Join us for an insightful conversation with Eric Rich as he delves into the intricate world of business development, sharing his journey from PwC and Infosys to his current role at Elixirr. Discover Eric’s unique perspectives on what defines effective business development, including his emphasis on aligning market opportunities with organizational capabilities and the importance of fostering genuine client relationships over simply selling services.
In today’s episode with Eric, you’ll learn how to:
- Craft a winning business development framework that sets you apart.
- Identify and dominate your niche to consistently secure new business.
- Build unshakeable trust with your customers, turning them into loyal advocates.
- Accelerate the sales process, transforming prospects into customers faster.
- Articulate your unique selling points clearly, captivating potential customers’ interest.
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Welcome back to another episode of the show. Joining Michael on the show is Eric Rich. Eric leads the growth at Elixirr. He has more than 25 years of consulting experience and is a recognized leader in advising clients around innovation operating models and design thinking, technology enablement, business transformation, and cost reduction process improvement initiatives. Eric has spent his career driving complex transformational programs for some of the world’s largest global companies across most major industry segments and geographies.
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Let me tell you a little bit more about what you’re going to learn in this episode with Eric. First is how to craft a winning business development framework that sets you apart. How to identify and dominate your niche to consistently secure new business. How to build unshakable trust with your customers, turning them into loyal advocates. How to accelerate the sales process, transform prospects into customers faster, and articulate your unique selling points clearly. Plus, so much more. Here to share with you his story and insights is Eric Rich. Enjoy.
Business Development Components
What does good business development look like in your mind? Are there frameworks or principles that you focus on when you think about the concepts and areas of this development itself?
It’s a complex topic. If business development were easy, everyone would do it and be successful at it. To me, there are a lot of different components of it. You talk about what is the market opportunity. What are your capabilities? How do they align? Where do you want to focus your efforts when you’re talking about building a business? In my mind, it’s not about getting fancy and trying to sell everything that a client mentions that they want, but it’s thinking about what are the things we are good at and where we stand apart and have something to offer that others don’t.
In the consulting world, I think that comes down to how you approach clients, what you mean to clients, and what type of work you want to do with them. For me, it’s always been about they have objectives as a business and they’re hiring us to achieve those objectives, so how can we help them? It’s not about I have something I think they need and let me go push something on them and sell a product or a canned offering. It’s more about they know their business better than I do. I’m never going to doubt that but I do need to know about their business.
They will have challenges where the experiences I’ve had as a consultant will be applicable. How can I take my understanding and quickly understand what they’re trying to do and then marry that up with what are the capabilities we’re strong at? These can be anything from a strategy to an operating model to a process transformation. It can involve capabilities like data and digital and the things that we see a lot of today as enabling technologies. If you come in with a toolkit of understanding of the business, a set of capabilities that you can bring to the table, and a framework to which to work.
How do I start? What do I do first? I want to understand the problem they’re trying to solve, make sure we’re working on the right thing, and then how I bring something of value to that problem. To me, it’s a relationship. I’m purposely in the government today because we sell in relationships. We don’t compete on RFPs and RFIs. It’s not about price. It’s not about who has the most case studies.
It’s about whether can I build a relationship with the client’s trust and will see me as a partner or not as a vendor and that kind of thing. That’s how I like to develop businesses. It takes time. It’s a journey, but you have to have enough going at all times where you’re not suddenly off all my projects and then I’ve got to now go spend a year developing business. It’s a process of keeping a pipe full of big accounts to build off of.
Let me ask you because you talked about the importance of identifying the problems, and what’s top of mind for the buyer or the prospective client. You’re not just coming in saying, this is what we have to offer and therefore you need it. It’s that kind of customization or making sure that it’s relevant. If I paint a very broad brushstroke, I think there are two camps. There’s the camp of people who believe that you need to spend a lot of time having deep, meaningful conversations with buyers to understand what problems they have and where the opportunity might lie.
You then have this other camp that believes it’s less about asking questions initially and more about saying, here’s the data in the market. Here’s what’s going on. Here are the problems. Are you having these problems? Of course, they’re asking questions, but one seems to lead more with the mindset of, let’s get in there, get our foot in the door, and then we’re going to ask a lot of questions. The other seems to come in with a lot more, we’ve already done the homework, we know the industry, we know the data. Where do you sit on that? What’s your view of those two?
