May 19, 2025 • 45 mins
What if the key to scaling your business wasn’t working harder—but identifying the right success conditions to make growth inevitable?
In this episode of the Sales Maven podcast, host Nikki Rausch interviews Mandi Ellefson, founder of Hands-Off CEO, to explore how uncovering and applying success conditions can transform your business. Mandi shares her journey from financial struggle to building a multimillion-dollar net worth—and how she now helps consulting agency owners achieve predictable growth with less stress.
Together, they dive deep into defining success conditions, why they matter, and how to implement them to create consistent client results, boost conversions, and design scalable offers. Mandi also shares tips on pricing based on value, qualifying the right clients, and stepping into a more empowered leadership role.
If you're ready to scale with intention—and integrity—this episode is your roadmap.
👉 Connect with Mandi on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mandiellefson
Timestamps:
00:43 – Welcome to the Sales Maven Podcast
01:20 – Meet Mandi Ellefson: From Debt to Multimillionaire
02:54 – What Are Success Conditions?
06:57 – Creating Consistent Client Transformation
13:31 – How to Navigate Market Shifts and Breakthroughs
15:58 – Identifying and Applying Success Conditions
24:29 – Metrics That Move the Needle
24:45 – Improving Sales Conversion Rates
25:20 – Estimating Revenue Potential
26:18 – Overcoming Resistance in the Scaling Process
26:54 – How to Price Based on Value
28:13 – Leveraging Success Conditions for Growth
29:25 – Designing Offers That Deliver Results
30:57 – Qualifying Ideal Clients
33:10 – Leadership, Integrity, and Saying No
40:15 – Mandi’s Final Advice for Sustainable Scaling
Nikki invites you to join the Sales Maven Society. Take advantage of this opportunity to work together with you and Nikki. Bring your questions, concerns, and sales situations; she provides answers and guidance. Join the Sales Maven Society here, click Join Today, and then checkout and use coupon code 47trial to get your first month for $47.00!
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Find Nikki:
Nikki Rausch
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome, and thank you for listening to the Sales Maven podcast. I'm your host,
(00:01):
Nikki Rausch, your own personal Sales Maven, here to offer you tips and strategies
and techniques to master the conversation of sales. Today's episode is a part of the
Mastering Excellence series, and if this is your first time listening to one of
these, Mastering Excellence comes from my background in neurolinguistic programming,
where we learn that there is a structure to excellence. And when you understand the
structure of how somebody is achieving exceptional results in some area of their life
or business, you can implement that same structure into your own area of life and
business so that you can get exceptional results as well. Today's guest I'm super
excited is Mandy Ellison. And let me tell you a little bit about her.
She transformed her life from battling $25 ,000 in debt to amassing a multi -million
-dollar net worth before hitting 40. As the visionary behind hands -off CEO,
Mandy isn't just another success story, she's a lifeline for consulting agency owners
drowning in the day -to -day. Her magic? Transforming million -dollar agencies into
scalable enterprises with minimal CEO dependency. Mandy has propelled hundreds of
agencies towards tens of millions in revenue by refining their offers and attracting
premium clients willing to pay 50 to 600 % higher fees all within 90 days.
As a former business exit advisor for millionaire exits with 20 billion in exits
under their belt, she knows a thing or two about creating and executing an exit
strategy. Her clients rave about adding five figures to their net profit monthly
skyrocketing sales and stepping back from daily operations to focus on growth or
prepare for sales. Behind her transformative consulting work, Mandy is a published
(00:22):
author and the host of the hands -off CEO podcast, sharing insights and strategies to
triple your fees and profitability scale, an exceptional consulting agency that grows
without you. Mandy, welcome to the show. - Thank you so much for having me,
Nikki. - I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. I always like to give
everybody a little bit of, well, first of all, what we're gonna talk about. Mandy
blew my mind when I met her recently. She was talking about success conditions that
drive bigger results. And I was so interested in success conditions. That sounds like
structure to me. So I'm so excited for you to share about that.
But before we do, I always like to give the audience a little bit of background
about like, how we even got connected, which was kind of a fun story for me
anyway. We got connected through Dan, who was on the podcast not too long ago. And
he said, "I think you guys should know each other."
- Yeah, that was fun. I saw your podcast episode, like he had shared it, and I was
on his list, and he shared it. And Dan, and I've known years back in the
mastermind, we were in or something. And he had me on his podcast, and I looked at
your podcast, and I'm like, this is really interesting. So we got connected through
Dan, and that's how we're here. - Yeah, yeah. And I will say, I feel really honored
that you wanna come and share on this because I know I know I shared with you
that my audience is kind of all over the board as far as like where they are in
their business. Some people are just starting out, some people have these, you know,
great big huge agencies and then others are kind of in the middle and the fact
(00:43):
that you are willing to come and share this and that I think every single person
listening is going to benefit including me of learning about these success conditions
and what that structure is behind it. I just I just again want to give my
gratitude for you saying yes to doing this. Well, thank you for saying that, Nikki.
And you know, one of the things that I have noticed is that when the market is a
little tighter and it's a little tougher, it's the smaller guys that tend to be
more willing to adhere to the success conditions. We're talking about that, but the
small ones they want, because they want it bad. So I noticed that the companies are
like, I want to get to our first million. They're like, hustle, hustle, hustle to
be able to do that. And they're willing to do whatever it takes. They just need to
have a better system, a better process to do that. So we actually see really good
results with these companies that are under a million, even sometimes as low as just
a couple hundred thousand a year, because they have a great expertise, because
they're willing to just submit to a process. That's one the things that you talk
about here. So like, I'll leave it back to you, but this is one of the things
that I just love about, you know, the scrappy earlier folks. - Yeah, yeah, which I
will say, I feel like a lot of us feel like we fit there, right? The scrappier
earlier, like we'll do what it takes, we'll be flexible. I always say my favorite
quote is, "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape." Like
we gotta be flexible right now. And especially considering just kind of what's going
on in the economy, how people are feeling about spending money, how every single
(01:04):
lead into your business, it's so precious and we need to really understand and
maximize how can we turn those leads into prospects and how can we turn those
prospects into paying clients? So kind of Tell us a little bit,
like outside of the bio, which your bio is fantastic and you are fantastic, what
isn't covered yet that when you think about the way you work with clients, the
business that you guys are in and the things that you find the most satisfying? I'm
super interested to know like, what do we not know about you yet? - Okay,
guess we have to decide how deep we wanna go on that because There's the market
forward message, and that's what people are aware of. They have a problem awareness
around. So as we talk about that, right? >> Yeah. >> Then there's the deeper
mechanisms that actually drive the results, and that's the part I don't talk about
as much, except for when clients start to get deeper and deeper down working with
us, and it really can go to but well,
not almost. It goes to a deep spiritual level, really. And this is not something I
talk about very much at all, because it's not what people would say that they need
or that what they want to buy. But the process that we take our clients through is
a very deep emotional journey. They have no idea what they embark upon. We just
tell them it's going to be challenging. And you've got to be willing to do the
work and you're going to see such incredible transformations in the next 90 days in
your business and really it changes your life too.
What happens is you go when you step into a new person really,
(01:25):
you become a new level of business owner, a new level of strategist in your
business, a new level of you're just able to be effective on in a way that you
didn't even have access to. And one of my mentors has described it as showing up,
being able to show up in a way you become a person that is unrecognizable to
yourself right now. Become a person who is unrecognizable to yourself. And that's
some of the things that I find myself constantly leveling up leveling up leveling up
and that's what because that's what's required you know I'm creating a 12 million
dollar company over the next four years that's where that's where we're at and we're
on our way into that and it requires me becoming a 12 million dollar CEO that's
right I have I've got to step into that I can't have that until I step into that
and I really embody that so what what we're doing is, with our clients,
if they want to have a million dollar company, we help them be able to step into
a million dollar CEO. And what does that look like as far as the offers we're
making? What does that look like for how, what are you actually going to be,
what do you want to be known for in the world? And that's not, that doesn't happen
by chance. You have to be very intentional about what do I want to be known for
because when you start your company, you've got an expertise, you're going out and
you're saying, "I've got this thing I can do well at. I'm going to go and find
people who need that thing and we'll sell that thing to them, that service or
whatever." And then you grow your company and then you get to a point where you're
like, "Okay, I'm not getting paid enough, this kind of sucks. You're also working
(01:46):
more hours and you're hiring more people and then you're finding you're making less
and less money, even though you're working harder and harder and you get to this
point here. And a lot of times what happens is that they just haven't been very,
they got to that point organically, a lot through referrals. It's just they kind of
have followed the breadcrumbs, which is exactly what you want to do. It actually
it's a path of success, but it will stop you. And I've seen this stop me too,
even being very intentional. Like you get to a point where you like, and we're
actually in a reinvention stage right now too. And I think everyone is right now.
