Michael Zipursky on Chaos to Creation Confessions: I think entrepreneurship is one of the greatest kind of risks that you can take.

Debs  0:10 
Today I’m talking to Michael Zipursky, from Consultingsuccess.com. Michael, tell us a bit about yourself and what it is that you actually do.
 
Michael  0:20 
Yeah, great to be with you, first of all, Debbie, and thanks for having me. So we work with entrepreneurial consultants helping them to build more profitable, scalable and strategic consulting businesses. My background is last 22 years building consulting businesses myself around the world and working with clients globally. And about 13 years ago, we decided that we wanted to really support the community of consultants and people who want to become consultants, to help them to be more successful by sharing what we’d experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly. And there was a lot of, you know, all of those things. And so we started sharing that through articles and content with no clear real monetization or business plan behind it, as we are running other businesses. And I say, we am referring to my cousin and co founder, Sam. And today we have, you know, a much larger team, but we start off just the two of us. And people said, you know, this is really great content and articles, do you have a course to teach us how to become successful consultants? And at that time, we didn’t. So we said, well, we’ll create one. And so we did. And that went well. And then people said, This is great. Do you have a course. But, you know, can we work with you more closely? And we said, well, we don’t have a coaching program. But we’ll create one. And so fast forward, here we are 13 years later, and we’ve had hundreds of consultants, I think about over 500. Now go through our clarity coaching program, we’ve had 1000s of people go through our momentum online program for early stage consultants. And we’re just focused every day on helping consultants to become more successful.
 
Debs  1:49 
Wonderful. Two things I picked up there, which is you waited till the demand you were actually demanded to produce provide the services that they demanded. They wanted, of course, then they demanded, they wanted coaching rather than you try and force something on to a market. So how does that work for you? How do you get that relationship with customers and clients, where they’re comfortable and confident? So actually, we want to work with you a bit more about this, we want to we want more?
 
Michael  2:16 
Yeah, you know, you give before you try and get you lead with a relationship, long term mindset, where the goal and kind of the the North Star is always thinking, well, how can you just deliver value without the expectation of receiving something in return, and, you know, that sounds maybe quite beautiful, or, you know, just and I don’t think the intention is always necessarily that pure, I am a capitalist at heart. Or at least in the early days, my younger years, I was very much focused on on money and revenue generation. Over time, that’s become much less of a focus. But, you know, I think we always just tried to help.
 
One of the things that for us was beneficial is we had another actually, at that time, I was running a consulting business, Sam was working at a different job. And so we had other sources of income while we were building consulting success, so we didn’t feel the pressure that we had to make it work today. However, our it kind of, was born out of the idea that we both wanted to come back again together to work on another business, because we had built and sold other businesses in the past together. And we really want to be able to live and work from anywhere. The idea of travel and continuing to see the world was really important for us. And so we want to create a business online together this time. And so we did feel a bit of a sense of not necessarily urgency, but we we were working on it with a lot of intention. And the market pretty quickly, you know, spoke and told us what they wanted help with what they liked what they didn’t like. And luckily we were we were listening. And so we’re able to listen, and then take that feedback and implement and test a lot of things. And some things worked and some things didn’t. But we kept on going.
 
Debs  4:02 
Well, it sounds a bit like a fairy tale journey, almost like you know, here I am working with my cousin. And then we did this and then the market. So this meant seriously, I know you’ve already said the good, the bad and the ugly. So what tell us some of the things that haven’t gone so well and what you’ve done to actually recover from that.
 
Michael  4:17 
Yeah, definitely. I mean, let me maybe take us back a little bit further, just because the truth of the story is that it was not necessarily a fairy tale. You know, I haven’t had the experience of going bankrupt or massive, you know, jolts of that nature that that some people have experienced. So I feel fortunate for that. But I’ve, I’ve had to hustle. I’ve had to work very hard. I’ve you know, gotten up early and stayed up late, had very long days working on the business.
 
When I was in Japan building an open up our one of our branch offices over there. You know, it was very challenging, not only from a cultural perspective, a language perspective, but I was also in my 20s being surrounded and Working with people who are in their 50s and 60s, in some cases even even older. And so, you know, the imposter syndrome certainly crept in, it was a challenging time, you know, I was working on many different things at one point to just try and support myself to really make it successful. But things came together. So I just want to be clear that and very transparent that it wasn’t always easy. And still, even today, it’s not necessarily easy.
 