It’s a challenging topic because there are merits to both. You have to be relevant and you have to get in front of clients proactively. You can’t expect these conversations, they’re going to give you two hours to sit and listen to them. You have to get your ad bats and take advantage of them and we do both. I do both. A lot of times, it’s thinking about what are the hot topics right now and how to find an opportunity to tell a client, “I have something to say about this topic, you should talk to me.” When I get that moment, it’s now I want to listen. What are they saying?
Is it their interest in this topic or is there something else underlying here that they’re trying to achieve? How do I translate that into an opportunity? I like to look at it that way. I always feel like we need to be ahead of our clients not necessarily their industry, but what’s happening in the world with technology data. All these things are changing very fast now, and that’s creating these opportunities for people. If I can go talk about an opportunity with a client, with a business slant on it, like what does this mean to your customers or your experience or your business or your onboarding process or whatever it is? If I can find clients to target that, that’s relevant to them.
We need to be ahead of our clients on what’s happening in the world, not just their specific industry, especially when it comes to technology and data. Share on X
Maybe it’s somebody who leads account opening or customer service, and then what are the five things they’re going to be interested in? Can I get a meeting by saying something smart about that and getting them interested? Then sitting and saying, “Before I dive in and tell you all about how great I am, tell me what your job and your role is. What are you doing? What’s on your agenda?” By listening, almost creating or co-creating the opportunities to go after them. That’s where I think the balance is.
Let me try and summarize that for everybody and let me know if this is accurate or if I’m missing something. It sounds like what you’re saying is you’ve already collected the data. You understand the industry. You have maybe a top 3 or 5 main points that are going to be relevant to that buyer and that’s what you use to get the meeting to hook them in. Once you sit down, that’s where you’re going to spend more time asking questions to understand the human, the person, before you start talking about the problem. Then you’re going to explore both the person and the problem.
I may not have the right understanding of the problem. They may not know the problem. By listening, you can get to, “Are you sure that’s what you’re telling me? Maybe it’s something else up here.” Doing it in a way that’s collaborative because I’ve been in that environment where we’re pushing sales and volume, and we’re trying to sell the next deal. There’s something in the market that says it’s shooting fish in a barrel and everyone needs it. I’m going to get 5 out of 25 attempts. I’m going to close something.
That environment has come and gone. I think that was when there was a lot of back-office transformation project software. That was happening a lot. I think now, you have to get someone’s attention by saying, “Something that I’m going to put in front of you now will help you achieve or exceed your goals and what you’re trying to do as a business,” and framing it that way so that they see it and they understand it. Again, when I get a meeting with someone, no matter what channel it comes in, there are lots of channels, but I know who they are, I know what their role is, I know their business.
You get someone’s attention by saying something that will help them achieve or exceed their goals and what they’re trying to do as a business. Frame it in a way that’s clear and compelling, so they can easily see the value you offer. Share on X
I can find out things pretty quickly, enough to say they are probably interested in these 3 or 4 topics. Let me at least present something to them and say, “I know I have time, or I’d like to get with you. Here are some things I think we can talk about. Is there anything else on your mind?” Once you get there, I rarely will bring a lot of presentation material to an initial meeting. It’s a conversation. That gets them comfortable that you’re not here to sign a contract and leave, and you’re going to be the person helping me.
The next thing I do every time is try to be helpful. First action. What can I do for this person? Introduce them to somebody, send them an article or research paper, or even build something, a few slides for them to say, “Here’s what I heard, and here’s something for you to think about.” Not a proposal, not a price document. That’s an entry into a new relationship. Once you’re in, it’s very different. Now I know your business. Our clients are senior-level execs. I know what’s happening in your unit. I know what’s happening and what your M&A strategy is.
I know how you guys are expanding or what new products you’re going after, and then I could start to think about my experience of being in similar companies. What are the things that got them in the end? What are the things that were great ideas or how did they go about it? You’re looking at how can I be part of your team with that executive. How can I bring stuff to you as a benefit of working with our firm? I will bring you ideas and things that are free advice but with the spirit of we’re going to be part of your growth plan.