There's so many changes that are happening right now. - Yeah. - But the opportunity
here is to really be very intentional about Who you actually want to be and not
from this perspective of like What maybe I can do that like I kind of would like
that, but it's not even knowing how to yet You have to step into that and then
you figure it out as you go along But otherwise you limit yourself and then you
really can't you really can't have true greatness Yeah, there's that reminds me of
the saying I think it's been said many times is the like what got you here Won't
get you there right of like having to recognize that at some point there's some
transformation that needs to happen. And also to really honor, I think, that
transformation is change and change is not comfortable. My NLP teacher used to always
say, "The only person who likes change is a wet baby." It's like,
yeah, 'cause change can feel so awkward and weird and to take on a new level and
you become a version of yourself that like you said it's unrecognizable but it's
(02:07):
also in the like it's almost hard to imagine because you don't know what's possible
yet so how could you possibly imagine what this new version of you would be unless
you have somebody guiding you and like kind of helping you along the path because
these are the things that we really do not do alone. I don't think.
- No, I don't. And I don't think, I completely agree with you on that. And you can
do it alone if you wanna have a very limited vision. - Yeah. - But the problem is
is you can't see the next level there. But someone else, like yourself, Nikki, with
your clients, I'm sure you perform this very well, where you can see them in their
next level. You can see a next level that they can't see for themselves. And this
is like a vision and gift. And this is like, I see this as almost like a
spiritual gift that you can actually see who this person really is. So this is not
like them actually changing. It's actually Yes, it's changing it but the
transformation when you look back you're actually saying I'm at this is actually more
of who I really am Yeah, it's it's like I Don't know it like I guess because I
see this butterfly behind your head right now of like, you know, you've got up on
your on your One of my turn a shelf. That's what that's what it's called You've
got the butterfly, but it's almost like you're growing into the my wings. And once
you grow in, you're like, yeah, these fit, these totally fit me. And they feel
right. But you didn't even know what it would feel like to have the wings until
you start to grow into them. And you realize like, Oh, they were there all long. I
just couldn't really feel them because I hadn't grown into them yet. I'm way off
(02:28):
topic here. But that's what I'm thinking about is this like you're growing into this
version of yourself that is meant to be, it is who you are.
And it's hard to do that without guidance.
It's hard to do that without. And just to be really candid, I want to say,
like, sometimes you grow from a place of pain, and having,
being forced to change, right? Because something has happened, but also there's
opportunity, like I think most of us prefer to grow from a place of like, oh, I
want expansion and I wanna like do more, but there's also this like, I don't want
this pain anymore. And so I'm willing to step into who am I really meant to be?
So anyway. - There's so much that you just said there that is just gold. And And I
think many of us say, and I put myself in this category too,
I just actually just sat down the other day and recognized I'm like, I'm no
different. But we oftentimes say that like, we don't want to go through the pain,
we prefer to be able to just be able to shift and change because we really want
to do that. But the reality is, is that what really drives us, drives the biggest
transformation is the downs, the breakdowns that lead to the breakthrough. And the
bigger the breakdowns, the bigger the breakthrough. So as much as it sucks, the
market changes, you know, we've had to reposition just a little bit, you know, some
of our channels haven't worked as well as they have in the past, and we just had
to pivot. And we helped our clients pivot, which is, which is fine. But it sucks
in the moment, you know, like, oh, you know, like, who moved my cheese, cheese kind
(02:49):
of moment, they're that Yes, I love that, right?
- But there's such incredible opportunities here if we can be the resource for our
clients, if we can actually be their solution to the biggest challenges right now.
And back to what I was talking about with the breakdowns, the breakdowns,
like in a down market, what we noticed especially the earlier folks that what I was
mentioning, like our market changes a little bit more. We start focusing on the
earlier folks more in a down market because they're out there saying, I need to do
better, I wanna do better, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes. And they have
big breakdowns of like, this isn't working, I need to make this work.
So we can create, we can facilitate very big breakthroughs because they want it so
bad. Whereas a big mistake that we see with some of the larger companies, I
wouldn't even say they're that large, but companies that are in the lower seven
figures, what happens a lot of times in this place is they go and they find a
hole to hide in or maybe even to die in. And I know that sounds pretty rough,
but
I can look at the the P &L across the line for companies in our industry and no
matter what their numbers were, I can see there's a trend that matches and I can
tell if they match the trend. I know they didn't do anything but put their head in
and just wait and watch or maybe they invested in all the wrong things. It's a
pattern. You can see it and it's going to happen again. The difference is that we
have AI that's going to come in and make whatever they're doing even more
(03:10):
commoditized. They don't have the same cash reserves that they may have had before
to go through. They don't have also the availability of cheap capital that we had
before, like it was just flowing out left and right that we're now paying the piper
for right now with inflation.
So I'm saying there's so many things that are up against
Um, the ones that go and stick their head in the, in, in a hole, it's, it's, it's
going to be rough when they decide to just decide that they need to go and make a
change. Yeah. So we're not serving, we're, we're not target, we're being very
intentional about who, who, who are the people they're sticking their head and we're
going to still help them. We'll still give lots of great free content, but we're
going to spend our time on the people who really are, want to go after it. Yeah.
- Well, and I think that leads us really naturally to what we're talking about here.
These success conditions to drive bigger results because again, when you started
talking about these, when you and I met a couple of weeks ago, I was like, dang,
this is like, I wanna know more about this because this is about,
well, hold on, I'm gonna just say, I want you to tell us, what is that, how would
you define success conditions and then we're actually like going to get into the
structure behind it, but how do you describe it? Okay, so let me give a little bit
of context around that because it's just kind of it's kind of jumping in the middle
before like we need to understand what what white success conditions even make any
difference. So okay
(03:31):
So in I'm going to talk about professional services firms because that's that's
That's our expertise. And one of the things that we see a lot of times is that
they will basically, their business is based upon referrals.
Someone gives them a referral, you can help them, okay? You've got money, okay,
we'll accept you as a client and we'll try to figure out how to help you. And
it's a very custom process and they're doing that over and over again when the
companies are coming inbound, and they attempt to build systems around that, but it
doesn't really work because they're all over the place. And this is a company
they're trying to scale this way. You can imagine how difficult that is to even
have a sales strategy around that. 'Cause like, what are you even offering? - Right.
- Right? What do you even wanna be known for? So what happens is that their results
kind of follow a bell curve, where they have some outlier results that are like
spectacular, and they did great work for them,
but they don't really know why. You talk about the unconscious confidence, they don't
know why they were able to drive great results. Then they have people on the other
side of the bell curve that were just were train wrecks, and they have a little
bit better idea of why that is, right? And then you have them that didn't do so
well, or they just don't even know because they didn't collect that data and because
the clients were not giving them that information, they didn't even know how
effective their services were at driving results. A lot of times they didn't even
define results, they just did a service, right? And then you have some that are,
(03:52):
then you have some on the other part that they did pretty good work. And those are
their best clients, but they don't know how to so, so really like their top 10 %
of their clients are their very best types of clients, but they don't know how to
be able to replicate those results. And they don't. And part of that is because
they don't look at us and say, okay, well, this was a law office.
So we'll just go after more law offices. So let's say they go a niche down on
that, But you can go a niche down that that's that's a good start, but until
you're getting clear about
What is the intentional outcome we're creating for these these lawyers tell me if
I'm going to details here? No, I'm fine I'm tracking so we so we'll create this
outcome statement and this is what like this is this is your This is your stand of
what you're what you're creating for these these law firms. So for example, maybe
maybe that's that we're going to be able to help them
accelerate their their
how I was going to say efficient. I was going back to a number of different ones.
I'm kind of going through like 10 different offers in my head of different clients.
So like so streamline their efficiencies and be able to cut off and cut 10 hours
per week off of their of their admin team times 20,
and that's like half a million dollars of profit that they save. So like, maybe
their outcome statement is, we help lawyers be able to recapture half a million
dollars of profit in 12 months or something like that.
(04:13):
- Right, okay. - So that's like the outcome. - Yeah. Now, how do we be able to
create that outcome every time? What are the success conditions that we have to have
in place to be able to create that? Well, you're gonna need to have metrics to be
able to manage, to metric, to be able, this is actually possible. So what happens
is in your success conditions, you need to be putting these up front in your sales
process so that you can sell them on part of our process is that we track the
effectiveness of your campaigns so that we know whether how effective we're being, so
that we can dial it in and actually accomplish this outcome. If you don't give us
this, we can't actually stand by this promise. So that's an example of a success
condition. Another success condition is that there might need to be a minimum budget.
One of our success conditions is when we're working together with clients, there's a
certain upfront amount that is mandatory. We just cannot create this transformation
without it. It's just, we just can't, I'm just not willing to do that because there
needs to be a transformation there. So, and other success conditions might be that
they follow, that they're willing to follow the process. And so there's these
different success conditions you might need. It might mean a minimum number of
associates in the law firm. It might mean that you need an administrative person
that's going to help you execute all this internally. You know what I'm saying? So
you don't know what the success conditions are until you know what you're actually
creating those conditions to create. So you have to start with the end in mind.
