Zipursky: We had the expertise. I mean, so what did we change? We changed how we packaged and how we offered our solution, if you will. It had been, call it one to one coaching, it had been a course. And then all of a sudden we decided to formalise, productize, really distil down, take all these years of experience of what we really found was working and what wasn't and then organise that into a system that we could offer to people and really that productization of that and then offering that formally and really opening up the doors to it, that's what changed, right? So it went from us waiting almost for people to say, hey, do you have this? Do you have that? To us getting a lot of feedback over the years, selling different things, offering different things, but then going, you know what, I think we could create a more premium offering, a way to add a lot more value by working more closely with people. Let's formalise that, let's productize it, let's build a system around it and let's now be intentional with offering it. Like, I remember the first time I come back from an event in Hawaii that I had gone to one of the groups and coaches we were working with and I felt very, a lot clearer and more inspired to, to make a specific offer and around our coaching programme. And I did. And I remember we sent out an email and got something. I can't remember the number of people that responded back. They said, yeah, like I want to sign up for a call to learn more. I think within the next eight days we brought in $40,000. And for us at that time, I was like, holy, this is. This is crazy. I can't believe, you know, wow.

Liam Curley: I asked Michael to tell me more about this event in Hawaii that inspired this realisation. What did you hear or experience that sparked this inspiration to do something different to the courses you'd been selling up to that point.

Michael Zipursky: Yeah, it wasn't actually for our courses. We had started to offer coaching. Right. So if I just take you back for a moment. We first started offering, it was all free content. Right. That Consulting Success was putting out. It was mainly articles. Later there's a bit of a podcast, but it was mainly articles. Then we had people, a bit of a following, a lot of comments, people saying, hey, this is great, right? You have something that, like a course that goes deeper. So we created a course from there. People said, the course is great. Is there a way to work with you directly and you know, more intimately? And we said, no, we don't really offer something, but let's let us think about it. And we came back and we decided to offer coaching. So we had started offering, call it unstructured, smaller scale, kind of one to one coaching. But there was no programme, there was no real deep positioning behind it. It was like someone would reach out and say, hey, can you help me to grow my consulting business? And at that time it was okay, if I can fit it in, sure. When I was in Maui, what I took away and what I was inspired by was seeing how others had developed a lot more structure, a lot more call it productization around what they were doing. And we hadn't done that to that point. So I walked away from that seeing a much clearer vision for how we could take the coaching that we were offering and actually start to build a brand around it and build a company around it. It was apparent to me that this would become a much bigger portion of our business into the future compared to the courses or anything else that we were kind of offering to that point. So it was going in and at that point being surrounded by people who had taken their business to six figures per month, multiple six figures per month. At that time, we weren't there yet. And so seeing that, hey, others have done this and being able to really learn how they did it step by steps, the systems they put in place, what they tried that didn't work, what they tried that did work. And then being able to overlay that on top of know the structure or at that time, kind of lack of structure that we had, all the pieces started to come together and I remember leaving that event, coming back, putting structure around this coaching programme offer, which today is our Clarity Coaching Program. But this is, you know, well over a decade ago and we sent a few emails to our list and booked a bunch of calls. People responded like, you know, the book time in the calendar and I think within the first week or week and a half, we had booked $40,000 in new business. And that's when I was like, oh, we're onto something.

Liam Curley: The shift now that Michael and Sam needed to make was to develop and document the frameworks and the methods through which they'd created success for clients and their own consulting businesses in the past. With that, they could consistently deliver results and experience and in time be able to build a team of coaches that could deliver those methods.

Michael Zipursky: So that was the shift. It was going from making it about, hey, get coaching from Michael or Sam to, hey, we can help you. You know, if. If you're dealing with these things and you want to grow your consulting business, if you want to actually build a really great consulting business, then we have a programme for that. And so the. The focus, the spotlight went from being on us to being on, call it the methodology, the framework, the growth system that we had developed inside of the Clarity Coaching Program and making that what people wanted. And so it didn't matter so much who was the one delivering that or guiding the person through. It was more about making sure that they got the result that they wanted. And that required us to take what was, you know, in our head and really build a lot more IP around that and get the frameworks and get everything down on. On paper.

Liam Curley: Do you have a process for making that process?

Michael Zipursky: So we do now. Early on, we didn't. Early on it was just take a lot of notes, write everything down in a document and maybe record some videos around it, have a bunch of conversations with people. As we kind of went forward in the years from there, we definitely started to formalise more and really thinking about. So to answer your question directly, we always thought about what is the journey that we need to take a client on? If we think about our ideal client, what are the most common challenges, gaps that they have, what needs to be in order for the vast majority of people to get the outcome that they want? And then we would work through documenting how do we help someone to create that? So, for example, if somebody has expertise and they're running a nice consulting business, but they're just, maybe it's been built on referrals and their network, what do they need to do to shift away from that so they can actually start building a pipeline that is more consistent. Right. More predictable. Well, generally they need to be very clear on, like, who is their actual ideal client. They've just been getting different clients from their network and referrals. That's reactive. Well, now, if you're going to be more proactive. You need to actually pick where you're going to focus. So how do we do that? Well, there's a process for thinking through that. There's many different ways, but we found a way that works very, very well. So we documented that same for how do you think through your fees and make making sure you're not leaving a lot of money on the table and being strategic with your pricing. So again, we document that. So we just work through step by step based on the order that for us was, is the most logical. Like as an example, a lot of people think, I just need more leads and they just work on their marketing and they kind of jump on the latest fads of like, oh, do this on TikTok or LinkedIn or whatever. But there's no foundation in place. And so they end up spending a lot of time and money and resources and not getting results. And generally that's because of two things. Number one, they're not really clear on who their ideal client is. And so if they're not clear on their ideal client, right, their messaging is going to talk to their ideal client. So the second thing is that their messaging usually is not very intentional, specific, direct.

