[Podcast] How to Become a Brand Consultant

In this episode, we dive into the world of brand consulting, what it is, and how it differs from other roles in the branding industry.

We discuss the key qualities that make a successful brand consultant, including confidence, communication and listening skills, a growth mindset, and strong facilitation abilities.

Next, we will each share our own background and experiences in the branding industry, including how we got started and how we have developed our skills and knowledge.

We also share our unique perspectives on the process of working with clients and how we stay current on industry trends and developments.

Join us as we explore the ever-expanding field of brand consulting and gain insights for your own journey!

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Hello, and welcome back to JUST Branding. This is season four. I don’t know how we’re in season four already.

How have we done that?

Do not know. But yes, it’s Jacob Cass. It’s Matt Davies.

We are going to teach you how to become a brand consultant today. So this is a, we’re not doing an interview this time. It’s us, just us this time, like season one.

We are going to talk about brand consulting 101, how to become a brand consultant, some top tips. We’ll share our background, what skills you need to develop, what knowledge you need, our process, how to stay current in the industry and much more. So we’re going to see how much we can cover today.

It’s quite a bit, but welcome back, Matt.

Welcome back to you too, and welcome to all our listeners. I think season four is going to be amazing. So just so folks appreciate, don’t worry.

Me and Jacob, we’ve got a couple of sessions planned where we’re talking, so we want to mix it up. We did some of this in season one, and actually some of those episodes were some of the most downloaded ones, which is a quite a shock to me, but we are going to go back to interviews. We’ve got some amazing folks lined up for this season, but for now, we thought, let’s go back 101, back to basics, let you listeners hear how we’re getting on in our careers, and also share some of the tip lists and methods and ideas for you, as you know, we love to do for you, our loyal listeners.

So I want to say welcome to you, listener. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we hope we add some value to you, not only in this episode, but throughout season four.

Thank you, Matt. So let’s start at the top. Brand consultant, what is a brand consultant?

What do they do? Now, there’s a lot of titles out there, so I’m interested to hear your opinion, Matt.

Yeah, I think it’s an interesting question. We like to kick off with definitions, don’t we? So my definition of a consultant is somebody paid to improve a client’s condition in some way, right?

So that’s quite a vague answer, right? Because obviously you only get paid to improve the conditions of somebody or of a customer. But what is a consultant though?

I would say there’s a couple of things to perhaps add in here. I think both you and I, Jacob, and a lot of our listeners have come from a kind of a design or a marketing background. We’re used to executing on stuff, like creating visuals if you’re in graphic design, creating logos, creating identities, creating assets.

If you’re in marketing, you’re used to kind of pushing those out through various channels and managing social media and so on. And I would kind of call those things like execution, okay? And I think a lot of people are realizing, frankly, just being upfront, that execution is slowly becoming commoditized and has been for a number of years.

At least I saw this, you know, some years ago, and it got me-

And now AIs are here.

Now AIs are here. I mean, wow. I mean, the kind of the growth of the AI stuff is scary.

And the fact that you can put in, you know, a few prompts and suddenly, boosh, you’ve got blog posts and content written. And, you know, it’s really scary. But the one thing I think AI cannot do, and, you know, commoditized execution cannot do is that human element, right?

That kind of personable advice, really getting to know a business, understanding perhaps a leader within that business, and then offering valuable thoughts and advice. So that’s one thing it can’t do. And the other thing I think AI cannot do is something that I always bang on about, which is alignment, which is the big thing that I talk about.

So when we get a lot of people together in a business, the problem that they have is all kind of getting excited about one core thing and focusing. And what they try and do is they all, you know, with the best of intent, go in lots of different directions. So you have to keep as a leader, bringing people back together and pushing them forward.

Now, brand helps that happen. If you’ve got a strong brand strategy, if you know, you know, who you are here to serve, how to show up, what the big idea is, how you can kind of push everybody forward and align them in that direction, then I think that’s a really strong thing. So going back to the original question, I would say, you know, a brand consultant, in effect is kind of like a business consultant, but rather than getting down into a very kind of a siloed area of the business, even such as marketing, I think the objective of the brand consultant is to try and keep that broad picture across all the different functions of a business.

And really, at least in my experience, help the leadership team to forge forward with something really purposeful. So brand consultant helps businesses by leveraging their brands effectively, I would say. What are your thoughts?

How would you…

You’re on a roll here, Matt.

I know, I try my best.

You are. So those titles, right? So brand consultant, how do you think that differs to other titles like brand designer or strategist or like a marketing director?

Oh, now this is a big one, right? Because with my definition, those labels could form part of the offering of a brand consultant, right? So I know we’re going to touch on our own sort of stories perhaps a little bit later, but for me, you’ve got to execute on a strategy.