Okay. So just to like step to the side here and maybe kind of come back with you
(04:34):
kind of to make sure that I'm understanding what you're saying and also the audience
too. So this idea of a success condition in the way that it is going to serve you
and your business and your clients, most importantly, is that there are some metrics
that when you understand how your top, you know,
10 % or 20 % of clients are getting exceptional results from the work that they're
doing with you. And you, you can understand and kind of like pull out that data of
like, what had to exist in order for them to get these results.
Now you can start to put structure so that when you bring on a new client, they
either have to meet some criteria in order for them to achieve similar results and,
or they have to be willing to follow your process that you know that when you
follow this process step by step, you're going to have success. - Yes. - Yeah,
okay, perfect. - Yes. - All right. - And it might be helpful for us to talk about
how do you actually define the success conditions, right? So I've decided to find
like, why it's important is that it drives predictable results every time.
And when I say predictable results, I'm not talking about predictable results the way
other people are thinking. I'm not talking about predictable deliverables. No, no, no.
I'm talking about what's your client actually intended for to get out of the service
that you wanted. And so they may have signed on the dotted line with like the list
of deliverables because that's what they had to do as part of their buying process.
What they really wanted is those deliverables to actually produce some business
outcome. What maybe that is a race profitability. Maybe that's cutting their staff
(04:55):
turnover in half, which generated a certain profit increase. So like they have
something in the mind and sometimes they don't even have something in the mind but
you need to plant that in their mind because that adds more value to your service.
- Yeah. Yeah. So speaking to a client, a prospective client, when you have a
concrete, like what, what is the goal? What are they looking to accomplish before
they decide to hire you? And you know, like, like for me, you know,
I love to work with clients who want to increase their conversion on consultations
to 50 % or more. So that's a concrete example, if somebody comes to me and is
like, my conversion rate is 20%, there is a very, very high likelihood that when
they implement the things I teach, we are going to increase their results. Now it's
easy for me to say to them, when we track this at the end, what's your conversion
rate now? And they say, my conversion rate is 75%. Well, then we more than exceeded
their expectations, I kept to my promise, right,
of what I was going to deliver by hiring me and working with me, and it comes
back to, I need to know that up front as to whether or not I can deliver on
that. But the only way I know if I can deliver on it is if they also take action
too. So therefore I have to have metrics and /or requirements in place for them to
one track results 'cause they can be like, well, I think I'm doing better, but
like, how are you actually doing? Are you tracking this? 'Cause if you're not
tracking it, then we don't really know. It's like, how does it feel to you? Which,
you know, isn't probably going to, I'm wanting to come back and spend more money.
(05:16):
So am I, am I hitting it? - Yes, - You absolutely are, and I would take it a step
further too. - Okay. - So you have, and maybe this is what you had in mind too,
but now when you track the results on this, you can like,
how much extra sales does that actually mean? You know, so we could look at that
and say, if you increase your sales conversion rate from 20 or 30 % to 50 % and
you have X amount of calls that are in place already. Someone who has a solo
person who has, maybe they have one call a week, that the amount of result that
they're going to get is very different than if you go and work with a team of
five people that have 10 sales calls a week, right? So you could do the same work
And you have infinitely higher upside and reward on the one of the team.
Because if you're looking at a team, that let's just run the numbers here, 10
times, so 50, they're doing 50 calls per week, 50 calls for that. So it's 200
calls a month. And if you, at 200 calls per month, at 20 % on that would be 40
sales. Now, if you double that even just getting it to 40, now you have 80 sales.
So if those sales were, let's imagine those sales were $20 ,000,
$20 ,000 sales.
If you have added 40 sales at $20 ,000 a month,
how much did you just add there
Two cents, what is that, 800 ,000 a month? Now,
800K a month, now multiply that by 12 months. Now let's just, I like to be a
little more conservative, so you just buy 10 months. So basically, you could add
(05:37):
another $8 million to a company about the same amount of time and energy as one
person, there's you you can um the one person anyway let's let's let's say it's a
little bit more right it's a little more time but you could generate eight million
dollars for them over the course of a year if you if you can hold them to the
success conditions if you could it and that's going to require helping them do
things that they're uncomfortable doing like nobody wants to track their numbers I
don't see there yeah we don't like it we avoid it it's We avoid the responsibility
of this. That's just what we do as humans. So being able to help your clients
overcome that human element and actually help them see why, like you wanna be able
to add $8 million to your company in the next year. We're gonna help you do that,
but like we gotta be able to stick to this.
Is that, how important is it for you to get to $8 million? You know, when you
talk to the CEO who's not holding their team accountable to do this, for example,
how important is it for you to be able to add eight million dollars to your
company next year. - Yeah. - And then that's how you get the buy -in for the
success. - Yeah, and then you have an offer, right? Like, whatever, if we're talking
about bringing in another $800 ,000 a month to a business, and I know these are
kind of some big numbers, probably for many of my listeners, but even if you say 8
,000, right? 800 ,000 or 8 ,000. For some people, 8 ,000 would be a huge difference
to their monthly, you know, nut and for others that 800 ,000.
And then what are they willing to spend and how can you then price yourself
(05:58):
accordingly? Because you know, it's like how much money will you spend to make
money, right? Like, although I do feel like people sometimes get hung up on this
because if somebody said to me, If you spend a dollar and you'll make $2, I will
spend all the dollars to double that money all day long, whereas most people will
be like, "How many dollars will I spend to make $2?" I don't know, like 20, it's
like what? No, like every dollar, if I can double my money,
I will spend every dollar to double my money, like that doesn't make sense
otherwise, but so there is a little bit of a sales component to it, but you now
can speak from a much more confident place when you understand that these success
conditions, when they are in place, your clients are getting exceptional results and
this is gonna drive, like we said here, success conditions drive bigger results. So
that is the purpose of you understanding what are your success conditions in your
business so that you can speak from a place of confidence and you can price
yourself accordingly, which, you know, again, when I go back to your bio, like this
is clients that are paying 50 to 600 % higher fees when they-- - They're earning
that. They're earning that. - They're earning that, right? Because now it's like, oh,
I can charge more because I can speak from such a place of credibility as far as
results. - Well, and let me give you an example of what that looks like too. And
here's the thing is that for the people listening, like you were hearing these
numbers and you're hearing these things, it sounds really big. I want you to hear
this for yourself because as you're thinking about you designing your own offers, or
(06:19):
do you want to be, what is the minimum result that you want to create for your
clients? What is the minimum result? Do you want to create, do you want to be
known for someone who adds $8 million to a company in a year? Do you want to be
known as the one who adds $800 ,000 to a company a year? That's not bad either.
That's pretty good, right? But what do you want to be known for? Not like I do
this ex -service, I do this bookkeeping, I do this marketing agency stuff. We're the
best at SEO. That is a service that's not necessarily getting to an outcome.
And when we start selling outcomes and we start selling to the problem set that
they actually have, and then positioning our services to say, "Well, under the right
conditions, what could we do?" And how do you find these conditions? You look at
the worst examples and the best examples. Worst examples, like everybody when you
come up with like, when I ask, give me like, what are the best ones have in
common? What are the success conditions you can learn from the best ones? And they
sit there stumped and they're like, I don't know. They sit there for a while and
they're like, okay, what are the worst ones have in common? And then like the list
goes on and on and on, right? So that could be the easiest way to do it is you
start with like, what are all the ways that we could fail with this? And then you
just reverse engineer for how do you be able to be successful and that way you
work with the very best clients, the ones that are fun to work with that have
budgets.
And here's the other thing too, as a client, let's say they don't have budgets,
(06:40):
they find the budgets when you can actually show them a compelling vision. This is
what I see for you. And I see that this is possible for you because you have
this, this and this in place, your success conditions, right? So, if you're, But the
requirement, though, is that we need a minimum of $50 ,000 to be able to do this.
We can't do it for anything less than that. And what happens is that when we walk
our clients through this, you know what I was talking about them standing into it,
just becoming a different person, when they actually see what's possible from their
services, when you look at it from this angle, what happens is one of our clients
that are currently in our cohort right now, or is this law for cohort, she's like,
She went without talking to any of us. She just went and went to her clients and
said, and she doubled the prices to all of her clients and said, like, I simply
cannot do it for any less than this. She, because you know what?
I'm choosing to offer exclusivity for our clients. That's what was her choice on
this. And she's like, I can only have one in one market. So I have to charge
twice as much for this. And it might even been more than that. I might have been,
I think it was actually more than twice, but, and she's like, and the prices are
going to be going out from here. She went and she sold, this was before her offer
was even done. We helped create this offer, then she went and she doubled her
prices. So she went from charging 15 ,000 to 30 ,000 and she was like, that was so
easy. I think I need to add 5 ,000 more. So that's an example like on the smaller
scale. And this is, This isn't because she got better at sales.
