The dream of every business owner is to achieve freedom. That’s what not having a boss is all about, right?

But, says Mandi Ellefson (and she speaks from personal experience), all too often you’re more stressed and busier than ever as an entrepreneur. 

You don’t have to be, adds Mandi. You can work as little or as much as you want… and watch your company grow.  

The first step is making yourself, as the owner, unessential to day-to-day operations. Mandi shares how to make that happen, as well as what must come next.

Tune in for all the details on that, as well as…

• The wrong way to build a professional services business (most go this route) – and what to do instead
• A biggest mistake professional service providers make when growing their company
• How to recognize the people who can help you take your business to the next level
• A strategy for creating more value for your clients… while increasing your profits
• How to offer lofty guarantees to your clients… and stick by them with absolute consistency

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

• www.handsoffceo.com 
• www.handsoffceo.com/roadmap

Transcript

Doug Hall: Hi, everybody. This is Doug Hall, your host of Go for Growth with Doug Hall. And today I have a special guest, Mandi Ellefson, the founder of Hands-Off CEO, and a successful business person in her own right and a very important advisor to business owners, particularly in the services industry, to help you stop working in your business and focus on working on your business. So Mandi, welcome to the podcast today.

Mandi Ellefson: Thanks so much for having me, Doug.

Doug: So, tell us a little bit of your backstory, how you got to this level of helping business owners get out of working in, being so busy, to work on their business. What led you to that?

What Led Mandi to Business Coaching?

Mandi: I had a company myself where I had gotten very stuck in the business. What that looks like is that I had my second baby on the way and weeks from delivering like, more like days from delivering, and I had all these projects that were, that I needed to wrap up so that I could have maternity leave. And I had to go on maternity leave and the business was going to shut down because I was, it was so dependent on me.

And here I had started this business to have all this freedom. And this freedom ironically, I had created as an operations manager in a previous company that I had run, but I didn’t know how to create this for myself, and I was really frustrated by it. And I figured it out. My staff at the time had kind of just dropped the balls right at the most inopportune times as like, the baby’s just like ready to come out and like I got it all wrapped up, but it taught me a few lessons.

Doug: And the baby’s doing fine and is like probably grown up now I hope?

Mandi: Mostly, yeah. She’s eight. Yeah, mostly grown up. She’s eight years old now.

Doug: She thinks she’s grown up, right?

Mandi: She sure does. Wow. That girl’s got some attitude. Yeah. So anyway, that led me on this journey of looking at well, you know, I was able to figure this out before, and I just can’t seem to figure this out for my own company. But what I discovered was that it’s very different for service-based companies. And that scaling a service-based company was very different than the other model that I was a part of for this company that was actually a real estate company. And when you’re actually, when you’re selling more of a tangible type of product, it’s much easier and more straightforward than when you’re selling your own knowledge.

And it was a web design company, a web design, and branding company. And I got so stuck in the middle of everything because all the knowledge was in my head for how things needed to be done. And I was too involved in the day to day of the projects and really what I was just kind of playing monkey in the middle. And when the people that I was throwing things out to just kind of went away then I was stuck the monkey doing all the work. So I went on this quest to really understand, like, what is it going to take for me to build the kind of company that’s going to allow me to be able to work as little or as much as I want.

That would allow me to be able to be gone four weeks at a time if I’d like to. That, but would really allow me to grow the company in a way that I can grow my impact, make a bigger difference. But that wouldn’t be so dependent on like me trading my time for money. I did a lot of testing and really understand interviewing and reading a lot of books. But what helped me the most was when I was just testing out some of my ideas on colleagues that I had. And after a while I started charging for my work because it just was like, it was really effective and I was able to help people free up a lot of time in their businesses, and really help them get unstuck in these different areas of growth in their business.

And by doing that, I had learned how to actually do that for my own company. As I was doing this I was also recognizing like wow, I’m really enjoying this. This is really what my true calling is. So I passed off the business to, then and an apprentice at the time, she bought the company. You know, it was a pretty small company so it wasn’t like a huge amount, but she’s still running that company today. And it’s been a really good thing for her. And I really turned this, a win-win out of this. And then I started what has now become Hands-Off CEO.

