Don't spill your candy in the lobby

Yeah, is it this book that I just accidentally happen to have lying around on my desk here?

Yeah, I just misplaced it, you know, and just just noticed it when you mentioned it. Yeah, absolutely. Because so, you know, I've been in all kinds of scrapes, scenarios, situations. I didn't want to find myself in all kinds of things. And so. Yeah, when you start working with with other people and particularly founders and CEOs. You see the same patterns and a lot of those patterns are the way that those people carry themselves into negotiations and sales scenarios, particularly, and all types of those types of relationships. And it all comes down to this thing, which we kind of isolated as the frame. know, somebody always holds the frame in any conversation, whether that's down at the, you know, local, bar or it's in a sales conversation. So recognizing that pattern has been one of the biggest things and been able to see it in the experiences I had and see it in others and help them to overcome it. So yeah, absolutely. It's a massive part of, of the whole thing.

Yeah. Well, ironically, that's basically the book is organized really through, 10 laws, if you like, you could call them laws. but so it's hard to put them down into, into three, but let's take an example of the qualifiers edge, for example, which is chapter seven. So in sales, I mean, you've asked me previously. before today's meeting about authoritative selling and you know, why, why I emphasize that so much. So the qualifiers edge is that everybody's trained and bombarded. mean, there's literally, I checked this earlier. There's literally something like 9 million results on LinkedIn for sales coaches and consultants. It's an, it's an endemic. We're absolutely bombarded with, you know, sales narratives and training left, right, and center, whether we want it or not, but almost all of it is tactical. So it's about, you know, how you convince, how you, you know, tactically sell someone something that they might not necessarily want. And it's vendor type behavior. It's all chase and push. So the qualifiers edge, for example, is you need to go into every negotiation or every sale looking to. qualify or even better disqualify. So when you go in with that mentality and you look for reasons why you would not want to work with this person, or you would not want to sell your product to this person. It makes the conversation way more authentic and organic and it makes, and it, it unnecessarily enables you to win the frame. It's not always a goal to dominate somebody else, but if you seek to qualify rather than sell, then I found that, you know, sales conversions go up dramatically in sales organizations and particularly founder led sales. so that's one example, but essentially, you know, practically the frame is, is a real thing that exists. It's been written about for in different ways, probably for about 50, 60 years. Technically there's some old documents, some old, some old kind of research and documents relating to it. but essentially, you know, it's something that exists in all sales and all negotiations. So learning how to use it, when not to use it, how it works, all those kinds of things is in my opinion, essential to, to running any kind of business.

Good question. So. In my own work and, and, know, my consulting that I would do with a client, I would always say, I would always kind of go contrary to everybody else's narrative again, which is typical of me. I'm quite contrary, contrarian, but I would always say that, you know, this kind of new, narrative that everybody has, which is, you know, the, in America, they say the riches are in the niches and You know, the smaller the niche, the more successful you're going to be and all the rest of that stuff. I don't believe that's true unless you're in a very high scale environment, like a Russell Brunson, you know, kind of funnel hacking type of world where you're spending a ton of money on advertising. So I don't subscribe to tiny niches and I certainly don't subscribe to selecting and choosing your own because you can spend an awful long time. slogging away at a niche that doesn't work and make no money. And it's probably the biggest problem. mean, of those 9 million coaches and consultants, it's a known fact that 1 % of them even make it into six figures. Right. So the rest are flailing, but yet they're making a lot of noise and you know, so I drink my own Kool-Aid essentially. There's, there's certain industries that I enjoy working in. I love working with. professional services companies because the ticket is usually higher. And so therefore the ROI is, is quick. you know, lot of the stuff we talk about, authority selling the frame preeminence, all of that stuff comes over really well in professional services. having said that there isn't many industries that haven't worked in, you know, accounting, financial services, traditional stuff, legacy manufacturing. There's not much I haven't worked with the principles tend to carry. but typically if you're a CEO founder, you're doing 3 million in revenue plus you're not private equity backed. and you don't run by committee, then we could probably do something together, you know,

Yeah. So I have to be careful here not to come across as, as a laggard, because I'm, because I'm not right. So I, I understand, you know, I move with the times and I understand the importance of AI and I understand how useful it is, but I also understand the, the current dangers in terms of relying on it and taking advice from it and, You know, making it a central source of truth, which isn't because right now it just hallucinates. I mean, I, did something the other day where we, asked Claude something and it basically sourced information from an article, which was also AI generated. And so it's like AI takes advice from AI and provides you with advice. So, so all of that said. A lot of my work, so I use it like everybody else for productivity. So I never use it to, to, do my thinking, or I never outsource my out, think my thinking to AI because it's, I believe it's gotta be my thinking, but I'll allow it to help me articulate things because that's just common sense. Why would you not do that as a tool? So use it. So I'll use it to help me articulate and clean things up faster than we could before. But when it comes to the work I do with clients, I think one of the biggest advantages we have right now is that, and again, you asked me about authority and preeminence and those things before, but tactics and tools are not a durable advantage because everybody has access to the same ones. So you can go and be as world-class as the next guy that's using the same tool. But the nuances that make us human are. you know, irreplaceable at this point, and hopefully for the foreseeable future, it's those things that that element of expertise and human nuance that, you know, allows us to outsmart the machines. So I think 99 % of people, or let's say 95 % or whatever, will go and rely on AI to go and do everything for them. But that won't help them to stand out in a red and increasingly redder ocean. Which it is more or less every industry is. So, you know, I tend to start to do the opposite. So I will talk to clients about slowing down, doing the manual things again, you know, kind of I'll go into a sales team that's using lots of AI and lots of automation. And the first thing we'll do is kill it and I'll get them to own a hundred leads again and go and contact a hundred leads. I'll get them to go and read Chet Holmes, the sales machine. because I think it's relevant again, you know, things like that old school. and so I slow down, step outside of that stuff, let everybody else kind of confound themselves with it. Whilst we do the human things that stand out because ultimately despite this AI, I think that people are craving human interaction. They're craving proof that what they're interacting with is a human. And so I kind of stand by those values.

