IAM1010- CEO Helps Professional Services Companies Avoid the Biggest Mistakes

Richard Rothstein is the CEO and Founder of Rothstein Consulting. At a previous company is was the youngest and fastest-rising VP of Sales before rising to EVP of Sales and Marketing.

Rothstein Consulting is a growth agency that helps professional services companies like accounting firms, and also startups avoid the biggest mistakes in their sales processes, marketing programs, and recruiting efforts.

• CEO Hack: Build your personas
• CEO Nugget: Don't really think hard and be focused
• CEO Defined: Guiding the business

Website: http://www.rothsteinconsulting.com/

http://wwww.startupgrind.com/nova

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardjrothstein/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rrothsteinsalesconsulting

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Transcription

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00:17 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the IMCEO podcast.

00:45 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Richard Rothstein of Rothstein Consulting. Richard, it's awesome having you on the show.

00:53 – Richard Rothstein

It is awesome to be here Gresham. So thank you so much.

00:58 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely super thankful to have you on as well too. Before we jump in, I wanted to read a little bit more about Richard so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Richard is the CEO and founder of Rothstein Consulting. As a previous, at a previous company, he was the youngest and fastest-rising VP of sales before rising to executive VP of sales and marketing. Rothstein Consulting is a growth agency that helps professional service companies like accounting firms and also startups avoid the biggest mistakes in their sales processes, marketing programs, and recruiting efforts. Richard, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:30 – Richard Rothstein

I am ready. I'm so happy to be here today, Gresham. Thank you so much. Yeah. And, you know, just a little bit more back, I mean, I have 20 years in sales and marketing these days. You know, I started when I was in high school, I was helping my dad sell mattresses, you know, and when I got out of college, I made the jump over to B2B and there's been no looking back since. You know, that executive vice president role, I started talking about, you know, that's when I started to really get to know marketing really well and start to, and it's been really fun this journey. And with Rothstein Consulting, I've been able to really help people even more fully and delve into some really cool things that people are doing, and help people do things in ways that they didn't really know. So this fits right in with what I'm doing. So thanks for having me.

02:17 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate having you on. And I love to kind of hear, you know, that CEO story, you know, and what everything that led you started, because I think alignment is definitely 1 of those big, huge things when you're able to kind of take your expertise, your zoning genius, what you've been able to kind of be excellent at and be able to kind of create that and help out so many others. It sounds like you've had that journey towards getting there.

02:35 – Richard Rothstein

Absolutely. Well, you know, so when I first started Rothstein Consulting, we were geared entirely around sales processes and we've expanded since then. But what led me to open Rothstein Consulting is that I don't know how many people in your audience have worked in sales, but everyone has had bad sales managers, right? And what I realized is that most of the bad sales managers out there are actually people who wouldn't call themselves sales managers. They're people who own companies, people who were founders that had a really deep knowledge of their business, of their business core area, but just for whatever reason, you know, did not have the skills yet leveled up to a point where they could be a good sales manager.

So that's what got me started thinking, man, these people really need help. And the funny thing is when I first got started, I was like, you know what I don't, I've never seen anywhere, I was so green. This is amazing. I was like, somebody should help them with their sales stuff. You could go in, you could do workshops and they just love it, right? Like nobody's doing this, right? Well, it didn't take me long to figure out that lots of people are doing this. But, you know, not a lot of people really tailing it to the startup community, which is something that I did for quite a while.

I've added in, Dorothy and so on now, professional services, but for a long time, we pretty much exclusively dealt with startups. And that's an area where people are really, I love working with startups. I learn all kinds of crazy new cutting-edge things. At the same time, they're people who a lot of times are humble enough to, the best of them are humble enough to know what they don't know. And to look to a guy like me and say, yes, please help me, help me set these things up, help me, help me. And I'm more than happy to do that.

04:27 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I definitely appreciate that. And I almost wonder and definitely correct me if I'm wrong. I think so many times and you hear this and you know, when you read the beginning of the E-Myth especially, that a lot of times founders or people that end up being those sales managers as you spoke to have an expertise, they really know the product, they may have even created or launched the product. So they have that knowledge of it, but that isn't always the same as sales knowledge of understanding that process. It can help, but it's not exactly the same thing. So it kind of sounds like that's what you help the people you work with do.