You can’t just have some rough ideas in terms of the business. The business can take those ideas and execute on its own, but a consultant might stick around and help the business actually get some of those things to market or get them out in the real world. The consultant might not be doing the execution, but the consultant might be advising and kind of almost bringing in connections and people from their network or wherever it might be to help that business solve the problems that are before it.

So for me, the labels of a strategist, for example, I’d say, well, I’m a strategist, but I’m also a consultant, right? These are not conflicting terms. It’s not like you have to sit in a little box and just do the same thing.

I’m glad you said that.

Yeah. Well, that’s how I feel about it. And I think like a strategist is somebody who isn’t executing, who’s trying to map the journey ahead into the unknown with obviously the consensus of the leadership team of the business and pushing that brand forward, always listening to the voice of the customer and how customers are kind of interacting with the business.

And the other kind of element to this, and I’ll just throw this into the mix, is a massive area that I think businesses struggle with is their culture. And brand, of course, links heavily into culture. So you can play in a lot of different areas as a consultant in brand, because the brand basically is the glue that sticks all of that stuff together, or at least it should, and makes sense of it all.

And it gets you the ability to sit at the top table to really help businesses, not just create a veneer, and a wallpaper, and a look and feel, but also actually lean and live into that. And I think that’s the big challenge. How can you help brands actually execute and live into that brand and create those experiences that they claim that they should be creating for customers?

So it’s not just something they say, it’s actually something that’s experienced.

Absolutely. I see it as the higher level thinking to simplify it. It’s the understanding the problem, diagnosing the problem, and to do that, you have to really listen to the leaders to properly consult, to give them the right answers, right?

What do they actually need to achieve their goals? So in a simplified version, that’s how I see what a consultant does. And then you can pull in other people like strategists or designers or marketing directors, depending on what is required.

Perfect answer. And I think you’re right. So sometimes you might step into that role if that’s in your wheel park, or other times, as you say, you might bring someone else in.

And that’s all part of adding value to the client and improving their situation. So yeah, I think you’ve actually got that spot on there. And I think the other thing to maybe mention at the outset is the beauty of playing in this space is that, and this is probably gonna sound a bit bizarre, but I’m gonna say it anyway, you don’t always have to have all the answers, I think, as a consultant.

I think that’s something that’s worth putting out there. What you’ve gotta have is the skillset, the energy, the personality, and the reputation to help a client improve their situation. You can have some various skillsets around that, but what you’re really there to do is, as an outsider, come into the business from looking at it from a brand perspective.

So from, you know, why should somebody buy from this company? You know, where are they going? Where’s the innovation here?

What’s the big idea behind what they’re trying to achieve? What are the problems, to your point, Jacob, that this leadership team is struggling with? And how can we improve the situation?

Now, at the outset, you might not know what the answers to that are. You might not even know what all the problems are. And I think that’s the beauty of it.

I think one, my background is in agency, running agencies. And one of the problems I think agencies have, just in terms of the way that sometimes they set themselves up is that they have this neat little process, which goes from step one, two, three, and four. And at the end, you’ve got all these deliverables.

And really the client kind of comes to buy the deliverables. The client wants the website or the brochures or the look and feel. But as we all know, when you actually step into a project like that, the truth is, is stuff comes out of the woodwork, particularly when you start doing strategy, because suddenly you find some big challenge or a big hole in the customer experience or the reviews on TrustPilot are not actually, you know, reflective of the perception of what the company is actually thinking or whatever it might be.

And maybe there’s some competitor who’s actually much more powerful in the marketplace than anyone imagined. Now, whatever the situation is, those things come along. And if you’ve already boxed yourself into a kind of a waterfall process, where at the end you have to deliver on these number of things, otherwise it’s considered a failure, what that means is everybody’s focus is on the execution.

And that is unhealthy. I think where the consultant really leverages their power is that they don’t have to sell execution. What they sell is the thinking, is the brain.

So I like to borrow something from the consultant’s consultant who I actually was privileged enough to train with last year, a guy called Alan Weiss. And if you’ve heard us talk about this, you’ll know he’s been on the show in last season and we’ve pushed his book, Million Dollar Consulting a few times. But what I find is he says, look, a consultant is a brain, not a pair of hands.

So if you’re hired to be a pair of hands, if you’re hired to execute, there’s nothing wrong with that, but that isn’t really what a consultant does. The consultant is there to be the thinking and the brain, to be able to give advice and ideas and inspiration and structure the strategy going forward, not a pair of hands to actually execute. Now, some people, and I’d like to ask you about this, Jacob, some people can bridge both.