(07:01):
This is because she was more confident in what she did based upon understanding what
we can really do. And we really pushed her to help her see a bigger vision for
what she could create for her clients. And then when she understood what success
conditions she had to have in place, now her sales conversations is qualifying and
quantifying. Just like, do you have this in place? If you have this in place,
what's possible, it's a different conversation. It's a completely different
conversation. - Yeah, because now we're helping people self -identify in or out,
but also in your conversations, you're quickly able to identify, is this a right fit
client? Because there's no reason to bring on clients that aren't gonna get results
because they don't of the success conditions. So I love this so much. I also love
your example of like come up with your worst examples and your best examples as the
place to start. So if you're starting there, you've got your best examples and your
worst examples. What's the next step that you would advise somebody? Well,
what I would look at is one thing is to really step into really being the leader
here and that's you know when I started out with this example of how most
professional services who won't even admit this by the way but a lot of and I
think I think we've all been there right or where we've had a prospect come to us
and they weren't quite the right fit but we kind of justified it in our mind that
they were we can work with them it would be workable and it's not necessarily
always this unethical thing. It's just sometimes you just have like you just brought
on something that you're like, I wish I didn't do that, right? But you still
(07:22):
deliver on it, right? But yeah, it's just all kicked ourselves. Oh, man, I should
have turned that person away. We've all done that. But one of the things is like
it's having the courage to be able to look at yourself and to be able to also
just acknowledge that there's been times in the past that you brought on clients
that you probably shouldn't have. and you brought on those clients because maybe the
cash flow is lower. Maybe you overlooked some red flags that you won't overlook
again, but it's having the integrity to say no. - Yeah. - And showing up in that
energy, in your sales conversation, in your marketing, that shows up as authority.
- It does. - And having the integrity also, you know, if a client joins your
programs like we just had one recently he joined our programs and like he was not
here into our success conditions and like I could just start to see this is going
to be this is we're going to be dragging him through this whole thing we just
refunded him the money and said I don't think it's a good fit right now um let's
maybe this other thing's better fit for you now we'll we'll see where we go we
where we come but but if we didn't do that it would have impacted the rest of our
whole cohort and that is that is an integrity issue because we have made a promise
to them that we're going to help them have this transformation. If we have one
person in there who is not doing the work, who is resisting the process, and it
creates a negative drain on the whole group. So we can't have that.
So that kind of sucks because there's a big chunk of change that you go and
refund, but that's integrity, that's leadership. But it's so important though, to be
(07:43):
able to do that, you've got to be building your pipeline so you can feel confident
in doing that.
That's the other piece there. So I think that would be a next step as well. Yeah.
So being able to quickly identify this person is a good fit or not a good fit,
and being willing to let go of the people who are going to drag you in the
business and the group down if there's a group component. I have been a part of
groups where I always wondered like, why is this person still allowed to participate?
Like they're so disruptive or they're just not, you know,
it just feels like the rest of us are doing all the work and this person is just
like kind of writing the coattails of everybody else, which doesn't feel good to the
other members. And I will say, I do look to the leader in that moment and go,
like, this is your decision. So I don't know that I feel comfortable about your
leadership, right? And I know I've been in a situation too, where I remember years
ago where something happened and two people in the group reached out to me and
said, Hey, this thing happened and I'm not comfortable with it. And I was like, Oh
man, I missed, I missed the boat there with how I should have handled the
situation.
And so I had to remove somebody, right? Because, because of that.
And so there is this integrity piece. So I love that, that, and it, it can be
hard, right? Especially when revenue - And offering a refund is like,
oh, it's so painful, but sometimes it's the better solution. - It's the better
(08:04):
solution because you're making a decision from a place of abundance, but you wanna
be creating the conditions in your business so you can operate from abundance as
well. - Yeah. - But that's around sales and a lot of things that you're teaching
around making sure that, so. - Yeah. - But But you're absolutely right, this is a
deficiency in leadership and that's one of the things that I look very carefully
about is if I'm joining any kind of group, who's leading this? I have been part of
some masterminds that like lots of high -level people, really fantastic people there,
but how they were leading it, the culture that they were building, it created in
one case like a very catty group. There were so many amazing women in this group,
But all it took was about five of them to really, to create a really terrible
experience. And I learned from that. I'm like, I would never want that to happen.
So I looked at, you know, with our retreats that we do,
how do we, like some of our, we have very tight success conditions for our
retreats. So that everyone has a really great experience. And part of that is we
have ambassadors there that like are on the ground making sure that there's not that
everyone's included that everyone feels heard and like the leaders of the group can't
be the ones in there in all those conversations you have to be able to plan it in
our case that's what we found works but I'm just very careful about where I choose
to spend my time around but is there is there good solid ship and that are and
more often than not there is there's not and the reason why is there because
they're not willing to make those hard calls they're not willing to say like so and
(08:25):
so I mean I before we had we had this online retreat that we had to do during
COVID which was just awful I really hope we'll never have to do that again it was
it was a great retreat for like is what we were able to do but like I would much
rather do it in person, right? But that was a promise that we kept to our clients.
And I had, there was one gentleman in there that, he was just showing up very
combative and he would have been a real detractor in it. And it would have impacted
the experience so negatively for everyone.
And I had to just tell him, like, you know what? This isn't a fit, let's
discontinue our working relationship here. And he was pissed. He was really bad at
me. And, um, and he actually did this gaslighting thing too.
And I like, I felt he really got under my skin and I'm like, did I do the wrong
thing here? And I may really felt bad, but here's the funny funny thing about this
is that about a year later, I ran into, um, to another company that he had worked
with that he'd actually recommended. And they were, they were really a very smart,
um, intelligent group. And, um, And they mentioned something that I didn't say
anything, but they mentioned that like how hard he was to work with and basically
part of the exact same thing that he said about me. And I'm like, okay, I see
there's a pattern here. And so I didn't want to go down on the negative rabbit
hole. But my point on this is that making hard calls is it's hard. And you have
to have the leadership to be able to take into account what you have actually
committed to, like what you're actually creating in your business, the culture that
(08:46):
you're creating for your clients, the culture you're creating for your team internally
too. You know, we have a very hard, fast rule that if someone is rude to our team
and like a prospect during the process, done immediately. We don't,
like if they're rude, they showed us who they are. Yeah. And if we violated it,
You learn the hard way not to yeah, I have some of those roles with people and
the way they treat my team too So I get it and okay, so I feel like for the
sake of time we're We're gonna kind of bring this to a close but this idea of
success conditions you've given us a few things to really think about which is You
know that metrics really do matter in the business and the more clear you are on
them, the better results your clients are going to receive, the more confident you
can go into your sales conversations and the,
frankly, the more you can charge. So I think those are all really exciting things.
And to get started, be thinking about what are your worst examples, what are your
best examples, and And stepping into that place of leadership and what does that
mean to you? And so this to me brings kind of full circle where we started talking
in the beginning around this is not surprising now for me to hear you say that
when people go through this process with you, they sometimes don't recognize
themselves because learning about your leadership style and where are those places
where you stand in integrity and say, thanks, but no thanks, bless and release,
may be a huge shift in your business that's needed in order for you to reach that
next level in your business. So thank you so much for sharing this.
(09:07):
I always like to ask a little bit about you as we're wrapping up. So my question
to you, If I may, Mandy is to ask you what brings you joy or pleasure right now?
- Lots of things. - Yeah.
- You know, I really, it brings me a lot of joy. You know, that client that I
just mentioned who increased her fees from 15 to 30 and then now 35, that increased
her net profits 700%. And that's life changing for her as she's starting a family
and there's just, that brings me a lot of joy, I will say, going mountain biking
with my husband brings me a lot of joy and going skiing, working with my clay,
clay and my pottery. I've got my pottery studio. I do pottery as well, which is
fun. And Spending time with my girls, I've got a 17 -year -old about to graduate
high school and a little sweet 13 -year -old girl who just loves to play music and
paint and sing and draw. Like she's just so sweet. I just so,
that brings me so much joy. Those are the things that bring me joy. - I love it,
I love it. What's something exciting going on in your business right now? - We are
in re -invention mode, which is so exciting. And we are adding a lot more sales
components than we have in the past around building sales,
building sales teams, specifically starting with sales assistance and using,
but you can just use your existing team right now and connecting with people earlier
on to be able to add tons and tons of value. So we're teaching people about that,
how to be able to create executive briefings, how to fill those with your team,
and really take this to a whole other level for-- how do we be able to,
(09:28):
like the theme of your podcast, mastering excellence? How do you master excellence on
a whole next level
As a company, and what that does is it allows you to elevate your profits, elevates
the relevance of you, of your offerings, it elevates your visibility and the way
that you're seen as a leader in the market. So we're helping people be able to
make those shifts and those transitions is going to help them really thrive and
flourish through any market condition. Which is important right now.
So I love that. And then last, how can people listening connect with you? What is
the best way to have some more Mandy in their life?
