In this week’s solo debrief episode of Entrepreneurs Rising, Carl Taylor shares his biggest takeaways from his conversation with James Kemp, a fierce proponent of the “sovereign consultant” business model and known for his skills in crafting compelling offers.
Carl reflects on James’ view on leveraging the three modalities — consulting, mentoring, and coaching — and why it’s a great idea to flexibly utilize these as skills, not just identities.
He also goes back to their discussion about painful past relationship experiences, the value of clear and truthful communication, and the different paths they took that allowed them to become the astute, more resilient men they are today.
If you’re keen on living the life you’ve always wanted, this episode will help you get clear on the right direction to achieving your goals.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL DISCOVER…
- How Carl Taylor and James Kemp met (00:58)
- James’ free template resource (01:34)
- The three modalities: consulting, mentoring, and coaching (02:18)
- Sovereign consultancy (05:42)
- Relationship journeys and how these painful experiences forged Carl and James into the men they are today (06:35)
- James’ three biggest pieces of advice (07:51)
- How James shows up in his current rebuilding journey (10:30)
QUOTES
- “You need to be building a business that serves your life. And to do that, you need to design your life first.” – Carl Taylor
RESOURCES
Entrepreneurs Rising Podcast Episode 114: The Path to Entrepreneurial Freedom with James Kemp
WHERE YOU CAN FIND CARL TAYLOR
Automation Agency
CarlTaylor.com.au
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter
TRANSCRIPTION
Hello, and welcome to Entrepreneurs Rising. I’m your host, Carl Taylor. And this is a solo episode. This is an episode of just me and you together on YouTube or podcasts and audio wherever you may be. And this is where I debrief, my biggest takeaways, my house highlights out of the conversation I had earlier this week with James Kemp. Now, I say this all the time. But I do encourage you to if you haven’t already to go and listen to that full interview, it’s going to take about an hour of your time. These are long, deep conversations. If you don’t have that time, or you’d rather just get the highlights, then this is the episode for you. And if you already did listen to it, and you just want a good summary and reminder of some of the bits that maybe you were like, Oh, that’s great. And then you’ve forgotten about. That’s what this episode is for. It’s to really just show you the things that stood out to me.
Now James is someone I’ve known for many years, we couldn’t put an exact figure on it. But it’s definitely in the high single figures, not quite the decade. And James is someone that I have a lot of respect for. He’s an intelligent man, he’s gone through a journey that is quite challenging for men, we have some similarities in our journey, we have many differences in our journey, too. But he’s a very smart man. He’s a very genuine man. And he knows what he’s talking about, especially when it comes to offers, and I’ve consulted with him to help me on my office. So I think it’s a real privilege to have the opportunity to chat with him.
Now, he has a great resource that you can find out the offer code.co, the offer code.co. It’s a free template of how he sells millions of dollars worth of consulting services to using just a Google Doc. So highly recommend it, it’s free. He mentioned on the podcast, he had a guy recently download it for free and make over $100,000. And so when he made that much money from just the free thing, he then obviously then signed up to work more closely with James. So whether you’re a consultant or coach, or an IT provider, and agency, if you’re wanting to understand how you could sell more position your offer? Well, I do recommend checking that out.
Now, some of my biggest ahas was when chatting with James was he had this great distinction around these three modalities. And even the fact that he talked about them as modalities rather than identity. So what do I mean? Well, typically, and this may be you, typically you’ll meet someone that we are, I’m a business coach, or I’m a mentor, or I’m a consultant, and they take that as an as an identity, my identity is I’m a consultant, my identity is I’m a mentor, my identity is I’m a coach. And what he was saying is that that kind of puts people, sticks people in a bucket that keeps them trapped. Because really, if you’re going to be a leader, and we talked a lot about leadership in both business and in life in the episode, if you’re going to be a leader, and especially think about if you’re a parent, and he reflected this back to parenting, that you actually you need to use all those skills. And you so you’re not, the identity is maybe you’re a leader or you know, in my dad program, we talked about being a king, right, and the king is the leader of the family, the king is the owner of the business, the king is the protector of the family and the kingdom rather than the risk taker.