I want to go a little bit deeper into what you did early on at Elixirr in the role of business development and coming over from Elixirr UK-based company, but your role is to open up the US market, to expand into the US market. Before we do that, I want to go a little bit more into this idea of creating the at-bats, as you call it, creating the opportunities where somebody is going to say yes to an appointment and meeting.
Developing The Hook
When you identify an ideal client, somebody that you want to do business with, very clearly, you’re leading with the idea of I’m going to build a relationship with this person before I even talk to them about how we can specifically help them, which sounds fantastic. How do you identify? How do you get to the point where you think, here are the 3 or 5 things that I should put in front? How do you go about it” If you could share that process of developing the hook, developing that initial outreach, that message that’s going to get somebody to say, “Eric, yes, I’m going to carve out time to speak with you.”
Let me make it a bit of a broader answer than that. The first and most important thing is who are you going to target. I had to re-establish and reinvent myself coming to Elixirr because my prior firms were big consulting firms and well-established. We had a sales team. I was a “Here’s a lead, go close it” kind of leader. This is very different. When I joined Elixirr in 2016, it’s been eight years, I was the only one in the US. If I had done it on my own, I wouldn’t have had the benefit of having Elixirr. We do things and I could take those ideas and build on them.
I had no team, no brand, nothing other than contacts and relationships. Early days, it was about exploring the market and getting out there and saying, how do I figure out even who to sell to? What type of role is in an organization? What type of companies? What industries? That’s a process that you have to learn very fast or you’re going to fail because you need clients. Once I have success, how could I build on that by that client recommending me within their company or to their network or whatever? The way I go about it and think about it is you have all these channels.
Their client relationships, their past relationships, their conferences, or getting yourself out there on marketing platforms. There are all kinds of ways to do it, including partnerships, etc. You have all those channels and you say, I’m going to keep these going until I realize it’s not bringing me success and I’m going to double down on another one. You then start to learn the process of what capabilities we have in the market trends and demands that are happening.
Whether it’s across the industry or within the industry, where is there a market for some of those things here that I can go after based on who I know and how does it line up with their company? You start to explore and you realize, we’re good and strong in retail banking and there’s a huge market in the US of regional banks and they’re a good size to sell to because they may not get the attention of the big consulting firms all the time. They’re not chasing Bank of America. That’s a good opportunity space for me to go after.
Once I started going after it, I realized a lot of them are doing data and insights-driven work. I have a data capability. That’s good. Who does data stuff? Business leaders, CEOs, CIOs, etc. You hone in on what is it about banking and data that there’s a message around or a topic around, is it cross-selling, is it customer service and better experience, is it onboarding efficiency? What are those things? Do I have the capabilities to do those things?
Do you usually learn that from the conversations that you’re having as you reach out to those people or do you find that you get a lot of that intel from reading?
You have to do your work, but it’s test and learn. There’s nothing better than going out and having a conversation and realizing that didn’t work, versus me reading a bunch of stuff. If you’re not out in the market, you’re not going to learn. Even early in my career, I realized I decided to go out and get a job after my bachelor’s degree and I thought MBA down the road maybe. I realized that I’m learning more by doing work in the field. Doing an implementation in a refinery and seeing how a refinery works is a gold mine way better than a textbook. That philosophy has always stuck with me and you apply it in sales and business as well.
If I don’t get out and try, now I might try with a warm-friendly person and test something with someone I know first before I go like try it with someone and lose a potential client forever because I’ve offended them in some way. You have to learn and you start to learn what works and you learn the process you go through that works. It’s not the same for all of our partners sell differently. They all have different ways of doing it, but we’re all selling similar themes and outcomes like, why does our approach work better? We all sell that the same, but I might try to sell to a certain channel differently than somebody else who has a different way of accessing clients. We all have our ways that work for us. That’s what we do.
People often say that when a new CEO comes on board or a leader in an organization, the first 90 days are critical.
I was going to say that. I forgot. A new executive in a new firm is a big target.
