Do you ever feel stuck trading hours for dollars, dreaming of a business that runs without you constantly grinding? That was Deb Gabor, best selling author and branding expert before she created a business empire on her own terms. And in this episode, she reveals the exact framework she used. Deb’s built a multi-million dollar consultancy by rejecting the traditional hourly billing trap, proving there’s a better way for consultants to deliver lasting value.
In this episode, you’re going to learn:
- How to transition from trading hours for dollars to building a profitable consultancy
- The dangers of focusing on short-term revenue and its impact on brand identity
- The concept of “irrational loyalty” to create a business clients love
- A strategic branding methodology that emphasizes transformative value over hourly billing
- Key questions to ensure your team consistently meets and exceeds client expectations
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Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.
Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business.
So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.
In this episode, you’re going to learn the dangers of chasing short term revenue and how it can erode your core brand identity. You’ll discover the power of irrational loyalty and how to build a business clients rave about. And Deb shares the key questions to ask consistently to ensure your team is meeting and exceeding client expectations.
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Now, let’s get into it.
Deb, you live and breathe brand. You’ve written books about it. It’s what you advise and work with your clients on. I wanted to kind of hear from you a little bit about where things got started. How did you get into branding and when did you have a light bulb go off that, “Yes, this is what I want to build my career around. This is what I want to really establish my name as being known for.”
Well, I like to tell people the story that I sort of came into this world in a brandless existence. My family are all from Eastern Europe and I’m first generation born American. And people who came over from Eastern Europe who were both Holocaust survivors as well as survivors of the Hungarian Revolution – my family were very practical, down to earth people. You could probably interpret that as cheap, which meant that we had brand named nothing when I was growing up. And as a result, that sort of like stimulated this obsession with brands in me to the point, I think you heard me tell this story once, that when I got my driver’s license, the very first thing I did was I went and I picked up my best friend and we drove across town to go to McDonald’s. And it was the first time in my life, actually the first and last time, that McDonald’s hamburger had ever crossed my lips because I was fascinated by this idea that people were attracted to this through the brand.
So this fascination with branding, it started very early and all the way through what I studied when I was at university, graduate school, and my early jobs. And I worked in the technology industry, sort of in the first coming of the technology industry, specifically in B2B technology, large enterprise systems, carrier systems, things like that. Really, really unsexy categories. And I found that I could be more helpful to the folks that I worked with inside of those technology companies when I was able to help them permeate these deep emotional relationships with end customers in order to be able to sell things more effectively. So I would say, professionally, that was probably the birth of my interest in branding.
And then after working for a couple of years in big brand name, household name technology industries, I went on to the agency side of the business. And like a lot of other people who started their own consulting firms or boutique agencies, it was sort of like a manifest destiny. I had topped out in my career. I was reporting directly to the CEO of the last agency that I worked for. I was doing really, really good work, really to create value for her personally and for the owners of the company. And I was so passionate about what I was doing. I kind of became an accidental entrepreneur and left all of that, stole a couple of clients, went out, and then there was just a huge demand for what I was doing, the way that I was doing it as an independent consultant. Then the next thing I know, I’m hiring helpers. And then I needed operations people, I needed account people. And then all of a sudden I had a business. So I know from other consulting agency people that I’ve worked with and that I’ve known over the years that it’s a very similar story to a lot of people.
There’s a lot to unpack there, so I want to hit the rewind button a little bit. You mentioned you’re working with this agency, you’re working directly with the CEO, you see that you’re already at the top, you want to do more. What were you doing? What did you feel was missing from the current agency that you were working at? What did you feel like you could do differently that could add more value? What was that kind of advantage or opportunity that you identified?