And I did for a number of years. And then as time went on, I’ve kind of leveraged completely into the strategy space. Some people don’t want to let go of obviously the creative element and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So it’s just, but it’s about being aware of where you play. And I would suggest the value that you bring, because I think there’s perhaps more value in becoming a brain than a pair of hands, particularly when we see things like AI coming along the scene. What do you think, Jacob, what’s your sort of take on that?

That balance is tricky, right? When you’re being paid to do the high level thinking, but then you’re also selling your deliverables, there’s a tricky line there. So finding your balance is definitely going to be key for that.

But there was some things you’re dancing around there about skills or knowledge that we need to have as a brand consultant. I’d love to pick your brain on what you think makes a good brand consultant. Because for me, it’s like a wide depth of skills and a deep depth of skills in terms of knowing different areas, right?

Marketing, design, business, strategy, vision, and bringing that together to help advise. And just to come back to my point about selling deliverables, you may not be able to do all of those elements, right? You may be a brand designer and you deliver logos and identities and so forth.

However, you could also do the strategy part as well. So it just really depends on what you’re offering, I guess is my point. But the skills, let me go back to that.

What do you think makes a great brand consultant? What skills and knowledge?

I think a number of kind of things. I think you’re right. It’s not like you’re kind of in a box, right?

So first of all, you’ve got to be comfortable being slightly uncomfortable, right? I think that there’s a confidence that comes in this space because not every process, not every method that you’ve ever used will always work in every single business. So there’s always moving parts.

So you’ve got to be kind of comfortable in that space. And I think as designers, we kind of are, right? We’re used to stepping into the unknown because a designer usually starts where they are today, looks at a brief and thinks about the better future, the better tomorrow.

And so we’re used to kind of thinking, well, how do we get there? And that’s the beauty of design. It’s kind of about trying to solve the problems en route sometimes to the end solution, working, testing and learning, failing fast and all that stuff.

But you’re doing the same thing, but hopefully in a derisk, trying to de-risk yourself, but doing it with alongside of business. So that’s, I kind of say I’m a kind of business designer.

I like what you said there. It’s like a few things, like you said confidence, but the unknown. So it’s like having confidence in the unknown, right?

Like trying to solve the puzzle, putting all those pieces together.

Having the belief that you will get there with the client, I think is very, very important to kind of, yeah, just being, yeah, being slightly uncomfortable. So that’s kind of the first sort of, that’s a mindset thing, I think. I think the other thing that you need to be good at is have great communication skills and listening skills.

So they’re two different skills, really, I guess. One is listening very carefully, but then the ability to summarize, like you said at the start, Jacob, simplify the complexity, which again, as designers, a lot of designers are used to doing that, used to taking complexity, all the 50 messages that the marketing team want to put out there and working with them to slim that down into something super slick and powerful. Copywriters are used to doing that all the time.

So these are transferable skills from many other places. Simplification, listening, simplifying and communicating. They’re big skills.

Yeah, simplification. I love that. And that’s probably why Marty Neumeyer’s books are so popular because he’s literally cut down the fat and brought out books that are literally just what you need.

They’re easy to digest. And that’s because he’s a master, right? And he can clearly communicate and simplify.

Like anything that looks effortless, they’re generally masters, right? Gymnasts or chefs, they just whack it out and they can do it perfectly. That’s because of all the years.

So I think a great brand consultant has that depth of skills so they can effortlessly simplify and improve a client’s situation based on their goals.

I think you’re right. And you raise that kind of thing of breadth and depth, right? And I think that’s true.

I think it’s probably worth saying, and I hope younger listeners don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you can just like step out of university into very easily. The reason for that is you need to have seen the inside of a few businesses, you need to have gone through some sort of, you know, various processes under other people, learnt how these businesses tick, some of the language, some of those sorts of things. And so it isn’t sort of something that you can kind of easily attack without that, without putting yourself out there a little bit before and trying to learn along the way, at least that’s how that’s in my experience, because you need to be able to, you’re going toe to toe with business leaders, right?

You’re helping them, you know, with really big challenges, with massive, you know, risk potentially, if you get it wrong. So there is, you’ve got to grow that. And I think if we, you know, we can give some tips out later, but one tip I’d sort of throw in there now is, you know, if you’re interested in getting into this space and have no experience in it, then I think you need to start getting some experience, right?

But that doesn’t mean jumping in and working with Coca-Cola, right? Cause that’s never going to happen, but starting small, maybe starting with some charities, maybe, you know, small startup businesses, you know, just to kind of understand how these businesses tick and how, you know, you can begin to add value. But as I say, even then, I think you probably want to have experienced, you know, having some sort of background in business, coming at it from either a marketing, a designer, you know, even digital marketing kind of perspectives that you have some, something to fall back on, some understanding to fall back on to add value.

Principles. That’s it. That’s absolutely right.

Another skill, I was just going to throw in another skill, if that’s okay. And it kind of connects to the communication thing. One skill that I leverage massively is facilitation.

