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Trevor Shorte, Chief Growth Officer at Consulta | The Future of Consulting & AI in Business · Reframe First

• Oleksij Rak: Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Reframe First. I'm Alexey, the host of the podcast. And let me welcome our today's guest, Trevor Shorter. Trevor is Chief Growth Officer at Consulta. Hi, Trevor. Great having you here. And thanks a lot for joining. So from what I learned, Consulta is one-stop shop for business, to find business expertise for any kind of challenge or that you have. And you work with... ⁓ Trevor Shorte: It's good to be here. Thanks for having me. Oleksij Rak: 200 plus consultants, work in 30 plus different industries, like a lot of industries. yeah, what I know. Could you us more about what consultant is and ⁓ what your is or some background about all of So please. ⁓ Trevor Shorte: You Sure. So consulting just in and of itself is really a platform that allows normal businesses, small mid-sized businesses, the ability to be able to get in touch with consultants who can help them move their business forward. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Trevor Shorte: at the end of the day for most of these businesses, getting that type of help can be hard. A lot of them sometimes will end up trying to do it yourself with the advent of AI that allows a lot of people to be able to do that kind of stuff or ⁓ go to YouTube and try to figure that out on their own. ⁓ sometimes you just really need a professional who can actually help you figure that out. ⁓ And so what we have a consultant is we have actually a roster of like 200 plus vetted consultants who have expertise in multiple different areas of your business. you know, things like HR, operations, sales, marketing, finance, it doesn't matter. Anything that a business can do, we have a consultant who can actually help you with that. And so if you're a small or medium business and you need that type of assistance, what you do is you just go to the platform, Oleksij Rak: you Trevor Shorte: You can put in the keywords of what it is that you're looking to do and you'll get a list of all of the consultants who are capable of doing that for you. You book a meeting with the consultants. You can have a conversation with them to kind try to get to know them a little bit better. And once you've decided that you're going to do that, all of the other stuff that happens like the... Oleksij Rak: and you'll get a list of all of the consultants who are capable of doing that for you. Over the meeting with the consultants, you can have a conversation with them to contract to put out a contract to get to the development better. Once you decide that you're gonna do that, all of the other stuff that happens like the need and transaction and everything else, all of that happens on the platform. So you business with the business and you give it to consultant that needs to take and help you with your business. And for the consultants, they're able hear you. Trevor Shorte: transaction and everything else, all that happens on the platform. So you as a small business, you get a consultant that needs, that can help you with your business. And for the consultants, they're able to get new businesses that they can actually work with on a regular basis. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, awesome. That's a good business. about, ⁓ mentioned people learn it on YouTube, people start learning it with AI and so on. ⁓ I personally learn a lot with YouTube and nowadays it's AI, so it's huge amount of knowledge. How did ⁓ change with AI, everything? Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: Do people still come to your platform to look for consultants or do they first go to AI to solve their problems? Trevor Shorte: ⁓ Well, it's really interesting in that because there are some people who just there's when it comes to founders specifically there they're very they're very much that whole mindset is I need to know and figure this out myself and be able to do it because there's that narrative that says like you know as a founder if you don't learn to do these things on your own you're really not building a business you're not doing anything ⁓ me that is a really harmful narrative. Like if you're not a plumber Oleksij Rak: . Yeah. Trevor Shorte: What are you going to do? you going to try to figure out how to ⁓ do the plumbing in your house if you've never done it before by watching a video on YouTube? No, to me that just makes absolutely no sense. But there are people out there who will try to do that. Or the same thing with electricians, right? You're going to learn how to rewire a house just by Chad GPT how to do that? ⁓ but there are people who want to try to do that, right? And ⁓ never that narrative. ⁓ If don't know something, Oleksij Rak: the Okay. Trevor Shorte: Find a professional who can help you actually do that. That's the best way to do it. a lot of businesses, they're strapped for cash. I don't know if you're familiar with the consulting world, but there's a lot of big consultants out there who these enterprise companies will be using. And they're charging like 15, 20, $30,000 a month for their services. Small meeting businesses can't afford that. Oleksij Rak: No. Oops. Trevor Shorte: But what they can do is they can actually talk to a consultant who has that level of experience through our platform for way less than would cost them to be doing it if they were talking to them as an enterprise side customer. And to be perfectly honest, a lot of those large consulting firms don't want to talk to small and medium businesses anyways because there's no money in it for them. they're a totally underserved market. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, ⁓ that's a great metaphor about electricians and plumbers, because in my house I know where the wiring is in the walls or where the pipes are in the walls. So at what, yeah, I'm not doing ⁓ or electrician ⁓ At point do I, as a founder of a business come to you for, go to or go to market to search for consultants? What is the point and what is like ⁓ the right involvement? like using that metaphor, I know where my cables are in the world. Trevor Shorte: you recognize where your limitations are, is really what it boils down to, right? As a business owner, if you know that I can do basic accounting, but if I want to do the books for my business, I might need somebody else who's going to help me do that, then yeah, that might be the time for you to do that because ⁓ consequences of not getting your books right, especially come tax time, can be devastating for a business. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ Trevor Shorte: So why would you try to do that yourself? mean, ⁓ out there that can help you with that, but one of the things that they have is an added benefit. You can actually talk to somebody. who can help you work through that software. They're specialists in that particular bit of software for sure, but you still need that extra human hand to be able to say, you know what, let's think this through because the computer will only tell you so much, right? At some point you need the person who's got that actual lived experience and the ability to be able to say, hey, you know what, yes, I realize the computer is leading you in this direction, but maybe you should look at something else perhaps or ask it a different question to see if it comes up with a better answer for you. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Trevor Shorte: So there's always going to be somebody who has that type of experience who could be useful to a business in any area. I mean if you're looking to expand, how are you going to do that? What's the first thing you need to do? Sure, can, again, you can Google it, you can talk to chat, GPT, or your LLM of choice, but it's still not going to give you the right answers unless you're asking them the right questions. Oleksij Rak: The right question is the most important part. Trevor Shorte: the person who has kind of experience ⁓ know those questions that you need to ask. Oleksij Rak: Okay, I see. With regards to consulta, what is the most common, the most repetitive problems requests that people are coming? Is it accountants? Is it GTM strategy? Is that whatever? that? Trevor Shorte: Yeah, I mean, I don't know specifically if there's one area that everybody kind of leans toward. mean, me, because I'm a sales and marketing guy, I only talk to the sales and marketing people. ⁓ don't know what the other stuff is ⁓ they're getting into. I ⁓ typically for most small and medium businesses, it usually revolves sales, marketing, or operations. Those three things are typically things that they tend to need a lot of help in. ⁓ upon how many employees they have, ⁓ I mean, if you have five employees, ⁓ a lot different HR wise than if you have 50, right? So it just depends on the size of the business and what it is that they're looking to do. ⁓ of the businesses that we're talking to, they into the small and medium range where the revenue could be anywhere from ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Trevor Shorte: a hundred grand a year to a million. So it just depends on the nature of the business and also what stage they're in as to whether just starting out or if they've only been around for a couple of years versus if they've been around for decade or so. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. ⁓ If you have five people, just go and talk with the people. Trevor Shorte: Right? But there, I mean, as I'm sure you can appreciate in whatever jurisdiction you live in, there is always going to be employment laws that you have to follow. Right. And if you've got five employees, it's a little easier to figure out than if you've got 50 or 100 or 1000. Right. Or even needing somebody to help you manage those. Or, I mean, again, they don't know what they don't know. And they've never built a company that has Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yep. Trevor Shorte: 50 employees in it from an HR perspective, who are they going to go to to get that kind of help? Oleksij Rak: Absolutely. You mentioned sales and marketing guy and your role is chief growth officer at Consult. How do you grow Consult? How do you sell? How do you sell Consult? What are doing there? Trevor Shorte: Yes, correct. Hahaha! ⁓ Well, I mean, it helps for me to be on podcasts like this so that people can see and hear what it is that we do. Oleksij Rak: You're also in the service industry, same as I am. I'm curious, how do you sell your services? How easy it is? And what do do specifically? Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So the biggest thing for us is make sure that we understand what the problem that we solve for the people who we want to solve them for, like the business we want to work for, what's the problem we're going to solve for them? And be able to frame that in a way that they actually can see how that outcome is going to be helpful to them. basically getting in front of them. Because I have this saying that, you know, people can't buy your shit if they don't know you exist. Right? So our job is to make sure that we get in front of as many people as we as many businesses as we can to let them know that we exist. And here's what we can do for you. And that, I mean, is the basic gist of anything growth related. It's understanding who you're going to talk to, figuring out where you're going to find them, and then making sure they understand the value that you provide for them. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Trevor Shorte: and you get those three things right, everything just kind of falls into place after that. Oleksij Rak: Do you follow them aggressively or are you just on the radar continuously? absolutely right, so until they know about you they will not buy anything from you, but hopefully they approve this. Trevor Shorte: Yeah, there's rule of thumb when it comes to sales ⁓ it's always like, know, 5 % of the people that you ever talk to are ever actually actively in market looking for your solution. The rest are just kind of, you know, getting by with whatever it is, whatever method it is that they've created, know, whatever they're doing. to get them through the day basically, right? Very few of them are actively looking. So trying to get in front of people and talking to them when they're actively looking, if they're actively looking, they may already have a short list in mind. So those people typically aren't necessarily good for us to talk to specifically. We wanna talk to the people who might thinking about it but haven't done anything about it. Oleksij Rak: them. That's it. Trevor Shorte: because those are the ones that are easier to talk to in that you can start to get them thinking about, maybe I can do this differently. Because if someone's already made their decision about who they want to talk to, trying to get onto that short list is really hard. Oleksij Rak: there Trevor Shorte: So it's easier for us to be able to sure that we are positioning ourselves so that when people are ready to make those types of choice or start looking into those types of things, our name is one of the ones that they think of. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, so you somehow need to identify your potential clients and stay on the radar, basically. Trevor Shorte: Correct, correct. And there's a whole host of ways that you can do that. Obviously, being in the rooms that they're in. So if we know that there's a small business trade show happening for ⁓ service and we'll go and we'll make sure that we ⁓ have booth there and we'll talk to who comes up to us who wants to learn ⁓ more about it is we do. We do other industry trade shows. for tech, if we want to talk to the tech startups, we go to those industry trade shows. We want to talk to the restaurant startups, we go to the restaurant trade shows. Those types of opportunities put us in front of the people who may be thinking about, know what, I don't know everything I need to know about this, ⁓ I should talk to these people. Social media obviously plays a part. We do ⁓ outbound outreach as well as part of that, part of our program for cold outreach we do. So, I mean, there's a whole ⁓ bunch different tactics we use to try to get in front of people so we keep, stay top of mind. But for the most part, it's your standard sales and marketing exercise tactics, right? Oleksij Rak: Which of the channels works best for you? I heard a thought ⁓ this channel, ⁓ this podcast that it's really hard to distinguish which channel people came from nowadays in marketing because people are you on YouTube and in the meanwhile they are checking your socials and they are sending your social to somebody else and they are checking your website and you know in the end... Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: just cannot distinguish where they came from. But still you ⁓ be keeping track of what works, what not based on some signals. So you know which ⁓ ones best for you? Okay. Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. So a lot of people think I'm crazy when I say this, but a tent and signals like that, I think are just hogwash. I don't believe that they exactly exist. Attribution is hard because how do you say that came to you and bought because of they saw you on YouTube, but if you're also doing other things in other areas where you could have shown up in front of that individual. ⁓ then you try to ask them where they saw you and they really can't remember, right? ⁓ ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Yep. Trevor Shorte: get them to the point where you're ⁓ the question, where did you hear about us? And you give them a list of things. They're like, ⁓ I don't remember. So they just click one of them. They can't for sure. ⁓ So why I say that type of stuff is not... It's helpful for sure, ⁓ because at you know the channels that you're working. But is it really accurate? Oleksij Rak: Okay. Trevor Shorte: knows because you're not in the person's head who's when they're answering that question what they're thinking right now that being said is there ways that you could try to track some of that stuff of course you know that's why they invented UTM codes and cookies right and pixels and all that other stuff sure that kind of stuff works but the all part of the whole Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Trevor Shorte: as they call it, the sales funnel process, right? It's like putting ideas in people's heads in various different locations. And then eventually at some point when they're ready, they're going to on you and say, I'd like to consider you as part of ⁓ ⁓ list that I'm looking at, ⁓ ⁓ the exact trigger that put them there though? Who knows? But at the end of the day, does it really matter as long as they show up? Oleksij Rak: It does because like different channels like cost different amount of money Trevor Shorte: Of course, of course, but I'm saying if you're spending money across multiple channels, yes, I get it that it's important to be able to try to track that so you can figure out which is best and you can spend more and you can spend more time and energy on. I totally get that, but I just think the information that's coming back to you when you're starting to look at that is just, it's never going to be 100 % accurate. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's know. So sounds to me that you should ⁓ in marketing and you should be present everywhere. you will get Trevor Shorte: Anywhere your potential customers can see you, yes, that's where you need to be. Oleksij Rak: Awesome. Okay. And with regards to the customers, how did the buyer behavior change recently? Because with new gen, generation with AI, all that, like, you have this exploration in your fingertips. learn a lot and ⁓ people do come prepared. So ⁓ did it change? Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. yeah. mean, listen, I've had people talk to me and come up and say, well, I did a ⁓ with ⁓ favorite AI thing, and it told me this. ⁓ I'm like, yeah, sure, that's good. But what happens when ⁓ do this? Or what happens when you do that? ⁓ ⁓ it say ⁓ you asked this question? ⁓ they look at me and go, ⁓ I never thought of that. Oleksij Rak: I'm going about the conversation that I had with I did a social with my favorite friend, and it was And I'm like, yeah, I mean, that's good. But I'm going to do this. I'm do this. I'm going to have to do it again. And going to say, I'm to do it again. do it again. And I'm to be a good friend. So I can't just go back to what I was saying before. I'm saying, know the right question to ask. And I'm go say some things that I'm very, very awkward Trevor Shorte: So again, this goes back to what I was saying before. It's like, if you know the right questions to ask, those types of things are very, very helpful and very useful. I am not going to knock AI in any way, shape or form. It is a very handy tool that can do a lot of things. I struggle with using in ⁓ the of, let's say you want to do cold outreach. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Trevor Shorte: Could you get an AI to create you a whole bunch of emails and just send them out to everybody? Sure, of course that could work. Is that gonna get you anywhere faster? I don't think so. Because unless you're able to, they say, personalize a scale, that's not something that resonates with people. And a lot of people don't to that. If you somebody a... Oleksij Rak: Okay. Trevor Shorte: Random D and I mean case in point we were talking about this earlier, you know, you're linkedin for example You don't even manage that so i'm gonna spend a whole bunch of money creating Creating creating outbound content to reach you on linkedin sends you dms and stuff like that You're not even reading them, right? Because you know, that's not that's not something that's gonna work for you ai with ai I can do that to thousands of people a day What's the return on that? Very little. Now, could you say that, you know, it's harder to do those things manually? Of course. But just because it's hard doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Oleksij Rak: What's the return on that? You that. It's hard to do the same thing. Of course. But just because it's hard, it's me. It's a bad idea. And a lot of the attempts at doing that speed, to doing something that is fast, and there's that whole concept of throwing up, throwing up, and all sorts of things. It's a lot of people's strength. Trevor Shorte: And a lot of people tend to think that speed to doing something like that is best. And there's that whole concept of, know, if you throw enough crap at the wall, some of it's going to stick. A lot of people subscribe to that when it comes to sales and marketing. I'm not one of them. I think that you operate in an authentic manner and you can showcase to people the outcomes that you can provide for them, that is much better than, sending out a thousand emails a day. When you can do that to 20 or 30 really targeted individuals that you know could be potential customers for you, find 20 of those a day and spend your time focusing on that instead of the five, six, 700 emails that people are trying to send a day or make cold calls. listen, I'm not knocking cold calls either. Everybody needs, it needs to happen. It's something that has to do. Oleksij Rak: No, I agree. Okay. Trevor Shorte: I never did understand the idea of saying to someone, yeah, we do 100 cold calls an hour. I mean, 100 an hour. Who are you talking to for that length of time? At that point, that really means there's what? 60 minutes in an hour, right? And you're making 100 calls. So you're talking to how what? Less than 20, 30 seconds per person? What can you accomplish in that from a sales perspective? It's really, hey, do you want to buy my shit or not? Oleksij Rak: You you Trevor Shorte: If no, okay, bye. Click next. What are you doing at that point? What's the, are you making the phone call? And there are people who swear by that. And I just, I just don't understand that. Oleksij Rak: How do you come prepared for perfect calls? Like you mentioned, you need to research your target clients and find 20, 30 of them and target them. What does it take to prepare for them and what should you do? What's the secret to sell? Trevor Shorte: So I come from a world of doing enterprise sales. ⁓ when I say enterprise, like mid-sized and mid-enterprise sales, ⁓ enterprise sales. And so ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Okay. ⁓ Trevor Shorte: Idea that you can walk into someone's office and not know a damn thing about what it is they do How it is they do it and everything else and then try to get a meeting with somebody they're gonna laugh you out the door Right because they'll be just like why are you here? You don't even know anything about what it is that we do So how can you tell me that what it is that you're about what you're trying to sell can actually help me? get tons of emails coming cold emails all the time. ⁓ talking about, you know what? If you buy a buyer service, we can do this for you and it will make your business that much greater. I'm like, ⁓ you can, but you don't even know what my business is. You seem to think I sell toilets for a living. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Trevor Shorte: So, mean, and this is the type of stuff that you can unfortunately get when you start leaving that type of stuff to AI, right? Because AI doesn't have the context that you need for that. But if you go into a business and you say, look, I know the business that you're in, I know the industry that you're in, I can see what it is that you're trying to do because I have business acumen and I can assess your business and say, all right, I think this is what they're doing. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Trevor Shorte: Let me go ask the question and say, if you guys are doing this, would this thing that I have that I'm selling be helpful to you? Because we know that other customers who we're talking to who are doing the things similar to you have seen success in doing this. Would that be to you? And paint the outcome that they would be looking for in their business. But also at the same time, understanding that they're already trying to figure out how to do that on their own. and they've most likely got some kind of situation that to them is good enough. And so knowing as a sales rep that when you're walking into the door, they've probably already got a good enough solution, you have to make a really compelling argument for them to say, ⁓ you know what? Maybe your system isn't good enough. Maybe we need to do something differently or think differently about how we solve this problem. And you can't do that if you don't know anything about their business. Oleksij Rak: Yep. Yeah. How do you work with the object objection? Because usually when you come and talk, especially in enterprise world, they already have the objection. We got selected list of vendors, we want to do it in-house, we want to whatever, you know. So they know about their problem and they already have some solutions in mind. Maybe if it's not active yet, you know, because if it's like, as you mentioned, if it's an active search, so they already have like short list of candidates. Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: of options have to that if it's still passive price, how, but they still have these objections. How do you overcome them? Trevor Shorte: So this is an interesting interesting question simply because ⁓ literally wrote the wrote about this the other day on my LinkedIn I had ⁓ a post about specifically about objections and For me, is how I see it If ⁓ you're getting from somebody ⁓ it means you didn't really have a lot of clarity upfront about what it is that she the outcome that they were trying to achieve and You weren't able to be clear Oleksij Rak: Okay. Yeah. Okay. Trevor Shorte: on how you can help them get there. is a very good to have in a sell situation ⁓ because you basically have a gap between, and this is what I ⁓ call ⁓ recognition where they are like, what do think you're selling versus what they think they're buying? ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Okay. Trevor Shorte: If those two things don't align, you're not going very far. Because if you think you're selling one thing and they think they're buying something else, forget about it. able to... to be clear on what it is that they are looking to achieve, the outcome they want from it, and how your product aligns with that, that is when you start to have better conversations. And when you're starting off with those better conversations, there doesn't really seem to be objections that come later. They're just more so questions as to how they can make it work for them, which aren't necessarily objections. They're just more so, okay, I like what you're saying. How do we make this work for us? opposed to, we don't want to do this at all. Oleksij Rak: When you're selling to a company, you should... company is somebody is paying money, but ⁓ the who is buying is the person you're selling to. And unless the founder of the company, these are two different... The objectives are quite different. And if you sell the person, it's quite that they are ⁓ thinking about companies benefit Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: They may buy it because it's cheaper, they may buy it because it solves their problem, it may be faster, they don't want to delegate it to some unit in their company because they are not confident they will get it done and so on and so forth. Every person has some different reason of why they are buying something. How do you find that key to the person? Because in the end, it's the person that's buying. The company is paying money, but the person... Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So this is what I teach a lot of people when I'm talking to them about sales, I'm ⁓ with a business and working with a client. This is what I teach them to kind of understand. When you're selling to a business, there's, I mean, unless it's a solo operator, there's always gonna be other people in... ⁓ Oleksij Rak: So. Yeah. Yeah. Trevor Shorte: in the decision making process and they all have their own individual reasons for why they're going to say yes or no to said decision. And if they aren't all aligned on whether or not A, this is the right decision to make or B, whether or not the decision needs to be made now, you're dead in the water at that point. And so for me, it's Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. you Trevor Shorte: as a sales rep, I want to surface those people very quickly. off the bat, know, if you're the person, initial person you're talking to, ⁓ going to say, well, I need to, you know, I need to go back and talk to my boss, whatever else. So who would you need to talk to? Is there anybody else in your organization that would need to be part of this decision? ⁓ you're talking about, let's say, for example, selling CRM software, right? The company if they're worth their salt, they probably already have some type of solution that helps them figure out what it is they need to do with their customers. So you need to now try to help if ⁓ they're even in the market to looking at changing that, ⁓ if they were, ⁓ else that entails. So if you're talking about getting someone to change their CRM, you need to get their sales, ⁓ VP of sales involved, you need to get finance involved, you need to get IT involved. Oleksij Rak: So. So. you need to get the salesman to see the sales involved, you need to get the finance involved, you need to get the IT involved, this is all going to be multiple different people that need to be involved in the decision-making process that affect the entire company, or you're to a man in a car and you want to talk to him about it, and you need to do the software to do the production of each of different operations. Trevor Shorte: So there's always gonna be multiple different people that need to be involved in decisions that affect the entire company. Or if you're talking to a manufacturing company, right, and you wanna talk to them about adding different software to their production line. Well, you need to speak to somebody in operations, back to finance, back to IT, all of those people are gonna play a part in that decision. So you need to get all of them in the room and be able to surface any and all challenges that they would. they would have and I mean literally the best question that you could ask them is, is there anything here that could be stopping us from making this deal happen? You start asking those types of questions and people will obviously start to surface those answers for you. The biggest challenge from a buyer psychology perspective though is the person who is the main contact that you have at that business who wants to make that change has to put their reputation on the line because they're vouching for this new solution. So they have to be confident in their decision saying, look, I'm putting my neck on the line for this because there's that old saying that nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. may not necessarily be the case anymore. And people can get fired for a whole host of reasons. ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Okay. And so, I'm to with a of questions. So, I'm with a question from a friend student at He's at University of He's professor at the University He's a professor at Trevor Shorte: If your company was never looking to change their CRM, but all of a sudden you come up with this idea and say, we need to change it, I brought in a solution that's going to cost us $100,000 to implement and it fizzles out, someone's looking going, why did we spend this 100 grand and who's responsible for it? People are very guarded when it comes to that type of thing. And obviously the larger the dollar amount of the deal, the larger that kind of thing can play in as a factor into the decision making. wants to have that hanging on them, right? So they will sometimes avoid making those types of decisions. Oleksij Rak: you Trevor Shorte: So this is dance that kind of comes with selling. It's really understanding the outcome that that business wants to apply ⁓ utilizing business acumen and knowing how businesses run and then what is important to them, showing how can actually help them achieve that. I talk to a lot of people about ⁓ when you're selling to customers, talk to them in a way that you were talking about not selling them as your customer, but selling to their customer, right? Because exist to service their customers. So whatever it is that you are providing for that, whatever it is that that business has as a service or whatever they're using ⁓ ⁓ service of their customers. So you can position whatever it is that you're doing, ⁓ Oleksij Rak: So Trevor Shorte: in the service of doing that, that puts you into a better to figure out what the outcome that they're looking for and how it's going to achieve that for them. ⁓ it is very simple. It could be just less money, right? But if you think about from a, let's say a change perspective, right? ⁓ they've currently got a CRM platform, that means that they now basically have to rip all of that out and install the new one, but cause very minimal disruption to the business at the same time. Oleksij Rak: So. Yeah. Trevor Shorte: If they don't have an appetite for that, your deal is dead in water. But if they're okay with that, then you want to try to help them mitigate that risk so that they can be able to make that transition easily, quickly, and still be able to service their customer base and not cause any disruption to them. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, you're awesome. What you recently heard is that your customers, do not... Trevor Shorte: So lot of things you need to think about when it comes to that kind of stuff. Oleksij Rak: They quite easily understand if you're talking about yourself or if you're talking about them. If you're talking about how great your product is, so you love them. If you're talking about what your product or your service will solve in their business and if you tell them from understanding of their points, I understand what you're coming through, I understand what the building can solve. Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: and please consider that our service offering, our product can help you with this and that, then probably you have a chance. Awesome. What other trends do you see in buyer behavior? ⁓ Trevor Shorte: Exactly. Yeah, and that's the thing. Just that is what gets you the chance. It doesn't even get you a deal. It just gets you a chance to have a conversation with them. Oleksij Rak: Well, you mentioned you weren't in the press sales right now. You are not that much in the press sales. You're selling to small enterprises. it change recently in the way they behave and in the way they make decisions? Like ⁓ advancements ⁓ tech and whatever? Maybe is something that's ⁓ different nowadays. Trevor Shorte: Well, honestly, the shift that happened and it's kind of came in conjunction with COVID though, right, is ⁓ can we ⁓ our costs so that we are making, listen, I can't fall to business for this, make the most amount of money with the least amount of expenses. That's how business works, right? ⁓ And ⁓ they very quickly, during COVID, we can do ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Trevor Shorte: We can do so much with little. We need to have ⁓ buildings people in them all the time now. ⁓ We completely go fully remote and save ourselves all this money on real estate for the businesses, for the smaller businesses, ⁓ and allow to actually get ⁓ right to and actually be able to start. Oleksij Rak: You Okay. Trevor Shorte: being more authentic with the customers that they're serving because now starts to think about, well, how do I buy local? How do I buy something a small business that's gonna help them survive? Because ⁓ the businesses are gonna be fine. ⁓ And people think the big businesses are ripping them off anyways and they wanna ⁓ support smaller and local businesses because they need the help. ⁓ And that ⁓ mindset always kind of... had been there, but it just got really amplified during COVID. And now specifically with the way, with the geopolitical situation and stuff that's going on in the world today, it's becoming more hyper-focused on, take care of our own first. ⁓ being said, when you're talking about large mid-market type businesses, ⁓ for it's really just about how can Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Trevor Shorte: lower our costs to the point where we are running really, really lean, but still serve as our customers and still be able to make the maximum amount of revenue. And for a lot of them, unfortunately, it boils down to, you know, how many employees can we get rid of and replace with AI? And from a cost perspective, I think that's the worst idea ever, that is what it is. There's, ⁓ mean, Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Okay. Trevor Shorte: The number of tech layoffs that have been a number of people who've been in tech layoffs over the last year and a half, staggering, right? Because these businesses are optimizing for the least amount of expenses so they can ⁓ their revenue. Whereas small and medium businesses, they're very concerned about how they're spending their money. they don't want to overpay for things. So going back to what I was saying about when you're looking at consulting, first them, the narrative consulting is it is crazy expensive. And rightfully so it is because for some of the information you're getting, ⁓ it is that