So the agency that I was working at, its core was doing technology public relations, and media relations, which was not my area of expertise, and it definitely wasn’t my specialty. My specialty was really in the realm of strategy, like business strategy, things like funding strategy, positioning strategy, messaging strategy. And this firm, over the time that I worked there, had divided into a couple of different divisions that covered all of those different realms that technology companies could need. And we went through some very, very dark days in 2001, 2002. So 2001, we had September 11th, which was a real negative impact to all industries. And for some reason, the technology industry, in particular, went through a couple of massive rounds of layoffs. The company, instead of being in these five unique divisions that were providing strategy consulting and research and positioning and messaging and things like that, it went back to its core, which was being a technology PR firm. And then here I was, a pretty talented leader in the organization who had a lot of people reporting to me and when they folded all of the divisions back into the core, I was left leading a PR group, which, you know, I learned the business and it was meaningful, but I was looking ahead, and I said, “You know what? This category is probably not going to exist very much longer.”
When I started in that business, we were trying to get our clients front page of the business section, front page of the tech section, above the fold print media coverage in traditional media, so Wall Street Journal and publications like that. I was looking down the road, and I saw the influencer world changing in this industry, that people who were having influence over the direction of the technology industry, for customers who were making purchase decisions for media, for financial analysts, they were starting to pop up as, bloggers and people who were experts or thought leaders. And I thought, the whole influencer category is going to change. And I thought, I need to get myself out of here because I don’t want to be the agent of brokering relationships between companies and influencers. I want to work directly with companies in a way that is transformative to their business.
So when you decided to step out on your own, build your own business, what was the messaging that you used to go to the past clients you had worked with or those that you had kind of built relationships with? How do you convey that message in a way that you think really kind of piqued their interest and had them going, “Yeah. Okay. Deb, I’d like to have a conversation with you”? What do you think about what kind of that secret sauce was or that hook or that angle?
That’s probably best told through a story that actually comes from my work. So I know that you’re probably familiar with this book that I wrote, Branding Is Sex: Get Your Customers Laid and Sell the Hell out of Anything. Just a side note, everyone in my family is so proud that I wrote a business book that has the words ‘sex’ and ‘laid’ in the title, but that actually comes from my real experience. And that experience is sort of how I figured out what I was going to go to market with and what was unique and then how I was going to position and message that.
So, I worked with the very, very famous head of a B2B technology organization that was in a really unsexy technology category. And they were getting ready to launch a new server operating system. Again, a not very sexy kind of thing. And I was working directly with the CEO on thought leadership and executive platform stuff, and while we were rehearsing him to go out and talk in front of the media, analysts, valuable customers, key accounts for this global technology company, we kind of got into a little scrape, him and me. It was impossible for him to talk about this particular product and this whole suite of products in a way that wasn’t about speeds and feeds and bits and bytes and how many hops to a tier 1 network. And basically his refusal to step out of that normal kind of messaging to really establish how this product or this brand was going to make their customers heroes in their own stories, really came down to me having this important face to face with him. So we’re working on his speeches, he likes to ad lib, he’s a little bit obtuse, he comes from a very analytical engineering background, but things were coming across flat, undifferentiated, not unique. And I looked him in the eye and I said, “At the end of the day, how does this server operating system get that IT leader laid?” And it was something that just sort of popped out of my mouth. This is a legendary story from my youthful beginnings. He rolled back in his chair and he was like, “Oh, I totally know.” And then he unfolded this incredible story about the emotional connections that they were able to make with this IT leader that involved him being the hero in his own story.
And I had a big “Aha!” And I thought at that moment, no one is talking to tech leaders this way. No one is really peeling back the layers of the onion to get deep into the gooey core of the values alignment that comes from people doing business with the brands they love. This is something that had been going on in consumer advertising and marketing and branding pretty much since time immemorial, getting beyond sort of basic functional and proximal emotional benefits. But I had a unique way of getting to the core, and I found for that client and then subsequent clients, that that ended up being something that was transformative to their businesses. That was kind of the genesis of the whole thing.