And so this mentorship is a tool that you use. And so he broke it down like this, that mentoring is I’ll tell you how I would do it. And that’s how I genuinely genuinely show up most of the time for my dad program clients is I’ll tell you how I would handle this like, Okay, this is the problem, here’s how I’d approach that. Consulting is going well, I’ll tell you how I, you know how to solve it, like just go and do this thing. And so if someone comes to me, and I’ve got a product called Deep Dive where I come and spend two days in their business, often in the deep dive, I’m getting more into the consulting, but there it’s gonna just do this, do this, do this. This is how we fix it. It’s a bit consultative where I engage with them. But at the end of the day, they leave with a here’s what you need to now go away and do if we haven’t done it on those two days. And the coach is a true coach, not someone who just calls himself a true coach and coaching as a skill or modality is I’ll show you that you already know. So true coaches are about kind of helping you find the innate wisdom that you have inside and helping you uncover that asking you lots of questions to get you to your truth. Mentors, here’s how I would handle it. And a consultant is just go out and do this. And most people will put themselves in a bucket but he talked about them as their different skills or modalities that you need to just pull on it the right lever and so if you think of yourself as a leader, or a parent, there are times when you’re going to mentor your child or your your team.
There are times you’re going to consult I reflected it back when I’m working with a operations manager there are times when I’m just going to come in and say, here’s what I need you to do. Go away and do this. And there are other times Where the mentor is about removing roadblocks. So it’s like, oh, this is the challenge you’ve got right now. Well, let me tell you how I would, how I think about this or how I would probably tackle this problem. I’m not telling them what to do. I’m just telling them how I would tackle the problem. And then the coaching is going like, Okay, well, let me what have you thought about? What are your options? What, what do you think’s the best action here and coaching them into their own place? And so if you have a team and you’re leading a team, you’re going to do this just like you would with a child, when you’re parenting them at times, you’re going to be telling them here’s what to do, times you’re going to be telling them, here’s what I’ve done. And other times, you’re just going to be asking them questions to coach them through the process. That was probably one of the most profound things that came out of his mouth.
Yes, we talked about offers and building. James’s secret is he helps people become sovereign consultants, how do you build a million dollar profitable business with a team that you are plus a team member? Like? How do you go super small, very different to my approach of like, you need to build a business that works without you, it’s going to you’re going to need a team, you’re gonna need tech. And generally, the team is going to be more than one, it’s doable, but you’re probably going to need more than one, if you’re truly going to step out of your business. He’s trying to take leverage and approach of productizing your business similar to what I would get you to do. But he’s productizing the business down to still being the deliverer, because you’re choosing to be that consultant, who then pulls on those modalities of mentorship, consulting and coaching. So I thought that was really powerful of if you’re stuck in an identity right now, you need to shift that identity out of I am a coach, I’m a consultant, I’m a mentor to I use these as skills to address the type of client I work with, with the problems that I help solve.
Another thing that we touched on, which is a little bit outside of business, but we started to talk about some of our relationship journeys, we had similar relationship journeys, where the women in our lives kind of just up and left. And yeah, it was painful journeys for us. And we had, again, we had different approaches to how we did that I stepped out of all my business stuff, and just focused on me and healing me. And he had kids at the time, I didn’t have kids. And so he lent into the fire and the challenge, and that’s forged him into the man that he’s become just like my stepping into myself, forged me into the man I became. But one of the things that came came out of that that I liked, was the idea of clear is kind of sometimes, especially if you’re a nice guy, like I’m a recovering nice guy, it can be easy to be a bit murky, because you’re actually a little afraid maybe to ask for what you actually want or what you need, and your work or to tell them someone that you know, you’re not happy. And so clear is kind doesn’t necessarily mean clear is when you tell someone with clarity, where you’re at or what you need, or what’s going on, doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to be met with happiness, but it is kind it’s kind of yourself, it’s kind to them because you’re speaking your truth.