I think entrepreneurship is one of the greatest kind of risks that you can take. But you take that risk, because you know that the upside potential is, you know, it’s infinite, it can just, there’s so much potential there. And that’s why you go down that path. So I’ve certainly enjoyed the journey, but it hasn’t always been easy. So that’s the first part.
 
Now you asked for, you know, some failures, or some some missteps. And what I said to you, Debbie, before we hit record is, there isn’t one because like, we literally have, I don’t like to call them failures, I just call them learning experiences, I don’t view them as being something negative, but they happen all the time. And so I’ll give you one example, which is, this was actually a previous business that we built and sold several years ago. And it was a kind of a job site specifically for marketing and design and creative related jobs in Canada. And it was one of the top sites in Canada, and we were always looking for ways to, to grow our reach beyond what we what we were able to kind of muster ourselves. And we found a newspaper who had business folks newspaper that had hundreds of 1000s of monthly readers like really, you know, pretty significant distribution. And we struck a kind of a, an arrangement with them, where we would be able to be featured in their newspaper and get read regular ads, without having to invest any money to purchase those ads. And so there was there was no downside, really, for us, but pretty significant upside potential.
 
And we did what or, you know, I did what I think many entrepreneurs do and are guilty of, which is you start to get very excited about what the future looks like. And so in my case, you know, I started dreaming and talking about with, with my cousin sound like imagine if, you know, when this happens? Well, it’s like, we’re gonna reach so many people. And while we’re, you know, this is what we’re doing right now, like, we’ll definitely be doing double that. And so you get really excitable these days, you kind of paint the future, to a very rosy kind of ideal picture. But the reality is, oftentimes, it doesn’t work out that way. And so our case, when we launched it, we literally saw like, nothing like it was negligible.
 
And we, we didn’t give up on it, we kept trying to make it work. But it did not perform the way that we had expected. Luckily, we were able to kind of reverse that arrangement in in a form that was satisfactory to both parties. But that I think, is a very common challenge that we all face, we get excited about something about a potential of something that could be big, and we then take our eye kind of off the ball or off what’s already working for us. And and then when something doesn’t work, we think that, you know, sometimes we believe that, you know, we look at that in a negative way. In our case, we saw that that outcome wasn’t great. But it didn’t stop us, it didn’t slow us down from moving forward. So that would just be one thing that I put out, as always, you know, it’s great to look for big up for big opportunities and, and partnerships and strategic alliances. But you should never do that in a way that it takes you away from you working on doing the things that you know, are already working for you. And oftentimes just trying to figure out how you can do more of the things that are working for you is much better than trying to do something new.
 
Debs  8:41 
I love that idea. And I want to ask you a question that because you said we didn’t give up on it. When do you know to give up? If something’s not right, actually, how do you evaluate it to an extent that you know it’s right to give up or to change? Or to pivot or whatever MBA word you want to throw at it? But how do you know when to give something cool?
 
Michael  9:02 
Yeah, I mean, that’s a really, really great question. And I don’t think I have necessarily the best answer for that I can just speak to what what we do. And even today, you know, we’ll try things and they won’t work. And in some cases, after trying them once, will just look at based on the results and go, yeah, that really didn’t work. Here’s probably why it didn’t work. And then it’s a question of, is it worth our time, our energy, our resources, the investment to try and figure out how to make it work? Or is, you know, is there a better place to put our attention, our resources or our time and our investment? And so we’ll try, for example, something from a marketing perspective, and go Okay, we know we’ve heard this is work for somebody else. We think this should work for us. Let’s try it. And then if it doesn’t work, we may continue to try and like you know, we’re not going to give up well, we’ll keep battling through until we can improve or, or or get clear on on whether it’ll work or not.
 
But sometimes we’ll look at and just go Yeah, that that was an experience. And it just doesn’t seem like it’s the right thing for us to continue putting more resources into when we have some other path that already is working better for us, or that we feel is worth a test. And so we are constantly testing new things, we’re trying new things, it doesn’t mean that everything works. I mean, in many cases, things don’t work. And what’s interesting about building businesses and especially from marketing perspective, is you can try things. And sometimes the things that you’re doing, don’t give you a result, they don’t show you the sign that they’re actually working in the short term or, or immediately.
 
