How to Overcome the Obvious Fears of Group Consulting — Part 2

Hi, it's Sean and you're listening to The Three Month Vacation.

Imagine that you're a super fan of Bruce Springsteen.

You've got every one of his albums, no-all his songs, and you've eagerly waited for

the day when you could go and see him live in concert.

And then you hear that Bruce Springsteen is coming to town.

At this point, it's not even a decision, is it?

You buy the ticket, and then it's a countdown.

On the day of the concert, you see lots of people going out in the same direction.

They're wearing similar clothing, there's behaviour, excitement in the air.

You've gotten in really early, you sit down, you look around, and then something is missing.

There's just Bruce and there's you.

There's no crowd, there's no shared energy.

Surely this must be one of the best moments of your life.

But it doesn't feel like it, it feels like an empty concert syndrome.

And this is how clients feel when they have been exposed to a correct structure and delivery

of group consulting.

You would think that people want to deal with just the trainer, just the consultant, one

known one, yet once a person has tasted the amazing nature of group consulting, they

realise that that concert, that event, isn't just a performer.

It's the crowd, it's the group, it's the people around you that create the experience.

As consultants and trainers, we strongly believe that people come to us for guidance.

And they do.

So we are like Bruce Springsteen's, we go around singing for one person at a time.

And if that sounds insane to you, well it is bizarre.

It's exhausting for the performer and the audience member who is your client, doesn't get

the same feeling.

So why do we do it?

Well, there are many reasons, and we're going to cover those in this podcast.

But I'm going to be a little lazy, I'm not scripting everything for this podcast.

A client in 5,000 BC asked all of these questions, and so I'm going to read out the questions

and then give you the answers.

And yes, it's a different format, but I think you'll enjoy it just as much.

And let's start out with the first point, which is the fear of losing hyper-personalised

attention.

It's more than likely that you've seen the invisible gorilla problem.

In this video, which you'll find on YouTube, you're asked to count how many balls are being

thrown between the performers.

One performance throws it, the other catches it, and you have to count those balls accurately.

Now, while that is happening, a gorilla, not a real one, but someone in a costume walks

across the floor, does a whole bunch of stuff.

And when viewers have watched that video, they can accurately tell you how many balls have

been passed between the performers, but they completely fail to see the gorilla in the

room.

And this is the same kind of problem that we have when we're talking about hyper-personalised

attention.

The gorilla in the room that we don't see is the medium.

When you think of group consulting, you often think of it as happening through Zoom calls,

video meetings, audio discussions.

And in these formats, only one person can receive attention at any given point of time.

When 10 people on a Zoom call, one person speaks, and the others wait, and time becomes very

frustrating and fragmented.

But this limitation isn't about groups or group consulting.

It's about the inefficiency of the medium.

Because we are so focused on attention, attention, we have to give the clients attention that

we fail to see that video and audio is that disruptive gorilla, and we don't see it at all.

Audio and video conversations create several hidden problems.

To begin with, they force synchronous interactions.

The clients must show up at a specific time on a specific day.

They have to work their whole day around just that silly meeting.

The second thing is that encourages rambling.

When people speak, it's like they're sitting around at a cafe.

They wander through thoughts, they're thinking of what they have to say, they repeat themselves,

and of course, they tend to get more pompous than when they're writing.

One forces you to be focused on the words and the structure of the sentences.

When people are on these calls, they just take up so much bandwidth, and we've all been

on that call where one idiot will continue to speak forever, and you want to throttle that

person.

It's usually a man, but yeah, I'm rambling.

And when one person is going on like this, it creates passive learning.

So participants spend large amounts of time listening to conversations that mostly may

not apply to them.

When you have written interaction, the dynamic changes completely.

In a well-structured forum or written discussion environment, a client asks a specific question

and the consultant responds in detail.

The client returns with refinements, and this ping-pong of precision can happen dozens

of times in a day, let alone a week.

Instead of a single one hour call, a client may receive smaller bursts of highly-focused

advice.

And the result, it's super surprising.

There's more personalization, not less.

In written consulting environments, the level of interaction can become extremely high.

For example, when we have courses, some clients create 30 to 40 posts a week.

Others may create 70 to 80 posts a week.

And even if we discounted quite a bit and say only one third is the advice given by the

trainer by me, then that's quite a lot.

That's 15 instructions given over the spread of a week.

And this type of interaction is impossible in audio.

It's impossible in video consulting, because if you give this much information on one

call, the person is overwhelmed.

They can't do anything.

They just drop it.

It is impossible.

Plus, the time requirements will make it unmagible.

What seems like hyper-personalized attention is actually a headache for both parties.

They use the default method of one-on-one consulting, because that's how they've seen it

in the past.

But that doesn't mean the past equals to the future.

And at this point, the second question pops up, which is, the logistics of filling a group.

One-on-one consulting seems to have a major advantage, which is that a client can start

tomorrow.

Group consulting appears more rigid.

You have to gather several people.

You have to start on a fixed date, coordinate schedules, and then ensure that you have enough

participants.

Now, this makes the process feel dependent on marketing and sales.

And immediately, we start to get fearful.

Almost every consultant begins with one-on-one work.

When I started out, I would deal with the client online and would speak to each other, blah,

blah, blah.

One hour would pass within the call.

It would go for an hour and a half, because I'd like to speak.

Maybe the client likes to speak.

It doesn't matter.

When I went and started working with companies, nothing really changed.

I drive to one end of the earth to meet one company, then another company.

It was all about time and more time.

And to be fair, one-on-one consulting isn't problematic.

Yes, you can only work with a limited number of clients.

But your hourly rate can go from $60 an hour to $150 to $500.

People charge $5,000 an hour or $20,000 an hour.