So when I went to market, I was able to have these really authentic, in depth conversations with the leaders of technology organizations to understand, “What are your challenges in the sales and marketing process? Where are you finding it difficult to connect with customers? What’s going on in your business that keeps you awake at night with regard to how you’re spending your marketing dollars or how you’re enabling your salespeople to make these sales?” And I was uncovering all of this pain that could be solved by branding. I mean, it really came from an argument I was having with a client and just a frustration and this big “Aha!” that I had that we need to make this not about functional benefits. We need to make storytelling, the same kind of storytelling that’s been happening in the consumer world since the beginning of time, since the beginning of consumerism. We need to make that come to life in the technology industry in these really, really unsexy categories and enable people to want to take a role in the hay. That’s really where it came from.
I want to go deeper into everything you just talked about and how it applies to consultants and how consultants can benefit from that. But before we do that, you mentioned, or at least it sounds like, things moved pretty quickly from the time that you decide to go to market and you start to get some traction, all that good stuff. Talk to me about risk. How are you feeling in those times when there’s demand for your services and for your expertise, you need to start bringing people on to be able to service clients and deliver for clients – what was going through your mind? How did you actually go about thinking to scale, to grow this business in a way that obviously you’re taking risk on, but not taking on too much risk? What did that look like for you?
So when I first started out, I never had any intention of building a company. I was making so much money as a consultant, I could charge so much for the engagements that I was doing. At first I was charging by the hour and I was charging a ridiculous amount of money, but I was selling time. And a lot of consultants, when they first start out, they get caught in this trap, and I was definitely caught in that trap. I was selling time. And sometimes, these weren’t 2003 dollars. Sometimes I was selling that time for US$350 to US$500 per hour. And so you can imagine, I was really enjoying the cash rolling in, but I was working every minute of every day. Plus, I had been recently divorced, had a small kid at home without an involved father, traveling all the time, and it was just not a satisfactory kind of thing. So when you talk about risk, anytime that you’re selling time, the minute that you stop spending time, your income goes down. So that was number one.
So I had this realization, having managed very, very large organizations in the previous companies that I worked for, I learned a lot from my experience of being able to scale offerings within other people’s companies that I could apply to my own learning. And one of the first things that I did when I was selling time, when there were projects that exceeded the amount of time I was selling, I brought in other people and sold their time and marked it up. Again, there’s no scale there. There just wasn’t scale there. And so from about 2003 to 2007, I was kind of limping along in that way, really using 1099 resources. They had no allegiance to me. I was a source of work and business for them. There wasn’t a guarantee that we had values alignment among ourselves, nor were they on board with me, with my vision.
And so I had this huge wake up call as a strategic branding professional. I was like, “What is this brand about that I’m actually creating?” Because I woke up, smelled the dog food and it was like, “Inevitably, I’m creating a company here. If I’m going to create the best company that I can, I need to really dig in and understand what it is about. What do I want? How can I serve the world in a unique way? And then how can I create lather, rinse, repeat, scalable processes and people that can do that?” So that’s really about 2007 is where this idea of the irrational loyalty methodology was born. Methodology is really, really important to my business. Not just how we do the work, but why we do the work, and creating something that’s something of a system that’s locked down, protected IP that we own, that no one else can imitate. So brand strategy agencies, brand strategy consultants, they’re a dime a dozen. You can’t swing a cat around your head and not hit 150 other people, even in the market that I live in right now, that do exactly what I do. But it was very, very important for me to really figure out why people should buy these services from us.
So the methodology was really, really important to that. And that methodology being something that I could train people on so that they could scale the consulting and deliver on the same promises I could, kind of using the background algorithm, if you will, to deliver answers. But then the methodology extends to my mission, vision, values, purpose, my goals, my big hairy audacious goal, all of that. So then from about 2007 to about 2015 or so, it really was doubling down on those things that would take me out of the charging for time aspect of the business and be able to flip the script on consulting, so that instead of selling hours, I could sell something that was based on a deliverable or a result, and be sure that I had human beings who were aligned with the way that we do things, aligned with our values, aligned with how we’re productive and engaged with clients so they could deliver on that promise. That created a much more profitable and scalable business. It also created a protective, competitive moat around us. And then from there, I did things. I’ve written three best selling books that are based on this methodology. It’s out there in the world. We use it with all of our clients. We’ve done a lot of thought leadership on it. Every time I do an interview about it, I’m just hammering on this same idea so that it’s become this acknowledged thing that, by the way, should I go away from this business, this irrational loyalty methodology and sort of delivery system is something that lives on well beyond me. So it created a world where I could do things like be at my kid’s soccer games and school plays, and I could travel for pleasure and do volunteer work and really be as a CEO in the role of coach-mentor instead of manager.