much. However, you can find affordable ways to do that. A lot of them will try to, you know, the DIY route, or they'll go and ask their favorite LLM about that, right? they're missing the larger picture in that even though you might be saving yourself some money in the beginning, ⁓ actually costing yourself time and effort in the long run. Oleksij Rak: you Okay. Trevor Shorte: because you're not able to get the expertise that you need that's gonna help you accelerate your business that much faster. like to tell people that sure, it's great that you can use an LLM to get you some ideas about how to ⁓ your business. But you think about it, how long is it gonna take for you to learn something like that? Do you think that it'll take you what, a year, two years to be able to really get good at it? Oleksij Rak: you Trevor Shorte: versus utilizing the 30 years of experience that I have in my head that can get you to where you want to be or where you should be in let's say 90 days. Right? And that's the difference between people who think that they can do it themselves and teach themselves this stuff, especially if they've never done it before. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, with regards to companies trying to save money, I'm chatting with a lot of founders and executives nowadays in this channel and in travel industry actually and in travel everybody's saying about thin margins, know margins are real and just do not have money ⁓ and ⁓ one the reasons is because like economical geopolitical like crisis is Around world people do not have money to spend on travel that amount of money the other part of that is technology because Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: the age of AI, all this technology gives you ability to become more operational efficient. And right now it's a race, know, everybody's trying to be more operational efficient to ⁓ prices, to get the volume, to get the markets. Everybody's doing that. ⁓ in the end, they are racing against each other. ⁓ that's one of the reasons. And ⁓ comes layoffs, there comes all of that. Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, so this is at least what I see in the industry Trevor Shorte: Yeah, it's happening everywhere around the world. unfortunate. the thing, though, that comes out of that, though, is, ⁓ I and just from a consultant perspective is you've got a lot of people who ⁓ are being displaced ⁓ and are... Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Trevor Shorte: They're saying, you know what, I don't want to go back to my corporate job. I'm going to go out and I'm going to do consulting thing. You know, this whole fractional idea about people be doing fractional work that is big, that is literally exploded over the last couple of years, simply because all of these people who are, who are now no longer part of the workforce, they're now thinking I can go out and do my own thing because I have the expertise and I have, to be able to share that there's enough businesses out there that need that kind of help. Oleksij Rak: . . Trevor Shorte: and see if I can figure out how to do that. And how that benefits me from a consultant's perspective is I can add more consultants to my network. I can have all of these extra vetted consultants who can be able to provide this type of knowledge and expertise to these businesses because everybody's starting up a business somewhere. There's always going to be who are starting up things. And ⁓ they Oleksij Rak: Yep. Trevor Shorte: expertise from various different areas. So where else are they going to find it? Well, if we're in their face all the time, they're going to find it from us at Consulta because that's the type of people who we want to talk to. Oleksij Rak: And actually that sounds like a age for the kind of business. Let me explain. At this moment, there are a lot of talks about one-person unicorns and stuff. So it's still not hidden out there, but the fact that with AI, with current technology, with a small team, you can build quite a lot with proper automation. place and so on. It means that like you stay small in and you move really fast. when you need to solve some particular problems like finance, do not need to see foreign your company because that's another another person in the group, you know, and quite quite often you might be do not need it. ⁓ But need somebody who can set it up for you and and make it run and so sometimes you know, fractionally look into that. ⁓ Okay, fine like taxes are being paid and so on. Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: So yeah, everything is on the record. yeah, the finance part is stable. So you need somebody fractional. So probably that's kind of the golden age for kind of businesses ⁓ you're in right now. Okay. Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's where we can help. Because if you're looking for that short term type person who can help you with that type of thing, this is the best option for you to be able to do that. And all you need to do literally is just go to the platform, say, I need help in this, and you'll get a list of it. Because you could do that in Google, of course. But now you're the one that has to vet and figure out who of these people can actually do the work. Right? Whereas you come to our platform and you put in that keyword and all of a sudden you just, here's everybody who can do this type of work for me. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, absolutely. are your plans about scaling consultant? And you're on and what's bets about the future nowadays? ⁓ Where to see yourself, like your company, not yourself, but your company in a year or two. Maybe two years is too far nowadays. Trevor Shorte: You Well, yeah, way things have been changing over the last few ⁓ two ⁓ seems like we could ⁓ way behind on something else if we take two years to do something. ⁓ So the ⁓ part about what we do at Consulta is the fact that ⁓ because our business is mainly with consultants from all over, ⁓ can literally be in every single country. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. So the important part about the COVID-19 Exorcize Fund is that our business is really the Exorcize Fund. We can hear and hear everything about it. As long as you're an Exorcize Fund member. Trevor Shorte: as long as there's consultants there in that country who want to work on our platform and customers who want to buy from us on the platform, we can be anywhere. And so we currently have mostly Canada the United States right now consultants, ⁓ but consultants in multiple different countries as well. we've got some in the UK, we've got some ⁓ in ⁓ African continent. ⁓ I mean, South America as well. I mean, we were kind of... Oleksij Rak: Yeah. ⁓ Trevor Shorte: expanding the market place in and of itself that, you know, ⁓ businesses all around the world who are looking for this type of help. And if we can provide ⁓ who can help them ⁓ their country and in their specific language or ⁓ the knowing the laws of that particular country that they are working out of. ⁓ then that is obviously going to be very helpful to us. expanding kind of globally a ⁓ idea for us as long-term, ⁓ continuous In the short though, it's really just making sure that we're staying seen in front of the individuals that we ⁓ want to talk know, actively going out and working with Oleksij Rak: Okay. Trevor Shorte: industry associations, with ⁓ like-minded businesses, know, businesses that offer ⁓ services small and medium businesses that we may not necessarily... ⁓ Oleksij Rak: So. So, if you're looking at it, there's a lot things that have been done to be certified as a social social society. Trevor Shorte: do at Consulta, so they will be looking at, like, there's a lot of companies that, what do call it, they certify business licenses and stuff like that and giving you your ownership and stuff like that. Partnering with someone like that, so when you get your business ownership, you can now have access to a consultant who can help you build your business from there. So those types of like-minded partnerships that are out there, finding more of those is, Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Trevor Shorte: I guess the next step for us is figuring out how we can continue to get in front of people who need to know we exist. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, well, you were saying that I was considering that this approach with consultants, it really makes sense. I was trying to look from my business perspective and there definitely are some areas where we struggle, I struggle, and it would make sense to work with some consultants. But in the end, only now I realized that it would make sense, even though it does exist. I was also analyzing, I am receiving like emails a day from different leadgen companies that we can do leadgen for you. ⁓ I'm guys, you're doing code lead generation to showcase me that you can do it. So it's not working. I am not responding to you. So like ⁓ I'm against all of that, but ⁓ only I ⁓ realize concept. So probably you should like get in front of other people's. Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oleksij Rak: I more aggressively or I don't know how, ⁓ now I did realize that it would make sense. ⁓ Trevor Shorte: And this is the beautiful thing about when I have these conversations with people is just because if you can get them thinking differently about how they're actively trying to build their business, it's like you see that light bulb go off in their head and you're like, ⁓ yeah, okay, that makes so much more sense. And then once that happens, then you can start talking to them about, okay, so do you want to go about doing this then? How can I help you get there? Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Trevor Shorte: And if you are looking to move your business in this direction, this is how we can help you. And that's the whole point about sales is how you're going to get them to where they need to go. Oleksij Rak: I just meant that on the top of the funnel there is so much noise nowadays. Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: It's so hard to get through the top of the funnel and get potential clients to the second layer. Because. Yeah. Trevor Shorte: Honestly, have, I don't wanna say this is about all people, but very short attention spans. And when I say short attention spans, I mean, if it's not interesting to me in the first 20 or 30 seconds, I'm moving on. because people in general, we always have long attention spans. mean, there's a whole reason why people binge watch TV shows for hours at a time. You can't tell me that those people don't have a shorter attention span. They just spent three hours watching four episodes of a single show, right? But if looking at something that doesn't interest them in the first 10 seconds, boom, they're gone, right? But once you've got their attention, you can have it for hours. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah. Trevor Shorte: It's getting their attention is the challenge. pro tip, babies and small animals works every time. ⁓ time. ⁓ babies ⁓ mini and mini goats, cats, puppies, it does matter. Any of those any animal or from two topics gets their attention. Oleksij Rak: Not finishing the enlargement. Trevor Shorte: every single time. Oleksij Rak: and it does work in enterprise world. Trevor Shorte: Mm-hmm. yep, yep, ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Great. Thanks for the tip. This is definitely a great one. Yeah, ⁓ sure. We should use it in our outreach campaigns or in ⁓ inbound Awesome. Thanks a lot for this ⁓ insightful ⁓ I something new today about marketing for sure. Trevor Shorte: If you work those into your marketing, you'll be fine. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oleksij Rak: So before we wrap it up, is there anything else you would like to add on top of what we discussed? Trevor Shorte: listen if you need help with with any parts of your business, you know again sales marketing ⁓ operations finance I've probably got somebody on our platform who can who can handle that ⁓ you want to talk about sales and marketing I told you this before I can talk about that stuff all day long and ⁓ ⁓ than happy to talk to people about sales and marketing So ⁓ you want if that's something they need help in come Oleksij Rak: Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Trevor, for coming. And that was a great discussion. Have a great day. Trevor Shorte: Come talk to us, we can definitely help. right, you too. We'll talk soon. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. ⁓