Want to add additional revenue streams to your business? Linsday Adams shares how he pivoted to selling Assessment Tools and how he now makes most of his income from said assessment tools.
If you’re a coach, consultant, trainer, or speaker, assessment tools are a great way to add additional revenue streams to your business.
Visit Linsday’s website: 24x7assessments.com.au
TRANSCRIPT
Renee
Welcome, everyone. Renee Hasseldine here. Founder and CEO of Think RAPT. And today I’m joined by the relationships guy, the fabulous Lindsay Adams. So fabulous to have you here. Welcome.
Lindsay
Hi, Renee. Thanks for having me on. I’m absolutely delighted to be here.
Renee
Now, you are called the relationships guy. What is that about? Tell me a little bit about who you are, what you do.
Lindsay
It’s funny how that came about, actually. When I started my business, I had 23 years in the public sector and left government in the year 2000 started my own business. And I did a lot of team building and then I morphed into manager and leadership development and then I bought a franchise business teaching business owners and salespeople how to do business by referral.
Lindsay
Now, I eventually got out of that business, but I was under a non-compete so I couldn’t use the words networking, referrals, you know, and I thought, What am I going to do? And what I look back on, what I’ve been doing, it’s all relationship based. And so relationships underpin most things that we do in business today. Want to be a great leader? Got to be in relationship with people. Want to work in a team that works well? Got to be in a relationship with your teammates. Want to sell stuff to other people? Got to get into a relationship.
But how the name came about was I was talking to one of my business friends and she said to me, you know Lindsay, you’re the relationships guy you do that relationship so well. And I went, Hang on a second. What did you just say? She said, You’re the relationships guy. And I went, Oh, I like that. And I went and checked. All the URLs are available, so I grabbed it. It’s mine. I am the relationship guy. But it’s it is one of the things that I do pride myself on. I do do business relationships or relationships well, and I’m not talking boy girl stuff here. I’m talking about connecting with people.
Renee
Human to human.
Lindsay
Yeah, human to human. Connecting with business people. And then once you’ve made that connection, it’s about how do you leverage that to get more business. So, you know, it’s one of the key business skills. I think everyone should have a handle on.
Renee
Yeah. And you know, like all of us, we all faced challenges with COVID. So how did that look for your business?
Lindsay
It was truly interesting. So I’d earned my living for the last 20 something years, speaking at conferences, running training seminars and workshops, bit of coaching, and when COVID came
Renee
Lots of in-person stuff. It relies on events.
Lindsay
Live events, getting on a plane. Qantas and I were very good friends. I’m a frequent flyer, but when COVID came of course all that’s stopped and it just stopped and fell over, I had cause you know Lindsay we love you about you know we are then putting on on hold postponing whatever now eventually did sort of come back in a different way in a hybrid form of course. But I looked around and thought, what am I going to do now? And I had a license to distribute some behavioral assessment tools. I’d been using these tools myself and the owner of the business said to me, Lindsay, you refer a lot of business to us. Why don’t you become a distributor? I kind of went at the time, I don’t know.
Anyway, long story short, I did, and I noticed that when COVID hit, the sales of my DISC assessments went up dramatically. And DISC being one of the key tools that I sell and so I contacted the people who were buying them. I said, What’s going on? And they said, Oh, well, everybody’s pivoting. And we’re we’re using the assessments, of course, to help us understand them and advise them where to from here. And I went, Aha. And so I pivoted and really swung my focus around to selling the behavioral assessment tools on a more consistent and regular basis than I had been in the past.
Renee
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you know, before we hit record, you know, you mentioned you’ve raised you’ve got a quarter of $1,000,000 for running these assessments in this business with assessments. So that’s pretty quick from that.
Lindsay
Well well, it is. It’s it’s a bit of a long story, actually. And if you look over my shoulder here, you’ll see that the white frame certificate there right now, I bought sorry, I that’s one of my suppliers. They gave me that. It’s a lifetime achievement award because I bought over two and a half thousand of their assessment tools.
Renee
That’s a lot of assessment.
And an average price of 100 bucks an assessment. I’ve tipped a quarter of $1,000,000 into their bank account right? Now, before all I did when I bought them was I simply bought them doubled the price and then sold them to my clients. So I made a quarter of $1,000,000 from using these assessment tools. And so that’s one of the concepts that I now teach my customers is actually you can add another stream of income to your business by using these tools. So I sell them at a wholesale price, they which is, you know, quite economical and then they can add a margin on and resell them at a retail price. So not only are they getting access to a quality tool which they can use with their client, but they can actually make some money as well.
And of course, a lot of a lot of consultants, you know, we’ve all experienced this kind of rollercoaster income, you know, one one month, one quarter we’re just making a fortune the next quarter, we’re almost unemployed because what happens is we get busy, we stop marketing, we’re busy delivering. And then when when that job finishes, we go, oh, my goodness,
Renee
Where’s the next job?
Lindsay
Where’s the next job? Oh, I didn’t think of that, did I? And so what having these
Renee
I see that all the time.
Lindsay
It actually it actually evens out the peaks and troughs a bit and it does help an awful lot. And so when I explain the concept to, you know, coaches, consultants, trainers, speakers, they go Ahhhh never thought of that. In fact, I ran a webinar for a professional association in New Zealand and I knew one of the guys there and he called me up the next day and he said, I am so stupid, Lindsay, like, sign me up. Where do I start? You know, he said, I, I am missing opportunities left, right and center. I should have been using these tools years ago. Now he does a little leadership training and now he regularly buys these assessment tools and uses them with his clients. And he said to me, you know, it genuinely has added another another stream of income to his business.
Renee
Yeah, that’s awesome. So you mentioned DISC, what other assessment tools?