04:59 – Richard Rothstein

Absolutely. No, definitely. And, you know, one of the I'll throw out a quick tip here is 1 of the biggest things that entrepreneurs do and tend to do is when they build a great new, big shiny thing that's awesome and super awesome. And there are lots of you out there building really awesome things. I'm not diminishing that. But what you'll do is you'll get, they get in front of a client, potential client, and they wanna tell them everything about that product. Right? That's not what you do. Okay, so tip number 1 from Ronstein Consulting today just tells them the things that will move them closer to buying. So they don't need to know everything about their product. They just need to know the things that fit their needs.

05:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's absolutely huge. And it's so funny you say that because it took me back to I've been in sales training and in jobs that I've had. And I think I went through like a 3-week sales training. And 1 of the things I think that our trainer said is that every time you get right out of sales training, you want to basically verbally throw up all that knowledge and information that you have to the very first client you speak to, tell them everything they want to know and you don't really have that back and forth conversation where you're trying to basically fulfill their needs.

06:11 – Richard Rothstein:

No, and that's what's about it. I use an inbound methodology for sales and marketing these days. And it's super client-centric, right? And I recommend anybody even just Google inbound marketing. And you know, there are tons of books on Amazon about it, you know, it comes a lot out of what HubSpot does. I'm a HubSpot service provider. And, you know, just be that super client-focused, using technology to leverage that, be data-centric about how you're helping them, use data so you can be personalized and technology can be personalized to them. But please pay attention to that client and don't just act like everything needs to be exactly the same.

06:53 – Gresham Harkless:

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And definitely everybody can have your customer journey, I guess, kind of set up, but you want to be able to kind of tailor it and guide your potential customer through that process. So I know you touched a little bit on how you work with your clients. Did you have anything else that you can add to how exactly that process goes what you feel maybe if it sets you apart is what I like to call your secret sauce.

07:14 – Richard Rothstein

Yeah, so there are lots of growth agencies, but 1 thing I'm doing these days that a lot of people aren't doing is inbound recruiting and helping people set up these programs. And so when you look at sales and marketing together, it's kind of almost a fake thing that you pull them apart and call them two different things. They're really all 1 thing together, the client acquisition process. And what every company wants them to do is they pick a point somewhere along the journey and they go, boom, now it goes from marketing to sales. There's even a thing for it where you say you have marketing-qualified leads and then sales-accepted leads.

So they create this fake channel, this fake chasm that your deals have to cross. But it's not true. It's all 1 thing. It's your client acquisition process. I say that to say, that if you cross out the word client and put an employee acquisition process, then you have inbound recruiting. So the idea is that just like I talked about inbound, being client-centric, you can do the same thing in the employee hunt, I mean employee-centric, right? And you put a little bit of effort into being really an attractive company to be at and treating it like a sales, you know, like a sales and marketing kind of process and a pipeline to get the best quality people versus, you know, treating it like you're a gig keeper.

Oh, I know I've got the best stuff and you know, you have to get through me to get it. That's not how people are looking for jobs anymore. And that's not how you get the best talent. So That's a big thing for a lot of companies. Anywhere, now look, those kinds of programs that I'm doing for people aren't for, hey, I need 1 CTO, right? It's for the things that you know, accountants are a great example, because accounting firms know they're gonna need X accountants every year, X number of accountants. And if they can get those number of accountants in, in those seats, they're gonna make 3 to 5 X what it costs to put them in those seats, right?

So if you're in that situation where you know there's a natural level of attrition, you know, where you know, hey, or for growth purposes, you know, you know, you're going to want to expand at X level and you, you know, Y number of technically skilled people in a particular way that has, you know, Z huge value to your company And heck, you know, it can even be a way you ramp up a sales team, right? When you get into growth mode. That's something that's pretty unique that nobody else is doing.

