The Business of College Consulting
The Business of College Consulting
Lisa Bleich: Thriving In a Constantly Changing Profession
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In this interview, Lisa Bleich discusses her initial steps in marketing her services, relying heavily on word of mouth and personal connections. As her business grew, she recognized the need for systematizing processes and hiring a team to handle various aspects of client work, particularly essay writing. Lisa emphasizes the importance of finding team members who complement each other and align with the company's culture. She also shares insights into employee compensation structures and strategies for managing client workloads efficiently. We wrap up the interview with Lisa sharing what's on the horizon for College Bound Mentor and her best advice or new college consultants!
Check out Lisa's book Surviving the College Application Process!
Welcome to the Business of College Consulting podcast. I'm your host, brooke Daly, founder and CEO of Advantage College Planning and Advantage College Planning. Franchising, building and growing a business is not for the faint of heart. In this podcast, you'll hear incredible stories from successful college consultants about growing a thriving business. They'll share the secrets behind their remarkable growth and the trials and triumphs shaping their path to success. Welcome to the Business of College Consulting podcast. I'm your host, Brooke Daly, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Lisa Bleich. She is the CEO of College Bound Mentor and also the author of Surviving the College Application Process. Welcome, lisa, thank you for having me. It's nice to be here. Yeah, great, so glad to have you. So, lisa, tell me a little bit about College Bound Mentor, the story behind it, how did you get into College Consulting or what made you make that decision?
Speaker 2:Sure. Well, it's interesting because I was listening to a bunch of your podcasts before, so I was listening to my origin story and I started this business. The seed of the idea came in back in 2004. So it was a while ago, and so I had just moved from Los Angeles to New Jersey, to Westfield, New Jersey. I had kids that were all in elementary school.
Speaker 2:The most recent position that I had I was a visiting assistant professor at Whittier College, which is a small liberal arts college in Whittier, California. The claim to fame is that Nixon went there, and so in that job I was basically given the task of being the marketing department and I had taught, like at University of Phoenix, but nothing really significant, and they gave me the opportunity to just create classes. They said this is the name of the class, you have seven classes to teach and come up with a curriculum. And I was like, well, is there a syllabus, or like you just create the syllabus yourself? So I jumped in and I just created the syllabus. And now, meanwhile, this is, I just given up my nanny. I had three kids. How old were they? They were seven, five and two, and I just jumped in and I started creating this curriculum and then I found this environment that I loved. I loved teaching, I loved connecting with the students, I loved talking with the other professors, and when I was there I realized that there's like I'd never heard of Whittier College and I just saw that it was this great educational experience for the right student.
Speaker 2:So then we moved to New Jersey and everybody I met was really stressed out about college and I just was meeting different people.
Speaker 2:I wasn't wasn't necessarily friends of kids my own age, but just random people that I would meet and I thought there's got to be a better way, Like there's got to be a way to approach this in a more strategic way and a less stressful way. So I had given myself a year to get started, you know, to get everybody settled. And then, of course, within two months I was like, OK, I got to figure out I'm going to start this business and so I decided I would just take that same approach that I used for what I did for starting at Whittier and I would approach it to the college admission process. So I learned everything I could about it and I just come from that world and before that I had been doing I've been a marketing consultant and I'd worked in marketing and product management.
Speaker 2:I was also director of recruiting for Ticketmaster Online City Search, so I was matching, I was interviewing tons of people. We doubled the company when I was there and so I had a lot of like disparate experiences that all connected together for college admissions. So that was the origin of how I did it and I just started it as just started the business and I just started telling people that I was doing it and then people started hiring me and then it developed over time.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's amazing, lisa. Like I'm thinking about the highlights of that story. Like you gave up your nanny, you're in this full-time job, more than full-time job. They ask you to teach seven courses but create them from scratch. Yeah, yeah, like you could do anything.
Speaker 2:I don't know about that.
Speaker 2:I mean I look back and I think about the things that I did when I had, you know, I had three young kids and I just did it. I, you know, it was sort of. I've always been someone, if you, I like a challenge and I would always get really bored with things, and so I always liked the idea of creating and thinking about how do you put things together. And what I love about this profession is it's constantly changing. Yes, you know, from one year to the next, you have to decide how you're going.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's some things, obviously, that are the same, but with everything that goes on in the world in the last, you know, all of the time that I've been doing it, it's always something different, and I think that's what's kept me interested in this business, because there's so much going on. And then when you're growing a business and you've got that aspect of it, along with each of the students and how you're managing that, so yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I think back. I don't know how I did all that, but I did. Somehow I did I found a way.
