Building a Successful Consulting Business with Amy Rasdal

0:00John Busby:Have you ever wanted to get into consulting, but don't know how? That's the topic I discuss today with my guest, Amy Rasdal. She's the founder of Buildable on the Beach. Amy's background was an accomplished executive, and she made the transition to project-based work and found she could make more money and work on her terms. Pretty soon, she received so many questions about what she was doing, her business has turned into helping others do the same. I hope you enjoy this episode.

0:32Hi, Amy.

0:33John Busby:How are you? Good to see you. I'm good. Thank you. How about you? I'm good. We're on sort of opposite sides of the West Coast. You're down in sunny San Diego. I presume it's sunny. I'm up in rainy old Seattle. Hasn't gotten the sunny season yet. I'm excited to talk today about building careers in consulting and fractionalized work. There's sort of this, at the end of the movie when somebody's retired or they're on the beach sipping a margarita or a virgin daiquiri and they got their laptop open counting their money or people are working on the beach. That's sort of like a meme for a satisfied business person.

1:15John Busby:And you literally named your business that, Billable on the Beach. I'd love for you to tell me about the business, but also So is it true that you once said that being a tech CEO, so full time instead of having your own gig, is to a certain extent being overworked and underpaid? Absolutely. So I am a Silicon kid. I grew up in Silicon Valley when it was being built. So my family moved there from Los Angeles. And when we moved there from Los Angeles, we thought, what is this farming community that our parents are moving us to? Because Silicon Valley used to be fruit orchards, plums, apricots, various types of stone fruits.

1:58So we thought it was crazy. But what that means is that I grew up in Silicon Valley when it was being built. I sat around the dinner tables in middle and high school of all those guys. And it was mostly guys who sort of built Silicon Valley. My dad himself was an early semiconductor guy. So I really grew up not realizing there was anything but technology. until I got to business school on the East Coast many years later. I had no idea that people staked their careers on powdered drink mix or sugar cereal and things like that. It just never occurred to me. I thought that a career meant technology startups because of where I had grown up.

2:47So my career goal kind of coming out of high school and starting into college was eventually to be a tech startup CEO. What else would I do? That's what people do, right? But I eventually got to a point in my career. So I started out as a software engineer. I worked at the bench writing code for a few years. I went to a fancy business school back east. I set about systematically building my cross-functional experience. I had some great, I worked out of business school for a subsidiary of Eli Lilly. And in those days, they had kind of those old school management programs. I do still hear of them from time to time where you get to try all of the different cross-functional rotations.

3:36As long as you're performing, you can choose what you want to do next kind of each year. So I was systematically building. I jumped off. I did startups. I did venture funded. I did bootstrapped, getting all my experience. And eventually I looked up and I looked around at people who are a little ahead of me, people who were doing that and the sacrifices, honestly, to your personal life and your family that you have to make if you aspire to do that. You have to go where the jobs are. You have to move.

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4:49John Busby:Check it out at business.com slash plus that's business.com slash P L U S. I was seeing people uproot partners and later families and moving every couple of years. And I wasn't so sure about that part of it. And my husband was especially not very sure about. I uprooted and moved him from San Diego to the East Coast for business school. And that didn't go particularly well. There came a point where one of the startups, as startups do, crashed. We went up so fast like a rocket. It was so much fun. And man, we crashed and burned just as hard and fast as we went up. So I fell into consulting for a little while and I looked up and I thought, oh, wow, I can make more money.

5:43I can completely control what I do. I can have more impact on my clients. I can have greater satisfaction. I had never thought about doing consulting. It was just a thing I was going to do to fill in until I found my next sort of perfect role. At that point, I had been vice president of operations and engineering, was looking probably next spot COO and then into a CEO role. And I was on track and I thought, whoa, being a CEO is overrated, underpaid. I can actually make more money doing this. And it was kind of shocking to discover that. And then I also saw people, I talked about the success path, moving, moving your family, jumping around.

6:33Well, some people don't make it, right? I tend to be overly confident. I probably am more confident than I deserve to be, but not everyone makes it. And you can't control everything. How many times have we or our colleagues gotten into a situation, and it seems to be especially common right before you get into the C-suite, where all of a sudden the company is sold and the new guy comes in and brings his team, or there's a pandemic, or there's a war, or things in the political, economic, or just the micro political environment of that company beyond your control, where you thought your next spot was going to be in the C-suite and all of a sudden that's evaporated.

