April 2023 Blake Harber Consulting Update

All details and learnings on my consulting business for April 2023

May 08, 2023

April was a record income month at $42,000.

I’ve scaled to more consulting customers than the previous months but will be shifting my focus in the coming months. I’ll expand on that in a bit.

💰April Financials

✅ Consulting Income: $42,000
✅ Expenses: -$1,132
✅ Net Income: $40,866
✅ Pipeline Added: $190,000

🎉 Highlights

Consistent lead flow for 4 months straight
- I’ve been really fortunate to have decent lead flow for the last few months.
  Higher demand helps me to focus more on capacity planning & how I want to spend my time. I’m finding that my lead sources are a bit sporadic. I’ll expand on this later.
Better clarity on income
- The scariest part of going full time was not knowing what to expect in terms of income. It’s been A LONG time (over 12 years) since I didn’t have a salary.
  
  When I decided to go full time, my wife and I were prepared for 12 months of little to no income.
  
  After 5 months into the journey, I feel much more confident about my income ranging from $25k - $50k a month based on some capacity planning with customers.
Job board is live: https://jobs.blakeharber.com/jobs
- A request I get frequently from founders / friends is to help find talent for their startup.
  
  I also get many of you reach out asking about cool companies to be looking at. This is my way of starting to connect the two.
  
  Also, as of this month I’ve began monetizing some recruitment efforts. If you are looking for my recommended companies or want to post a job shoot me a note: me@blakeharber.com
Clarity overall on what I want to do…
- A lot more to come here… stay tuned for my next post in the new few days. I’ll also share a bit more on this later.

📝 Learnings from April:

Sourcing Deals:

Being ‘everywhere’ is helpful. So, I try to create this perception of being everywhere. I’ve gotten more in the habit of saying yes to all podcast and speaking engagements. Not typically something I would do… Regardless, it’s helpful.

Here’s how I’m trying more so to ‘be everywhere’:

I send my VC network 2-3 deals a month. Tactically, this means that any time I’m talking to a founder and I hear they are fundraising / getting ready to, I ask for their pitch deck to get in front of VCs. Then I get to email all my VC contacts to see if they want to talk to the founders. This happens 2-3x a month.

a16z
FPrime Capital
CRV
Basis Set Ventures
Peterson Ventures
Sequoia
Gradient Ventures (Google’s fund)
Amazon’s VC
and quite a few more…

I want to be top of mind for these contacts as much as possible.

I talked to a friend the the other day that said, “but I don’t have VC contacts”… my response: VCs don’t care who’s helping them source deals, they just want to see deals.
➡️ Find a contact, find their email and send it. Good chance you’ll get a response.
I post on LinkedIn at least 1x a day. Most of my posts only get a little bit of traction (5,000 - 8,000 impressions. Impression counts are relative, I have 32,000 followers). ***Linkedin locked me out last Friday, no idea why and with zero explanation. Hope it get’s resolved soon, very annoying.

Typically 1 or 2 posts a month will gain significant momentum and do >100,000 impressions. These posts are game changers.

Posting is a daunting task. It’s a grind. But every single call I take with a new founders starts with “I’ve seen your stuff on LinkedIn”…

I’d argue it’s recency bias. I’ll take it.
Many of my referrals come from non-founder, non-VC people who also work with founders. The conversation almost always looks like this:

I don’t know this person very well. In fact, we’ve met 1 time.

This referral comes from someone here in Utah that works with many similar founders to help them recruit reps.

He’s talking to my ICP all day.

I do my best to return the favor here as well.

A few key things in honing in on:

➡️ I have a larger audience in Utah
➡️ People in Utah and surrounding states are familiar with the companies I’ve helped build
➡️ This familiarity builds trust faster

Doubling down on building my brand awareness with 1-degree removed connections is key to continued growth.

Measuring every minute of every day

At the core of what I’m building, I want to see how big a 1 person business can become.

With that in mind, I have to learn what to outsource and how each minute contributes to growth.

I’ve recently started measuring what I do every single day, every minute. This sounds like a pain in the ass, but it’s actually quite interesting.

My goal is to figure how how I can spend 5 hours a day on $1,000 / hour activities instead of $100 / hour activities.

Ultimately, it’ll help me see which activities help me get closer to $1,000 / hour outcomes vs which ones do not.