The First 90 Days
That can often be a trigger in terms of who to target. As a consultant or right firm owner, you might find people that are new in roles, that can be a goldmine of opportunity. Let me shift the question a little bit and thinking about your experience now, I know it’s been eight years since you’ve been at Elixirr, but if you were a consulting firm owner and let’s say you were new to the go-to-market, you had the expertise for maybe many years in the business or maybe you’ve been consulting for a period of time.
You want to take things to the next level and you feel like, “I have 90 days to make something work here. What would you do or are there any lessons from what you’ve seen and what you did? Would you do anything differently from what you did back eight years ago in those first 90 days? How do you approach that critical period?
You’re making the assumption that the first 90 days were successful. It’s honestly like getting traction. That was a big reason why I joined Elixirr because there was a successful firm already running and I could take some time to figure out what I was going to do in this market and get help and advice from the people that had gone through it before me. It’s not easy. This is the biggest thing that surprised me. I grew up in a big consulting firm and advanced. The second opportunity that I pursued was a new consulting capability in a bigger IT services firm, which was different.
That was a very different way to sell and approach the market. When I came to the Elixirr for the first time, this is now roll up your sleeves and get out in the market and make a market. You’ve got to go be a market maker. That meant I had to be open to I think I’m selling this today, but next week it might be a whole different idea because it’s getting traction. It might be a different type of client. I did oil and gas for 25 years and I’ve done nothing but banking and insurance at Elixirr. It’s finding your way.
In the first 90 days, the most important thing is I very quickly have to get a grip on the market, the wide space of the market. Why am I in existence today? What am I going to do to position myself as something different? If I end up competing against known brands, we know what happens. If I end up competing against people who can undercut me on a strategy project because they’re going to get downstream work and I don’t do that work, I know what happens. You have your basic. Just like any startup, the idea I have is to go to market and this is a white space.
I’m going to figure it out in two weeks if it does work or not. If it’s not, I need to start saying, “What part of it can I turn into something new and a new idea and go after that? I almost would say in this particular type of business that you must do what we preached to our clients, which is to have a hypothesis, test, and learn. Make no doubt about it, the most critical thing for us is you’ve got to start contributing numbers to the business or it doesn’t last long. The business is for you.
The Ideal Client Selection Process
You talked about different clients, different industries, different sectors that you’ve worked in, and also the importance of going out there, validating the market, having conversations, having maybe a hypothesis or some assumptions, but being willing to adjust based on what you see in the market. I’m wondering what lessons have you learned about ideal client selection. What stands out for you? Maybe even taking some stories.
There are some examples. One of the tenets is an experienced executive in a new firm, that’s a category. We call it the middle market America. Honestly, these are massive companies. They have lots of money but there’s this underserved market of mid-market energy companies. There are lots of them. Public utilities, regional banks, $1 billion to $4 billion companies. There are lots of them out there. If you find the ones that are growing, you can see it growing. You can see their valuation growing. You can see their revenue growing.
You can see their services growing. You can see them becoming more prevalent. Those are the guys that need it. They’re running their business probably like they were when they were $500 million. They need operational help. They need OP models. They need to understand digital and the relationship with their customers and their people, their employees, and users, like how they run their business, and how they run their supply chain with digital. Those are the kinds of things that I look for.
When you’re looking at stuff like that, to me, in those early days, I wasn’t so worried about the industry. I was more worried about the type of common problems they were all going through. COVID was a new set of problems like a lot of companies had a new set of problems to deal with. It wasn’t like I was going to be a niche in this industry. It was I’m going to look at the space of revenue growth and innovation and cost optimization and efficiency, two very big buckets.
What was in those, and how do digital and data play in those? How do you create innovative ways of working when you’re solving problems in each space? The question I always ask is what does good look like in an OP model for this type of business for a B2B business? How can you take a sales prospecting process and lead it down to minimal time so you can spend all your time closing deals? Those are the kinds of things that you think about these problems and you target them at the sales organization in any B2B company that doesn’t have to be in this industry.
Is there anything that knowing what now you would do differently with the benefit of hindsight in terms of how you go about selecting who to focus on?