Because I think one of the key requirements to do consultancy well is to knit together different parts, different thoughts, different people within an organization. So as I say, align around that greater future. And if you can facilitate well, in other words, you can run workshops in kind of an agile fashion.

You can get people excited. You can explain the principle of why we’re doing this exercise, why it’s gonna be helpful, what you’re looking for out of it. You can dance around personalities so that when you get conflicting views, you give people a good experience.

They don’t feel threatened, I think is a very important thing, particularly when you’re dealing with leaders. Facilitating all of that is a crucial skill. And again, that’s not something you can kind of just, you’re just born with.

You almost like have to fail and learn and develop. And sometimes that means taking me some years to get to the level I’m at. And it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.

I’ve had epic workshop failures in the past, but all of that, you’ve got to have a mindset whereby I’m trying my best, I’m going to be open and honest about it. And if I fail, that’s okay. And I’m going to learn from that and review all the time what I’m doing so I can continually improve my service and the experience I give.

And I think if you have that mindset, you can really make waves as a consultant.

What are your thoughts, Jacob, about facilitation?

Yeah, absolutely. But I think, like you said, you do have to have some background knowledge before you get into that situation, like running a business, right? That’s like the essentials of knowing how things work and how that relates to brand and brand building.

So facilitation is key, but I think that’s part of the skill set you will acquire once you get into that role, if you will. So just to recap what we’ve said, confidence in the unknown, being uncomfortable, communication and listening is a really important skill and the mindset to get there as well. I think combine all those three, and then you go into facilitating a workshop and listening to leaders and things.

That’s really, I guess it’s the cross section of all those skills coming together. And that’s what I think is gonna make a really great brand consultant. So I think this is a good segue into our stories into how we became brand consultants, brand strategists, brand designers, and share that journey, just to show you that it’s not always a smooth path.

There’s ups and downs, absolute, and maybe you can relate. And then we can talk about our process, how we stay current, and then we have some other more direct tips to come.

Great. Well, I’ll tell you what, you go first. You go first, Jacob.

I always like hearing Jacob’s story. It’s always nice. And it’d be nice to kind of get up to speed in the last few years, because I haven’t heard the…

I mean, we speak regularly, but it’s nice to kind of get that context. So where does it start? Where does the story of Jacob Cass start?

We’ll keep it short, because there’s a lot. But we will… Long-time listeners will have heard this story before.

However, I’ll cut it shorter. So I started out as a design student, like most of us. I studied visual communication, and that was for three years.

And then I got headhunted by an agency in New York City. So I moved from Sydney to New York. So I went from being a design student to working for brands like Disney and Nike.

It was a huge catapult for my career. I cut my teeth for five years in New York at different agencies, in-house shops and also agencies. So I’ve seen everything from being a student to have been a freelancer in-house and also at agencies.

That’s really where I cut my teeth. Then I went, did the digital nomad thing for about three years. And throughout this time, I was running my own brand agency called JUST Creative, which is still my brand agency today.

And that’s where I still work. JUST Creative has turned into a larger platform. Yes, it’s my branding agency, but it’s also a community.

It’s where we host this podcast. It has like thousands of articles, resources, downloads. Now we have a team of 12 writers and editors from around the world.

However, I also do brand consulting, you know, still. I also do brand design. I also do web design.

So when we were talking about those boxes before, like I wear a lot of hats. I run a community and a mastermind. I do group coaching.

I do one-on-one coaching. So there’s a lot of things that I do, but at the heart of it is design and brand. So that’s the purest way I could think about it is design.

So I see myself as a designer, but also a brand lover. So that’s it in a very quick nutshell. Along the way, I was learning a lot of different skills, you know, from blogging to design to business to the backend of business to marketing, design, email marketing, like marketing is so huge, but it was definitely digital marketing, SEO, and just running a business, how to send the right message, how to position a brand.

There’s so many different elements that I’ve learnt along that journey. And that’s my story. So I’ll pop over to you.

The thing I admire most about you, Jacob, is how diverse your approach is and how open you are to embracing change. And, you know, I know you have other little ventures off on the side, like you did The Forest, and various other things. And I think you are a great example of somebody who’s really kind of gone wide, but kept to the core of what you’re about, which is great design.

And in fact, that’s how I knew of you. And listeners would have heard this story before, but hey, let’s just share it again. Why not?

So going into my story, I was born at a very early age. And then I did college, university here in the UK, not university, college in the UK, got a diploma, could have gone to university, decided not to, because I had a little job at an agency and I was always keen to kind of get out there and get real work done. Went through a few agencies, cut a long story short, decided to start my own agency, which I ran for nearly 10 years.

