Sean Murphy gave a workshop at PATCA in January of 2025 on Planning for 2025; here is the video, transcript, worksheet, and slides.
Workshop at PATCA on Planning for 2025
Event Description: Taking stock of your business assets, analyzing what financial, intellectual and social capital are valuable leads to the discovery of new assets, new methods and new abilities that your organization needs to refine or acquire. Like organizing a tool shed: some things need to be sharpened, some need to be replaced, and some are missing. These should drive your goals in planning for 2025.
About the Speaker: Sean Murphy is founder and CEO at SKMurphy, Inc. Since 2003 his firm has assisted technology firms and consultants with customer development, focusing on early customers and early revenue. He enjoys working with small teams who plan to change the world, creating more opportunities than they started with. He is also the founder of Bootstrappers Breakfast ® meetings that are designed for entrepreneurs to share ideas and “eat problems for breakfast.”® Sean has a BS in Mathematical Sciences and an MS in Engineering-Economic Systems, both from Stanford.
Edited Transcript for Planning for 2025
Note worksheet is included below the end of the transcript and can be copied from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aqzE-apQrNkD2szu43fDpIA8ZQmgyVSgjgsXPM29A_w/copy
Perry West: Good morning everyone, I’m Perry West, a longtime PATCA member. I am here to talk a little about PATCA and introduce our speaker. PATCA is the Professional and Technical Consultants Association (https://patca.org), a nonprofit professional association of independent consultants and principals who work in small consulting practices. PATCA offers a free post-a-project referral service at https://patca.org/post-a-project/ for people searching for an expert consultant. This is a real benefit for people looking for a consultant to solve a problem. PATCA members enjoy leads, referrals, and consulting education through a variety of events such as monthly meetings like this. You can join as an associate member today at https://patca.org/join/ and then add professional or client references to qualify for higher membership levels.
So, a little bit about the speaker today: Sean Murphy is the founder and CEO of SK Murphy, Inc. Since 2003, his firm has assisted technology firms and consultants with customer development, focusing on early customers and early revenue. He enjoys working with small teams who plan to change the world, creating more opportunities than they started with. His talk today is about setting our goals for 2025. I’ll turn it over to Sean.
Sean Murphy: Thank you very much, Perry. Glad to be here. We’re going to talk about goals and planning for 2025. A lot of folks here are planning on starting a consulting firm. I’ll just mention that PATCA runs monthly meetings for new consultants, and that may also be a good fit as you start on that journey. Today is less about how to get started as a consultant and more about helping you assess your experience over the last couple of years so you can use it as a basis for looking forward. Our goal today is to identify three key actions to take in the next quarter and then three key actions you will take later in 2025.
Please jot down four to six past projects on scratch paper, in a Word doc, or in the Google doc we shared in advance. If you’re new to consulting, you might look at four to six projects or significant tasks you worked on in prior jobs. Consider the impact each had on your client’s or employer’s business.
Let’s take two minutes and get started. We will revisit this multiple times; you don’t have to share it with anyone, so you can use real names or ones that only you understand. Dig into your “have done, can do” for the last few years.
I am going to take you through two approaches. The first is project-oriented to uncover key personal and business assets–financial, know-how, intellectual property, and business relationships. The second is more of an after-action that looks back one year.
The premise of this first approach is that each project has encouraged you to develop or enhance particular business assets and allowed you to make some money. I wrote a book on this, “Working Capital: It Takes More Than Money,” that goes into more detail than we will cover in the next 45 minutes. You can read that if you want to explore more deeply. But we will go into enough detail to help you start setting goals for 2025.
One area we will not explore deeply today is the financial assets you rely on for your practice. In addition to bank balances and cash flow considerations from your prospecting to payment cycles, you may rely on specialized tooling and equipment, real property, inventory, and physical work in progress. For completeness, I mention these examples of financial assets: most of you deliver projects that require labor hours, but they may also need funds to get started and specialized tools or facilities. Most projects will go through a lifecycle where they will require funds to complete and possibly some specialized tools or other assets.