Doug: Awesome. So if you think about the lessons learned in there and how they revealed themselves to you, was it really the baby and the pregnancy that turned up the pressure? Or did you see the warning signs before this? Did you recognize it? I’m trying to help the audience sort of figure out how do you recognize this.

Mandi: Yeah, how do you recognize this? So I don’t think I knew enough at the time. I was still pretty young at the time and I didn’t know enough to know what was really going on. And now from seeing this in hundreds and probably up to 1000 different entrepreneurs that I’ve spoke to and consulted with on this, I now can see a number of factors that actually lead up to this. Would that be helpful to go down that direction? Or where do you want to take us?

Doug: Yeah, I really think it would be helpful because part of, you don’t solve a problem until you know you have a problem. So what are the signs? What are the symptoms? What can they look at? And then what kind of what’s your proven process of how have you figured out to solve this? And I know that’s a bunch of questions all packed together, so you can unpack that. Start with the warning signs. How do people recognize that they really are the monkey in the middle?

Escaping the Middle

Mandi: Well, I think that there’s just, there’s certain stages that you go through. So there’s this first stage where not everyone starts off their company this way, but you’re kind of, you start off as you’re kind of the solo person that is responsible for everyone and for everything that is going out the door and the company. And this is particularly the case of your life if you start out as like some kind of consultant or a solo agency. Those are a lot of the kind of companies we work for we work with is a b2b services. So you start out that, you get kind of busy. So you’re hiring people to help support you in the admin work and all the other things that need to be done.

And then maybe you’re hiring other practitioners to help you do the work that you’ve sold. And what happens is you start growing and growing and then all of a sudden, you have this team of, you know, four, five, 10, 20 fusional, get to 20 at this stage. But you’re, what you are is you’ve kind of turned yourself into this monkey in the middle of that I mentioned, where you just kind of throwing things off, left and right. And you’re also the person who is chasing after all these details, making sure they’re all done.

And what that looks like is just a lot of exhaustion and you having so many details in your head and you’ve now become this manager, but you’re also responsible for making sure everything gets done too. So it’s like, this is where the hours really start stacking up. And the freedom that you started your business for it starts to go down down down, as, even if you’re only working 40 hours per week, which is not usually the case at this stage, you can just feel totally spent by the end of the day because you have so much responsibility on your shoulders.

So you still have not only the work that you had before, you have more because your company has the capacity to sell more, but then you have all the responsibility of making sure everything goes out through the door at the level that you expect the quality and oftentimes it doesn’t. So what happens is you have to fix it. So you’re like the failsafe and the bottleneck of the entire business. Yeah, so you get to that stage.

That’s like that, and then progressing from the monkey in the middle. It’s like you’re looking Okay, well, we’re going to hire a project manager. The project manager is going to then make sure that things are being done right. Kind of the next level up from that is turning this project manager, either hiring an operations manager or someone at that level or really training up your project manager into an operations manager. That’s my favorite way. I prefer to find people that, hire people at a certain level and then develop them into the leadership role.

And when you have that role in place, it’s like bliss. It’s absolutely incredible. It like brings tears of joy to your eyes that you’re like, there’s so many those little things, all the noise is just gone. And you have hours and hours of time in your day to be thinking about how to improve the business, to actually be improving your marketing and to be out there generating more sales.

Doug: Is that a final state or is there another step beyond that?

Mandi: There’s definitely another step beyond that. That’s one of the biggest things though. If you’re finding yourself where you keep getting pulled back in, one of the first things is, an earlier stage, it’s like it’s maybe a project manager. And as you’re more maturing, it’s like, we need an operations manager. And as you continue growing, that this operations manager can really grow into like a COO type of role. And where you’re, where they’re actually starting, well, this starts earlier than this. You really want your project manager to start actually helping you manage people even at that low of a level.

Yeah, at this next level, it’s just continuing to grow the company with less and less dependence on you, because the more you can get out of the business as the CEO, the more time you have to really accelerate the growth, the marketing the sales, and then as you are fine-tuning and mastering each piece, then you can start delegating out each of those roles as you continue growing and then it’s just taking this machine that you’re building and fine-tuning, fine-tuning, fine-tuning. And then you could be really creating rapid growth just from small incremental changes at this point.