I think that for many entrepreneurs these days, you know, we’re used to instant gratification, we’re used to seeing the impact of you know, sending a text and getting a response back or typing something into Google and instantly getting the results we’re we’re used to having an impact on that result. So tangibly, and clear in front of us instantly, well, with marketing and building a business. It takes patience, it takes time. And so what we’ve also become, I think, more attuned to over the years, is the understanding that as long as you really are leading with, you’re delivering value.
 
And I’ll give you a quick example of this. So a little while ago, I started doing a live stream on on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. So every Tuesday, so actually, today at 10am Pacific, I do a live stream on on those three platforms. Well, when I do those right now, because it’s only been probably three weeks since I’ve started this consistently, as kind of a show a consulting success, live stream. You know, it’s not a huge attendance. And if I compare that to, for example, the podcast, the consulting success podcast that we have, we have over 45,000 people that download that every month, and you know, but it didn’t start like that. So I know that when we started the podcast, we also didn’t have massive growth right away, it took years to establish Same thing with his live stream. But I know the live stream is providing value to people. But if I just looked at the metrics, I go, yeah, this is not really it hasn’t caught on yet, maybe this isn’t the right thing to do, maybe we should give up and go and do something else. But I know that because we’re leading with value, it’s going to impact people. And there’s just a slight little adjustments we can play with there to get more people to show up to get people to interact and to engage more. And then I believe that it’ll be a very valuable asset. Now, it could be wrong. And you know, in a few months from now, we might relook at it and go, Well, does this make sense. But my belief is that for now, anyways, we’re on the right path and track. And that was a bit of patience, and just commitment and kind of dedication, to work through it that we’ll figure it out. And we’ll turn it into something very valuable for all parties.
 
Debs  12:35 
Yeah, I love that idea. And the thing that I always say to my clients is that you need to put some constraints on to things, if that constraint can be how much money you’re going to spend, or how much time you’re going to spend. But if you’re going to do it, you have to do it, you have to like, really take that leap and do the best you can. Because otherwise, you just put in artificial constraints, you know, I’m gonna do it for three weeks, but you know, might not like it and might give him because I just don’t like, I always say, you know, you’ve got to do to the best of you can, but put constraints on it, maybe I’m gonna do it for three months or a year. One of the things you you said earlier was the it whether it feels right, so how do you balance the logical bit of, of your world and the feeling bit of the world? Because there’s like, there’s real, can be some times for me, certainly there can be some times a bit of, you know, problem there.
 
Michael  13:26 
Yeah, I mean, this is my over time, probably become better at a few things, I think help one are having other people that you can bounce ideas around. So whether it’s, you know, with, with Sam or other members on our team, whether it’s working with our own coaches, or mentors, or whether it’s just talking with other colleagues, and people who also run successful businesses, and, you know, sharing ideas, like just yesterday, I spoke to a friend who runs a very successful company. And, you know, I was asking him about his perspective around something that we’re thinking about doing, because he’s already done it before. So that can help to kind of provide a bit of clarity or a different perspective, to know how to filter through things.
 
And I think there’s nothing more valuable than talking to somebody or engaging with somebody who’s already been where you want to get to, because they can tell you what they’ve experienced, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to kind of extrapolate and be 100%, identical, identical to what you’re going to experience. But you can really get some some great feedback from that. So part of it, you know, I’ve learned to trust my gut, more than I did before. My intuition I’ve learned is something that tends to be quite accurate, even though I probably didn’t give myself the kind of, you know, not the respect that I didn’t get myself that the acceptance I didn’t really believe in my intuition. But over the years, I started to really think more about that and talk to different people and do some assessments and things of that nature.
 
I’ve recognized my intuition tends to be quite accurate. So just learning more about myself becoming a bit more self aware and then tapping into the external perspectives helps to form the approach and around how to make decisions when it comes to cut to those constraints. And you know, at the end of the day to why it’s your life, like, you know, you don’t, I would say, I don’t want to spend time doing things that I really don’t enjoy. Now, does that mean that every single thing that I do at all times during the day is stuff that I absolutely love? No. But if I know that, there’s a reason why I’m doing it, and I have a path to make things better than I’m willing to go through some of those challenges, or some of the things I don’t necessarily love. Because I know that it’ll create more freedom, more flexibility, strengthen the business, strengthen the brand, and provide a lot more value to everyone.
 
Debs  15:46 
Brilliant. So another question for you. Is there anything in particular that’s gone? Like so surprisingly, where you just didn’t expect it was going to go that? Well? And it surprised you? Is there anything that’s been a surprise recently?
 