I think it was about nine years and a bit. I’ll tell you about the end of that in a second, but one thing that just to sort of connect with Jacob was I used to run my agency and we used to, as anyone who’s run a business and has done SEO would know, one of the things that you’re really keen on doing is kind of looking at your keywords, your key search terms and how your website is doing in relation to those terms in terms of the rankings. And I remember going into meetings and this JUST Creative kept knocking us off of like top spot for key phrases like brand design.

You’ll never let this go, Matt, will you?

And I was like, it was this JUST Creative and I’ll pull it up and there’s a stupid face of Jacob Cass sat there. And I was like, oh, I really can’t stand this guy. Jacob knew absolutely nothing about this.

My team thought he was hilarious because it kept happening as Jacob dominated the search phrases and obviously outperformed us. So anyway, fast forward a number of years, eventually the agency had grown. We got it to 12 people, which is quite a big size where I was in Nottingham in the UK at the time.

For that area, it was pretty decent. And we had some big clients like Boots or Walgreens, if you’re in the US and Experian were a big one and Nikon and Specsavers, which is a big kind of glasses, spectacles company here in the UK. So we were kind of punching quite above our weight.

But one thing I found was I found it very hard to scale the agency model. And I think there’s a number of issues with that, which I don’t want to kind of bore listeners with, but one was selling time and trying to kind of package time in a way that clients would be really happy with. Frankly, the clients didn’t care about that.

They wanted the solution to their problem. That’s where they saw the value. And it was only on our side that I was trained to kind of think, well, that task would take X amount of hours.

Let’s box it in that kind of way and charge an hourly rate and all that stuff. So I think there’s a number of issues there on selling time and we can talk about that perhaps a little later of how to break out of that. Cause I think that’s a huge problem with the industry and the way it’s set up.

And the other thing was, I found that people would buy me, but not necessarily my team. So that was really, really difficult. And you actually see this in the industry a lot.

A lot of agencies are built around individuals. The ones that have done it like kind of scaled and grown have been able to kind of take a methodology and implant that within their teams and then keep updating and reinventing that methodology. That is very hard to do.

Very, very hard. You have to have very committed people and you have to have clients willing to pay the big money so that then you can bring on brilliant people. So that you can then add that huge value and scale it, you know, do that at scale.

That’s actually quite tough to do. I found it very difficult, particularly in the location I was in, because back then it wasn’t virtual. Like you had to literally have an office and that brings overheads and all of that stuff.

So it’s sapped a lot of time. It’s sapped a lot of energy. And so anybody kind of going through, you know, basically jumping from project to project to project, trying to build sustainable growth really, really hard, trying to get retainers in really tough.

And I just remember it became very stressful. My wife was also in the business and we just had some kids, which was great, who I love very much. And we kind of realized that we’d created this beast of a business which actually wasn’t working for us.

And we were kind of, I was running around trying to feed it and it wasn’t feeding me, if that kind of makes sense. So we made a decision to sell. We found a local agency, a lot bigger than us, digital marketing agency actually, who were comfortable to buy.

They bought us, I joined their leadership team, cut a long story short. I found the same thing happened again, but just on a bigger scale. So clients would kind of fall in love is the wrong term.

That sounds really dodgy, but they’d like connect with me. And if I was in the room and I’d run a workshop or something, and I’d help them break through a problem, they’d want to speak to me. So I was, you know, and you’d kind of collect clients over time who would be very demanding and you’d feel like beholden to them and like almost like you couldn’t say no to them if they were calling you at 10 o’clock at night.

You kind of felt that you had to take the calls. So I was getting, this happened to me over and over. I have a problem with this because I like to, I’m a people police, I like to serve.

So in the end, I thought I was facing a bit of burnout, agency fatigue, if you like. And so I kind of went on LinkedIn and flicked the switch to open to opportunities, I think this is 2016. And so I was headhunted by a corporate.

I went in-house, I helped them build a kind of an in-house agency. We set that up. And all the time though, I was running workshops, even within that situation, we rebranded, I was part of the team that rebranded that company in the UK.

I was flown over to Toronto and I did some work in the US. So it was great fun. It was really good fun.

I learned a lot. But then as happens in corporate life, like there was a series of redundancies and my name was on the list. And so I was kind of offered a way out, which I took.

And then I was like, what on earth do I do now? Like I don’t, I have no idea what I’m doing. So that’s when I kind of was offered a couple of consulting contracts.

And I always used to think, man, to be a consultant, you need to be like 50, 60 years old, no disrespect to the 56 year olds, but you have to be quite long in the tooth. You have to have been around the block, probably got white hair. I don’t know.

That was my impression of a consultant, right? But then I was thinking, well, actually, Matt, you have actually had quite a bit of experience. You’ve seen the inside of a lot of boardrooms, but I saw myself as a very much as a designer.