Well, you can reach out to me. I'm on Facebook, I'm on LinkedIn, so you can reach
out on any of those channels, Mandy Ellison, M -A -N -D -I -E -L -L -E -F -S -O -N, kind
of a mouthful. But if you go, probably the easiest way though is that we have a
book summary for the Hands Off CEO and it's a scalability checklist that you can
download if you go to handsoffceo .com /checklist and it will give you the summary
there you'll be able to learn and get a little deeper dive on how to be able to
create these type of offers that will allow you to be able to charge a higher
price point even in this market, especially in this market. It actually works better
in this market because clients are so much more discerning and they're looking for
just the right thing. So if you go there, you can get the book summary and that
scalability checklist and you can also just buy your book too at handsoffcio .com
/book for 99 audio copy. Awesome. Thank you so much.
(09:49):
Thank you for being here. I'm a fan and I love what you shared and you have my
brain spinning around ideas for my own business and my own leadership, my own worst
and best examples, all of this. So thank you so much for being here. It's such a
pleasure, Nikki. Thank you for having me. Thank you. And for you, the listener,
thank you for showing up, for continuing to listen to the podcast, for continuing to
share, leave your reviews, reach out to me. I am super delighted to hear what your
takeaways are from episodes. So keep doing that. Thank you so much. I am wishing
you continued success in all that you're doing. Have a great rest of your day.
Welcome, and thank you for listening to the Sales Maven podcast. I'm your host,
(00:01):
Nikki Rausch, your own personal Sales Maven, here to offer you tips and strategies
and techniques to master the conversation of sales. Today's episode is a part of the
Mastering Excellence series, and if this is your first time listening to one of
these, Mastering Excellence comes from my background in neurolinguistic programming,
where we learn that there is a structure to excellence. And when you understand the
structure of how somebody is achieving exceptional results in some area of their life
or business, you can implement that same structure into your own area of life and
business so that you can get exceptional results as well. Today's guest I'm super
excited is Mandy Ellison. And let me tell you a little bit about her.
She transformed her life from battling $25 ,000 in debt to amassing a multi -million
-dollar net worth before hitting 40. As the visionary behind hands -off CEO,
Mandy isn't just another success story, she's a lifeline for consulting agency owners
drowning in the day -to -day. Her magic? Transforming million -dollar agencies into
scalable enterprises with minimal CEO dependency. Mandy has propelled hundreds of
agencies towards tens of millions in revenue by refining their offers and attracting
premium clients willing to pay 50 to 600 % higher fees all within 90 days.
As a former business exit advisor for millionaire exits with 20 billion in exits
under their belt, she knows a thing or two about creating and executing an exit
strategy. Her clients rave about adding five figures to their net profit monthly
skyrocketing sales and stepping back from daily operations to focus on growth or
prepare for sales. Behind her transformative consulting work, Mandy is a published
(00:22):
author and the host of the hands -off CEO podcast, sharing insights and strategies to
triple your fees and profitability scale, an exceptional consulting agency that grows
without you. Mandy, welcome to the show. - Thank you so much for having me,
Nikki. - I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. I always like to give
everybody a little bit of, well, first of all, what we're gonna talk about. Mandy
blew my mind when I met her recently. She was talking about success conditions that
drive bigger results. And I was so interested in success conditions. That sounds like
structure to me. So I'm so excited for you to share about that.
But before we do, I always like to give the audience a little bit of background
about like, how we even got connected, which was kind of a fun story for me
anyway. We got connected through Dan, who was on the podcast not too long ago. And
he said, "I think you guys should know each other."
- Yeah, that was fun. I saw your podcast episode, like he had shared it, and I was
on his list, and he shared it. And Dan, and I've known years back in the
mastermind, we were in or something. And he had me on his podcast, and I looked at
your podcast, and I'm like, this is really interesting. So we got connected through
Dan, and that's how we're here. - Yeah, yeah. And I will say, I feel really honored
that you wanna come and share on this because I know I know I shared with you
that my audience is kind of all over the board as far as like where they are in
their business. Some people are just starting out, some people have these, you know,
great big huge agencies and then others are kind of in the middle and the fact
(00:43):
that you are willing to come and share this and that I think every single person
listening is going to benefit including me of learning about these success conditions
and what that structure is behind it. I just I just again want to give my
gratitude for you saying yes to doing this. Well, thank you for saying that, Nikki.
And you know, one of the things that I have noticed is that when the market is a
little tighter and it's a little tougher, it's the smaller guys that tend to be
more willing to adhere to the success conditions. We're talking about that, but the
small ones they want, because they want it bad. So I noticed that the companies are
like, I want to get to our first million. They're like, hustle, hustle, hustle to
be able to do that. And they're willing to do whatever it takes. They just need to
have a better system, a better process to do that. So we actually see really good
results with these companies that are under a million, even sometimes as low as just
a couple hundred thousand a year, because they have a great expertise, because
they're willing to just submit to a process. That's one the things that you talk
about here. So like, I'll leave it back to you, but this is one of the things
that I just love about, you know, the scrappy earlier folks. - Yeah, yeah, which I
will say, I feel like a lot of us feel like we fit there, right? The scrappier
earlier, like we'll do what it takes, we'll be flexible. I always say my favorite
quote is, "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape." Like
we gotta be flexible right now. And especially considering just kind of what's going
on in the economy, how people are feeling about spending money, how every single
(01:04):
lead into your business, it's so precious and we need to really understand and
maximize how can we turn those leads into prospects and how can we turn those
prospects into paying clients? So kind of Tell us a little bit,
like outside of the bio, which your bio is fantastic and you are fantastic, what
isn't covered yet that when you think about the way you work with clients, the
business that you guys are in and the things that you find the most satisfying? I'm
super interested to know like, what do we not know about you yet? - Okay,
guess we have to decide how deep we wanna go on that because There's the market
forward message, and that's what people are aware of. They have a problem awareness
around. So as we talk about that, right? >> Yeah. >> Then there's the deeper
mechanisms that actually drive the results, and that's the part I don't talk about
as much, except for when clients start to get deeper and deeper down working with
us, and it really can go to but well,
not almost. It goes to a deep spiritual level, really. And this is not something I
talk about very much at all, because it's not what people would say that they need
or that what they want to buy. But the process that we take our clients through is
a very deep emotional journey. They have no idea what they embark upon. We just
tell them it's going to be challenging. And you've got to be willing to do the
work and you're going to see such incredible transformations in the next 90 days in
your business and really it changes your life too.
What happens is you go when you step into a new person really,
(01:25):
you become a new level of business owner, a new level of strategist in your
business, a new level of you're just able to be effective on in a way that you
didn't even have access to. And one of my mentors has described it as showing up,
being able to show up in a way you become a person that is unrecognizable to
yourself right now. Become a person who is unrecognizable to yourself. And that's
some of the things that I find myself constantly leveling up leveling up leveling up
and that's what because that's what's required you know I'm creating a 12 million
dollar company over the next four years that's where that's where we're at and we're
on our way into that and it requires me becoming a 12 million dollar CEO that's
right I have I've got to step into that I can't have that until I step into that
and I really embody that so what what we're doing is, with our clients,
if they want to have a million dollar company, we help them be able to step into
a million dollar CEO. And what does that look like as far as the offers we're
making? What does that look like for how, what are you actually going to be,
what do you want to be known for in the world? And that's not, that doesn't happen
by chance. You have to be very intentional about what do I want to be known for
because when you start your company, you've got an expertise, you're going out and
you're saying, "I've got this thing I can do well at. I'm going to go and find
people who need that thing and we'll sell that thing to them, that service or
whatever." And then you grow your company and then you get to a point where you're
like, "Okay, I'm not getting paid enough, this kind of sucks. You're also working
(01:46):
more hours and you're hiring more people and then you're finding you're making less
and less money, even though you're working harder and harder and you get to this
point here. And a lot of times what happens is that they just haven't been very,
they got to that point organically, a lot through referrals. It's just they kind of
have followed the breadcrumbs, which is exactly what you want to do. It actually
it's a path of success, but it will stop you. And I've seen this stop me too,
even being very intentional. Like you get to a point where you like, and we're
actually in a reinvention stage right now too. And I think everyone is right now.
There's so many changes that are happening right now. - Yeah. - But the opportunity
here is to really be very intentional about Who you actually want to be and not
from this perspective of like What maybe I can do that like I kind of would like
that, but it's not even knowing how to yet You have to step into that and then
you figure it out as you go along But otherwise you limit yourself and then you
really can't you really can't have true greatness Yeah, there's that reminds me of
the saying I think it's been said many times is the like what got you here Won't
get you there right of like having to recognize that at some point there's some
transformation that needs to happen. And also to really honor, I think, that
transformation is change and change is not comfortable. My NLP teacher used to always
say, "The only person who likes change is a wet baby." It's like,
yeah, 'cause change can feel so awkward and weird and to take on a new level and
you become a version of yourself that like you said it's unrecognizable but it's
(02:07):
also in the like it's almost hard to imagine because you don't know what's possible
yet so how could you possibly imagine what this new version of you would be unless
you have somebody guiding you and like kind of helping you along the path because
these are the things that we really do not do alone. I don't think.