And at the end of the episode, I asked him, What are the three biggest things he wants people to hear and he had first, like, put your mask on first, we’ve all heard that analogy of when in a plane, you put your own mask on before you put on your child or someone next to you. Plus, like you’ve got to, you’ve got to look after your own needs. First, if you’re not putting your mask on, if you’re not looking after your needs that you you’re just kind of escaping in in life, and eventually it’s all going to come to a head and that was my experience, that was James’s experience with the relationship side of things. The second thing he said is that you are the product of the five people, you hang around, which is a overused or well used saying, but what I liked about his distinction there is if you’re surrounded by people who are creating a business and a life that you don’t want. That’s what to think about. So it’s not just like, oh, I need a product of the five people around me, it’s like you are the product of the five people around you. And is that meaning that it’s kind of forcing you or leading you into a business model or into a life model that you actually don’t want.
And you really need to think about it is that putting you around people that are making you go I should do these things that isn’t the life you want, turning you into something you don’t want to be to really take a review take stock of those five people you spend the most time with. Is it turning you into someone you don’t want to be? And then the last thing he said was we are all sovereign, you can buy sovereignty you talked about you can choose your life, you can take control of your life. And the idea and I fully agree with this is the first thing you need to do is you need to be building a business that serves your life. And to do that you need to design your life first, get crystal clear clarity on what life you want to have. And then how do you build the business to deliver on that life for you.
For me, I want the freedom to be able to travel and to spend time with my family to focus on passion projects and things that interest me that may not necessarily be super profitable. And I do that by having the businesses and the investments provide the cash flow and in a way that don’t require high amounts of my time so that I can show up and live the life that I want to have. I can spend the money on the travel I can have the nice Toys and the fancy things and lives in the nice houses, but also have the time freedom to choose how I use my time, pretty well every day, wake up and go and what I want to do today. So that’s kind of how I think about designing a life, and then building a business that serves it. Couple of other things that I think are really useful, useful things to to know is it was a little Perla towards the end of the episode, we talked about how he shows up.
So James right now is on a journey of rebuilding. And his goal is to get to a $5 million consultancy business of just him in a VA, him and another team member who’s in the Philippines. $5 million, that’s gonna have a lot of profit margin in that one. It’s just him and a VA, right. And he’s been there before he had a business of that level and even higher. But the way he does that is he acts today, like he’s already achieved that goal, the decisions he makes, the way he shows up in the business is based on it already being a $5 million business. But he gave the distinction, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he isn’t going and taking first class flights or spending crazy amounts of money that he doesn’t actually have because he’s trying to act like he’s a $5 million business. No, it’s about more the standards of how he shows up the standards of what the business needs to be the standards he expects of his team member. Those are the things that he thinks about. And I think that’s a valuable lesson to any of us where you know, whatever stage you’re in, in business, is it comes down to whatever your goal of where you’re trying to get to, you know, for me, it’s it’s a big part of why the identity shift for a dad, if you want to move more into what I call the king energy in your business, where you go from being the operator of the business to be an owner, that identity shift alone changes the way you show up in the business, you make different decisions in the business you make. You think about the roles and the tasks every day, when you’re when you get sucked in to do something. Your mindset is like, Okay, this is me getting stuck in the day to day I’m not being the owner of the business. How do I make sure this never happens again, like all of those things start to shift. When you act like, no, I’m supposed to be the owner of the business, not the operator. I shouldn’t be doing this. So that’s some of the biggest takeaways from the episode.
I do encourage you to go and listen to that episode. But it was a great one. James is a really good dude. Again, I recommend the offer code.co Go and check that out. Until next time, keep up the journey. If you’re liking the show, and you’ve been listening for a while, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share it with friends, let other people know, and I would love to hear from you. If you’ve been listening for a while, silently maybe you haven’t left a review. But you’ve got some good value and it’s had an impact in your business, reach out rising dot show is where you can do that. Or you can also find me personally at Carl taylor.com call with a C. So if you if you’ve got a story to share, I would love to hear from you because it helps me know that this content is helping other people. So rising tide show all the show notes everything you need. Keep up the journey. Keep listening to this podcast and always open to feedback and to hear from you. Till next time. See ya
Outro:
You’ve been listening to Entrepreneurs Rising. Thank you, dear listener for tuning in. I appreciate your time and look forward to connecting in future episodes if you would like show notes or any resources from today’s episode, you can find them at rising.show rising.show you can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes as well as links to socials and or the ability to reach out and connect with me make your suggestions for future episodes. Until next time, keep up the journey.
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