My biggest learning coming over to this type of consulting business was that I had to shake my years of experience in selling templated solutions to the market. You got to go out there and say, “You need this and I learned that relationship, trust, understanding your client, it’s almost like intimacy. I’m giving you the feeling that I care about your business, and I do because it’s fun and it’s interesting.
You need to deeply understand your client’s business and make them feel that you genuinely care about their success and want to be a true partner in achieving it. Share on X
I want to be a partner in your success and if your outcome is what I care about, then you’re going to trust me and you’re going to know I’m going to be there. Even if we hit a problem, I’m going to be there to solve it. That’s not to say I didn’t have that feeling way back then, but it was much easier to sell in a bigger firm because you were getting stuff served up to you. This was different. What I learned about that was I may have had a relationship with a client in a big company for twenty years, they’re not my buyers because they’re still in the organization that buys from the big guys and they’re not going to get fired over hiring me.
I have to go out and find new customers and new clients. What I found was a lot of people will say like when they’re growing up to this higher level in their career where they’re responsible for revenue and building a growing business, they will say, “I don’t have a network. I don’t have a black book of executives to sell to.” The moment you challenge them and say, and I learned this very quickly, it’s the people that you see every day that you go meet for drinks that are your friends, your family events, your uncles and aunts, they’re probably executives in some firms somewhere.
Find out what they do. Talk to them. Have discussions about what you do and what are you excited about where your company is doing and learn from that. I’m not saying sell to them, but learn from them and then take those ideas and go think about it. Is there an opportunity in the market for that? You have to find the market opportunity. The other thing I learned was it’s going to change every three months. In today’s environment, if I don’t keep current on what’s happening, especially technology and innovation, I’m going to miss the window.
I have to constantly be knowing and things come and go. You think about the discussions that a year and a half ago were blockchain and crypto. That disappeared and people are now talking about other things, AI and ML. You have to think about what is the topic people are talking about. For a while, it was EST, for a while it was return to work and return to the office. What do I do with all the space? That’s going to constantly change.
You have to think about it. I have a set of capabilities that can be applied to any type of problem. I need to understand the problem. You’ll start to find those nuances in every problem have a similar thing, which is getting a piece of information from one point to another point faster, or whatever it is, taking a lot of data, giving insights. I think if you can work with that framework and then be smart and clever on how to apply it, then you’ll have success.
Focusing on relationships by default or definition usually means slower. You’re giving yourself more time. It’s more of a long-term mindset. You’re not rushing. You’re not trying to persuade or push. What are you seeing right now in the markets that you work in? What is the length of that typical sales cycle from the initial conversation to signing on the dotted line? What does that look like?
Of course, the answer I’ll give you is it depends, but I’ll give you some range.
A range maybe of what you’re saying.
Typically it’s in a fast cycle. It’s 2 or 3 months and in a typical cycle. It’s probably a year of investment. I will tell you this, I learned this from doing consulting. We used to do these big transformation change projects. The biggest failure point was always we got to the end and then we rolled it out to people and they weren’t ready. It’s the same thing. I always would have said, “If we had got them ready before and made that investment, it would have cost more in the first phase, but we wouldn’t have all these problems in the pocket.” It’s the same thing with sales.
I can spend a year developing a good relationship with the business and a client and proving myself. Maybe I invest in a project for them or maybe I do something at an investment price or whatever. What that is building for me is I’m reducing and eliminating my future sales costs. I’ve got a client now that’s buying for me on a capacity model and I don’t even have to go sell anymore. I signed a contract every year and they do call-offs for it. What does that say to me?
That’s the business I have. I don’t have to go do another year to get that business. That’s how I built. At all times, I do have these 5, 6, and 7 conversations that are going to take six months and I know that. I have to be patient with it. Finally, the one thing I said was, now let’s do something. I’ve also got this existing business and the hard thing about starting a company or a market is getting that kind of platform and starting to have that foundation to build on.
Bringing Business In Sooner
I guess, my assumption would be that in your position where the business already exists, there’s already cashflow coming in. You’re in a position where you can take a little bit longer. Of course, you have to deliver, I’m sure, showing progress and results and you’re going in the right direction, but the paycheck is coming in while you’re doing that. For somebody who is maybe running a much smaller firm, they needs to find ways to bring business in sooner. What advice might you have for somebody who is in a position like that?