Doug: So if you’re looking at a consultancy or an agency and you, again this is to sort of help people assess where they are. Obviously, the solo person is one. But does that feel like sort of three to six people in that first phase? Two or three or four people gathered around the founder, is that sort of a normal size?

Mandi: Yeah, but I actually see that stage going up into like, I see this up to 15 sometimes 20 but I can see it going up to 15 and what that, and on another version of this that I’ll see a lot too is having a very flat organization. And what that looks like is you have a lot of higher-end people. A lot of chiefs and not a lot of Indians. Hope that’s not a derogatory term for some people. I am part Native American. Very, very tiny amount so I feel I have every right to say that.

Doug: You’re legit, you’re allowed. That’s okay. Do they then have contention for resources, all these chief sort of competing for assistance or projects, you know? Are they all battling each other then? Or what does that look like?

Mandi: I think that, you know, maybe that it sounds like maybe you’ve run into some of that with the work that you’ve done, Doug.

Doug: Yeah, I’ve seen a bit of that. And I think that flat organization makes the man in the middle or the woman in the middle, I see them just spinning around like a top answering everybody’s questions, solving everybody’s crisis. Not any time for them, no time for themselves. They get to like five or six o’clock and like, oh, everybody went home. Good. I can do some work now.

Mandi: Right. Right. Yeah. And they’re constantly fielding questions. And one of the reasons why is because they haven’t actually delegated out entire responsibilities. They’re just, it’s just piecemeal. And not on top of that.

On top of that, it’s like not only just for selling out the whole responsibilities, but the responsibility of even coming back to the CEO and reporting on how the progress is going and having like that feedback loop in place where it actually turning the feedback loop around. So instead of you going after each person in your team and checking in how things are doing, they’re coming to report to you of the progress and really coming to bring solutions and not problems.

Doug: Right. And that would be a sign of growing but that first phase, they probably don’t realize that or nobody’s ever told them that.

Mandi: Right. And I think that this comes down to it’s just like, as we’re growing our companies, we’re growing as leaders and really our company cannot grow any faster than we can as a leader as a person. And that’s why it’s like it’s what happens is that the company starts butting up against the leader if they haven’t done that internal deeper work in order to let go and in order to really unlock that next level of growth by getting out of the way.

But the challenge is that the people don’t on the team, even if they’re they’re exactly the right person, they have the right skills and everything, they really don’t have the direction. They have not been empowered for them to really do the best work. And the CEO doesn’t really know how to empower them to do the very best work. And I see that that happen even in a greater frequency or intensity with organizations that are more flat because a lot of times I see the reason why they’re more flat is that the leader is reluctant to really step up and quote, be the boss.

They don’t want to be like that bossy person. So there’s like kind of this weird, you might, I’d like to know if you’ve kind of seen this too, is that there’s like almost this weird like co-managing, co-leading type of thing where nobody’s really in charge. And this is way worse with partners too, by the way, where you have like the

Doug: Law firms or accounting firms right?

Mandi: Right. And then on top of that, just like co-owners, so you have multiple owners like, there’s nobody really driving the ship forward. So what happens is everybody’s just kind of going off into, like, they’re different directions. And it takes, it’s a lot of energy spent. It’s kind of like trying to grow with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake.

Doug: Yeah, I’ve seen that. And I think in professional consultants and professional services in particular, there’s this sort of education bias that they come out. Like being a manager or being an executive is a bad thing. I’m a professional. I’m not picking on him, but I’m an attorney, I’m CPA, I’m whatever. And if I act like a boss, they’ll think less of me. I’ve seen that.

Mandi: Right. And you know, and I’ve seen that too. And actually, there’s certain leaders we’ve really made a big difference for it was just giving them the permission that like, this is your job to be the leader. It is your job to set the vision, it’s your job to set the what and the why. And your team’s job is the how, and your more upper-level managers, they’re going to be involved in the what and the why perhaps. But like, your job as the visionary in the business is to really set those things. And your job is not to get any kind of consensus on it.

Your job is to set that and enroll everyone on your team into that and getting them excited about it and really helping them see what’s in it for them, and helping them see the why. And then on top of that filtering out people in your organization who don’t fit that and attracting in the right kinds of people that do fit the vision and the mission going forward. But it takes some serious courage as the leader that you’re going to set that and you’re going to say this is what we really truly stand for. And these are the only kind of people that we’re going to be having working with our company. These are the only type of clients that we’re going to be working was too.