Michael  16:07 
And okay, that you caught me off guard. I was like, Okay, do you want good stuff? Yeah, you know, it’s given me, like, I’m pausing as I’m processing this, because I’m a very optimistic person. So I think I would tend, in some ways to look at any initiative that we have. And, and, and kind of cast a pretty optimistic view on it, of what it could be. But I’m also I would say, realistic or conservative at times, like I am, I go, Okay, we’re going to do this, this launch this new product. And, you know, we’re gonna do $100,000 during this initial launch. And then the reality might be that we’d maybe do more, maybe do a little bit less, but it doesn’t bother me. I don’t I don’t take it personally. So I’m optimistic about all the you know, most of the things that we do, you know, so I think about Yeah, one, one program that we launched, probably two years ago, now, after taking it off the market, completely reengineering it, really getting it up to the standard that we wanted to make sure that we could deliver the experience for for new clients. And, and really help them to create consistent results. We, when we launched that, like it was a really successful launch, and probably much bigger than I would have expected. But it’s not that I went into it thinking like, Oh, this is not going to be anything. And then it was something my optimistic side of myself was like, Yeah, no, this is gonna work very well. And it worked out just it just happened to work out even better than probably what I expected.
 
I always view things in a positive light, I will think about what could potentially go wrong. And as long as I’m okay with with that, then we’ll typically move forward and see how it does. But business is all about trying things and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. And, and learning from that. And as long as you’re learning from the things that go well, and then you tend to lean more into those and do more of them, or you identify things that don’t work as well. And you either decide to cut and remove those, or you find ways to improve them, you’re just as long as you’re doing that consistently, you’re just going to get better and better and stronger and stronger. And and ultimately, you’re going to reach you know, the levels, levels of success that you probably never even would have dreamed of, when you first got started.
 
So that for me is one of the most interesting things about business is that it’s, it’s kind of like this, you know, petri dish of you don’t like exactly, you know, like, it’s always growing things and you get to try things. It’s like a science experiment with so many different moving parts. And in your early in a kind of an entrepreneur’s journey, that that kind of variability can often cause a lot of anxiety, fear and stress and get you to, to start to doubt your, you know, your self worth, or your self esteem, certainly can impact your level of confidence. But as you start to move further and further down the path and gain more experience, you recognize that those feelings don’t necessarily go away, like you still will have worry, you still have fears. But you know, they’re part of the plant, like they’re part of the game. And you just channel them into knowing Okay, I’m, I’m worried about this, why am I worried about this? Okay, well, what do I do now, to hedge what I do now to reduce risk? How do I shift this? Is there another opportunity? I’m not seeing you play with this game? And then you come up with Okay, I now feel much more prepared. Like this probably won’t even happen. But if it does, now, I have a plan of how to handle it. And I’ve actually discovered a whole other approach that is actually even more exciting than when I first thought like, so you go down those paths. And for me, that’s, that’s probably one of the most exciting parts of business and so I know I probably took your question and did like, three right turns, three left turns, I’m I’m taking us all over the place. So I’m going to bring it back to you. You can get me back on track.
 
Debs  19:54 
I will actually but it was really good because it brought you back to something you said earlier, but this idea of imposter syndrome, it’s very, it’s kind of it seems a bit like popular at the moment a bit fashionable imposter syndrome. But I think all entrepreneurs, all my clients, certainly, you know, have a bit no matter how many years they’ve been in business, what size clients they’ve worked with, or how big their businesses are, how many businesses are sold, there’s tiny, tiny bit of data there. How do you? How do you march forward with that with those tiny little bits of data? And the second part of that is, how do you manage the risk? So what’s the sort of? How do you balance the risk assessment and risk process with that?
 