And when I’d sold my business, there was a clause in the contract that basically said I couldn’t set up another design practice. So I was like, huh, what on earth do I do? So what I decided to do was set myself up solely as a strategist.

That’s a scary thought, right? Imagine Jacob, I said to you, right, you’ve got to take all of your portfolio off of your website and just sell strategy. Now to a designer, that’s like, whoa, like, cause yeah, because that’s how you see yourself, right?

Ever since you were a kid, I’m a designer, I’m Matt the designer. But I kind of had some opportunities already, so it was kind of de-risked. And I went for it.

And actually, do you know what I found weirdly in this space? I think the idea of a brand consultant at the time was quite a new idea. Marty had written a couple of books, which I’d read and I absolutely loved.

But it wasn’t really, it’s become more popular as time’s gone on. It was kind of, I was kind of one of the first into that blue ocean, if you like. And yeah, it went really, really well.

And I found, I was able to kind of build a brand in that space, as some of our listeners will know. If you follow me, you will see some of the activity that I do. And I think that, and for me, it’s been amazingly successful.

I’ve just kept it as a company of one. I went back to my wife and I said, love, I think I’m gonna start a business. I’m gonna just do strategy.

She was like, no, remember the stress of when you ran a team? I was like, listen, I promise you, I will not employ another person. She said, okay, on that basis, I will allow you to start this freelance.

So I did, and that’s been kind of a guiding principle for me, just a personal thing. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with employing people. If you want to do that, great for you.

But just for me and my personal situation, yeah, that’s how I’m set up. So consulting became the thing and is now my total focus as a strategist, as a consultant. And what I tend to do is exactly what you said, Jacob, is when a project comes along that needs some execution or needs some research that’s outside of my skillset or needs some, even other consultants who maybe are experts in the category that you’re playing in, bring them in, become part of the team, the SWAT team that solves the problem and admit when you’re not sure.

And I think clients really leverage that and respect that. Final point for me, I ask people often like, why do you hire me? And often I’m told that it’s for my energy.

Now, how weird is that, right? Oh, and the beard, of course, beard and energy. But it’s kind of the value that I think you can bring.

So what I’d say to people is find your… I mean, by the way, some people would think, Matt, I couldn’t stand your energy. I couldn’t stand being in the room for three hours with you.

But I definitely couldn’t sit at a desk opposite you. But some people value that. And they’re the people that I obviously want to work with, the people that need that in their organizations, that need that kind of boost to kind of move things forward.

So that’s kind of my story. I think I’ve pretty, I’m probably missing loads out, but hopefully that kind of explains how I got to be on the show with you, Jacob. Oh, that’s you.

Let me complete the loop. How did I get to be on the show? So when I went back out as a consultant, I was like looking at people I admired in the industry.

And I remembered this JUST Creative chap who kept knocking me off. And a number of other people that I actually reached out to, and I reached out to these people that I really thought were amazing and said, look, you know, you don’t know me, but I know you. I’ve been following you for a number of years.

I really kind of want to grow my network and connect with people again. I’ve been in-house for a bit, working for a company. Do you fancy a quick call?

And Jacob, you were so kind to take my call. And then we had a couple of calls. And I think you were thinking about moving more into this space and also moving your community with you, kind of explaining it along the way.

And I had zero, because I’d been in-house, I’d not really built my community at all. I thought, hey, this is amazing. Jacob’s got this amazing community.

I can maybe add some thinking to that and potentially grow my reach as well. And also learn from you, Jacob, and hopefully vice versa. So it was a real kind of great match, I think.

And hopefully, here we are, season four, four years on.

It really is crazy. So thank you so much for sharing that, Matt. And I love how it was like you set the ship to set a light, right?

When you had that ultimatum of like, well, I can’t go back now. It’s in my claws. I’m a strategist.

Now I’m a consultant. And you just went on that path and here we are. And you’ve really grown in the past few years for sure.

And it’s been a treasure to watch, actually.

I’ve been very blessed. I think that thing, it sounds like it’s a nice story, isn’t it? When you look back.

And hindsight is a wonderful thing. But a lot of it was accidental, right? Being completely honest with people.

It was intentional in a way, because there are a number of other sort of personal things. I wanted to spend more time with my family and consultancy adds a lot of flexibility if you set yourself up in a certain way. And as I say, one of the things I found was just breaking through of selling time.

And I think that’s probably a big theme, maybe for another time, if we want to get into it. But if you want to learn about that, look at Alan Weiss and look at Blair Innes, who’s written a book on that as well.

I hope you guys, listeners have got some value from listening to our stories just to show you there’s never a smooth path, right? It’s just things will take you there, and you’ll get all these skills along the way, and you use those unique skills that you have to become something greater. And that’s what I think is how you can become a consultant, is just by using all your past experience, joining together, listening, communicating, simplifying and facilitating, as we mentioned before, to create something brilliant for your clients.