Doug: I think both of those are really important and they’re really hard for folks because sometimes they come from a scarcity mentality. Well, we need every client, we don’t want to lose a client, or, you know, we need the work or we got to keep people busy. And they settle for employees and they settle for clients.

Mandi: Well, you know, and that’s a really good point. And it’s one that we see happen a lot before some of our clients work, work with us. The kind of businesses that work with us, they’re already doing pretty well as far as that they’re not necessarily struggling, it’s just they’re getting to a point where they’re really getting stuck in the growth of the company. They can’t grow anymore without like, basically their personal life imploding.

But it’s all kind of impacted by the structure of the company and how that’s all working. And you know, one of the examples that we have is one of our clients, Jamie, in the first 13 minutes we had worked together, he had increases profit 55%, net profit, which I mean, as you know, Doug, that’s a pretty big increase in profit.

Doug: That’s awesome. Terrific.

Mandi: Yeah. Right. And in order to do that, though, there was some house cleaning that had to happen, right? He was an incredibly courageous leader, and, and still is. And he just really stepped up and said, This is what we stand for. This is what we’re creating. And he set the bar high. And as a result, some people chose to do not, they filtered themselves out, and that’s what will happen. But what happened also is that the rest of his team was like, yeah, this is what we want to be involved in. And they’re really excited about it.

And his team are just really stepping up and he went from being very involved in the day to day to now being really in the director seat, and he’s just like, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. And he’s rolling this out with his other company, too. It’s also taking it down to the client level, though, and looking at what are the clients that we’re no longer willing to work with? What are the only kind of clients we will be working with? And so we were talking a little bit about this before we pushed the record button, Doug, but we, you know, we were talking about how the sustainability of the business is so important.

A profitable, sustainable foundation is really important in order to let go. And that was what was really missing in his business. So what we looked at is like, what, how can we be able to provide a bigger outcome for clients, predictably, consistently, every single time? And what we did is we looked at, all right, who is the best clients that we could be working with, and under what circumstances and what’s the very best work that we could do for them? So what through a process and this took about, I mean, this is an intensive process, right?

It’s very effective, but you know, it takes a good month to really get your head wrapped around it. And what we came out of for him was that we can, we’ll add $10 million in three years for beauty and skincare brands. And that completely revolutionized the way that they went about marketing and selling because now it’s just qualify and quantify. It’s like, Can we get this result for you? Do you have these characteristics in place that we’re looking for, where we can guarantee this kind of result? They were able to triple their fees. The amount of inbound leads doubled. I shouldn’t say inbound.

They doubled the amount of leads, because it’s actually not, it’s not really about inbound, it’s actually a lot of it, it’s about outbound. It’s about really going taking a sniper approach to your marketing and selling so that you can that, so you know this is the exact type of brands that we’re looking at working with. And, you know, when you reach out to them with a message that like, Hey, we had $10 million in three years to, you know, this type of company and you have a case study with that, they’re pretty excited to talk to you about that, you know? And you can get

Doug: Yeah, you pretty much tell them, at least listen to you.

Mandi: They’ll at least listen to you, even if they don’t believe you. That’s the thing about making big offers, you don’t actually, they don’t actually have to be believable at first to get a phone call. So anyway, they’ve had a big uptick in there, they’ve had prospects making referrals, just to give you an idea because that’s pretty hot, right?

Doug: That’s pretty cool. They aren’t even a client yet and they’re making referrals.

Mandi: Exactly. So here’s the thing is is like that, like by impacting the structure of this, what we’ve done is we’ve started off by like, this is what we’re selling and this is how we can sell it for, you know, three times more. We’re looking at how do you be able to double like, two to 10 x your fees? By starting with how do you increase your value? How do you be able to be so valuable that you can guarantee your services and when you guarantee your services, when you take out that risk for them, then they’re willing to pay a lot more for it.

Doug: That’s a big nugget. If your promise is big enough, the ROI is there and In the future, you guarantee it, then you can double, triple 10x your fees with what you’re saying.

Mandi: Yes. Yes, you can. But you have to do good work.

Doug: Yeah, clearly you have to do good work. Maybe great work.