Speaker 1:You did it Right, exactly, yeah. So tell me about those first few years. Like, what were your biggest challenges when you started taking on clients? Like did, and how did you market yourself? Like, how did you get the word out? It sounds like you were a fairly social person. Like did that play into it? You're just talking to people, I think it did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's a couple of things that were going on. I came to New Jersey and I quickly immersed myself in the community wherever I could, and then I started. My neighbor was applying to college and she was all stressed out about it. So I said, oh, let me help you. And I was always the person that people would come to. I helped my nieces and nephews and so I helped her with her applications and her essays and things like that, and I had also been doing it when I was at Whittier. I was helping people get into graduate school, like my students, so I was familiar with that. So then I would just kind of keep an ear out.
Speaker 2:If somebody had a high school student, you could always tell the parent who had the high school, the stressful high school student and I would just say, oh well, I have this business and I made cards and I gave it to people and I told them about my background and they said, well, how long have you been doing this? I said, well, I'm just starting, but I had this experience doing that and I just would tell people that I was doing it. And then people hired me and I was actually just looking back at my numbers before this thing. So I think I was sort of not dabbling, but I was building the strategy and the systems for the first couple of years so that I knew what I was doing and learning as much as I could about it. And then in 2000, I guess it was 2007, I think I had three clients 2007. Then that doubled or a triple to nine clients and then it became 25 clients and then it became 45 clients and then you know, it's in the 80 or 90 clients. So it was one of those things. I almost felt like that, claire, I'll remember that commercial you tell two friends and then they tell two friends. So I would just tell people that that's what I was doing.
Speaker 2:I would also do a lot of parlor meetings. So I would go, I would see if there was a sophomore, because I knew there was a pipeline. Since I come from a marketing background, I knew that I had to fill the pipeline. So I had to start with sophomores, because if you started with sophomores then you could work with them over high school and then you can know what your pipeline is and how many students you were gonna have. So I focused on the sophomores and I would do these like in-home parlor meetings, I'd call them. I would go meet with parents and students and tell them and help them think through their classes and their activities and then I would typically get you know. If there were 10 people there, I would maybe get three or four of them would sign up as clients.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Yes, some people call them like Tupperware parties. I'm the Tupperware part of college consulting. Yes, exactly. Exactly and knowing your marketing background, I just wanna take a moment to talk about the things that you didn't do in marketing that you knew were not going to be successful or didn't bother with because of the nature of our business. Does that question make?
Speaker 2:sense. Yeah, absolutely. I didn't do any advertising because I knew that it was a word of mouth business, so I didn't spend any money on advertising. I would do advertisement in like a program for the high school as more of support, but not but knowing that it wasn't going to have any return to me. Back then there really wasn't the whole social media stuff, so I wasn't even thinking about buying ads, so it was more just a matter of I really didn't spend money on marketing.
Speaker 2:I spent all of it on building expertise and talking to people in a way that people would recognize, and giving away as much information. In fact, when I first used to do these meetings, I would think people would ask me all these questions and my first thought was well, you're not paying me and I'm giving all this information. But I realized the more information I gave, the more clients wanted to hire me. So it was this counterintuitive. So that was something that I learned pretty quickly on the more I could give information, the more I could sound like an expert and be an expert, the more people would want to hire me.
Speaker 1:So that's what I know you were making that very important point and I think that in other episodes we've touched upon this, but I think it's so important. I have a lot of college consultants who say, well, I tried doing presentations and that didn't work for me. And then they ask questions about, like, well, how much do you tell people in a presentation because I don't want to give stuff away? I have very much the opposite approach, and it sounds like you do too, obviously that the more you give away, the more parents feel like we need to work with her.