The next point, we’re going to fly through some tips in terms of, for our listeners, in terms of how to actually grow as a consultant or be a better consultant. So gaining experience, right? Kind of what we’ve been talking about over time, you get experience.

Building up your portfolio or your brand, you can do this through videos, speaking, events, leadership, becoming a thought leader in a way to communicate your expertise, networking, attending events and groups and LinkedIn and social media and so forth. Degrees, courses, certifications and masterminds, and we’ll come back to the masterminds there. Following industry publications, so newsletters and LinkedIn and staying up to date with trends, right?

AI, Web3, the metaverse, NFTs, brand in general. How can you use these to better your skill set? Some deeper skills, right?

Psychology, human behavior, business strategy and brand in general. These are some big skills that we didn’t really touch on. And I would say practicing is probably the number one way to improve, right?

Offering your services to whether it be friends or for free in the beginning to develop your skills, fake clients, and then building up your experience through practice, because it is a practice. And last but not least, but continuously learning and evolving, always attending conferences, workshops, networking, and just building up the skills from different people, learning from different people. So that’s what I want to share.

They’re just some very direct tips. Obviously, we can dive into more of them, but is there anyone you want to explore further?

Well, I think that’s a really great summary, to be honest with you. I’d written some notes down, but I think you covered off pretty much nearly all of the ones that I was going to say. I think the key is the main struggle I think people have when they first enter this space is how to attract clients.

And I think that’s the number one sort of obstacle. How do I attract clients as a consultant? And the only way, I’ll tell you this now, that you get clients as a consultant in this space is if people already trust you before they reach out to you.

I hope that’s good English, right? In other words, they don’t buy, no one goes on Google and goes, brand consultant. Oh, look, it’s Matt.

I’ve never heard of him before. I’m going to hire him, right? That is never how it works.

This is a people by people game. So you have to be in the marketing game, I would say, as a kind of a core kind of skill. So I think that’s perhaps a good place for us to do a little bit of a deep dive.

And so to kick that kind of conversation off, I would sort of come down to bizarrely brand principles, right? You’ve got to brand yourself. You’ve got to understand a couple of things.

You need to understand, you know, the value that you bring. What is your value proposition? You’ve got to understand who you serve powerfully.

Like who is the best person for you? Not everybody is right. Don’t make the foolish positioning claim that, you know, you’re here for everyone.

You’re not. Who are the types of businesses, types of people within the businesses that you’re here to serve? And then I think you need to work out how you become, how will they become aware of you?

So Jacob, you mentioned public speaking, and I’ve found that that’s a massive, well, at least when I started was a huge place to play, which massively took me out of my comfort zone and still does, but it’s such a powerful place to open up awareness about you in ways that you would never even normally dream of. So even now, I’m actually tuning in from Costa Rica at the moment, where I’m kind of having a little workation. And even out here, I’ve been blessed enough to be invited to go and speak to a whole bunch of solicitors next week.

Now, I’m going to go and talk to solicitors about brand. This is massively slightly scary for me because these are people talking about legal systems and offering a particular type of service. But even there, I think I can add some value.

So I’m going to step out of my comfort zone. I’m going to talk to them. I don’t know if any business will come out of it.

But what I know is it will expose me to a whole new set of people. I’ll keep curious. I’ll keep humble.

I’ll give them hopefully some value. And who knows, at some point in the future, I might get a call from Costa Rica by somebody who sat in that talk, heard me speak and says, do you know what, Matt? I’ve got the problem that you addressed in that talk now, maybe a year or two later.

And that’s happened to me a few times where I’ve done some public speaking and immediately no traction. Give it a year, give it two years. You plant some seeds and you’ve got to constantly plant them.

I was going to say plant those seeds as you did. Those seeds, they grow over time. It’s not straight off the bat.

You’ve got to have a bit of a strategy. And I sort of done a lot of stuff by accident, but let me just tell you real quick. So I do public speaking.

Some might hear me, they then follow me. So you’ve got to generate content if you’re going to position yourself effectively. You’ve got to continually talk about the problems that you solve.

And my strategy, you know, here’s cards on the table. I always like to show myself in action. And so here’s me doing a workshop, you know, literally terrible selfie of me doing a workshop.

And this is what we addressed. And this is the problem we solved. Here’s me doing a public talk.

Here’s me, you know, on a Zoom call doing some stuff. Here’s me doing some research, whatever it might be. So the point is, is that you are constantly drip feeding and planting and watering those seeds as time goes on.