Guarantee With Confidence

Mandi: Well, the other thing about this too, and Doug, maybe you’ve seen this as well with service providers is that like, their results can be pretty hit or miss. So when you’re going to invest with the service provider, you’re like, it’s like throwing spaghetti against the wall. And people are willing to spend, your clients are willing to spend like a small amount of money to test. But you can’t do your very best work with that kind of commitment. So it’s looking at like, how do we stack the odds in our favor so that we’re only working with clients where our very best work is done every single time? What do they need to have in place?

What do we need to be able to do? What do we need to add to our process so that we can guarantee these results? And who do we need to say no to so that we can have that confidence that every single time we’re going to be providing these massive outcomes? And doing that, it provides the foundation, it helps, it increases your, not only increases your fees and increases your conversions for the right kinds of people. And then you have the structure too. We put that together what we call a client success map. And it’s, you know, might be three steps might be five steps, or however many steps it is. And we first started off with the selling.

So this is how we’re selling this, like I was explaining to you with like the big outcome. But then that also, what’s amazing about this is that you hand over this client success map and it now becomes a roadmap for your team, your operations team to take this, your operations manager, and develop it into what we call an operations management blueprint. And they’re building out the like, they’re reverse engineering how do we actually get this outcome for our clients? How do we guarantee this?

And that becomes your operating systems for your company, specifically for the service delivery part of it. And then that’s how you transfer the ownership over to your team. So you’re starting with a strategy that, why the team is actually doing the how, and you’re going to be helping with them, helping them with it to a certain point, but it’s also how you train your operations managers too. It’s like they’re taking over this project. You’re passing it off to them. And they’re now soliciting you for like, feedback with it. But and I mean, that’s the there’s more to it but that’s just the big picture for how it works.

Doug: That’s a great, great big picture. Yeah, I love that. So the why and the what it’s sort of the top level, the how is in the middle, and then the who is important because if the founders doing all the work, that’s not going to win. You need other people to be the who. So that ops manager, project manager that’s important. What lessons have you learned in picking the right whos? When your clients go in your direction to get their first project manager what do you tell them?

Mandi: Well, I think the first thing is understanding your client success map. Because understanding what you’re actually selling, and who you’re selling, it’s going to determine some of this who, right? But also that process you’re breaking down for, it will help you see what skills you actually need. Because one of the biggest mistakes that we see a lot of service providers make is that they’re like the one-stop-shop. We do this, this and this, this. And one of the challenges with this is that it’s expensive to be the one-stop-shop, and you can’t do their, your very best quality work that way.

So what happens is you’re really good in some areas, and you’re not so good and others. So instead of being the one-stop-shop, you can be really good at creating a specific type of outcome. And when you’re really good at creating a specific type of outcome, then your process for how you get to that is really quite irrelevant. Who’s doing the process is also quite irrelevant too because and this is where it’s so key. This is how you remove the CEO out of the day to day, out of the service delivery.

Because the thing is, is that if you are positioning your service as the CEO as they have the most valuable time, then your clients are always going to want the CEO, they’re always going to want you. So until you actually like, move what you’re doing into a replicable system that is delivering real outcomes and not just a system. Everybody thinks, oh, we just have a system. It’s not just the system. It’s actually delivering outcomes and if it’s appropriate, guarantees. And when you’re doing it that way then you can really dictate how it’s going to be done in your business.

And now it’s, now your clients can let go of their fixation on the CEO being really involved in the work. Because the reason why they’re, they feel like you need to be involved in the work is because, and the reason why they’re micromanaging is because they don’t actually believe, they don’t have confidence in you that you’re going to get it done without them doing that. So if you have, if you’re leading the whole process with a very tight process for I keep saying the word process.

But like, if you’re leading the engagement with this is what we do first than this, there’s no way that their leaders can come in and get you off course because this is the course. This is what they agreed to. This is the contract that you have. And in doing that, there’s no, there’s none of this power vacuum where your client feels like they need to jump in and start micromanaging you.

Doug: It sounds like, in many cases, you’re helping your clients get the magic that, you know, sort of the, their secret sauce out of their head, put it down in a way that’s scalable and teachable to other people and then make this pivot so that the clients listening to you rather than you being pulled around by the client. You’re driving your process.