Speaker 2:Exactly because they realize what they don't know and they don't they realize all that stuff. So that was definitely something and I actually didn't ask you a question about the challenge. So the challenge as I was growing the business was I came from a marketing consulting background and there was always this idea that you had to give a deliverable to a client. You had to give them a tangible product. So I very much have that in my mind and I came from that world of doing, you know, elaborate presentations and competitive analyses and you know something that was very tangible. So I wanted to create reports and I wanted to create information for clients and I found myself in the very beginning dreading getting to their client because I went out to create this spreadsheet with all the information that they wanted and it was taking up so much time and this was not fun.
Speaker 2:So at first I hired someone to help me populate things and then I, early on when I moved to New Jersey, I was part of this, really a mastermind group, but it was kind of like that, and there were different women that were doing different things and one of them was a. She did computer programming and database management and she still runs my database today. So I said this is my problem. I want to take all of this data and I want to be able to create a database so we could just click the schools that somebody wants and then it would populate these reports with the information that I'd like to have. And so she created that for me.
Speaker 2:We worked on it over, like, say, the last 15 years and now we have this amazing database and we always update it and we now we purchase our data from used to be winter green orchard, now we purchase it from Peterson's. And so now I have somebody. I just say I need these reports for these schools. And boom, I have those reports. And it's life. That was life changing, because then I could. I could work with students without having to spend hours and hours putting their list together, and then it was like, oh, I could do a list in an hour and then I can get all this information and it's good to go. So that was a huge, huge change for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. Yeah, talk about efficiency and nice to have a computer science person in your, in your group. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, she's not really in our group, she's just, yeah, I mean, in the mastermind group. Yes, it was right, because she again opened up my eyes to what you could do, because I just knew I had a problem and needed a solution, and she brought it to me so cool and I love that she still works with you.
Speaker 1:So can you talk about your growth and your kind of business like development, like how did you decide to expand to a team? What did that look like? When did you know that it was time to expand?
Speaker 2:Sure. So originally I brought on someone to manage the database and do research for me. So that was the first thing, and then I have to say, a lot of it was organic. I wish I could say I was very intentional.
Speaker 2:I became intentional later, but the first person that I brought on was Diane, and Diane had a specialty in learning differences working with students with learning differences and at the time I really didn't have an expertise in that I'm not necessarily trained in it, but I just have learned a ton about it, so I understand it. So she was doing this and she just reached out to me and said hey, do you want to have lunch? I said sure. So I met with her for lunch and we decided that we complimented each other well and so she would work with all of our students with learning differences, and then I would work with the other, and so she was the first person that I brought on as a mentor, as someone to take everyone through the process, and at the time I was still actually managing all of the essays myself I'm a good writer, so that wasn't hard for me. But the next person we brought on was Beth, and Beth was amazing. She was on the board of ed and she didn't really have. We both went to business school together.
Speaker 2:We were actually in a show together when we were in business school and we ran into each other in yoga, so it was one of these things where our paths crossed again, and so she was interested in getting into this business and so I thought you know what, I'll train her on how to do it. And so she came on and she was working. We were pretty much working very closely together, so it was the three of us and we really liked having the team, because we could bounce off ideas off each other. It just made it not so lonely. And then we brought on another person when Diane left, because she wanted to. She just needed more time to do her personal stuff. So we brought on someone else and that did not work out. She was good at consulting, but it just wasn't a good fit. It wasn't a good fit with the personality we didn't. We just didn't have a good mesh. And so I remember sitting in meetings thinking, wow, I really am not enjoying this. And so after the first year we both decided to part ways and she's, you know, more friendly now, but it just as working together. She really wanted to start her own business and I think she was just learning for me and that's fine. So then I realized, okay, we've got to change things. And Beth was having a harder time with the essays and that was not her core strength. And so she started bringing on someone to help with the essays and then I realized, you know what, I don't need to hire another mentor at this point, because we call mentors as someone who manages the whole process versus essay specialists who work on the team. I can hire essay specialists and then I can manage a much larger load and then they can take over the biggest time sink which is doing all of those essays. So that was the model. Then we morphed into that model and that worked really well, having essay specialists, and then I can manage many more students. And then I think, when it became more intentional again, it was a little bit of organic. I want to say this was in 2000, maybe 2015 or so.
Speaker 2:I was meeting with a with breakaway prep, which is a test prep company, and they have an office in Chatham, new Jersey, which is maybe 20 minutes away. So we met with them. We were just trying to understand their business and what they were doing, and I talked to the owner and he said that he was licensing his business. So rather than he was going into different markets and licensing his proprietary stuff and I had a lot of proprietary stuff as well.