Makes a lot of sense. So, Deb, let me ask you, going back a little bit, you talked about this progression from charging high hourly fees to then the arbitrage or leverage of charging out 1099s and you making the margin between that. So kind of a classic firm model, even though they weren’t full time employees, they were subcontractors, to this wake up call one day of “You know what? there’s got to be a better way. What does my brand actually stand for? How do I maybe better define my brand? And then what adjustments or changes do I need to make in order to make sure that I’m heading in the right direction?” When you were kind of analyzing or thinking through what you want the brand to stand for, changes that you might need to be making, let’s say from 1099s to more full time people, from the old model to the new model, at that point, what did you feel could go wrong? What was the hesitation or the perceived risks? Because I think oftentimes when people look at making big changes in their model, in their pricing structure, in maybe calling out a specific type of ideal client, being very intentional rather than being broad, there’s often fear attached to that because you need to say ‘no’ to some things, you need to push away so that you can get closer to what you ultimately want. What was that for you?
That’s my whole business. That’s what I do. Helping other companies think through that. And to some extent, as a consultant in that category, I was a little bit like the cobbler’s unshod children, right? So we had to take a real close look at who is our ideal customer, our archetypal ideal customer, and aim ourselves directly at that. And a couple things that we learned that were somewhat counterintuitive was that our ideal customer was not a marketing doer. Our ideal customer really was a senior leader who was at a critical point. The business is in growth mode and we work almost exclusively with businesses that have a grow or die mindset. Our ideal client is the marketing leader, and the average tenure for these people is about 18 months in their role. So they’re in there, be brief, be brilliant, be done. They’re innovative, they’re recognized by the industry. They don’t want to be bothered with the sausage making details of the process. They’re extremely results oriented. They want to see that their partner has skin in the game. And what they need from a branding and marketing partner is not putting trains on tracks and making sure that they’re running on time. What they need is someone who is going to push them to do the very best they can. Well, not just the very best they can, but whatever it takes in order to lay new tracks. So it’s a different kind of relationship and we put a velvet rope around that.
I love, in the new business process, to tell people like, “I suspect we’re not going to be a very good fit. You know why? Because if you don’t have the stomach for the hard work that we do, our number two core value on our list of core values is we do hard things like the work of branding is hard. But I’ve never been through a strategy engagement that didn’t result in someone from the leadership team being misaligned and sometimes leaving the leadership team or going to a new project or something like that. If you don’t have the stomach for that, we’re not the right fit.” So the process of figuring that out was doing a lot of things that were counterintuitive to the rest of the industry. So most people get their branding services from either design focused firms like creative firms, and they start with a creative first approach or they go to traditional advertising agencies. We do something that’s very, very unique, which is research and strategy led branding. And we start with strategic branding first and that’s counterintuitive. But then the way that we charge for the services was also counterintuitive.
So if you go to any other kind of firm in this category, they charge you by the hour. They set up a retainer based relationship and you work down those retainers and then you bill by the hour once you have run out of hours. I said, we have a unique strategy led process where we’re charging you for the value of the deliverable we create for you and its transformative power for your business. And so going to market with that, it helped us weed out a lot of clients because I was able to deposition the billing by the hour model. I could say, “You know what? Your past experiences with marketing partners have probably been hourly billings or retainer based relationships. In my experience, having run businesses that did that, it doesn’t drive the appropriate attitude or behavior on either side of the relationship. We have skin in the game and we are going to charge you x number of dollars, a flat fee. It doesn’t matter how many hours we spend on it or how few hours we spend on it. What you’re paying for at the end of the day is the transformative value of the end product.” There were some clients who were like, “Nope, that’s not for me.” And if they said, “That’s not for me,” then I say, “That’s not for us.” I have never billed by the hour.