Mandi: Yeah. And here’s the thing is, if your client is dragging you around, what’s happening is there’s an absence of leadership. That’s what’s happening. So yeah, it definitely is about pulling it out of your head, but it’s also bigger than that. It’s bigger than that because it’s about really identifying where you can do your very best work and eliminating a lot of it. Because if we don’t want to put, we can pull all sorts of stuff out of the CEO’s head but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be the most profitable direction that the company should go.

Doug: Great point. So you would argue, do less better.

Mandi: Right, do less better, but do the right things because

Doug: Yeah, do the right things.

Expanding and Delegating the Right Way

Mandi: What I mean by that, is that looking at where there’s demand in the market, where there’s painful problems that you can solve. Painful, multiple six and seven-figure problems that you can solve for clients. And then when you have these painful problems that you’re solving, then they’re willing to throw some money at it, right? And then now you have enough resources for you to do your best work.

And you have resources to hire your, hire the best kinds of people. You have resources to build out systems and to do all these great things that, you know, you do with your clients, Doug. But you have to have the resources to do that. And I think that’s where a lot of service-based companies especially fall on their face is that they want to let go, they want to put all these things in place, but they go about doing it the wrong way. And they don’t have enough profit built into the company. So no matter how much they’re squirreling around trying to like, work on these systems, it’s not going to work.

Doug: Right. So that goes back to that magic thing of get down to where you create the most value. Get in a position to double your fees, triple and quadruple them guarantee. Tell me a little more about that guarantee. What have you seen, how have you seen that practically work among your clients? Is it a back end guarantee? Like, we get to the outcome or you get your money back? Or what does that need to work?

Mandi: Yeah. That’s a great question. There’s so many different ways to go about doing it and I have a whole workshop that I teach on how to put together really strong guarantees that helps you be able to, the agency 4x fee guarantee workshop that I’ve put together. But I’ll just kind of give a few nuggets from it is that the most important

Doug: That’ll be great. That’s perfect. I mean, so what I was gonna say is if people are interested Mandi can tell you how to get ahold of her and her team at the end. So just hold your horses. But I want you guys to get nuggets from Mandi on what like what does this look like? So give us a few of those guaranteed nuggets that you’ve seen.

Mandi: And the only reason why I mentioned about that is that this is some guarantees are something that I think are taught very poorly. And that one of the worst things you can do is offer a really lousy guarantee. I’ll just give you an example of like, the worst possible one you could offer. I was talking to a guy at a booth at a conference, a popular marketing conference. And that was his agency. And I said, you know, like, something along the lines of like do you guys, have you guys ever thought about offering guarantees? And they’re like, you know, we don’t guarantee or we guarantee we do our very best. Like, what kind of bs guarantee is that?

Doug: That’s ridiculous.

Mandi: So you want to use a guarantee as a way to attract in ideal clients that are, people that it’s really for a shock and awe and say, Wow, you really can guarantee that? Wow, you really can guarantee 100% happiness and 5x ROI? You can guarantee that? And they’re like, wow, I don’t hear anybody say that. But it’s not to close a sale. You should never use a guarantee to close the sale because those are the worst type of clients because they’re the kind of clients that don’t really believe in themselves. And they’re looking for you to come save them.

So if they asked to if they ask a lot of questions about the guarantee and they’re like going over with a fine-tooth comb, that’s a good indication to asked them to dig a little deeper and say, you know, why are you asking? Why do you ask, you know, you get kind of curious about it, right? It could be, it could be a warning sign. So, but you use it as a way to, I mean, even if you don’t guarantee it, it’s that kind of thinking, though. It’s the kind of thinking for, like, if we were on the line, we could only get paid if after actually delivering the service. But we wanted to maximize the dollar amount that we could get from this, what would we do?

What would be and that has to be aligned with something the markets willing to pay for, of course, but of course, but there there there could be. ROI guarantees like I’ve given that the 5x ROI guarantee is one that we use, we use 100% happiness guarantee. That one we that one, I would encourage you to use it up to a certain point, because it can be very demotivating if you have like, say 100 like a year-long program with 100% happiness guarantee it can create this really weird type of dynamic. You can do pay after results.

