Terry Rice

I think the most important thing is to use the wedge strategy. Just if you've never chopped down a tree before, the easiest way to chop it down is not by just hacking at it for hours. You want to drive a wedge into one side, just a small wedge, and then from the other side, pull it down. So what McKinsey does is they offer audits as a wedge.

So instead of saying, hey, give us millions of dollars for this huge project, they say, hey, give us a smaller amount for this audit that we'll do. And then afterwards, they'll say, hey, look, if you want help implementing this stuff, then you have to give us a bunch of money.

Yeah, sure thing. I spent the first 10 years of my career in corporate working at companies like Adobe and Facebook and some agencies. And then in 2015, I left to start my own company actually got fired to start my own company.

And that's when I just really got scrappy in regards to building my own business, primarily doing digital marketing consulting, and then moving on to helping other entrepreneurs. And now I'm focused more on lifestyle design for high performers and have a program called Savage that helps people with that.

Yeah, yeah, sure thing. And I'll start by saying this all happened by accident. And I'll tell you that backstory in a moment. But, you know, all the things, Walmart, Amazon, Google, like, you know, I can keep going, but hopefully that helps. And on my end, it's great to have access to companies that big because you have such a bigger impact. And as a result of that, you can make more money.

So I'm looking forward to guiding people towards their process of getting these big contracts as well.

Yeah, I think the most important thing is to use the wedge strategy. And this was made popular by McKinsey. So just if you've never chopped down a tree before, the easiest way to chop it down is not by just hacking at it for hours. You want to drive a wedge into one side, just a small wedge, and then from the other side, pull it down. So what McKinsey does is they offer audits as a wedge.

So instead of saying, hey, give us millions of dollars for this huge project, they say, hey, give us a smaller amount for this audit that we'll do. And then afterwards, they'll say, hey, look, if you want help implementing this stuff, then you have to give us a bunch of money. On my end, I accidentally discovered that strategy.

Years ago, this private equity company reached out to me and they said, look, we're about to buy this e-commerce company for like $40 million. We know you're a digital marketing expert. Can you just audit it to make sure we're not buying a lemon? And I'm like, yeah, sure. So I went through that process, give them the audit, and they're like, it seems like you've never done this before.

And I was like, yeah, you're actually kind of right. They're like, can you give us a format that you can use over and over again? Because we want to use you to pre-qualify all our deals going forward. I was like, okay, cool. I got to create a system around this. So I did that. And that's why I'm encouraging everyone else to do this too.

Because once I did that, they're like, can you give us quarterly audits to let us know how we're doing based on your previous recommendations? Okay. So the cool thing about audits is you land one that can easily turn into four. And then on the back end, you could say, hey, look, if you want help implementing this stuff, I can consult you as well.

So for anyone listening, that's the easiest way to get involved with big companies. Just offer them an audit, you know, smaller dollar value, prove your value. And then from there, you can ramp up to bigger deals.

Yeah, and that initial interaction builds that trust, making it so much easier to get big deals. And another wedge that I discovered on accident was working with marketing agencies. So I would do workshops on Facebook ads, digital marketing, so on and so forth for the new hires. But the thing is, agencies sometimes have a high turnover.

So they're calling me back like the next month, the next month, the next month, train more people. And people tend to leave agencies as well. So when people go to a different agency, they would say, oh, yeah, bring that guy, Terry, in to go ahead and train us. So, again, I would do these workshops, but then I'd also stand with a retainer to consult them going forward.

And they're working with big brands, right? They're managing these multimillion dollar contracts. So, therefore, I could charge in proportion to that as well.

Yeah, it's funny. One time this company reached out to me, they had like, it's like a small budget, like an $80,000 budget for some Google campaign. And they call me the day before it's supposed to go live and like, what should we do? And I'm like, yo, give them their money back. Like, I don't have time to teach you how to do this in a day. But that's what happens.

Like, if you can just fill that void for people, because this was a branding agency, they had no idea how to do direct response marketing. So if you can find an organization, in this case, an agency that already has access to these big companies, but they're missing something you can fill, then it's a done deal because they need you to retain that client.

so there is and it's a great foot in the door like you said and they can lead to more contracts so i love that um yeah let's go let's go deeper on this real quick just a double click so with those big companies you're going to be sometimes surprised to your point at how much they don't know i'll give you a real example i went down to consult walmart like in their at their their headquarters it's a bentonville arkansas i went down there to consult them

And first of all, I was surprised that the snacks weren't better. Like it's Walmart. You have access to like literally everything. And the snacks were subpar. But other than that, like they suffered from groupthink. Right. So since they all work together, live together in this micro community, there are no new ideas coming in.

So to your point, like you don't have to be necessarily smarter than the people that you're consulting. You just have to have a different perspective that they're unaware of.

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