But the intellectual capital and know-how you have accumulated is much more significant for most consultants. So, I am asking you to consider carefully what you learned from these projects and how you can apply this know-how going forward. Were there particular skills that you developed? Were there checklists, templates, or insights that you crafted or organized that you can use to diagnose prospect needs or deliver solutions to their challenges? Have you developed rules of thumb or guidelines you can use to manage projects and keep your internal operations running smoothly?
You may have filed for trademarks or patents or created copyrighted content. These are all assets you bring to your business at the start of 2025, and I will ask you to analyze them as well. But in terms of the projects, think about what you learned or developed that you can recycle, re-use, or leverage on new projects
The relationships you’ve established as a result of these projects are another set of critical assets. Now, if you’re coming from full-time employment and thinking about consulting, think about the people you’ve worked with. Consider the industry, professional, and other groups or associations you are a member of. List suppliers, vendors, former coworkers, teachers, and anyone with a perspective on your skills, the quality of your work, and what you can do.
This is your network or your tribe. I offer two tests to help you determine if they are part of your network, not as encouragement for a transactional perspective. They are a member if you see an email or a letter from them and look forward to reading it. They are a member if you are happy- or at least willing- to help when they need a favor. You need to invest in mechanisms to stay in touch if you don’t naturally run across them regularly: attend work and school re-unions, drop them an email or card from time to time to let them know what you are up to, drop them an email if you come across something they may find useful, make introductions to people where both parties are likely to benefit from a short conversation.
If you don’t keep in touch, if you don’t proactively help others, if you only contact people when you need a favor, then you are not maintaining a healthy set of business relationships.
The other asset you normally create as part of delivering a project is know-how, which has different properties from business relationships. For those of you in more technical domains or disciplines, you find yourself on a treadmill–or a Red Queen race–where you are running to stay in place. The world moves on, and you must continually invest in maintaining and extending your skills and expertise, or you risk commoditization and obsolescence.
So, in addition to listing the know-how, skills, and capabilities you have mastered, you need to consider where to invest in 2025 to maintain or renew them.
Consider which aspects of your know-how and what business relationships drive key competitive advantages. What skills enable you to win business because you can deliver results in less time and with higher quality? In addition to business relationships with key individuals, are you a member of a group or organization that enhances your reputation among prospects? Do you have a set of relationships with a major firm or a key supplier that drive opportunities for you?
I will stop here and ask you to review the assets you have on the worksheet. Have you overlooked any? We’ll pause for a minute or two, and I’m happy to answer any questions you have.
Question from Audience: I’m making the transition from employee to consultant. Much of my intellectual property around professional services, managed services, and other technology services has been in writing and developing process and methodology documents for my old employer. Now that I have my own consulting company, how do I leverage my past work while respecting my confidentiality agreements and recognizing that the IP developed while working for someone else isn’t necessarily unilateral under my control?
Sean Murphy: The specific checklists or procedures you developed may be covered by existing confidentiality or intellectual property assignments. However, the skills and expertise that you developed from crafting documents and from improving them by observing and interviewing people who performed the procedures, whatever that you have left with in your head is yours.
Question from Audience: I understand that I can use what I have in my head. I find it hard to communicate what I have accomplished to prospective clients while still respecting confidentiality agreement with my old employer. I don’t have examples to share or real references or case studies where I can name the customer.
Sean Murphy: So, a couple of thoughts. It probably would be a good idea to develop an example or a set of examples you could share that you build up by looking at a hypothetical situation or volunteer work for an organization that might benefit from it.
There are three ways that you’re going to win business.
- Your credentials and your past accomplishments.
- Your methods, techniques, and approach.
- The outcome or the business impact that the client will get from engaging with you.
The third approach is normally the most powerful. Look back and consider your documentation’s impact on the employer’s business. Your potential clients are most concerned about the future and what positive impacts your documentation will have on their business. If possible, can you put a dollar figure on the impact, whether it’s cost reduction, error reduction, cycle time reduction, risk reduction, or incremental revenue or profit? What reasonable promises can you make to a potential client based on what you accomplished in the past?