7:20And it has nothing to do with your skills, your abilities, your performance, nothing. You can't always control that.

7:29John Busby:So you started consulting and taking control of that. And then I think you said you, I think what you've done is you've created a consulting business about helping others make this transition. And so what was that pivot that made people do that? Sure. So what happened is, first of all, I was doing consulting. And my version of consulting is taking the skills and experience that I had developed as a corporate and startup person and selling that to corporations and startups on a consulting basis. So it wasn't doing something totally different. I was taking advantage of all that skills and experience.

8:14And I wanted to maximize my value to my customers so that frankly, I could maximize my pay and impact. Well, what happened is people started saying, Hey, Amy, like we see you doing this every time we talk to you. You're doing great. You're doing all this cool work. You're making a lot of money. You're water skiing every morning. That's kind of the billable at the beach idea because I live in San Diego. You're working when you want, where you want, how you want, all those things. How do we get in on this? Well, at the core, I really am a get it done person. Implementation and execution is my core skillset.

8:58So I started thinking, well, okay, what do I want to tell them? What do I love? What do I hate? What do I wish I would have known? What would I do differently? John, I made all the mistakes. And some of them I made more than once. So I started to think, what do I want to tell them? And at first it was friends, friends that I had been working with. And then it started being, hey, could you talk to my friend's sister's brother's husband? And I started thinking, I get asked this so often. And I was starting to accumulate a body of work in terms of what I just said. What have I learned? What do I love?

9:44What do I hate? What would I do differently? What are the mistakes that I've made? How can I help people avoid those mistakes? And I realized the market was really asking for what's now billable at the beach. So over time, at first, it was just a one-on-one program that I ran mostly in San Diego, along with my consulting business. Over time, it became a bigger piece. And then I discovered the online world and the online world kind of came online, online group programs and online courses and teaching. So I built a group program with an online, you know, I have a teaching platform and an educational system.

10:27I jumped into the world of email marketing and digital marketing and really learned how to do that, which was really fun because it was something completely different. It was hard. It's still hard. There's so much to learn in that world and it changes constantly. that at this point, I'm only doing Billable at the Beach in terms of an online program. And I took my reach from being offline local to online with a global reach. Now, I only offer my program in English. Most of my people that I serve are in the United States and Canada. But I get some Australias and New Zealands. Occasionally, I get people.

11:13I had a woman in Kenya do my program. And that was just really interesting and cool to think that she was struggling with the same issues as all the rest of us in terms of building our career and what we want to do and where we want to take it. So that's really how that evolution happened.

11:33John Busby:You mentioned that when you were starting consulting, you made all the mistakes. And one that strikes me is what to focus on first. And I'll give you an example. I'm appearing for the interview. I was thinking about a friend of mine who was building a startup, not a consulting business, but still, you know, he was the first one. And he kept focusing on the name, what's the paperwork, who's on my advisory board, how do I distribute the shares, what's the logo, and not like selling. And the businesses you could probably guess went under. And so I would ask if the idea is to become billable right away and to start somewhere, what's all the things to do?

12:25John Busby:What's the most important? Land a project, get a check in the bank. You do nothing, nothing, nothing else until you land a project and get a check in the bank. What are the four things that you need to do that? a computer, a phone, brain power, business experience. Did I mention a website or a name or photos? No. And what I've really discovered because this proverbial, everybody wants to do that. And I was very tempted to do that. I figured out that I needed to make money right away because I have a lot of people to take care of, but everyone really wants to do that because it like, it feels good and you feel like, oh, I have a business, but here's the thing.

13:20Until you're generating revenue, it's not a business. It's a hobby. It's a pastime. It's whatever it might be. And the hardest thing of any business, and I really believe I have two fundamental beliefs. I believe that all businesses are fundamentally about relationships. And I believe the hardest thing for everybody is to generate revenue, sell. It's so hard. And what we all like to do, myself included. So I talked about, I started as a software engineer. I'm the most extroverted person you could ever meet. Now, I'm a little bit weird because I also grew up and still do a ton of performing arts.