I’m taking over a client for another consultant right now, and she’s been billing by the hour. I can’t even get my head around an hourly contract. I don’t even know what that looks like. Literally, for the entirety of the 21 years that I’ve been building this business, we have done everything on a flat fee basis. Every project has a beginning, a middle, an end, deliverables, results, and that is what our clients are paying for. I will tell you, it’s made the business profitable. It’s made the business difficult to manage because in many cases, I don’t have sources of recurring revenue. So it makes it a little bit unpredictable, and to some extent, I’m beholden to where’s the next project coming from. But we’ve been really fortunate to enjoy a lot of very, very long term relationships with clients, some of them going back to 2004. One of them that I’m thinking of, tens of millions of dollars worth of projects for this client. And we still do several million dollars a year with them on an individual project basis. So it’s counterintuitive to the industry, and it was unique. And at first I was like, “All right. I’m really shooting myself in the foot because I need to keep all these people busy and bill them by the hour.” And taking the leap to be like, “Nope, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to do this on a project basis because it delivers unique value to the kinds of clients we want to work with.” That was a big risk.
Let me ask you about marketing. We’ve talked about messaging, about how you’ve gone to the market in a way that is different from other firms that some people might consider to be in a similar kind of category. I know you do a lot of speaking because that’s how you and I met. We were both speaking at an event. Is that the number one source of new clients for you, or is there something else that you do from a marketing lead generation perspective that you feel works really well for your business today?
Well, my business has grown almost exclusively through referral, which I think is very common in this world. The other thing that has happened is, I told you that the average CMO tenure at big technology companies is about 18 months, I have several clients, several ideal clients, that have gone company to company to company over the last 20 years and have taken us with them, and are so irrationally loyal to us that they negotiate into their employment contracts that they won’t take the job unless they can hire us as a partner to them. So that’s really great, and that’s a form of referral there, that keeps businesses really small. And I will tell you, I’ll be very honest with you, I have done everything from hiring a business development person, like a VP of business development who was supposed to go out there and make those relationships and glad hand and get us into RFPs and all that kind of stuff. That was a fail. I have hired outside lead gen firms to help bring in inbound leads, most of which were “I just need a” kinds of clients, and we don’t work with “I just need a” kinds of clients. And so it was very difficult to use an outside firm to qualify those leads. We’ve also done quite a bit of digital marketing. I believe the kinds of services that we sell, the sales cycle, and the level of consultation that has to take place over that amount of time, lead gen doesn’t really speed up the process. Speaking fills the top of the funnel with new people, gets people into our world, people who read my books, people who see me and, “Yep”, people who download my things. All of those things get people into the top of the funnel, and we can do what we can to nurture them through that process.
But I will tell you, the one and only thing that truly works is establishing relationships in which my team and I can add value to existing clients and then network through those clients. I think it keeps consulting businesses small, and if there’s someone out there who has found a method for marketing and business development that’s better or different than that, I want to know that. But I have tried all the things. The sales cycle is long. My engagements are huge. What people pay to do a brand strategy engagement with us, it starts at $75,000 and can go up to well over half a million dollars in some cases. So if you’ve got something that you can share with me– we do all the things and we have to be in all of the places all of the time, because the path from awareness to purchase is not linear, so we have to do all the things all the time. But I can say that there’s no one single magic silver bullet for that.
Can you share with me one mistake that you’ve made recently?
Just one?
I know, right? It’s like asking an entrepreneur, “Have you had any challenges?” What I’m really looking for, Deb, is something that was a learning experience for you. And was there a change to your pricing? Was there a shift in the model? Was there an engagement with a client? Something that you feel, “Hey, we made a mistake here, but we really learned from it. And others are likely to run into something similar, and if they know what I know now, they could maybe avoid that mistake or just turn it into an advantage for them.”