It’s a great question. To be clear, we run a profitable growing company. It is very important to bring results in early on. It’s not any different than what you’re explaining, but I think what you have to be willing to do and get your head around is 1) This is not easy. 2) You’ve got to be willing to sell what you could sell. I might have a vision of like, I want to be the best AI company in the world, but if I can sell a data strategy project to that client because they know I’m smart about data, I’ve got to do that to get my revenue coming in and to have that opportunity to grow find business with that client.
You have to be willing to pivot quickly into where is my fastest path to revenue coming in. I hope people are learning now with what’s happened over the past few years that not everyone can have a startup. You need to earn your right to do that and it’s not easy. It’s very difficult. My advice to people starting on this journey would be to get your experience, take your cycles, and learn from people who are doing it and doing it successfully, and then start to try to do it. Many people see it and say, “I want to do that, I want to be a founder,” and then they realize the investment that my friends gave me runs out in two months.
Not everyone can just jump into a startup. You need to earn your stripes by gaining experience and learning from successful entrepreneurs before taking the plunge. Share on X
It takes work. That’s for sure. I wanted to ask you about differentiation. You mentioned a couple of times earlier in the conversation about finding where you fit in the market. I think Elixirr today, maybe does roughly about a hundred million or over a hundred million US dollars equivalent to give or take. Am I in the ballpark?
Yeah, ballpark. It’s a public data center.
Somewhere around that. From what I saw, that was public information and I’m going from pounds into US dollars. If we compare that, let’s say to a McKinsey, that’s about 1/10 give or take what McKinsey is. Elixirr is still a very established company in terms of revenue size but still much smaller than some of these very large organizations like McKinsey.
Communicating Your Unique Advantage
When you think about going to market and you think winning business, is it focusing on the companies that aren’t going to the likes of McKinsey? Walk us through that because I think there are a lot of consulting firms. There are a lot of firms that provide strategy advice on AI and data and innovation. That by itself is unique. What I’m interested in is this. What do you focus on to bring out the unique aspect, the advantage that your company has? How do you communicate that?
That’s a challenge. Even in Elixirr, it varies by market. How we position ourselves in Europe and the UK might be different than here. Generally speaking, I’m not looking to avoid accounts where McKinsey has a relationship. I’m looking to say, “What can I do?” We pride ourselves on being better. That’s what we’re striving for. I’ve done a lot of projects alongside or in the same ballpark or in the same client as some of those names. The niche that we found in the US when we started having success here eight years ago was there were a couple of things that people weren’t doing well or that clients were getting frustrated with.
If you take a topic like innovation or even AI or something, you can have a strategy and you can talk about a strategy, but who is out there having a very brief discussion about a strategy to understand what is your business trying to do and then saying, “Here’s an application in your business that we can prove out to understand what the strategy should be. Let’s do something.” It’s like breaking down a big broad strategy of where I want to be in ten years to what is my strategy to solve that. What are the enabling tools and prove it to me?
Show me the results. I call it almost strategy through outcome or strategy through execution. Get it done, execute, and get me an outcome. Show me what worked and didn’t work in terms of what you said the strategy should be. Let’s modify the strategy and do the next. I think it was that talking about like let’s do something with clients instead of like, because they’re getting tired of hearing about it. Let’s do something and let’s help you get the support internally and the funding you need to do what your vision is or to deliver what you’ve committed to your stakeholders, your clients, or your customers.
I think by having that attitude of we’re in this with you. If the outcome is not there, we’re going to keep working until it is there, we’re going to figure it out. If we’re both wrong, at least you did it for 100K or 150K in six weeks. If not, I did a whole year strategy for you and gave you some ideas and by the way, we missed the boat and you spent a lot of money on me. I think that one thing is that attitude of we’re entrepreneurs, you’re an entrepreneur in your role in the company. You’re trying to do something and achieve some goal and you have ideas and you need to be creative and innovative about how you get them to market. I’m in this with you. This is our thing. Let’s go do this.