14:07So if you give me the stage, I can fake it. But otherwise, I'm a little bit more of an introvert. So what people are really doing is they're kind of hiding from getting out there, hitting the pavement, knocking on doors and selling, because that's where the risk is. that's where we're going to know, is this business really going to work? We're not going to know that until we get out there and start selling. And it's hard, but I'm an engineer by background. If I can do it, anybody can do it. But that's the hard part.

14:45John Busby:And everybody has their level of comfort with selling for sure. But I would, I would submit that the more confident you are, that somebody is going to really love what you have, the easier it is or the easier it is to sell. And so I ask, I say that to set up the question of, you know, how does someone like me with 20 years experience, or maybe someone who's earlier in their career with 10, translate that effectively into something that the market wants? So that's a great question. And I do work with a lot of people who have a significant amount of experience. And in fact, my flavor of consulting is actually not fractional.

15:28It's superhero, superpower, super pay, get in with a client, use your superpower, make good money, and then move on to the next one. Don't try to lock in. I'm not looking for a part-time job, right? So what you're asking is, how do I figure out what my superpower is? someone possibly like you who has a large amount of experience. It may be in different areas. Some of the people that I work with really are general managers. General manager is not a consulting role. That's not a superhero, superpower, super pay. So you really need to zoom in and carve out a piece, which makes people a little bit nervous, but you need to come up with a value proposition.

16:18So you're a marketing guy by background, right? You need to do a little bit of market research on what's going to sell. So I also went to business school and spent some time in marketing. That sounds fancy. It's not. Put together a little sort of elevator pitch, what you think might work, put together a couple of them if you're trying to figure it out, and then go out and test it with three or four or five friends. See what feedback you're getting, tweak it. When you put together what your superpower or your sort of value proposition elevator pitch is, you're looking to maximize three things. What is the thing that you believe that you're the best at?

17:03You have the experience you're really good at. And you can actually, I've done outreach to like, again, I say market research. It's just really simple. Ask a few business colleagues a couple of questions. So I've gone out and said, hey, you worked with me here or there or whatever. When you think about me, what's the thing that you think I do best? And then start putting your data together because there may be a thing I think I do best, but I really want it from the customer's standpoint. So what's the thing that you do best? I have a colleague that I really love and he says, what's your highest and best use?

17:46So I love that way of putting it because it kind of helps crystallize maybe in a different way. What are customers going to pay you the most for? And what's your greatest passion? What really lights you up? So you can't start with, or at least only do that third thing, because what my greatest passion is and what really lights me up may not be what the market wants to buy. So it's kind of the intersection of those three things, your highest and best use, what the market will pay the most for, and what I love. Now you can play with those levers a little bit. So I might say, well, the market will pay the most for this thing, but I really love this thing.

18:30So I'm willing to take a little bit less pay for doing the thing that I love. Sometimes I have people who've been CPAs who come in and they say, save me from accounting. I don't want to do accounting anymore. And I say, well, okay, that's where you can make the most money. They say, that's okay. I'll sacrifice a little bit of this to do a little bit of this thing. So you get to like play with those levers and decide where that really goes.

19:00John Busby:I think it's important to help as we're talking about this to define the different types of maybe consulting work and then the pros and cons, maybe there are no cons, of the superpower superhero. The way I think about fractional work is I'm going to work for a company for a certain number of months, almost like a retainer basis, and you're getting my expertise, but you're paying less because you're only getting a percentage of it. And then there's a superhero, which is like a project for a set amount of time with a single or a set of deliverables. And then there's also maybe an agency, which is sort of like, I'm not a solo artist here.

19:42John Busby:I'm going to sell you on this project and a team's going to work on it for you. Is that sort of the right way to think about the different types of work like that. And so my reaction to superhero is some areas that it can be really good is that it's not, I don't think, threatening to incumbent employees because you're there to help with something and move on. You're not there to like, there's no hidden agenda to take somebody's job. Is that a fair statement? Very fair. And to follow on with that, what I found very quickly, I don't have an ego about my title. So I had been at the C level, right?

20:26I zoom in right under that as a consultant, because you're so good at zooming in on the exact issues. I don't want to threaten that person's job. I zoom right under and I make that person look like the best possible person. So I'm not threatening them. They want to keep me around and I'm going to leave anyhow. So I really don't want their job. So it's really, really important. And the superhero really is kind of like right under, like almost like I think about Superman, like flying in and propping that person up.