09:38 – Gresham Harkless

I want to switch gears a little bit. And I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. You might have already mentioned some of these, but this could be an Apple book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

09:48 – Richard Rothstein

So I'm actually going to tell you, I have kind of, this is my like big tip I'm giving everybody right now. I don't know if you truly call it a hack, but it's something everybody needs to do. And that is to build your personas. I do a lot of mentoring too. In fact, I'm mentoring with Lighthouse Labs right now and their current cohort. I also am a mentor at Halcyon and at Founders Institute right now. 1 of the things I'm seeing a lot is that people need to spend a lot less time building their big shiny and more time in their personas and their customers. What is a persona? A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal client. Okay. Now that you don't necessarily just have one of them, try to focus on no more than three when you're starting out.

And basically the idea is who are these people? What are the problems? Right? You know, Hopefully, you started out with a problem you're going to solve. Great. Now who are the people who have that problem? What are their specific needs around that problem? What are their specific needs around that problem? Again, that's the biggest thing, but also what are their demographics? Where are they, right? Where's the watering hole, if you will? When you go to, you know, what are the conferences they're going to? What are the networking events they go to? You know, what are the webinars they attend? Who are the influencers they follow? What social media outlets are they spending time on?

Do they spend more time on LinkedIn or Twitter? Or who knows, it could be Snapchat, you know, could be TikTok, whatever, you know, know these things, right? Know your client inside and out, and it will guide you with everything, right? You mentioned Emeth, actually, And that's kind of this idea of if you have that, you know, agile lean structure, right? That's the idea. Like, don't go build it until you know what people want. And even as you're building it, make sure it is what people want.

Because if you go and you waste a whole lot of time and somebody's money, you know, a lot of these days it's yours if you're building it because a lot of times investors want to see something built and they want to be the ones throwing gasoline on the fire, not the ones handing you the match. So, you know, chances are you're spending your own money to build it. You know, be smart about it. You know, know who that client is and know what they want and need. And that will help you so, so much.

12:30 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And definitely be more focused, that's for sure. And so I want to ask you now for what I call CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be around sales and the customer acquisition browsers, or it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

12:46 – Richard Rothstein

So what I would tell my younger business self is don't really think hard and be focused.

12:53 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And so I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're open to different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Richard, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:04 – Richard Rothstein

So a CEO means that you're not just in the business, that you're guiding the business. So I'm a 1 man band at Rothstein Consulting. So I'm the whole dang show. I have to execute everything I sell, I have to sell it, I have to market it, but I also have to guide it. The fact that I'm in professional, that I help people in professional services now, that was a conscious guiding effort that I made. And so again, it kind of plays into that last answer I gave. If you're just taking it for granted, if you're just going right in a straight line, that's not what a CEO is. A CEO is the person who decides what and figures out what the next move is. You're the person that's supposed to see around the corners, right? So if you're not out in front kind of taking that bullet for your company and for your people, in my mind, you're not really CEO, you're just a boss.

13:54 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I think so many times you get caught in either, being the boss or even doing all the things as well too, and not actually going above board, so to speak, and be able to kind of see where you're going, what you're doing, and as you said, so well taking the action to make sure that you're going exactly where you want to go. So I think if we don't do that and make sure we're paying attention to that, then that's a lot of times where we end up where we don't necessarily wanna be.

14:19 – Richard Rothstein

Yeah, I completely agree, absolutely.

14:23 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, Richard, truly appreciate that. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

14:36 – Richard Rothstein

Yeah, no, a few other things I'm actually doing right now too that I think you have a chance to talk about. I am the director of what is officially Startup Grind Tyson's Corner chapter director. So feel free to go to startupgrind.com and look us up. That's actually a new distinction for us that we're Tyson's Corner. So try either startupgrind.com slash Tyson's corner or Tyson's underscore corner. I'm not sure which 1 yet, but you should be able to look us up pretty easily. And that's another cool thing that I'm doing that I love that helps startups. The best way to reach me these days is either via email at Richard at Rothstein Consulting, or you can find me on LinkedIn. Super easy to find on LinkedIn, Richard Rothstein, R-O-T-H-S-S-S-A-M-T-E-I-N, and That's where you find me.

15:31 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. I truly appreciate that Richard made it even easier. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can get ahold of you, connect with you, and hear all the awesome things you're doing. I appreciate you my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:44 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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