When you first start a business as a consultant or coach, you’re in fine-tuning mode.

As the month’s start flying by, you’re growing your key business foundations by learning to:

1. Provide the best solutions for your target market (solutions that they’re actively looking for)
2. Meet client expectations (e.g. learning how to set up client boundaries while still providing excellent services that can be measured in great results)
3. Constantly reviewing your processes (which can be everything from your client intake procedures to project management and more)
4. In essence, you’re developing the value you bring to the table as a consultant and prove that you can solve your clients’ problems.

These 4 keys allow you to build your credibility and reputation and establish trust. In turn, you can gather glowing testimonials… and get referred!

Once you start building this experience and great work, you’ll be able to leverage your intellectual property and those client success stories. Then you’ll be ready to identify more and bigger opportunities (especially if you’re working in a medium to large organization) where you can go ‘higher, wider and deeper’ in those organizations.

This juncture can be a very exciting time. It means you can start expanding your business. It also means you can look forward to raising your fees and help more clients by aligning yourself with other consultants, strategic partners or service-delivery experts who can deliver parts of the larger projects you are bidding on or landing.

See, when you start to scale this way, you can potentially take your business to a 6-figure income or higher. Because with these partner consultants on board, you’ll be able to stop trading your time for money and start adding strategic value while growing our business at the same time.

Here’s an example of how one consultant did just that.

Joanne Trotta is a client of mine who owns a leadership development, training and consulting company called “Leaders Edge Inc”.  www.leadersedgeinc.ca

Joanne has established a stellar brand and reputation by delivering incredible results and developing the leadership capability in several industry verticals. She has loyal clients who look to her for all their human capital and leadership development needs.

Now she has scaled her business by having several partners who provide value add complementary services and offerings. This has resulted in:

• Doubling top line revenue numbers
• Creation of new products and services to sell which creates stickiness with existing clients and new business opportunities
• Foundation for the business to continue to grow year over year

You can choose to scale or you can choose to keep it simple.  Either way, it makes sense to develop a network of trusted and reliable partners that you can draw on, which will allow you to be all you can be for your clients.

Here’s one way you can start the search for your strategic partners.  If you’re in the Toronto, Ontario area, I invite you to come to live Trailblazer Forum, happening on the evening of November 16th.

I created this unique and powerful live event to provide exactly the kind of atmosphere that gives business owners a chance to connect on a deeper level than just the “same old” networking event.

It combines learning practical business-building tactics like how to use non-salesy techniques to win clients, with some of the intangibles like how we view our approach to business can make a big difference.

One of the most powerful things you can do when you’re running a consulting, coaching or other service-based business is to make connections.

• Connections who can support you with their wisdom and insights.
• Connections who can introduce you to other valuable connections.
• And connections who are truly invested in growing a community of like-minded people who want to share the “realness” of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur.

If you’re not in the Toronto area, but you want to find out more about how you can expand your offerings and make more money by using strategic partners to help you serve your clients, simply set up a free 30-minute strategy call with me on my calendar here: https://calendly.com/kim-chernecki1

© Kim Chernecki 2016

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