Rose Garden Consulting
Ali Mirza spent his early career selling personal insurance door to door in Canada. He was eventually fired, took some time off, and then found his first consulting work almost by accident. In his words, the business "really just fell into my lap" when someone he knew connected him with HH Land Developments.
Mirza started Rose Garden Consulting in 2011 as a sales-process consultancy for mid-market companies with $1 to $20 million in revenue. He initially did not charge a retainer for that first client, and he learned the work on the job. He now charges a retainer up front to engage and cultivate leads, then takes a commission on the back end. Retainers range from $5,000 to $25,000 a month, and project fees have ranged from about $20,000 to $130,000. He runs the business with four W2 employees and a network of contractors.
The first year brought in just under $190K, and the business grew to about $790K in 2015. Mirza credits his differentiation to a process that treats the buyer's motivation, rather than the product, as the core of the message. He argues that a "one size fits all" script misses what each stakeholder is actually buying, and that messaging should be built backward from that. He also positions his firm as a personable, lower-cost alternative to large consultancies.
The business is project-based, which made revenue lumpy. Mirza moved to Atlanta, and the company did not receive its first check of 2016 until March, leaving it near startup-level cash flow by September. He is now building a recurring product: a live, webinar-style Monday morning meeting modeled on the "Fast Start Mondays" he ran while selling insurance. He projects that 200 subscribers paying $300 a month would produce about $60,000 a month, but these are forward-looking estimates, not current results.
As of September 2016, Mirza was working with five or six paying clients and projected 2016 revenue near $560K. He planned a January launch for the Monday morning meeting platform and hoped to reach 200 subscribers within six months. His stated goal is to become a recognized leader in sales consulting while building a more predictable recurring revenue stream.
- •Mirza's referral-driven first client and his later consulting work suggest that trusted personal networks, rather than paid acquisition, carried the early business.
- •Charging retainers up front and taking commissions on the back end gave the business cash flow that project-only consulting usually lacks.
- •Positioning as a personable, lower-priced alternative to large consultancies let a solo operator compete for mid-market clients who could not afford big-firm programs.
- •Turning his one-on-one expertise into a one-to-many webinar is a clear attempt to escape the revenue ceiling of billable consulting work.
- 1.Ask your existing clients and contacts for introductions, and treat the first paying engagement as a chance to learn the service.
- 2.Charge an upfront retainer for engagement and lead cultivation, then add performance-based fees, so that cash comes in before the work is delivered.
- 3.Build messaging around what each buyer persona is trying to achieve, and write separate value propositions for each stakeholder.
- 4.Package your repeatable expertise as a recurring live format, such as a weekly session, and price it at a level your target smaller customers can afford.
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