Speaker 2:Like all the systems, I had created the database, everything else, so I really liked that idea. I know you did the franchise and I'd love to hear a little bit more about that and he did it with his brother who was in Minneapolis. A week later I get a call from someone who was referred to me by one of my friends from California, who moved to Minneapolis At the same time I moved to New Jersey asking me about the business, what you know. Just trying to pick my brain and we totally clicked this Abby and I thought this is the universe telling me that this is going to be my first license.
Speaker 2:It's in Minneapolis and it was crazy. And then we even launched ourselves through breakaway prep. In Minneapolis we did this big presentation. I came out. We had like over 100 people that came and Abby's been amazing and we compliment each other really well and she was interested in just stepping in and learning. She didn't want to start her own business and so she's been with me. And then Beth ultimately left to pursue other things. And then Stephanie, who's actually Diane's daughter. I was talking to Diane and she was telling me that Stephanie's ready to make a move and I said why doesn't she think about joining CVM? And then she became the next licensee. And then another person in Los Angeles I'd been in contact with, he's does more graduate school and he wanted to get into college and he does MBA work. So that was a nice compliment. So a lot of it was this organic. We're just connecting and then keeping in contact with people Because we're very intentional about who we bring in. They have to really fit our culture, otherwise it doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think that can be applied to any teammate who you bring on right. Like the fit is so important. I would rather not hire and have to turn away clients than bring someone on who is not a good fit and go. I would say probably one of the biggest lessons I've learned is go with your gut too, if it will leave.
Speaker 2:And every time I've not gone with my gut, I've lived to regret it every time, yes.
Speaker 1:It's like taking on a client who's not a good fit right Like. You pay for that in the long run. You pay for that, absolutely, absolutely. So, lisa, tell me about your current like client load. Like, now that you have all of these different things on your plate, have you scaled back the number of students you work with? Do you still work with? Do you work with more now than you did before? Like, what does that look like?
Speaker 2:I'd like to say that I scale back. I probably work with anywhere between 30 and 35 seniors a year and then 30 to 35 of every class. I would like to scale it back to just 30, but it just always seems somebody comes in late and it's a sibling or it's a French client. There's always someone that comes in Because I have essay specialist. It's fine, I'm able to manage it all and they are able to.
Speaker 2:The other thing that comes is when you're growing the business is that you have to get to a certain level so that you could bring on employees. All of my RSA specials are employees and so they're anticipating a certain income. If I were to all of a sudden say I don't want to work with 10 people and also I'd probably be bored if I only worked with 10 people I like the managing, and how do you make systems and how do you get things to work well and efficiently? That's part of the challenge that I enjoy. I realize that I have to have a certain number of clients because they're expecting a certain level of income. If I don't have that, then it doesn't work. Your break-even is at a certain point where you're bringing somebody on. That is where I am, but I'm helping Stephanie grow her business and Alex grow his business, abby's at the capacity. That's my goal also as we bring in new people, to help them grow their business and make them successful.
Speaker 1:I love that. Can you talk a little bit about? You are very systems process oriented, which I love. As a new consultant, what advice would you have for someone who's just starting out so that they have the capacity to grow and build their own systems and processes? Would you share any of your tips, best practices?
Speaker 2:I always start with the pain point, always think about what is it that and for different people it's going to be different things what is the part of the job that you hate, that you dread doing? What is the part of the job that you also don't really add value to? That's how I think about it. If I find myself spending a lot of time doing something that I know anyone could be doing this, I don't need to be doing this. Someone else can be doing this and they could likely do it better than I can do it. I'm not adding any value to that. Then I've got to either hire someone to do it or create a system around it to do it.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I noticed in terms of systems is as we were bringing on people and I would say that when I first brought on, say that I don't think I had great systems in place. She's smart, she figured it out. I'm one of those figure things out but I realized I needed to systematize things so that we were all following the same process, really walking through. What is our process? How do we do things? What are the meetings that we have? What do we do at each one of those meetings.