I’m using the app, Toggl track. It’s sweet.

When I get a few weeks down the road, I’ll share my learnings

I'm a social person, got myself an office outside of the house. Mental health improved 10x. Thanks, Kiln

This isn’t a cool update but it was a big aha moment for me.

I was getting burnt out quickly and was finding it easy to fall off course on important projects.

I realized I was never able to disconnect from work when I was working at home all the time.

This isn’t new to anyone, but the ability to go into an office any time of the day and leave that office at any time was life changing. I LOVE going into an office from 10am-2pm and finish the day at home.

Miss all the traffic both directions.

What do I want to do in life...

I’m 33. I’ve got some runway in me. While I love running a ‘lifestyle’ business, I’m game to bust ass for the next few years doing things I love to create optionality.

Optionality = choosing everyday what I want to work on with zero concern of paying bills.

Let me start by sharing how I’m evaluating each month. I’m trying to break down a few things in review of each month:

What am I doing that brings me energy each day?
What is draining me of energy each day?
How to I do more things that bring me energy?
How do I do less things that drain me?

Here’s my answers currently:

✅ What brings me energy right now:

Building income from nothing. Trying to create income where there wasn’t income previously
Helping other people figure out how to quit their jobs and build income on their own
Writing
Learning new skills like how to build an audience and community
Doing vulnerable things like building in public
Helping find ways to make money doing things they enjoy

😫 What drains me of energy:

Back to back Zoom calls
Working with demanding people

⚡️How do I do more things that bring me energy each day

I’m going to reduce my customer count to increase time. This means I’ll drop my revenue a bit but the payoff will be to focus on scaling those other revenue sources. More on this below.

Accelerating Growth

I’ve been thinking A TON about how I can accelerate revenue. Breaking $40k a month is a great milestone, but I keep thinking about how do I get >$60k, $80k or $100k a month? So far, I’ve boiled it down to a few options:
- More Consulting - this is the most obvious. I have the bandwidth and lead flow, but I don’t want to. I believe it’s a dis-service to my current customers and ultimately it’s not what I want to do.
- Scale additional revenue streams - This is definitely a focus for me. I have 3-4 different streams of income right now but haven’t focused on how to scale any of them. I’ll be thinking about this more really soon. These streams include: courses, recruiting, referral partners, affiliates and sponsorships.
- Grow via acquisition - there’s a lot to uncover here but this is 100% in the cards for me in the near future. I’ve already begun the search. Stay tuned in coming weeks for updates on the search

ICP Learnings

I’ve had a lot of learnings around my ICP in the last 60 days. Now that I’ve onboarded a handful of customers, I’ve realized what type of work is going to have to take place for each segment of customer.

The 3 types of customers I see in my ‘startup’ ICP:

➡️ Founder led sales, founding team is still selling themselves, no sales reps, pre product, market fit.

➡️ Founder led sales, 1-3 sales reps in seat, founder is still closing. Still pre-product market fit

➡️ Product market fit, usually a few sales reps in seat, founder managed team. Little to no sales process / playbook

My best fit?

#3 on this list. It’s the easiest and fastest.

I’m still working with a lot of the the first two, but as many of you know, it’s an extremely difficult stage and hiring me doesn’t guarantee we’ll find product market fit.

📚 I’m launching a course on selling your services online and building your side hustle while still holding a full time job. I get 10 people a week wanting to learn how I’ve built a consulting business. It’s the main reason I built it in public.

I’m packaging up everything I know into a single course including how to source deals, how to price and package your offering and how to build a repeatable monthly income stream while still working.

If you’ve ever wanted to try selling your knowledge and expertise, I’ll walk you through step by step on my journey to >$40k a month in 90 days.

Check it out here on pre-sale for 75% off: https://www.blakeharber.com/offers/o3Yh6nTc/checkout

That’s it! A few things before you go:

If you enjoyed this, I’d LOVE for you to share it with anyone that is interested in learning how to start consulting
If you are interested in sponsoring my Substack you can be one of the first ones! It’s grown to >1,000 subscribers of founders and tech leaders. Email me at me@blakeharber.com
If you know anyone selling a SMB business (open to most industries) with $100k - $500k in SDE, please shoot me an email. I’d love to meet them.
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Solopreneur from $0 - $1M