- No, I don't. And I don't think, I completely agree with you on that. And you can
do it alone if you wanna have a very limited vision. - Yeah. - But the problem is
is you can't see the next level there. But someone else, like yourself, Nikki, with
your clients, I'm sure you perform this very well, where you can see them in their
next level. You can see a next level that they can't see for themselves. And this
is like a vision and gift. And this is like, I see this as almost like a
spiritual gift that you can actually see who this person really is. So this is not
like them actually changing. It's actually Yes, it's changing it but the
transformation when you look back you're actually saying I'm at this is actually more
of who I really am Yeah, it's it's like I Don't know it like I guess because I
see this butterfly behind your head right now of like, you know, you've got up on
your on your One of my turn a shelf. That's what that's what it's called You've
got the butterfly, but it's almost like you're growing into the my wings. And once
you grow in, you're like, yeah, these fit, these totally fit me. And they feel
right. But you didn't even know what it would feel like to have the wings until
you start to grow into them. And you realize like, Oh, they were there all long. I
just couldn't really feel them because I hadn't grown into them yet. I'm way off
(02:28):
topic here. But that's what I'm thinking about is this like you're growing into this
version of yourself that is meant to be, it is who you are.
And it's hard to do that without guidance.
It's hard to do that without. And just to be really candid, I want to say,
like, sometimes you grow from a place of pain, and having,
being forced to change, right? Because something has happened, but also there's
opportunity, like I think most of us prefer to grow from a place of like, oh, I
want expansion and I wanna like do more, but there's also this like, I don't want
this pain anymore. And so I'm willing to step into who am I really meant to be?
So anyway. - There's so much that you just said there that is just gold. And And I
think many of us say, and I put myself in this category too,
I just actually just sat down the other day and recognized I'm like, I'm no
different. But we oftentimes say that like, we don't want to go through the pain,
we prefer to be able to just be able to shift and change because we really want
to do that. But the reality is, is that what really drives us, drives the biggest
transformation is the downs, the breakdowns that lead to the breakthrough. And the
bigger the breakdowns, the bigger the breakthrough. So as much as it sucks, the
market changes, you know, we've had to reposition just a little bit, you know, some
of our channels haven't worked as well as they have in the past, and we just had
to pivot. And we helped our clients pivot, which is, which is fine. But it sucks
in the moment, you know, like, oh, you know, like, who moved my cheese, cheese kind
(02:49):
of moment, they're that Yes, I love that, right?
- But there's such incredible opportunities here if we can be the resource for our
clients, if we can actually be their solution to the biggest challenges right now.
And back to what I was talking about with the breakdowns, the breakdowns,
like in a down market, what we noticed especially the earlier folks that what I was
mentioning, like our market changes a little bit more. We start focusing on the
earlier folks more in a down market because they're out there saying, I need to do
better, I wanna do better, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes. And they have
big breakdowns of like, this isn't working, I need to make this work.
So we can create, we can facilitate very big breakthroughs because they want it so
bad. Whereas a big mistake that we see with some of the larger companies, I
wouldn't even say they're that large, but companies that are in the lower seven
figures, what happens a lot of times in this place is they go and they find a
hole to hide in or maybe even to die in. And I know that sounds pretty rough,
but
I can look at the the P &L across the line for companies in our industry and no
matter what their numbers were, I can see there's a trend that matches and I can
tell if they match the trend. I know they didn't do anything but put their head in
and just wait and watch or maybe they invested in all the wrong things. It's a
pattern. You can see it and it's going to happen again. The difference is that we
have AI that's going to come in and make whatever they're doing even more
(03:10):
commoditized. They don't have the same cash reserves that they may have had before
to go through. They don't have also the availability of cheap capital that we had
before, like it was just flowing out left and right that we're now paying the piper
for right now with inflation.
So I'm saying there's so many things that are up against
Um, the ones that go and stick their head in the, in, in a hole, it's, it's, it's
going to be rough when they decide to just decide that they need to go and make a
change. Yeah. So we're not serving, we're, we're not target, we're being very
intentional about who, who, who are the people they're sticking their head and we're
going to still help them. We'll still give lots of great free content, but we're
going to spend our time on the people who really are, want to go after it. Yeah.
- Well, and I think that leads us really naturally to what we're talking about here.
These success conditions to drive bigger results because again, when you started
talking about these, when you and I met a couple of weeks ago, I was like, dang,
this is like, I wanna know more about this because this is about,
well, hold on, I'm gonna just say, I want you to tell us, what is that, how would
you define success conditions and then we're actually like going to get into the
structure behind it, but how do you describe it? Okay, so let me give a little bit
of context around that because it's just kind of it's kind of jumping in the middle
before like we need to understand what what white success conditions even make any
difference. So okay
(03:31):
So in I'm going to talk about professional services firms because that's that's
That's our expertise. And one of the things that we see a lot of times is that
they will basically, their business is based upon referrals.
Someone gives them a referral, you can help them, okay? You've got money, okay,
we'll accept you as a client and we'll try to figure out how to help you. And
it's a very custom process and they're doing that over and over again when the
companies are coming inbound, and they attempt to build systems around that, but it
doesn't really work because they're all over the place. And this is a company
they're trying to scale this way. You can imagine how difficult that is to even
have a sales strategy around that. 'Cause like, what are you even offering? - Right.
- Right? What do you even wanna be known for? So what happens is that their results
kind of follow a bell curve, where they have some outlier results that are like
spectacular, and they did great work for them,
but they don't really know why. You talk about the unconscious confidence, they don't
know why they were able to drive great results. Then they have people on the other
side of the bell curve that were just were train wrecks, and they have a little
bit better idea of why that is, right? And then you have them that didn't do so
well, or they just don't even know because they didn't collect that data and because
the clients were not giving them that information, they didn't even know how
effective their services were at driving results. A lot of times they didn't even
define results, they just did a service, right? And then you have some that are,
(03:52):
then you have some on the other part that they did pretty good work. And those are
their best clients, but they don't know how to so, so really like their top 10 %
of their clients are their very best types of clients, but they don't know how to
be able to replicate those results. And they don't. And part of that is because
they don't look at us and say, okay, well, this was a law office.
So we'll just go after more law offices. So let's say they go a niche down on
that, But you can go a niche down that that's that's a good start, but until
you're getting clear about
What is the intentional outcome we're creating for these these lawyers tell me if
I'm going to details here? No, I'm fine I'm tracking so we so we'll create this
outcome statement and this is what like this is this is your This is your stand of
what you're what you're creating for these these law firms. So for example, maybe
maybe that's that we're going to be able to help them
accelerate their their
how I was going to say efficient. I was going back to a number of different ones.
I'm kind of going through like 10 different offers in my head of different clients.
So like so streamline their efficiencies and be able to cut off and cut 10 hours
per week off of their of their admin team times 20,
and that's like half a million dollars of profit that they save. So like, maybe
their outcome statement is, we help lawyers be able to recapture half a million
dollars of profit in 12 months or something like that.
(04:13):
- Right, okay. - So that's like the outcome. - Yeah. Now, how do we be able to
create that outcome every time? What are the success conditions that we have to have
in place to be able to create that? Well, you're gonna need to have metrics to be
able to manage, to metric, to be able, this is actually possible. So what happens
is in your success conditions, you need to be putting these up front in your sales
process so that you can sell them on part of our process is that we track the
effectiveness of your campaigns so that we know whether how effective we're being, so
that we can dial it in and actually accomplish this outcome. If you don't give us
this, we can't actually stand by this promise. So that's an example of a success
condition. Another success condition is that there might need to be a minimum budget.
One of our success conditions is when we're working together with clients, there's a
certain upfront amount that is mandatory. We just cannot create this transformation
without it. It's just, we just can't, I'm just not willing to do that because there
needs to be a transformation there. So, and other success conditions might be that
they follow, that they're willing to follow the process. And so there's these
different success conditions you might need. It might mean a minimum number of
associates in the law firm. It might mean that you need an administrative person
that's going to help you execute all this internally. You know what I'm saying? So
you don't know what the success conditions are until you know what you're actually
creating those conditions to create. So you have to start with the end in mind.
Okay. So just to like step to the side here and maybe kind of come back with you
(04:34):
kind of to make sure that I'm understanding what you're saying and also the audience
too. So this idea of a success condition in the way that it is going to serve you
and your business and your clients, most importantly, is that there are some metrics
that when you understand how your top, you know,
10 % or 20 % of clients are getting exceptional results from the work that they're
doing with you. And you, you can understand and kind of like pull out that data of
like, what had to exist in order for them to get these results.
Now you can start to put structure so that when you bring on a new client, they
either have to meet some criteria in order for them to achieve similar results and,
or they have to be willing to follow your process that you know that when you
follow this process step by step, you're going to have success. - Yes. - Yeah,
okay, perfect. - Yes. - All right. - And it might be helpful for us to talk about
how do you actually define the success conditions, right? So I've decided to find
like, why it's important is that it drives predictable results every time.
And when I say predictable results, I'm not talking about predictable results the way
other people are thinking. I'm not talking about predictable deliverables. No, no, no.