Michael  20:39 
So the first part is having a very clear reason and a very clear why. And I’ll give you an example of this. So probably about a year ago, I was talking with one of our clients in our, in our clarity coaching program, and she, she’s very, very good at what she does, has came off a great career, working for large organizations actually in the nonprofit space. And she was hesitating to market her business, right. So she was bringing clients on, but like, she wasn’t doing what she knew she needed to be doing. And this is something that a lot of people face, because I mean, you know, marketing sales not signed that a lot you’ll love doing like, you know, you feel uncomfortable doing it, you don’t like to promote yourself and talk about yourself. But it’s it’s a necessary part of building a business. And so I said to her, you know, why are you Why did you leave your cushy, corporate job to start your own consulting business? And she was already now several, you know, months into I was like, what, why? Why did you do that? Well said, because I want to spend more time with my, with my kids, like, I want to have more that I was okay. So next time when you’re looking at your your schedule, so even like later today, or tomorrow, and you know, you need to be doing these marketing activities, sales activities. And instead of putting it off, just remind yourself, why you’re doing this, you’re doing it, you’re not doing it for you, the marketing and the sales stuff is not for you, it’s for your kids, it’s for what you want to create, it’s for the memories is for the meaning, right for the lifestyle that you want to have. And so she went off and did her thing. And then when I checked back in with her, she’s like, Yeah, no, I’m doing consistently now. Like, every time that comes up, I’m doing because I have a very clear why.
 
And so I think all of us to kind of carry and pull us through any doubt or challenging times or, you know, getting punched in the gut. And just feeling like it’s, you know, like, Am I really cut out to do this, many of us have had those experiences and, and what I’ve experienced is the reason why I keep getting back up, the reason why I keep going is because I know like I see a future, I see something that I want to create, I want to see something or you know, people I want to have an impact on like, there’s a clear reason, a clear kind of driving purpose that connects to the why. And without that, I think it’d be it’s very challenging for people.
 
And that’s why some people give up because they started doing something, but they weren’t really committed, they weren’t really dedicated, they weren’t really all in to doing it, they were just kind of dangling their toes in the water. And that makes it very easy. For the moment that you start to feel that doubt or whatever you want to call it, that you just go Yeah, this you know, this waters a bit cold and I take my feet out and go to you know, the warm blanket well, entrepreneurship and building businesses is not a warm blanket all times I mean, you can you can have the the the most expensive cashmere blanket, you know, as you build your business up, but many times you’re you’re naked in the cold, right, and you’re asked to run up mountains naked is not fun, but you do it. Because you know what’s going to happen, you get to the top of that mountain, you’re not only will you feel great, but in many cases you’re doing because you’re going to make a bigger impact on other people, whether it’s your own family or your clients or society or community. So that’s number one.
 
Number two, you asked about how do I weigh risks? Yeah, so yeah, I mean, it depends on on what it is. From an investment perspective, I will always I will only make an investment if I’m comfortable with the idea that all of that money might disappear. So it means that I will never take a chunk of money and put it into like a massive chunk and put it all into this one thing. Unless I’m very, very confident what I’ll typically do is make a smaller initial investment into something, see how it, how it kind of progresses, learn more and more about it. And as my level of confidence increases, I’ll then invest more and more into it. So that’s kind of from a financial perspective. But in terms of trying things will always just ask, well, what’s the what’s the downside of doing this? does it impact like could it impact our reputation could impact our our profit margin could impact our culture, our values? Like what is the what is the negative potential impact of doing this? And we’ll weigh that against the potential positive impact. But almost I mean, without question, we’re always going to ask ourselves, how does this relate to our values? You know, there’s so in our space, you see a lot of people out there who will talk about different things. They’ll You know, it comes across almost kinda like a bit internet marketing hype. be whatever you want to call it, and I’m not trying to talk negative or anybody, people do what everyone can do whatever they want to do. But for us, that’s not our approach.
 
We’re a family business. We look at our clients like family, our values are very much about, you know, family and travel and international citizens, people that appreciate different cultures, and, you know, and religions and languages and all that kind of stuff. Like, there’s certain values that we have. And so we lead with those things, we make decisions based on those things. And that helps us to to weigh, you know, where we’re making investments or where we’re willing to take risks.
 
But we take risks every single day, Debbie, I mean, we try new things. And again, we don’t know whether or not they’re going to work. But what we found over the years is, as you keep trying new things, and layering on more and more stuff, some of the things that don’t again, work right away will work over time. And our podcast, right would be one example of that, that in the early days you tested and if you just go like, well, is it working or not? It’s not necessarily leading to business directly, we kind of go like, Oh, yeah, this podcast episode got got published. And now we generate, you know, X amount of new revenue, it doesn’t work like that. But we know, in the case of today that we hear nonstop about people who listen to that podcast, a podcast episodes, where they’re driving, like, you know, five hours, and they’ll listen to a whole bunch of them all at one time. And we’re Oh, yeah, I came, you know, I reached out to you guys because of your podcast. So we know there’s an impact there. And that’s why we keep doing it. But even early on, like we didn’t, we didn’t necessarily have that we knew that good things would come from it. And so that’s why we committed to it.
 