Liam Curley: Right.

Michael Zipursky: It's. It's not communicating a lot of value. Those two things always need to be in place before you just start trying to turn the switch on for. For marketing. That's where we always kind of thought about what needs to be in place before you add the next, the next, the next. And that's kind of how we had ended up building out that whole process and system.

Liam Curley: Now that the method was on paper rather than exclusively in Michael and Sam's heads, someone other than the two founders could deliver it. So they needed coaches.

Michael Zipursky: Our first coaches that joined us to work with clients and so forth as we expanded. They were former clients, so they had come through our programme, they knew our approach, they understood how we did things, they knew what to focus on and why, because they had experienced it themselves, they had been part of it and they had seen the results they got from it and it really made an impact on them and they wanted to be part of kind of the movement and community of what we were building. So that was the first several hires that we made.

Liam Curley: Hiring former clients as coaches lowered the risk of making the wrong hire, but it didn't remove the risk entirely that Consulting Success would no longer deliver results now that engagements weren't executed by Michael and Sam.

Michael Zipursky: It was a bit scary early on because that typical mindset of we have a certain standard of coaching and delivery and we want people to really be successful. Are we going to get like a bunch of backlash if now all of a sudden we're transitioning from everything, Michael and Sam providing this to others providing it. But what we realised was that one, we prepared for the worst. We prepared for maybe potential issues to happen or to come up. But we navigate this by making the focus not about either one of us. We made the focus on the results, like what did the client want? And making the focus about the framework. So we had the IP, we had playbooks, and we were clear on what people needed to do based on what stage they were at in their business. And so we just needed to get really clear on making sure that was documented. We could teach that to others.

Liam Curley: Are you and Sam still coaching or not anymore?

Michael Zipursky: We have three different levels to our programme. Our highest level is called the Inner Circle. These are all seven figure and multi seven figure consulting business owners. And I'm involved with, with that group more than I am the other groups of our programme. But again, we have amazing coaches. They're all, again, high six, seven, even eight figure consulting business owners. They've had that experience. I mean, some of them have more, you know, much more experience than I do. That for us has always been intentional in terms of back in the day, like it was the, you know, the quote unquote Michael show. The focus was on me. I was the face. Still, to the degree that that exists. But this is why we have. It's called Consulting Success, not the Michael Show. And when we show the programme or we talk about what we do, we really want to put the spotlight and focus on the amazing team members that we have and the coaches that we have and the community that we've built. We don't want it to be just about one person or the other. It's much bigger than that.

Liam Curley: In a previous episode of Undisputed Authority, Ryan Deiss spoke about the difference between being a personal brand and being an ambassador. A personal brand as a business, which is what some might call it, draws attention to the founder and the attention stays on that person. The founder is the product. Maybe they sell one to one engagements, maybe sponsorships, but whatever it is, it's time or association with that person. As ambassador, the founder initially draws attention to themselves in the same way someone building a personal brand might. But instead of holding that attention on themselves, they point it back to the outcomes their business sells, often delivered by someone who isn't them. Here's Ryan Deiss speaking to this point.

Ryan Deiss: If you're going to create a brand, it usually is going to start with look at me, look at me, look at me. And then it needs to transition to look at that, look at that, look at that. And then ultimately if you get other people saying look at that, look at that, look at that. And then everybody's just looking at that and then all the people who are pointing at it can kind of slowly fade back into the hedges, right? Homer Simpson style.

Liam Curley: When Michael moved to Japan with Kankei Culture, he built a business on the foundation of relative expertise. Relative in the sense that the Japanese design firms he was working for didn't have an intuitive understanding of English speaking culture and communication. Michael did relative to them. Even if he was still a college student, not a conventional expert in communications and branding in North America, in this new market in Japan, he was an expert. And it was skill and knowledge that had clear commercial value. When he returned to Canada, he built Relagy, taking a similar approach to the learning as he did with Fingertip Media, but this time with direct marketing. The approach worked because Michael treated building and maintaining relationships as important as developing and delivering expertise. As I mentioned, expertise is relative, but it's only visible and accessible to the people Michael worked with. Because he built and nurtured relationships with them, they liked and trusted him. He had no formal training on being a consultant or running a consultancy business. He learned what he did through books, through doing, but also through coaching. He and Sam made a commitment early on to continually invest in mentorship and coaching from people who were one or two steps ahead of him. He was designing his own curriculum on how to build a business. At the time of recording this, Consulting Success has a team of eight full time employees and another 12 contractors. Sam and Michael run the team, turning over multiple seven figures. He doesn't necessarily have the credentials you might associate with authorities from previous episodes, which is proof that you don't need to have worked at Google or studied at Harvard to become recognised as an authority in your niche. Michael developed his skill set by learning from mentors, reading the books from those who didn't know him and receiving coaching from those who did. He then honed his craft by applying what he learned, finding what worked, what didn't, and then iterating. He placed himself in environments where his expertise was scarce and he built relationships with people where it was valuable. He then took all of that, wrote about how he'd achieved what he'd achieved and published consistently for a sustained period of time. That is how Michael Zipursky became the Undisputed Authority.

Liam Curley: Thank you for listening. This podcast was produced by Jamie Slevin, edited by Magnus Kramers, and researched, written and narrated by me, Liam Curley. I help experts develop the positioning frameworks and insights that differentiate them from everyone else in their field, and I've created a free email series called the 10 Patterns of Disruptive Wisdom. In my research of Undisputed Authorities, these are the consistent behavioural patterns I noticed among those who rise to the top. To get the email series, head to liamcurley.co.uk. Link is in the description.