So that by the time somebody then comes who has the problem that you solve has that problem, if that makes sense, they immediately think of you, your brand, your personal brand or, you know, your consultancy brand. Oh, I know a chap with a weird beard who seems like quite good fun. He might be able to help us with this challenge.

And it’s not a question, well, actually, it’s not even a question of he might be able to. They know I can help them because they’ve seen me in action. They’ve kind of followed me for a while.

So that’s kind of been my strategy. It’s hard work. It’s not quick.

And that’s how I’ve done it. And, you know, that’s completely transparency. Take that, do, you know, use it, do whatever you want with it.

Please don’t copy my bearded selfies though.

I was 172 about last year, right?

Yeah, it was actually. I literally went through and roughly added them all up in a tally. And yeah, they were about 172, but there we go.

Matt’s strategy on the table.

There it is. There it is, folks. Strip it apart, do what you want with it.

What were your thoughts? You were going to caveat some of the stuff I was saying.

Yeah, I was just going to, you said it a bit after, but the strategy, right? There’s so many different ways to market yourself and so forth. So the, you said people don’t type in something and like buy off the bat, which it can happen.

Like my whole business is based on search. So I want to caveat this as well, but it’s the trust and the brand aspect, right? So they can type in brand consultant, come to your site, and then they may browse your site.

They see what you’re about, you know, they go to your about page and they check out your socials and that’s your brand and your expertise and authority coming through. It should shine through when they come to your site. So that’s a different strategy that I use and have done since 2007.

It’s all search based, right?

So do you find literally someone would Google brand consultant, let’s say, hit your site and buy within that session? Or do you find that there’s a bit of a process?

So they’ll browse articles. Let’s just give an easy example. Let’s say someone’s researching logo design, for example, and they type in how much for a logo design and we have a resource on logo design.

And then they browse that and realize, oh, I don’t need a logo design. I need strategy or I need bigger thinking here. Suddenly, they start thinking bigger and they’re like, oh, this guy’s got some knowledge.

I’m going to check out his about page. And he’s like, oh, he’s done a TEDx talk. He’s been in Wall Street Journal.

He’s been on Entrepreneur and he’s got all these credentials. He’s like, okay, I’m starting to trust this guy. Let me check out his socials.

Oh, cool. He’s got a following. He’s got some content there.

He knows what he’s doing. Oh, let me check out his portfolio. Oh, he does this too.

So it’s this system that is working together that builds up that trust that you mentioned. So the trust that you’re building up is showing you the work in action and being consistent with your message of like, this is what I do. This is who I do it for.

And because you’ve been doing these workshops and events, you’ve got this audience that is in the background. And then when ready, they can find you. The opposite is when it comes to search, people are actively looking.

They’re more hot leads. So they’re warmed up a little bit. They know they have a problem and they’re looking for someone.

So it’s a little bit different. It’s a quicker process. So there’s two totally different strategies that we both use here.

And it really comes down to your expertise.

Yeah, I love that. Thanks for sharing that. And feel free to correct me if I…

It’s not correction. It’s just different.

Well, add some extra, add some Jacob sauce to my waffle. But the thing is…

You know what I mean.

I don’t think we’re going to top out this year.

What I guess I’m saying is, no, you’re right. And I think there aren’t a number of tactics, marketing tactics. This is what we were saying about learning marketing, and kind of understanding the funnel and so on.

And I use sort of a similar funnel in my website. You can go on there, you download stuff, I capture your details. I constantly message you.

But I guess both of these strategies, what they both have in common is that consistency, right? What is it that you need to be known for? What is it that you do that’s unique to you, that you can bottle and sell?

And how does that help the customer with their problem? Going right back full circle to the start of this conversation, a consultant’s job is to improve the client’s condition in some way. You need to understand what that is, and then you need to kind of keep consistently hammering on about it if you’re going to enter into the consultancy space.

Awesome. I think that’s a good way to wrap up, Matt. So thank you guys for listening and coming back for season four.

Like Matt mentioned, we have an amazing set of guest speakers lined up as well, and we’ll be doing some of these, you know, one-on-one session, or one-on-one, two of us.

Yeah, one-on-one, two, both of us together. That’s great. Can I just say, Jacob, if anybody is listening in and they think, hey, do you know what, there was something interesting there, I’d love for you chaps to go deeper on that, you know, or there’s a topic related to brand, relating to consultancy, relating to strategy that you are interested in, and you’d love us to talk about it or get a guest on to help unpick that.

Let us know. Drop a comment in wherever you’re listening to this. You know, Jacob and I are both very active on LinkedIn.

We’ve got our own websites. Ping us messages. We’re more than happy to listen in.

We want to kind of continue to add value in this space. We hope we do so. And as Jacob says, thank you for tuning in to season four and to this first episode.

We look forward to more to come. So thank you.

Thank you.