Lindsay
Okay, so there’s five core profiles. So DISC, I have a motivators assessment. So motivators is identifies what motivates you to create the behaviors that you demonstrate in the DISC assessment. So DISC is straight behavioral stuff. Motivators, I’ve got a learning styles, emotional intelligence and then a critical thinking. They’re the five core profiles I cover off on the basic human condition, and I’ve got a sales IQ, which is great. You know, if you want to measure how good you are selling stuff. And then I have a really neat company wide assessment called the Business Excellence Tool and what it does, it measures the non-financial KPIs in business. So a lot of business owners are all over the money. You know how much money have I made, how much does that cost, what are overheads? You know, what’s what’s our expenses? But they don’t measure things like culture, leadership, strategy. And so what that’s what this assessment does and it’s really neat.
So I’m working with a medical practice in Perth at the moment and we’re working on their culture and so they’re making truckloads of money, you know, you should have been born a doctor, Renee. They’re making truckloads of money, but they’ve got all sorts of staff problems. And so what we’re doing with this assessment is getting a handle on what are the challenges or what are the issues that the staff are not happy with.
And then working on that and again, that tool is a really good money generator for a consultant because they can go in into a larger organization, for example, and I’ve done this myself, go in and say, look, dear client, you know me, you trust me. We’ve worked together for many years. Look, I’ve got this new assessment. I want to test it out. How about I’ll do your leadership team for free? So do the leadership team. And no charge, right. Then you get the results and you get two responses, typically. Response number one is, thanks, Lindsay. We’ll look into that. Response number two is AHHHH well, what do I do now? And so as a consultant, it then becomes your opportunity to open get them to open up their checkbook and write you, you know, a nice fat check because you’re going to go and do a bunch of consulting work to solve all the problems.
Renee
Yeah.
Lindsay
And so these assessment tools are many and varied and I’ve got a bunch of others. But, you know, I could, I could probably drown you in assessment tools. However, those five, six, seven tools that I’ve mentioned are the kind of the core, the most popular, the most productive ones that I have.
Renee
Yeah. We’ve got yeah, we’ve got a lot of consultants and coaches in the network who I’ll know ears perked up, you know, listening to this. So, you know, and I’m just thinking, you know, what will they be wanting to know? And I think, you know, what, if if I’m putting myself in their shoes, I’d be thinking, okay, so what would it look like? I’m a I’m a leadership coach. You know, if I was to to bring these assessments in, what would that look like in terms of some of my hard numbers?
Lindsay
Oh, okay. So basically, you open up an account and the business is called 24 by 7 assessments. 24x7assessments.com.au. You’re going to have a look so you can open an account. You can access an account 24 by seven. Yeah. Okay. So once you open the account, you make a minimum purchase ten, ten assessments to get going and then you administer those assessments whenever you like. So you have your own username in and log in, you go in and set them up for your client. You create a link, you email the link to the client, to your client with instructions. They click on the link to the questions, fill it in, and it’s that quick. They get the results come to you immediately.
Renee
Okay. And so what’s the cost for something like those 10 assessments?
Lindsay
So the cost for it for a DISC assessment, I sell them wholesale price is $88.80 plus GST. Now you can go and shop around by all means if you can find disc assessments cheaper in Australia, you’ll be doing well. Yeah, I’ll tell you right now. And so there are, there are four main distributors of disc in Australia, the other three, they’re Goliath. And I’m David, I’m the little guy in town, but I do pride myself on service and I do like to look after my clients. So, you know, I’ll, I’ll go through it with you and explain how to use them if you’ve never used them before, I can. I’ve got a whole bunch of resources. So for example with DISC, you know, I’ve got PowerPoint slide shows, I’ve got lesson plans and I’ve got guides on how to debrief, I’ve got videos, I’ve got audios, I’ve got so much resources that I can share with you to help you use the tools better.
Renee
Okay, so do you need to be certified in DISC?
Lindsay
Well that’s the interesting thing I’m the only one in Australia who I sell these things. You don’t need to be certified to buy from me. All the suppliers will say to you, Sure, I’ll sell you a disc assessment that’s three and a half thousand dollars to start to be certified. And then, you know, it’s X and it’s it’s my 88 plus a lot more to buy the actual assessment tool so you know I’ve I’ve kind of I want to work on quality service and volume rather than a high fee. And, you know, so it’s it it’s a slightly different model. And if you want to be certified, I can do that as well. My certifications are again about a thousand bucks cheaper than everyone else and they really neat, you know, with the advent of COVID, of course, we’ve all changed our models. So so my certification is totally online. It’s self-paced, it takes about 8 to 12 hours to complete. And you do it all at your own pace at, you know, any whatever time of day you want to do it I just give you a log in away you go. You watch a video, you do a little assessment, you watch a video, you do a little assessment. You do talk to a real person at the end who actually makes sure that you’ve you know, you’ve done the work and you understand, you know, you know, grade you as competent and then you become certified and hey, presto, away you go. So it’s, you know, quite a good system but you don’t have to fork out 3000 bucks if you don’t want to.
Renee
Yeah. Yep. Great. Beautiful. All right. Well, that’s. That sounds awesome. You are amazing. Unsolicited.
Lindsay
Thank you. Thank you. That’s very kind.
00:12:42:03 – 00:12:47:03
Renee
Excellent. So people want to find out more, let’s get that URL one more time what’s the what’s the website?
Lindsay
24×7 assessments dot com au. And you can email me Lindsay at 24×7 assessments dot com do au. Would love to hear from you and if you say Renee sent you I’ll give you a bigger hug than usual virtually, of course.
Renee
Clearly, clearly socially distanced. Awesome. Thank you so much, Lindsay. It’s been great to talk to you.