Speaker 2:That was the other thing that we spent a lot of time doing is creating manuals, training manuals so that we could go through, and then creating videos for how we did everything that made it, so that everybody can watch something, learn something, see it and then do it and replicate it in the same way, because, ultimately, when you're growing a business, you want people to follow a structure of a system with their own personality, but you don't want everyone to do something differently, because that doesn't work either. That would be another thing I would think about with systems is just think about what is your process, write it down, identify what it is, what works, what doesn't work, what's taking a lot of time. When I learned about Zapier and automating things, what we were thinking about what are the things that are taking a lot of time? How do we get rid of those things? Can we automate it? Can I outsource it or can I find another way to do it?
Speaker 1:Hopefully that answers your question. I'm a huge Zapier fan. I love.
Speaker 2:Zapier, I do too, I'm trying to think. I don't know if you figured out how to copy a Google folder. That's my next thing Automated. I want to be able to copy a Google folder or the entire contents. And all of the contents and all of the content Interesting. I feel like there's got to be a way. I know there's got to be a way.
Speaker 1:Yep, there's got to be a way. Yep, I love that. And one thing I just wanted to touch upon that you talked about is you didn't start necessarily putting together your systems, procedures or training until you hired someone, and I think a lot of people feel like, well, I have to have all of that in place before I pull the trigger and hire, and that's probably not a bad idea if you can make that happen. I was very much like you.
Speaker 1:I didn't have a lot in place before I hired, but my first hire was very strategic in that she had many talents, and one of them was that she and one of the reasons why I was so excited about having her on my team was she created the college curriculum at a local charter high school, and so I knew that she had done that from scratch before, so I'm like surely she can do it again. She really helped me create all of that and set a really good foundation for future hires, of course. So it just may be something that, when you're thinking about hiring, that that's a skill that you want to look for. Is that ability? Yeah?
Speaker 2:that's a great idea, and I also think it's great to hire people that compliment you.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yes, you have to have people that are different than you, and that brings something else to the table, because I can't tell you, there's so many things that I know like I don't do this well. Abby does this really well and she's happy to do it. Stephanie does these things really well, alex does these things really well, this essay specialist does things really well. And also, like I had the essay specialists create the curriculum for when we were bringing on, because we've had to hire new essay specialists in the last few years, so I had them put the curriculum together and then manage the training, because they're the ones who are doing the work, so they know what it is and I have this.
Speaker 2:Thankfully, I have a lot of people that have been working with me for a while, and so I'm always looking for ways to give them more opportunities and I see what their strengths are and what they can do well and what they can't do well. And that's also something that kind of surprised me was I didn't realize that when in building this business, that it would also be an opportunity to provide women mostly they're women. I mean, we have Alex, our single man that works with us but opportunities to have flexible work time and flexible hours and be able to do the work that they need to do around their families or around their personal lives, and I think that was a huge thing and my employees often say that that's really. They really appreciate that I'm very flexible and I'm like look, you have life, you know what you need to get done. I'm not gonna micromanage you.
Speaker 2:You have to do it around your life and that's how it is, and that's how I've always built my career around my life and it's worked. So that was another, I guess, benefit of starting this business or growing this business.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love that. Lisa. Thank you for bringing that up. I think that's really important. So not only finding people who you enjoy working with, but it sounds like your team, like all of your core values align, which is also really important. So, as much as you're comfortable sharing, would you mind sharing a little bit about the compensation structure for your essay specialists? Like are they hourly employees? Like, how do you figure out the number of hours an essay specialist will work with a student? And then how does that cost get passed on to the client, or does it not?
Speaker 2:So all of my essay specialists are paid hourly and they're paid for all of the time that they work. We have a program big time where they put in their hours and then we just pay them through that and we've done it enough that we know on average how much time someone should spend on a particular, a particular set of essays. So if you're doing five essays or eight essays or three essays, and so what we've just instituted is that we used to have it based on the number of essays and then if you exceeded those essays then you would be charged more money. But I think that was a little bit amorphous for some people to understand. So now we've done it number of essays up to a certain number, not to exceed X amount of hours. So going forward, we will say, hey, this is how many hours you've spent, and so we'll charge them more. And I definitely charged, and this way the essay specialists know how many hours they're gonna get per client and then they'll also. But if they exceed that they'll get paid more.