21:06John Busby:You know, fractional work in that, and that phrase has grown exponentially. Probably if you were to go into Google Trends and let you know it's one of those hockey stick type things in terms of how often you're talking about it or focusing on it. And it made me wonder, you know, for folks that want to do billable on the beach, is this the ideal time to go out on your own because everybody's talking about it? Or maybe tougher because you're competing against so many other people that might want to do fractional or superhero work? What's your thought on that? Honestly, I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

21:43I do think that it's a little bit harder since the pandemic. I think more people have been pushed out. I think the possibility has become more common. I think we've seen the gig economy grow bigger. So I do believe that there are more people doing it and I haven't really figured out, okay, what does that mean? How does that play out? My view on fractional is you mentioned about fractional that you sort of lock in for a lower rate. So I'm not a fan of a lower rate. And I don't believe, I think that if you think you're really locking in, I think you're fooling yourself. I think this whole idea of career or job stability, whatever you do is a dinosaur.

22:49It's gone. And a couple of my comments about for the second Monday of every month for 12 years, it blew up during the pandemic. I did a talk at Lee Hact Harrison, which is an outplacement services firm. So people who get laid off from corporate jobs at a certain level often get outplacement services to help you find your next job. So I did a talk every month for 50 or 60 people who had been laid off about how to start your own successful consulting business in case they were at a point in their career that they wanted to try that route. So every month I had 50 or 60 people who had walked into their corporate job a day or a week or a month before that, expecting to start work and got the ugly truth that their position had been eliminated.

23:38Sometimes they had an idea it was coming, but that was rare. Most people don't think it will be them. And sometimes it's only one position. So the idea that you're locked in and stable, even if you're a corporate employee, I just don't think that's reality anymore, John.

23:55John Busby:I agree with that. I think those days are gone. And I realized that I live in San Diego, which is high tech and biotech. It may be a little bit more volatile than some places, but maybe it's also not, right? So I think it's the same thing. You think you're locked in on a fractional contract. Well, I made that mistake early on. I sold to a big company. Man, I was exhausted by doing all this selling. It didn't come naturally to me. It was hard. It took a lot of energy. I locked in 30 hours a week for nine months or so I thought. This was like October, six or eight weeks after I had started, executive staff at that company meets every Monday morning at 7 a.m.

24:43CEO walks in and says, well, team, guess what? We are not on track to meet our bonuses for the end of the year. And that's about six weeks away. We need to cut expenses and we need to cut expenses fast. What do they cut? Travel, advertising, consultants. I have a lot of experience in medical devices. This is a large medical device company. And they say, bye-bye. What am I going to do? Am I going to sue them? Really? I'm not. I negotiated an extra 30 days cushion. I took my toys and I went home nicely. So even a contract, I mean, I'm just being realistic about how things work in the real world, locking in stability.

25:37So I say, let's go all in superhero, superpower, super pay. Now, is there still fractional work? Are there fractional roles? I take a strong stance to be a little bit obnoxious about it, frankly, and to have a different point of view. But I really do believe it. I tend to be more fearless than some of my friends and colleagues. In my personal time, I love zip lines. I love to jump off things. In San Diego, we have this junior lifeguards program that the kids all do. And your culmination is to jump off the pier. And one of your parents gets to jump with you. And I tell all my friends, if one of you guys don't want to jump, I want to jump with your kid because I love stuff like that.

26:32So just to just to say that I'm being a little bit obnoxious, fractional work really is OK. But I want people to understand that there's a possibility to do more if they want to.

26:46John Busby:Going back to the super pay part of your equation, what are some techniques or what's the way that you think that you get a fair price? Because I often see people who are recommending on consultants be like, you're worth more than you think you are. So, I mean, do you see that pervasive with folks getting into consulting? And what's the best way for check number one, you know, to not to not settle. So I talked about all the mistakes I make. The most common mistake that I see, absolutely number one, is not charging what you're worth. Because it's hard and it's scary. And it's funny because I'm not a mindset coach, but I know people work on all that website and all that stuff because they're afraid of the selling piece.