The 3 pillars of revenue for any successful solo consulting business

I would like to talk about the three pillars of revenue that every consultancy or solo  consultancy should have. 

As you know, with consulting sometimes it can be feast or famine and you have to be able to ride out those highs and lows between your paying client work.

I would like to explain what has worked in my consultancy and get you thinking about the various options that might work and help with yours. 

The first pillar of revenue, (and I like to work in threes similar to a three-legged stool) which is your consulting practice or your consulting services. 

​This is your primary area of expertise or your core services for your clients. Project work and those kinds of things. 

Every consultant knows and does this but that's the problem, most consultants only focus on their consulting practice and don't augment their consultancy with the other two revenue pillars as I have done with my consultancy which can help you ride out those highs and lows. 

The second pillar of revenue is having a comprehensive online resources and guides section on your webpage. This is a mixture of paid and free resources wrapped around your niche or area of expertise. 

One of the first things I did when I went out on my own was create a downloadable guidebook or eBook. It wasn't even original content. I just curated a bunch of valuable content that helped those in my niche.

I charged $29.99 for it and In my first year I generated somewhere around $29,000 just on that ebook. This is a great tool if you have a very specific niche or process to your consulting that you can provide or help others even if it's not proprietary content.  

​The Consultants Marketing Growth Cycle

Even if your curating a lot of great content or information, you can put that information into a great-looking document and either sell it or give it away for free as part of your online resources and guides.

​Again, this is just another source of revenue or piece of an over strategy that helps you ride out those highs and lows.

The other thing you can have are checklists. Checklist are great for things that are industry specific to your niche and to your consultancy, so don't underestimate the power of those things as a revenue supplement and strategy to your ongoing consulting and client work. 

The third pillar of revenue and probably equally as powerful as doing your client work is having a comprehensive training and education program. I've found this to be a wide world of great opportunities, and is a big part of my consultancy.

Now you can certainly have online training and so forth as part of your online resources and guides mentioned above in pillar two but I am specifically talking about more live training, seminars, workshops, academies, education classes and things like that. 

I have found that having a mixture of free and paid offerings works well. Look for industry conferences, annual business meetings and offer a one or two-hour training or speaking session on your topic or area of expertise.

Many times you can speak for free and then provide high-paid or paid workshops where you take a deeper dive, train and educate people in those things.

This is what I'm doing with my workshops and seminars currently in providing teaching and education on how to start and scale your own consulting business. 

I've done four-day comprehensive academies where we've had up to 50 people coming and paying good money and getting lots of value. Most if not all of the people that come have stated that they get more value than what they put out for it and is why we sell out consistently year after year and have had great success with that. 

 So let’s recap the three pillars of revenue that every solo consultancy needs:

1. First your consulting and client work that you provide, project-based and so forth. 
   
   
2. The second one is having a comprehensive online resources and guides section, a mixture of free and paid.
   
   
3. Third one is your training and education programs where you're doing in-house or in-person training, seminars, education in your niche that augments your consulting client work.  

So that's my tip for you for this week the three pillars of revenue every solo consultancy needs to have. I hope you found that helpful and I'd love to connect with you at www.paulklein.net.

You may also be interested in my services agreement or contract template that you can download for free called “The One Page Consulting Agreement” You can use it as a template to develop your own. 

I've used this template to get some of my biggest clients like Cracker Barrel, Taco Bell, Slack and many other great brands that I have worked with over the years. You are welcome to download it for free at www.paulklein.net. 

I would love to connect with you and I am on all the usual social channels, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so forth. I'd love to hear more from you and connect with you. 

So what new pillars of revenue are you going to add to your consultancy?