I would not recommend that either. I would do, I would have more of a, I’d have some, there’s a lot of upside in getting service fees from performance though. And some of our clients do do that. I would look at it more as a way to pad you’re already existing fees instead of it being your main fees. But it can be really good for both sides of it. Because if your intentions and what you both want to get out of it are aligned, right? Then t’s going to be best for the client because when they’re making money, you’re making money and you’re that much more motivated.

Doug: And let’s say you did a 5x ROI or personal fee, personal pay on performance. You’re constantly reminding the client where you are. You’re reminding yourself where you are. So you’re going to make your fee so you don’t give back your fee and that sort of creates a virtuous cycle.

Mandi: Right. Well, and the other guarantee, it could be like we’re going to, it could be at some certain dollar amount. A guarantee that you’re going to be a dollar amount and you’ll work until they get that, or the money-back guarantee. But the thing is, is that if your clients actually just want the result, you choose the right type of clients, this really isn’t a risk because you just have a really good screening process. And I know that anybody who comes in our door, we don’t have a risk with because they’re lovely people that we enjoy working with and would never want to rip us off.

And we’re just there to help them really, to really support them and get them exactly what they need. But in order to do that, I think you kind of pointed on it, is that like there’s this tracking in place. There’s this, and that’s what we’re offering a guarantee, what it really does is it sets a very clear intention for where you’re going. And now there is, there’s a lot of tracking that happens and there are, there’s checks and balances in place to make sure that you’re actually hitting those marks and getting there.

Doug: Makes good sense. So when you look at the sort of world of consultants and agencies and all that you serve be able to talk about some common themes along the way. But if somebody is casually speaking to you and they haven’t, you know, really not at that stage yet or they’re not, they haven’t presented them to you, presented themselves to you as a prospect, but you want to share with them a little tip or a big nugget. Kind of like the number one business-building advice for a consultancy or agency. What’s your, what’s the one you start with? What’s your number one piece of advice?

Pile on the Value

Mandi: The number one piece of advice I give you is to add more value. Constantly be looking at how you can add more value to your clients, how you can add more value to your team. And, you know, how you add more value to your business too actually, is like making the business the business more valuable. When you do all that it adds more value. And that’s where true wealth is created.

True wealth is created by adding more value to the market and to the individuals within it. And when you do that you can charge more fees. You can be, it increases your earning power. The more value you add the greater your earning power per hour that you work. And when you are focusing on that, then it brings a level of sustainability to the company, and that the sustainability can then help you build scalability.

But always be willing to do what is not scalable first and sustainable in order for you to get to scalable. And I think too many service-based companies especially, they’re like, well, that’s not going to scale. We can’t do that. And no, it’s not going to scale. Let’s first start off doing what sustainable. What’s going to maximize your dollar amount per client, and then you can look at how do we scale this. How do we, that’s a lot easier equation to solve if you actually have money to solve it.

Doug: Right. If you really have added value the client will pay for.

Mandi: Right, right. And here’s the other thing, too. It’s like, well, I don’t want to sell my time for money. It’s just like, well, if someone comes and says, I’m going to give you $10,000, for one of your hours, are you going to sell it to them? I certainly would say yes. Yeah. Right? So it, the thing is, is it’s, like, it’s not about not selling time for money, because on some level, we kind of all are, but it’s about being able to increase your earning power. And then when you do that, that gives you the margin for you to actually hire other people to be doing the work for you.

Doug: Right, and then you get to that future spot of more time freedom.

Mandi: Exactly. But just the leverage alone though, that leverage alone will give you time freedom.

Doug: Well, that’s great. You gave us like a nugget and a half there. Thank you. That’s great. So tell our folks how they can find out more about you and more about Hands-Off CEO and, you know, what some first steps they might do if they’re, if they want to research with you?

Mandi: Sure. Well, if you go to handsoffceo.com/roadmap, you can download our ultimate roadmap to scaling your consulting agency. And what that will tell you is you can uncover three hidden barriers to creating more growth with less reliance on you as the CEO. And there’s lots of great nuggets in there about how to add more value and about how to improve your cash flow and just generally how to scale up your service-based company.

Doug: Terrific. Great having you on today. Really have shared value with us. And I appreciate that. And folks, check out Mandi’s offerings with handsoffceo.com. And Mandi, thank you very much. Look forward to talking to you again sometime.

Mandi: Thanks, Doug. It’s been my pleasure.