I'm talking about what's your client actually intended for to get out of the service
that you wanted. And so they may have signed on the dotted line with like the list
of deliverables because that's what they had to do as part of their buying process.
What they really wanted is those deliverables to actually produce some business
outcome. What maybe that is a race profitability. Maybe that's cutting their staff
(04:55):
turnover in half, which generated a certain profit increase. So like they have
something in the mind and sometimes they don't even have something in the mind but
you need to plant that in their mind because that adds more value to your service.
- Yeah. Yeah. So speaking to a client, a prospective client, when you have a
concrete, like what, what is the goal? What are they looking to accomplish before
they decide to hire you? And you know, like, like for me, you know,
I love to work with clients who want to increase their conversion on consultations
to 50 % or more. So that's a concrete example, if somebody comes to me and is
like, my conversion rate is 20%, there is a very, very high likelihood that when
they implement the things I teach, we are going to increase their results. Now it's
easy for me to say to them, when we track this at the end, what's your conversion
rate now? And they say, my conversion rate is 75%. Well, then we more than exceeded
their expectations, I kept to my promise, right,
of what I was going to deliver by hiring me and working with me, and it comes
back to, I need to know that up front as to whether or not I can deliver on
that. But the only way I know if I can deliver on it is if they also take action
too. So therefore I have to have metrics and /or requirements in place for them to
one track results 'cause they can be like, well, I think I'm doing better, but
like, how are you actually doing? Are you tracking this? 'Cause if you're not
tracking it, then we don't really know. It's like, how does it feel to you? Which,
you know, isn't probably going to, I'm wanting to come back and spend more money.
(05:16):
So am I, am I hitting it? - Yes, - You absolutely are, and I would take it a step
further too. - Okay. - So you have, and maybe this is what you had in mind too,
but now when you track the results on this, you can like,
how much extra sales does that actually mean? You know, so we could look at that
and say, if you increase your sales conversion rate from 20 or 30 % to 50 % and
you have X amount of calls that are in place already. Someone who has a solo
person who has, maybe they have one call a week, that the amount of result that
they're going to get is very different than if you go and work with a team of
five people that have 10 sales calls a week, right? So you could do the same work
And you have infinitely higher upside and reward on the one of the team.
Because if you're looking at a team, that let's just run the numbers here, 10
times, so 50, they're doing 50 calls per week, 50 calls for that. So it's 200
calls a month. And if you, at 200 calls per month, at 20 % on that would be 40
sales. Now, if you double that even just getting it to 40, now you have 80 sales.
So if those sales were, let's imagine those sales were $20 ,000,
$20 ,000 sales.
If you have added 40 sales at $20 ,000 a month,
how much did you just add there
Two cents, what is that, 800 ,000 a month? Now,
800K a month, now multiply that by 12 months. Now let's just, I like to be a
little more conservative, so you just buy 10 months. So basically, you could add
(05:37):
another $8 million to a company about the same amount of time and energy as one
person, there's you you can um the one person anyway let's let's let's say it's a
little bit more right it's a little more time but you could generate eight million
dollars for them over the course of a year if you if you can hold them to the
success conditions if you could it and that's going to require helping them do
things that they're uncomfortable doing like nobody wants to track their numbers I
don't see there yeah we don't like it we avoid it it's We avoid the responsibility
of this. That's just what we do as humans. So being able to help your clients
overcome that human element and actually help them see why, like you wanna be able
to add $8 million to your company in the next year. We're gonna help you do that,
but like we gotta be able to stick to this.
Is that, how important is it for you to get to $8 million? You know, when you
talk to the CEO who's not holding their team accountable to do this, for example,
how important is it for you to be able to add eight million dollars to your
company next year. - Yeah. - And then that's how you get the buy -in for the
success. - Yeah, and then you have an offer, right? Like, whatever, if we're talking
about bringing in another $800 ,000 a month to a business, and I know these are
kind of some big numbers, probably for many of my listeners, but even if you say 8
,000, right? 800 ,000 or 8 ,000. For some people, 8 ,000 would be a huge difference
to their monthly, you know, nut and for others that 800 ,000.
And then what are they willing to spend and how can you then price yourself
(05:58):
accordingly? Because you know, it's like how much money will you spend to make
money, right? Like, although I do feel like people sometimes get hung up on this
because if somebody said to me, If you spend a dollar and you'll make $2, I will
spend all the dollars to double that money all day long, whereas most people will
be like, "How many dollars will I spend to make $2?" I don't know, like 20, it's
like what? No, like every dollar, if I can double my money,
I will spend every dollar to double my money, like that doesn't make sense
otherwise, but so there is a little bit of a sales component to it, but you now
can speak from a much more confident place when you understand that these success
conditions, when they are in place, your clients are getting exceptional results and
this is gonna drive, like we said here, success conditions drive bigger results. So
that is the purpose of you understanding what are your success conditions in your
business so that you can speak from a place of confidence and you can price
yourself accordingly, which, you know, again, when I go back to your bio, like this
is clients that are paying 50 to 600 % higher fees when they-- - They're earning
that. They're earning that. - They're earning that, right? Because now it's like, oh,
I can charge more because I can speak from such a place of credibility as far as
results. - Well, and let me give you an example of what that looks like too. And
here's the thing is that for the people listening, like you were hearing these
numbers and you're hearing these things, it sounds really big. I want you to hear
this for yourself because as you're thinking about you designing your own offers, or
(06:19):
do you want to be, what is the minimum result that you want to create for your
clients? What is the minimum result? Do you want to create, do you want to be
known for someone who adds $8 million to a company in a year? Do you want to be
known as the one who adds $800 ,000 to a company a year? That's not bad either.
That's pretty good, right? But what do you want to be known for? Not like I do
this ex -service, I do this bookkeeping, I do this marketing agency stuff. We're the
best at SEO. That is a service that's not necessarily getting to an outcome.
And when we start selling outcomes and we start selling to the problem set that
they actually have, and then positioning our services to say, "Well, under the right
conditions, what could we do?" And how do you find these conditions? You look at
the worst examples and the best examples. Worst examples, like everybody when you
come up with like, when I ask, give me like, what are the best ones have in
common? What are the success conditions you can learn from the best ones? And they
sit there stumped and they're like, I don't know. They sit there for a while and
they're like, okay, what are the worst ones have in common? And then like the list
goes on and on and on, right? So that could be the easiest way to do it is you
start with like, what are all the ways that we could fail with this? And then you
just reverse engineer for how do you be able to be successful and that way you
work with the very best clients, the ones that are fun to work with that have
budgets.
And here's the other thing too, as a client, let's say they don't have budgets,
(06:40):
they find the budgets when you can actually show them a compelling vision. This is
what I see for you. And I see that this is possible for you because you have
this, this and this in place, your success conditions, right? So, if you're, But the
requirement, though, is that we need a minimum of $50 ,000 to be able to do this.
We can't do it for anything less than that. And what happens is that when we walk
our clients through this, you know what I was talking about them standing into it,
just becoming a different person, when they actually see what's possible from their
services, when you look at it from this angle, what happens is one of our clients
that are currently in our cohort right now, or is this law for cohort, she's like,
She went without talking to any of us. She just went and went to her clients and
said, and she doubled the prices to all of her clients and said, like, I simply
cannot do it for any less than this. She, because you know what?
I'm choosing to offer exclusivity for our clients. That's what was her choice on
this. And she's like, I can only have one in one market. So I have to charge
twice as much for this. And it might even been more than that. I might have been,
I think it was actually more than twice, but, and she's like, and the prices are
going to be going out from here. She went and she sold, this was before her offer
was even done. We helped create this offer, then she went and she doubled her
prices. So she went from charging 15 ,000 to 30 ,000 and she was like, that was so
easy. I think I need to add 5 ,000 more. So that's an example like on the smaller
scale. And this is, This isn't because she got better at sales.
(07:01):
This is because she was more confident in what she did based upon understanding what
we can really do. And we really pushed her to help her see a bigger vision for
what she could create for her clients. And then when she understood what success
conditions she had to have in place, now her sales conversations is qualifying and
quantifying. Just like, do you have this in place? If you have this in place,
what's possible, it's a different conversation. It's a completely different
conversation. - Yeah, because now we're helping people self -identify in or out,
but also in your conversations, you're quickly able to identify, is this a right fit
client? Because there's no reason to bring on clients that aren't gonna get results
because they don't of the success conditions. So I love this so much. I also love
your example of like come up with your worst examples and your best examples as the
place to start. So if you're starting there, you've got your best examples and your
worst examples. What's the next step that you would advise somebody? Well,
what I would look at is one thing is to really step into really being the leader
here and that's you know when I started out with this example of how most
professional services who won't even admit this by the way but a lot of and I
think I think we've all been there right or where we've had a prospect come to us
and they weren't quite the right fit but we kind of justified it in our mind that
they were we can work with them it would be workable and it's not necessarily
always this unethical thing. It's just sometimes you just have like you just brought
on something that you're like, I wish I didn't do that, right? But you still
(07:22):
deliver on it, right? But yeah, it's just all kicked ourselves. Oh, man, I should
have turned that person away. We've all done that. But one of the things is like
it's having the courage to be able to look at yourself and to be able to also
just acknowledge that there's been times in the past that you brought on clients
that you probably shouldn't have. and you brought on those clients because maybe the
cash flow is lower. Maybe you overlooked some red flags that you won't overlook
again, but it's having the integrity to say no. - Yeah. - And showing up in that
energy, in your sales conversation, in your marketing, that shows up as authority.