Yeah. You must've read some of my articles here, man. This is like, this is so much so far in my wheelhouse. so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. it just sat, you know, it's just so, it's so, it's so me and so vanquished. So the answer is we call it spilling your candy in the lobby, spilling all your candy in the lobby. So

typically consultants. So I've worked with a lot of consultants as well. So, you know, another, another area I've ended up working is helping consultants to build their practices. It's natural. It's not a target for me, but it's something that I've done a lot of. I've probably helped a hundred consultants and, advisors to build, their own practices, their own successful practices as well. But, so one thing that they all do is they all think that If you solve the problem upfront, if you can diagnose and solve the problem upfront, then boom, the, you know, the keys to the kingdom, the door will unlock and this person will want to become a client. But it's, it's kind of the opposite. It's a really strange paradox, but prospects don't come to us to receive a salute, an immediate solution to the problem. That's not why they're there. The first thing they want to do is actually understand the problem to start with, right? They don't want us to diagnose it and tell them what it is. They want to come in and understand it collaboratively. And it's kind of like our job is to hold up a mirror and to ask the right questions in order to do that. So I've found that asking the right questions is far more powerful than giving all the right answers. Asking the right questions demonstrates your authority without you having to say it. And it also allows the prospect to take a look in the mirror and see what's actually going on and feel understood. So, it's kind of this really, really strange odd paradox that when you go out to try to prove that you can help someone and give them all these ways to fix it, they tend to zone out. And running the opposite direction because they know you're trying to sell them. They know you're trying too hard. They know that you're trying to kind of solve the problem too fast. Cause you can't solve someone's problem in a 30, 40 minute discovery conversation, for example. So, so that's kind of, that's kind of the long answer, but yeah, I mean, it's, you know, don't spill your candy in the lobby. Don't give away the answers. I mean, it's your IP as well. And then there's the other crowd that will obviously try to take what you give them and go and implement it and all the rest of the, so it's fraught with danger, but you know, asking the right questions, reaching a diagnosis and then offering a reasonable way to roll your sleeves up and help them solve it. It's far more effective.

it's seven years. It's actually seven years. It's five years, I guess, five years on LinkedIn or somewhere where we connected, but seven years, I've kind of been doing it. And then we, we formulated, you know, vanquish as a, as an entity, probably a bit later than that. But, so the question, might have to cut a little bit of this out of the middle because I've forgotten the question. Sorry.

Good question. I would have. spent less time doing what most solo coaches and consultants do, which is kind of looking for the next shiny object and looking for the silver bullet to, to fix it all. you find the common pattern is the data round. So you're data round from content to Instagram ads to YouTube long form videos to You know, the latest costs that can help you become a seven figure coach or whatever that is. Right. And you find that there's this, this pinball, it bounds around all these things because they're looking for this thing that's just going to unlock it. And it's just going to build the practice. But I think, you know, I, I bounced around a lot for the first year to 18 months. And I kind of ultimately just realized that it's like any other business, nothing but hard work. You know, elbow grease and grit is going to build this thing. get rid of all the big shiny toys. know, you should be able to, I always say to my clients, I should be able to drop you into the Amazon jungle with a beat up old laptop and you should be able to build, you know, 30, 40 K a month practice within a few months. And, and, know, you don't need all this fancy stuff. So with that kind of Zen minimalist principle. I just think, look, talk to people. The only metric that's going to move this thing is talk to as many people as you possibly can have as many close to discovery calls as you possibly can with real people and do that by manually reaching out to them, being human, being authentic, and don't do anything else until you're doing 30, 40, 50 K a month. And then think about scale and chasing the next toy. I think that's what I would. kind of tell my pre-consulting self.

Yeah, always, always goals. So For me, my greatest interest and greatest passion really is building and for want of a better word, scaling. Cause again, that's an overused word, but building and nurturing and scaling companies, right? And so for me, you know, I have two strings to my bow on one side, have a portfolio. I have a portfolio of my own investments and my own companies and

a number of them are in this sector, a number of them are not. So I continue to grow that. But the next step on that ladder is partnerships. So I'm really focused now on nurturing a handful of really great partnerships, people that I'm going to work with for the next decade. So while it's great to do some of the project stuff that I've done in the past and done some incredible things with some incredible people and companies. I love partnerships. I love being part of something that I can really move the needle for and with for the longterm. So my focus is to develop and nurture more of those and, you know, kind of find the right folks that I want to do that with.

Yeah. So here's where I'm not. I'm not on Instagram. I'm not on Facebook. I'm sparingly on YouTube. I'm sparingly on, on X. You could say I'm almost anti-social, but no. So LinkedIn, www.vanquishconsulting.io. The frame is on Amazon. You can't miss it. other than that you know i'm not difficult to find

Thanks so much, Mick. I really appreciated it.