Debs  26:34 
Yeah. And also, you know, your Japan story, just for your own feedback. How long ago was that, by the way? Does that. So that was probably around 11 years ago? Because I when I sign up to a newsletter that, that there was like a little sequence. And story was part of that. And you’re an excellent storyteller? Because I was like, Oh, why can’t you just send me the next email immediately, I want to know what happened next. So I mean, that Japan story, I think, I got a really good feeling about you. And this family feeling came out this vulnerability came out in the Japan story, this side of you that’s very open to sharing your own things that weren’t quite going right. The Japan stories, by the way, everybody, you’ve got to go and sign up just to hear the Japan story now.
 
That made a connection with me. I mean, we’ve never spoken. But I kind of like felt a little bit like I knew united saw a bit of that vulnerability side in that story. And it was very funny, and well written as well. Very funny. What? What the if you wanted to share a bit of vulnerability now? Is there anything going on right now that you think you wish we’d never started hooping?
 
Michael  28:05 
There’s nothing going on right now that I would say I wish we’re we’re not doing I mean, we’re, we’re in a place right now, where we’ve been, you know, seeing pretty tremendous growth. Throughout the whole last year and a half during COVID, we’ve been building our team and adding team members working with many new clients, I mean, are, we just seen demand continue to increase. So I feel very fortunate for that. I know, it’s been a very challenging time for many people. But our business has certainly benefited and just been kind of on a growth trajectory for quite some time. So there’s nothing like that.
 
But in terms of vulnerability, I mean, that’s what I can say. And hopefully, this might help some, some listeners and viewers is that I was not comfortable. You know, being vulnerable. Many years ago, I got that, for me is certainly not natural, especially when I was younger, you know, building businesses, because I tended to be one of the younger people around the circles that I was in, I had this mindset that I needed to always look more professional and you know, dress a bit more professional, and I couldn’t show weakness I had. And so that was something that for me, like telling my story or telling our story as a company and being open about the challenges the mistakes, that’s something that does not come natural to me my background before I got into business, you know, in my early years in school and so for that I was I was in sports, like sports as my was my life. So I was very competitive. I still am competitive. And I think that competitive nature was like yeah, you know, you don’t show your competitor weakness. You know, you you got to keep going. And so that’s that’s kind of where that mindset came from.
 
But what I learned over the years and it started, I think, as I began to interview more and more people for our podcast, and just heard from multiple different people, there was no kind of there’s no collusion, there’s no connection. Except for that many people said, they shared vulnerable stories. I mean, one person, I remember talking about how one of their children had passed away another talk about how they had gone through a really crazy illness or, you know, things that it’s like, why are you why talking about this on your business website? Like, this doesn’t make sense to me. Right. And I didn’t view it as negative. I just didn’t get it. Because not saying that I would have done. But as I talked to them, and I asked them questions, every single one of them said that we had, you know, being open sharing, for example, that, you know, one person had a very serious drug addiction, another almost committed suicide, like all these things, that just doesn’t make sense, to me at that time as a business perspective, like, why would you share that does not show weakness. And what I learned is that every single one of them said that the more vulnerable, vulnerable, vulnerable they were, the more open they were, the more the more their business grew, the more that people actually start to engage with them and, and just fell again, you’re also a human being.
 
I think that’s a missing piece for so many entrepreneurs, mindsets and businesses, is that in fact, the more vulnerable you are, the more open that you are, and doesn’t mean that you, you know, you just keep throwing all your negative thoughts and mistakes, or whatever you want to call them, you know, publicly, you want to pick and choose what’s appropriate. But certainly, in the day and age that we’re in, the more that you can break down the barrier between what people see and think like, Oh, well, here’s some very successful person, look at everything they’re doing. Like I don’t really connect to them. I mean, business is about relationships. So if you can help to connect with someone, and or make the connection point easier, they will tend to, you know, want to connect with you more engage with you more feel like they, they like you more, they, they trust you more, right, and therefore they’re gonna be more willing to invest or kind of take that that leap of faith, because they don’t see it as big of a leap of faith.
 