Yeah, I’m still recovering from what I would consider to be the biggest mistake of my career. That was, during the pandemic, a lot of organizations that we had been working with on strategy things, they kind of put a hold on those things because we just didn’t know what was happening. We didn’t know up from down, we didn’t know right from left. And our clients were becoming really reactionary, and as a result, we became really reactionary. And what clients were asking us was, can we shift what we’re doing to focus more on blocking and tackling digital marketing, sales enablement, support for us to engage with our customers in a value add kind of way at a time when we really can’t be face to face with them. And there are a lot of questions about whether or not our business and their business are going to sustain. So we have clients coming to us to ask us, can you take these things and activate them in market? Basically, they were asking us, can you do digital marketing for us?
And so here’s where the mistake came. The answer was, “Absolutely, yes.” We wanted to capture as much of their budget as we possibly could. And during this time of turbulence, we didn’t know what was going to happen with our business. We didn’t know up from down either. And I was just like, I kind of was making the money grab. I was like, “We need to bond ourselves to these clients. We need to figure out how we can stick with them during this digital time. They say they want digital marketing, therefore we’re going to deliver digital marketing.” So I hired a big team. I hired a big team of digital marketers. I brought all creative in-house. I brought copywriting in-house. I went out and established some partnerships with some technical partners to make these things happen, basically created all of this infrastructure to transform into what our clients said they wanted. We sucked at it. We were terrible at it. It was not core to who we are, where our magic was. I mean, we are magical effing unicorns in the world of strategy and positioning and strategic branding. We are not magical unicorns in a very commoditized category.
Digital marketing is a very commoditized category. And one of my goals as a business has always been to transform the love-hate relationship that people have with their marketing partners to a love-love relationship. And I was creating hate-hate. We hated the clients, the clients hated us. I wasn’t working directly in the business all the time. And during the pandemic, my speaking platform went away. The book that I was writing at the time kind of just didn’t have any meaning in that moment. I had time, I came back to work. And when I came back to work, here’s what I found immediately – the very first thing I had to do was try to salvage three major client relationships where these clients were pissed. They were just absolutely pissed. And I was playing account manager, trying to show them the love-love. In the end, we don’t work with any of those clients anymore. I ruined those relationships. And here’s where the mistake was. We went off of our core. We strayed from our core DNA as an organization. We strayed from my mission, my vision, my values, my goals for what I want this company to do, our meaning. And it was the single biggest mistake I ever made. And so it was fun while the business got really, really big. And 2020 was my most profitable year in business ever. Fast forward to the end of 2021, 2022, I spent most of 2023 digging myself out of a hole that we had created by delivering shitty service and being undifferentiated and being not unique.
That’s a decision that–I didn’t make that decision by myself. I have a leadership team, and we make decisions together, and I didn’t go blindly into that. But that is something. Most of 2023 was me putting back my business to the business model that was the most profitable and the most value add to clients. I’m happy to say we’re very, very profitable again now, and people are having fun, and we’re liking what we’re doing, and our clients are liking it. But that was a massive mistake. Recalling advice people had given me that was like, “Fish where the fish are.” I went to where the fish were, and that took me off the core.
So, Deb, let me ask you, knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently or what you think you should have done differently? Because what I’m hearing you say is – and it wasn’t clearly just your firm, this was impacting so many different people in all industries all around the world – you are in a position where you’re taking on opportunities, trying to get the cash flow for the business to survive so it came from potentially the right intentions. But knowing what you know now that it did kind of take you astray, it caused lots of issues, what do you think you should have done differently in that situation?
What I should have done differently in that situation is really started with our core DNA, just done an investigation of that, and really been clear on what we are about, what can we deliver, what’s the relationship we have with these clients, and then thinking through what are their struggles going to be. And how, through the lens of our core DNA and our values and our mission and our purpose and all of that, how can we serve them in our own unique way, not in the way that someone else can. There were a lot of things that we could have been doing that were not digital marketing, that would have been very much in line with what is core to us.