An entrepreneur’s role is to identify and pursue innovative ideas, bringing them to market creatively and effectively. Share on X
That was the thing that got people like, “This is refreshing. You guys are going to do something. You have relationships that can do it faster. That’s great.” I think that was that speed-quality outcome was what got us some traction. The other important thing was we built very quickly on it. We showcased it and then we said, “We’ll do this with you as an investment, but we want you to make some interest for us,” or those kinds of things. At that time, we built momentum around getting noticed, getting some at-bats, and getting our story right. How do we message things and how do we have success in selling?
Cultural Differences
I want to also touch on cultural differences or potential cultural differences. You’ve worked with companies that are based in different places around the world. Today, your role is in the folks on the US market. You said eight years ago, you opened up the US market for Elixirr. What have you found? Is there anything that stands out to you in terms of the difference in how different countries and different places think about consulting and how consulting work is done? You can go broader in terms of strategy but is anything that stands out like they’re different here because we have a global audience? Share anything that stands out for you.
Just a little bit of probably new context. We’re evolving all the time. We’re moving now from a GTM approach and go-to-market, I’ve taken on some leadership globally for the industry now. We’re shifting to that because we see an opportunity. Opportunity is what drives us. We see that one market can learn from another market. If we can bring ideas across markets, that’s a good way to expand and grow a business. These are things we try all the time and we’re experimenting with it now and moving into it.
Back to your point, the cultural differences, one very important thing that I saw is, that there is an importance of being able to execute, depending on how far you go in the value chain of services. If you’re doing repetitive, intensive work and you can do it at a better cost location in a time zone that works, in a language that works, you should go after those kinds of things. I think one thing that I felt very strongly about when I made this decision to change jobs into this. It was the market today, what people are buying and what they want help with.
These experience digital proposition developments or those kinds of things, they’re very short, sharp opportunities. You have to get out there and get it done. That’s hard to do with a team in a different place. It’s much easier to do with people who have experience in a similar context environment, whether that’s industry or process or business model or whatever it is. If you can sit and be face to face and think about together and whiteboard and do things on the fly in an agile manner, that model is different. That’s small team sprints.
I don’t know if that’s a cultural difference or if it’s a shift in the way consulting, in general, is consumed by companies. I think I believe that’s what the opportunity is now and what clients are interested in. There are still big projects and big implementation programs and those kinds of things. I think the real win for what we’re trying to do is we need to be mobilized to get to where our clients are quickly with an understanding of not only the business culture in the US but what can I learn from others who have advanced far beyond where we are. Some of them, you’d be surprised. In some cases, there are countries way less developed than ours that are way beyond us in a certain area, like a certain concept that they’ve implemented.
Being able to bring those ideas around the world is important too. We will constantly change the way we’re going to market and where we’re structured based on where’s the next opportunity for us to grow. That changes again very fast. It can be every couple of months. As a small company, you can do that. You can do it forever, but we can do it here now.
Eric, I want to be conscious of the time that we have and respect that. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing a bit of your journey. I know there’s a lot to unpack and a lot more that we could go much deeper into, but I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, about Elixirr, and everything you have going on. I saw some great case studies and examples on the website. Where’s the best place for people to go and learn more?
I think our website is fantastic. It’s the best place to get started and see what we do. There are all kinds of ways to get in touch with us through that. I would say if people want to learn more, Elixirr.com. Start there and poke around and look at the work we do and the clients we work with. You can even meet the people in those videos of all of us on there. I think it’s interesting to hear what we’re about, and what our goals and objectives are. If that drives some interest, reach out and contact us.
Sounds good. Eric, and thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks, Michael. I enjoyed it. Good meeting you.
There you have it for this episode between Michael and Eric. If you enjoy this episode, be sure to hit that subscribe button. If you want to help support this show, I’d encourage you to share this episode with a friend or colleague. As a reminder, book your free growth session call with the Consulting Success team, head over to ConsultingSuccess.com/grow to book your free call today.
Also, a quick reminder, visit ConsultingSuccess.com. Everything referenced in this episode, including how to connect with Eric on social, you can find over at ConsultingSuccess.com. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. We’ll be back with another one. Until next time.
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