So revenue can scale, that's for sure.

But everyone doesn't get to those $20,000 an hour revenue.

So if you still have the number of hours in the day and your perception is that you can

only charge so much, growth is going to stop.

So only going to be able to go so far and then you can't do anything more.

So the transition that you have to make is to introduce group formats.

And you have to do this while you're still maintaining individual clients.

The transition looks like this.

To continue existing consulting, you announce a group program and then you start with a small

number of participants.

It doesn't usually begin with 10 or 15 people.

Often it might begin with 3 or 4.

The starting point is always a decision.

It's a decision to move slowly into group consulting.

So you say, I will run this program.

Without setting a destination, that journey is never going to begin.

And usually the date is going to be months from today.

You're going to need to figure out how a forum works.

You don't want to do this on WhatsApp or some chat thing.

You don't want to be dependent on some guy who can pull the plug on you.

But also those methods are very difficult to track.

The forum has existed pretty much since the start of the internet and it's still all

of the place.

The biggest sites in the world, something like Reddit.

After all forum-based, that's the fifth biggest site on the planet.

So if they can do it, yes, you can do it as well.

You have to set the goal and then all the marketing and preparation has to start to align

around it.

This takes us to our third part, which is accountability in an asynchronous system.

Something that's not working for everybody at the same time.

Many consultants rely on schedule meetings.

Clients complete tasks because they have to report progress during the next call.

So without those schedule calls, motivation gets weaker, people don't show up.

But accountability does not require everybody to be synchronized.

Social can exist without constant meetings.

There are examples everywhere, schools, airlines, manufacturing systems, restaurant, bakeries.

Everybody's doing their own thing, but they're all working towards a similar goal.

Each person operates through clearly defined roles, through schedules and expectations.

Consulting programs can also function in the same way.

The real key is structure, not timing.

So accountability comes from goals and milestones and all of that stuff.

But none of these require weekly calls.

In many cases, written reporting and progress updates are far more effective.

Yeah, that's it.

That's the third part.

And you think, well, isn't this a lot of work?

Yes, it is a lot of work, but we're not planning for just now, not today, not tomorrow,

not next week, but somewhere later in the year.

And possibly maybe even early next year.

There's nothing wrong with group consulting.

In the last podcast, we talked about how school was a very poor example of group consulting.

And that's because everybody was not sharing their work.

So you have to set all those parameters in place for group consulting to work.

But this brings us to the end of this podcast.

We covered just three of the objections that people who have some of the fears that they

would have.

And what were they?

The first fear was that clients expect you to be hyper-personalized, but you're not

being personalized on a Zoom call.

What you're doing is just blah, blah, blah.

You can be 10 times more personalized in a forum going back and forth, making little

tweaks.

So hyper-personalization is not about showing up at a specific time and then just talking

away.

The second problem is about scheduling.

When you're doing one-on-one consulting, you can start tomorrow.

Whereas if it's group consulting, you have to set a date, everybody has to show up on

the date.

All of this sounds like a lot of work.

But this is how concerts work.

This is how the Bruce Springsteen thing works.

It is group consulting.

You might not see it as group consulting, but there he is up on stage.

And there are tens of thousands of people in the audience.

One-on-one consulting works, but you have to set the structure together for group consulting.

And at this point, it's very important to realize that you don't have to drop one-on-one

consulting.

We have one-on-one consulting, which are over $1,000 an hour.

And a client pays that amount, and then they may return or not, and that's not relevant.

The one-on-one consulting exists side by side with the group consulting.

But it's a group consulting that is more steady income and has been for the last 20 years.

And finally, there's this whole fear that you have to get everybody together and you need

a structure.

Yes, you need a structure.

Everything has a structure.

So many organizations run purely on structure, even though there are hundreds or thousands

of people within that structure, and they work really, really well.

If you believe that consulting is the exception to the rule, then that's just a perception.

That's something within you saying, well, this scares me, and it should scare you, because

this is a big leap.

These are just three of the problems that will crop up.

They're probably another 300, but you get through them, and one day when you're standing

on the other side, you go, yep, I'm doing group consulting, and sometimes I also do one-on-one

consulting, and that's the best place to be in.

And with that, let's find out what's happening in psychotactics land.

The first thing that's happening is the storytelling course.

You had the Bruce Springsteen story, didn't you?

You saw how seamlessly it worked its way into this article, into this podcast.

And that's what you learn on the storytelling course.

Not just how to connect to articles, to presentations, and everything else, but how to structure it,

so that there is flow, there is drama, there is suspense.

People remember you because of your storytelling.

All storytelling skills can be learned.

You told good stories as a kid, as an adult, but there are fluke.

You have to be able to do this consistently.

That's why you should go to psychotactics.com slash workshops, slash storytelling, and get

on the waiting list, because you'll get the notification on April 11th to sign up for

this event.

You'll also get all the details once you sign up.

So have a look, I'll say bye for now, bye bye.

Still listening.

When I got to Auckland, I was a cartoonist, and I didn't have any work, so I'd go from

agency to agency asking whether I could get some cartooning work.

One of the graphic designers asked me whether I could teach her Photoshop, because I'd

done all my cartoons in Photoshop, and that's how it started.

That's how I got my first one-on-one consulting.

I'd go to a house every Friday at 6 p.m., teach her for an hour, then come back.

But that led to bigger opportunities where I'd go into graphic design firms or advertising

agencies and teach people how to do Photoshop.

It was without using any of the toolbars so that they got extreme speed.

I've moved on since then.

I do very little one-on-one consulting anymore, but that's the story.

Early days.

I'll say bye for now, and check out the storytelling course, and if nothing else, at least get the

goodies.

Bye bye, and see you in 5,000 BC.