Question from Audience: Thanks. You’ve given me a direction to invest some time and effort. I like the idea of developing case studies, whitewashing the company name, and asking for client references. I appreciate the guidance.
Theresa Shafer: I also will add that one of the highest linked blog resources are checklists. And if you don’t have a blog, you definitely can always blog on PATCA’s website, but those are well referenced and I’ve done checklists for dozens of clients and it’s always in the top 50 for sure.
Sean Murphy: I’m going to shift gears and look at this from a different angle: what worked in 2024 that you want to repeat or build on in 2025? Make a list of things that seem to be working that you will use as strategies or tactics in 2025. What things have not worked particularly well? Knowing what you know now, what should you stop doing?
If you are just starting out, you have more theories than evidence. But these are important questions if you’ve been in business for a couple of years. When you are working as hard as you can, you have to stop doing things that are not working to be able to invest more effort in effective techniques and make room for new ideas, initiatives, and experiments.
So, making your “stop doing” list is helpful. As a solopreneur or solo consultant or in a small firm with a few people, you are your own boss. You have to think about what you’re doing as a set of processes or tasks and keep your score so that you can improve your execution. Some common processes consultants need to engage in and manage are generating leads, crafting proposals in response to inquiries or conversations, managing projects as you start and deliver them, and assessing customer satisfaction. You may have other processes; these are just examples.
Think about how to be more explicit about how you keep your score. In addition to processes, we all have habits. Consider which of your habits clients value and which they don’t value or are holding you back. One model for changing habits is to figure out what triggers the behavior and what new behavior you will substitute in response to that trigger.
For example, if you procrastinate and wait until the last minute to where you’re only three days before the deadline to deliver something, consider creating an artificial deadline two weeks before the due date. I will treat that earlier deadline as the tripwire for having a draft or first iteration so that I spring into action sooner, or I’m going to allocate time for one final polishing pass before I deliver a report, briefing, or presentation so that I avoid kind of small defects that may overwhelm the client’s perception of the work I’ve done despite the other things that have gone into it. Does anybody have a bad habit they want to eliminate or a good one they want to expand?
Question from Audience: I think reaching out by posting regularly is something I am just starting to do, and I am not sure I have a good plan yet. I’m trying to post on LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups at least twice a month to see what that does.
Sean Murphy: That sounds good. For folks who are just getting started, everything is something of an experiment, which keeps it interesting, if somewhat frustrating. I suggest you define what you will try and how you will measure the success of each effort. Remember Montesquieu‘s advice, “The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.” So, deciding when to measure the impact is as important as how you will measure it. If it works, it should be something that you should be able to build on or amplify.
When trying new approaches, one way to minimize the risk or negative effects of an experiment that may not work is to start small. Act with integrity, but try it with a few people. Prototype critical aspects of your approach before investing the effort and expense needed to build the full system. Starting small allows you to fail quickly and cheaply and try a few different variations, increasing your chances of success. Finally, you should have a plan for how you will scale up if your initial efforts bear fruit.
Once you have been in business for a while, to be able to take on new initiatives and experiments, you have to let go or at least deemphasize things you’ve been doing that have been less effective or less successful. If you’ve got a 10-pound sack, you can’t get 11 pounds of feathers into it. So consider what’s on your “stop doing list.”
Question from Audience: I am just starting out, how should I think about getting my first client?
Sean Murphy: First, looking at what’s involved in getting one client is a good way to start. Focusing on a few prospects and making one a satisfied paying customer allows you to get an end-to-end perspective on what will be involved in making your business successful. How you make that happen will vary considerably based on who you’re trying to sell to, how they like to buy, and what they view as a first project. In consulting, you often have to provide a small project at no charge to demonstrate your skill and capability before a prospect will agree to a paid project. This “demo” may be a get-acquainted conversation or “a lunch and learn” briefing.