I would just offer one illustration of this, you know, think about the people that you’re closest with your friends, your family, whoever it might be, you know, what are your conversations about? Well, typically, your conversations are like a lot of vulnerability right here you’re talking about a lot of stuff is going on in your mind, or mistakes you’ve made or challenges you’ve had or why you’re feeling depressed or happy, or, you know, relationship stuff, you’re just being very open. Well, if you can start to work that into your business communication, you know, you and your brand, people will typically resonate a lot more, and that will attract more of the right people while repelling or pushing away the people that never really would engage with you anyways. Yeah,
 
Debs  32:32 
That’s absolutely, absolutely true. I’m gonna change I’m gonna change the subject entirely. Now. I guess I’ll just do these things. When was the last time you did something for the first time?
 
Michael  32:49 
Okay, good question. This thing for the first time. Oh, okay. I bought a boat recently. And I so that’s the first I’ve been on boats before, but I’ve never I’ve never really driven a boat much myself. So that was a first and that certainly anyone that’s that has a boat and knows when you first learned to park a boat? Is the like the most fun? Not? Yeah, exactly. It’s you know, it’s a learning the way I describe it to people, if you remember when you have to learn how to parallel park your car, right? And you hit the curb or you accept your and you’re moving water. And there’s, you know, other boats. So it’s, there’s just it’s a bit more complex. But yeah, that would be a first for me. I have two youngest children, two daughters. So I would say I encounter first with them almost every day, right? challenging situations times where I want to, you know, throw them out the window, but I don’t cuz they’re just so adorable and lovely. And I have to recognize and realize that. It’s they’re never doing anything wrong. It’s how I how I kind of process what’s happening in my mind. So yeah, it’s a good question. I have to think about that more and actually ask myself, what, what have I maybe not tried that I could or should try more. But that’s what comes to mind right now. Brilliant.
 
Debs  34:11 
And is there anything I haven’t asked you? I’m cautious at the time trying to think I haven’t asked you that you want to tell us.
 
Michael  34:18 
I mean, I would just encourage everyone to so a big thing that I share with all my clients. And they always kind of joke about this because we say it so often. But it’s the concept of imperfect action. I truly believe that every single person has just immense, you know, extraordinary potential inside of themselves. And typically, the reason that they’re not seeing the results they want isn’t because of a lack of knowledge or net or skills necessarily. It’s their mindset, it’s their own them themselves, right that are holding them back. And if you just start to move towards what you want to achieve You will learn something, you may learn that, you know, your approach is that not the right approach. But at least now you’ve learned something and you know that you need to adjust. And that’s still better than, you know, not actually getting off the starting block. But you might also learn that, hey, it works right away. And now you get to enjoy that success sooner than you would have. So that would be just be my kind of parting thought for today with for everyone is just it might be in your personal life, it might be relationships, some of you haven’t talked to in a while or showing love to it might be in your business, but there’s likely something that you really want to do that would be truly significant for you. But you haven’t started, you haven’t moved forward.
 
I would encourage you to ask yourself, what what’s holding you back? Why haven’t you done that. And then what would be the first thing would be one thing that you could do today. Even if it’s quick text message, even if it’s putting something in the calendar, even if it’s sending somebody an email, or you know, updating a plan, but something that would allow you to take action, and I would just encourage as much as possible to not. When I say take action, imperfect action, that usually means not just to build more things not just to plan and think and kind of build inside of your, you know, your office or your house or whatever it might be, but it’s actually getting out of the building. And that’s a bit of kind of a like metaphorically speaking, it’s not necessarily you have to leave your house because with COVID times not everyone could leave their house, but you need to engage with other people. And that, again, could be a phone call, could be an email could be a text message, but but do something, put something out into the world. Because again, you’ll learn and you’ll either be able to improve, or you’ll be on the right track.
 
Debs  36:42 
Wonderful, wonderful. Now try to get in touch with you. Where should they go? what’s your website? And how did they find out the Japan story? Everybody’s got to hear the Japan story.
 
Michael  36:51 
Yeah, I’ll just give you one one place then for the Japan story. And then people can learn other stuff from there. So if you go to ConsultingSuccess.com/blueprint. You can get a compilation of our most popular articles as a 47 page guide called the consulting blueprint. And you’ll also then get the Japan stories that he’s talking about. And, yeah, hopefully you’ll find those helpful.
 
Debs  37:21 
Wonderful. Michael, thank you so so very much. It’s been wonderful to speak to you and hopefully we’ll speak again soon.