And so, at the time, I was working with a strategic coach who coached our whole leadership team, and I had been working with him for years and years before that. And we recalled this exercise that was something that came out of one of Jim Collins’ books called ‘The Stockdale Paradox’. And The Stockdale Paradox basically said, “In the face of adversity, the people who fare the best are the ones that are realistic and clear, but also optimistic. They face the brutal facts of their own reality and remain optimistic.” And he and I together created this exercise where we went through and we thought about, what are the things that our clients are going through? What are their brutal facts? We called it ‘The Brutal Facts Exercise’. What are their brutal facts? What are our brutal facts? And how do we, through the lens of our core values and our core DNA and our uniqueness, how can we help them manage through their own brutal facts while addressing ours? And we did that once, and we probably should have revisited that on at least a quarterly basis during that time. And I think what I would do differently is I would question a lot more things a lot more frequently.
Give an example of when you say ‘question’, what would you question?
I probably would have monitored customer satisfaction on a more regular basis. By the time I dipped back in and I was dealing with these three clients who were defecting, it was too late. It was way, way too late. I know the signs of when clients are restless and whatever. And when I was working on my own client work, I was in frequent touch with those clients and had a good understanding of, “How things are going. What’s going well? What do we need to stop? What do we need to start? What should we continue?” All that kind of stuff. My team wasn’t doing a good job because they didn’t have an expertise in digital marketing. So the digital marketers were just running off doing digital marketing and we weren’t monitoring. And so when I say, I would have asked more questions more of the time, I would have checked in a little bit more, I just didn’t know enough about that business to know if it was going well or it wasn’t.
This is the challenge for any CEO in a sort of human capital, people driven business. We don’t want to be in the business all the time. I don’t want to be the bottleneck in delivering client service. I definitely don’t want to be the bottleneck. That’s not good for anybody. That’s bad for the leadership team. We don’t need a hero led business. We need a team led business, all that kind of stuff. So to some extent, I backed off. I’m like, “Okay, you guys do this. I’m going to go skiing every day.” And that’s literally what I did. And then come summertime, I have clients calling me. They’re like, “Hey, Deb-” They’ve disintermediated their account managers. They’ve gone past group account directors. They’ve gone to the vice president and got no relief. And they’re calling me at home or on my mobile phone on weekends, like, “Hey, we have a personal relationship. I think you should know what’s going on with your team.” There is nothing worse than being caught with your pants down. So that’s what I mean. I mean, I hope that this is the kind of sharing you’re looking for.
I appreciate you being so open. And I think there’s a lesson inside that that likely everyone is already probably resonating with, or this will help them to prepare and take preemptive action so that they hopefully don’t have to find themselves in that kind of situation.
Don’t do what I did!
Yeah. Listen, I have had similar experiences as well over the years, and the main thing is being able to find the learning from it and find how to improve so that going forward you become stronger.
But I want to thank you, Deb, for coming on. And I know we’ve just literally scratched just one little corner of the surface today and looking forward to spending more time together and having you share more with our community. But for now, where should people go to learn more about you and about your company and your books and everything else that you have out there?
I think the best way is to go to my personal website, which is Deb Gabor. And from there you can download things, you can look at the books that I’ve written, you can look at videos. There’s lots of resources available. I think that’s the best way to get in touch with me. You can submit a request. I think that’s the best way to get in touch with me. Also, I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, that’s my social channel of choice for business communication. I’m on Instagram, but it’s mostly pictures of my cats and skiing and food and kids and stuff like that. But yeah, Deb Gabor or find me on Deb Gabor LinkedIn.
There you go.
Yeah. Thank you so much for asking about that. I would love people– If they’re interested in talking about branding, interested about talking about strategy, I’ll talk to anybody. You saw this when we spoke at that event together where I said, “Hey, call me, reach out to me. Just tell me where we met.” I’ll talk to anybody about their brand because I’m on a million brand mission and my company is part of that. And the company is working on creating more than a billion dollars worth of increased brand value for the organizations that we work with. So it’s all tied together.
All right. We will link all that up in the show notes at consultingsuccess.com. Deb, thank you again so much for coming on.
Well, thank you, Michael. It was great to see you.
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