Question from Audience: How do I avoid getting trapped doing a sequence of free projects? I ask because they can make clients happy but I don’t think I am learning how to build a profitable business.
Sean Murphy: Great question! Services have to be experienced to be assessed, so you will need to find a way to demonstrate your capabilities. Testimonials, case studies, well documented methods all can help. I like Clayton Christensen’s advice for new offerings: be impatient for revenue but patient for profit. There is a substantial difference between free and at least a modest payment that may be well below the rate you are targeting. But the same is true for new products: they often require free–or at least low cost–trials or evaluation periods.
Prospects give us their attention and share needs or a challenge. If your answers are satisfactory they may share more information or provide some specific data, sometimes this is under non-disclosure, with their goal to see if you can provide some useful insights, ways to improve their situation, or a detailed plan. This may lead to either a small paid project or a paid working session where you provide specific actionable suggestions. So the client is providing more information and is ultimately paying for answers. You are learning more about their needs and establishing the trust that supports an effective business relationship.
Did folks come up with some key actions to take in Q1 or Q2 or overall goals in planning for 2025?
It’s important to identify your goals and then schedule when you will take the actions necessary to make them real. A to-do list is great, but the next trick is scheduling the work.
If this is your first time working on your own, running your own business, developing good habits and removing ineffective ones is essential. Habits are essential processes and procedures that an individual can execute without a lot of mental overhead. That allows you to focus precious creative problem solving effort on what matters.
One thing that can help is to be around other people who are working hard, for example, at a coworking site, a library, or a coffee shop that functions more as a study hall for most of the day. It makes it easier to buckle down and stay focused. Another is to find a “workout buddy” or two you can compare notes with on challenges.
You will need to rent a conference room or a private office or work from home if you will be spending a lot of time on the phone or in Zoom. Plan your day. The people close to you who are trying to write an article, think hard about a problem, or type in some code will not appreciate having you next to them in a loud conversation. It’s not a bad idea to carry your headphones for music if a neighbor gets on a call for ten minutes.
I want to thank everybody for coming. I’ll put my email in the chat. I hope this worksheet was helpful for you. We do a couple of things that help startups and consultants. Our practice focuses on leads and deals. We help you get the phone to ring, prepare and deliver sales presentations, and close deals. We offer mastermind groups where you can compare notes regularly with the same group of entrepreneurs. We facilitate Bootstrapper Breakfasts so entrepreneurs can share challenges and get different perspectives on them–it’s a blind date with destiny.
I welcome any feedback you want to email me on what you found helpful here or what was confusing.
I enjoyed meeting all of you, and I look forward to seeing you at future PATCA meetings.
Worksheet
Can also be copied from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aqzE-apQrNkD2szu43fDpIA8ZQmgyVSgjgsXPM29A_w/copy
Project Oriented Analysis
1/ List 4-6 recent projects
[Q1 write here and update list for Q2 and Q3]
2/ Add below each project what intellectual capital did you develop? Reference intellectual capital checklist
3/ Add below each project, what new connections did you make? Reference shared success spreadsheet
Four Lenses to apply to your Intellectual and social Capital
- What should you take more advantage of, showcase, or develop?
- Which ones are at risk for commodification or obsolescence?
- What needs maintenance or renewal?
- What’s driving your competitive advantage?
Looking Back at 2024
3/ What went well in 2024?
4/ What strategies or approaches do you want to use again in 2025?
5/ What did not work in 2024?
6/ Knowing what you know now, what should you de-emphasize or stop doing?
7/ Any changes you want to make in how you keep score on key processes like lead generation, proposal development, project management, customer satisfaction?
8 / Is there one habit that held you back in 2024? Can you change it in 2025 by avoiding triggers or substitute a new action when triggered?
Looking Forward to 2025
9 / What experiments will you run in 2025?
10/ Three key actions to take in Q1 (at least one should be abandon or stop doing to make room for new efforts and changes)
11/ Three key actions to take in 2025 (at least one should be abandon or stop doing to make room for new efforts and changes)