- It does. - And having the integrity also, you know, if a client joins your
programs like we just had one recently he joined our programs and like he was not
here into our success conditions and like I could just start to see this is going
to be this is we're going to be dragging him through this whole thing we just
refunded him the money and said I don't think it's a good fit right now um let's
maybe this other thing's better fit for you now we'll we'll see where we go we
where we come but but if we didn't do that it would have impacted the rest of our
whole cohort and that is that is an integrity issue because we have made a promise
to them that we're going to help them have this transformation. If we have one
person in there who is not doing the work, who is resisting the process, and it
creates a negative drain on the whole group. So we can't have that.
So that kind of sucks because there's a big chunk of change that you go and
refund, but that's integrity, that's leadership. But it's so important though, to be
(07:43):
able to do that, you've got to be building your pipeline so you can feel confident
in doing that.
That's the other piece there. So I think that would be a next step as well. Yeah.
So being able to quickly identify this person is a good fit or not a good fit,
and being willing to let go of the people who are going to drag you in the
business and the group down if there's a group component. I have been a part of
groups where I always wondered like, why is this person still allowed to participate?
Like they're so disruptive or they're just not, you know,
it just feels like the rest of us are doing all the work and this person is just
like kind of writing the coattails of everybody else, which doesn't feel good to the
other members. And I will say, I do look to the leader in that moment and go,
like, this is your decision. So I don't know that I feel comfortable about your
leadership, right? And I know I've been in a situation too, where I remember years
ago where something happened and two people in the group reached out to me and
said, Hey, this thing happened and I'm not comfortable with it. And I was like, Oh
man, I missed, I missed the boat there with how I should have handled the
situation.
And so I had to remove somebody, right? Because, because of that.
And so there is this integrity piece. So I love that, that, and it, it can be
hard, right? Especially when revenue - And offering a refund is like,
oh, it's so painful, but sometimes it's the better solution. - It's the better
(08:04):
solution because you're making a decision from a place of abundance, but you wanna
be creating the conditions in your business so you can operate from abundance as
well. - Yeah. - But that's around sales and a lot of things that you're teaching
around making sure that, so. - Yeah. - But But you're absolutely right, this is a
deficiency in leadership and that's one of the things that I look very carefully
about is if I'm joining any kind of group, who's leading this? I have been part of
some masterminds that like lots of high -level people, really fantastic people there,
but how they were leading it, the culture that they were building, it created in
one case like a very catty group. There were so many amazing women in this group,
But all it took was about five of them to really, to create a really terrible
experience. And I learned from that. I'm like, I would never want that to happen.
So I looked at, you know, with our retreats that we do,
how do we, like some of our, we have very tight success conditions for our
retreats. So that everyone has a really great experience. And part of that is we
have ambassadors there that like are on the ground making sure that there's not that
everyone's included that everyone feels heard and like the leaders of the group can't
be the ones in there in all those conversations you have to be able to plan it in
our case that's what we found works but I'm just very careful about where I choose
to spend my time around but is there is there good solid ship and that are and
more often than not there is there's not and the reason why is there because
they're not willing to make those hard calls they're not willing to say like so and
(08:25):
so I mean I before we had we had this online retreat that we had to do during
COVID which was just awful I really hope we'll never have to do that again it was
it was a great retreat for like is what we were able to do but like I would much
rather do it in person, right? But that was a promise that we kept to our clients.
And I had, there was one gentleman in there that, he was just showing up very
combative and he would have been a real detractor in it. And it would have impacted
the experience so negatively for everyone.
And I had to just tell him, like, you know what? This isn't a fit, let's
discontinue our working relationship here. And he was pissed. He was really bad at
me. And, um, and he actually did this gaslighting thing too.
And I like, I felt he really got under my skin and I'm like, did I do the wrong
thing here? And I may really felt bad, but here's the funny funny thing about this
is that about a year later, I ran into, um, to another company that he had worked
with that he'd actually recommended. And they were, they were really a very smart,
um, intelligent group. And, um, And they mentioned something that I didn't say
anything, but they mentioned that like how hard he was to work with and basically
part of the exact same thing that he said about me. And I'm like, okay, I see
there's a pattern here. And so I didn't want to go down on the negative rabbit
hole. But my point on this is that making hard calls is it's hard. And you have
to have the leadership to be able to take into account what you have actually
committed to, like what you're actually creating in your business, the culture that
(08:46):
you're creating for your clients, the culture you're creating for your team internally
too. You know, we have a very hard, fast rule that if someone is rude to our team
and like a prospect during the process, done immediately. We don't,
like if they're rude, they showed us who they are. Yeah. And if we violated it,
You learn the hard way not to yeah, I have some of those roles with people and
the way they treat my team too So I get it and okay, so I feel like for the
sake of time we're We're gonna kind of bring this to a close but this idea of
success conditions you've given us a few things to really think about which is You
know that metrics really do matter in the business and the more clear you are on
them, the better results your clients are going to receive, the more confident you
can go into your sales conversations and the,
frankly, the more you can charge. So I think those are all really exciting things.
And to get started, be thinking about what are your worst examples, what are your
best examples, and And stepping into that place of leadership and what does that
mean to you? And so this to me brings kind of full circle where we started talking
in the beginning around this is not surprising now for me to hear you say that
when people go through this process with you, they sometimes don't recognize
themselves because learning about your leadership style and where are those places
where you stand in integrity and say, thanks, but no thanks, bless and release,
may be a huge shift in your business that's needed in order for you to reach that
next level in your business. So thank you so much for sharing this.
(09:07):
I always like to ask a little bit about you as we're wrapping up. So my question
to you, If I may, Mandy is to ask you what brings you joy or pleasure right now?
- Lots of things. - Yeah.
- You know, I really, it brings me a lot of joy. You know, that client that I
just mentioned who increased her fees from 15 to 30 and then now 35, that increased
her net profits 700%. And that's life changing for her as she's starting a family
and there's just, that brings me a lot of joy, I will say, going mountain biking
with my husband brings me a lot of joy and going skiing, working with my clay,
clay and my pottery. I've got my pottery studio. I do pottery as well, which is
fun. And Spending time with my girls, I've got a 17 -year -old about to graduate
high school and a little sweet 13 -year -old girl who just loves to play music and
paint and sing and draw. Like she's just so sweet. I just so,
that brings me so much joy. Those are the things that bring me joy. - I love it,
I love it. What's something exciting going on in your business right now? - We are
in re -invention mode, which is so exciting. And we are adding a lot more sales
components than we have in the past around building sales,
building sales teams, specifically starting with sales assistance and using,
but you can just use your existing team right now and connecting with people earlier
on to be able to add tons and tons of value. So we're teaching people about that,
how to be able to create executive briefings, how to fill those with your team,
and really take this to a whole other level for-- how do we be able to,
(09:28):
like the theme of your podcast, mastering excellence? How do you master excellence on
a whole next level
As a company, and what that does is it allows you to elevate your profits, elevates
the relevance of you, of your offerings, it elevates your visibility and the way
that you're seen as a leader in the market. So we're helping people be able to
make those shifts and those transitions is going to help them really thrive and
flourish through any market condition. Which is important right now.
So I love that. And then last, how can people listening connect with you? What is
the best way to have some more Mandy in their life?
Well, you can reach out to me. I'm on Facebook, I'm on LinkedIn, so you can reach
out on any of those channels, Mandy Ellison, M -A -N -D -I -E -L -L -E -F -S -O -N, kind
of a mouthful. But if you go, probably the easiest way though is that we have a
book summary for the Hands Off CEO and it's a scalability checklist that you can
download if you go to handsoffceo .com /checklist and it will give you the summary
there you'll be able to learn and get a little deeper dive on how to be able to
create these type of offers that will allow you to be able to charge a higher
price point even in this market, especially in this market. It actually works better
in this market because clients are so much more discerning and they're looking for
just the right thing. So if you go there, you can get the book summary and that
scalability checklist and you can also just buy your book too at handsoffcio .com
/book for 99 audio copy. Awesome. Thank you so much.
(09:49):
Thank you for being here. I'm a fan and I love what you shared and you have my
brain spinning around ideas for my own business and my own leadership, my own worst
and best examples, all of this. So thank you so much for being here. It's such a
pleasure, Nikki. Thank you for having me. Thank you. And for you, the listener,
thank you for showing up, for continuing to listen to the podcast, for continuing to
share, leave your reviews, reach out to me. I am super delighted to hear what your
takeaways are from episodes. So keep doing that. Thank you so much. I am wishing
you continued success in all that you're doing. Have a great rest of your day.
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