Speaker 2:And then it's not coming out of my bottom line, because that was what was happening. Particularly since COVID. The number of hours that people were spending on essays increased because people were applying to so many more schools, and so they were doubling the number of schools. And so, even if it was the same four essay, there were little tweaks to it, there was just a lot of and I'm sure you have, you've seen the same thing. I see you shaking your head. Yes, absolutely, yes, yes, all right. And so, from a profit standpoint, I was spending a lot more money as a percentage of the overall fixed fee on essay work, and so that's why we switched to this. So we'll see how that works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, it's such a challenge, I think. So our complete package covers up to 10 applications and above and beyond that then we charge a flat fee per application that a student wants to submit. But what gets difficult and tricky and a little bit gray is when they are taking an already written essay and tweaking it like did we really create a whole new essay? No, so it's different. It's a different amount of editing time, so there are some challenges with that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, there's no perfect system. There's no perfect system. I mean, that's why we did the hybrid one, because we felt like we can at least say you've spent this many hours and if a student is a really good essay, a good writer, and they redo an essay and you look at it and it doesn't take any time but of course you're not gonna charge for that it's just more. When somebody is spending three additional hours on an essay that they should be able to just adapt very quickly, that's when it becomes problematic.
Speaker 1:Yes, right, exactly good. So it sounds like you've had. Your business has kind of morphed and you're in the license model and you have your team. What's on tap for the future? Do you have any growth plans or anything that's exciting?
Speaker 2:Well, we're starting a podcast. So I think that's our next big thing. You've inspired me to start. Yeah, it happens. So we have that going and I think I said a lot of our like people have often it's been organic, where people will come to me, and so I'm, on one hand, I'm like, oh, you should really grow this business and make it this huge, but on the other hand, I'm like we're happy with how our things are going. I mean we've definitely expanded into graduate school. We do a lot more graduate work medical school, law school and MBA school through Alex, because Alex is all MBA stuff, so he's really strong in that. So, looking at doing different things like that, but I don't. I guess I'm at a stage in my life where I don't really want to make this business crazy because I feel like we're a boutique firm and we really like the people that are here and I don't want to just grow for the sake of growing.
Speaker 1:I love that and that's important. I think what is your why and I did an episode recently with Chris Bell and he's intentionally staying solo and there's good reason for that and I think just because you're filled with clients doesn't mean you have to grow a team even you don't have to it's really thinking about what is it that? As you mentioned, what do you enjoy doing? What do you not enjoy doing? Offloading those things so that you continue to have capacity. So that's great. Do you have any advice for newer consultants on thinking about resources? So when you first started, did you join associations or join any groups? It sounds like you've had some kind of women's business group that you joined.
Speaker 2:Books that you read any inspiration mentors, sure so when I first started, I read all of the books that were popular at the time. I went through the fist fight. I read Rockhard apps, I read the Green I think that was back the time the Green Books, green Guide to Admission. I don't know if you even remember that, but they were out of Connecticut. I did that. I actually didn't know about ICA until what do I mean?
Speaker 2:It was 2008, 2009, when I really became more serious about growing the business. So then I joined IECI, I joined HECA and I found those super helpful to do all of that stuff. I really loved just meeting people and talking to people and getting ideas of what they were doing. I think that's really where the mentors came from. And then, as far as mentors I was thinking about that I feel like I take a lot of inspiration just from different people that I meet who have had businesses. Some of them are in this industry, some of them are friends, some of them are just people that I hear or listen to their stories or read about their stories. So I find and I also take inspiration from my clients, believe it or not, I feel like they do a lot of amazing things.
Speaker 1:Yes, I know, I know Sometimes I feel so lame when I listen to what my students have achieved. I'm like, oh my goodness, I know You're 17 and you've done all that. I have done nothing. Exactly Awesome. That's awesome, lisa. Are there any questions that I haven't asked you yet that you would like to share Any words of wisdom for newer consultants who are just getting started?
Speaker 2:So I think just go for it is really what it is. I think that if you just get started, you'll figure it out. Everyone does figure it out. Understand what your core strengths are, what you're bringing to the table. Understand your own elevator pitch and what are the key I don't want to say selling points, but what it is and why you're doing this business. And if you can articulate that really well and you could surround yourself with people that share in that vision and find customers, clients that also want you for who you are and what you bring to the table, then I think you'll be successful. I've always been one just like step in and like ask for forgiveness, not permission. So just start, get going. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to learn from those mistakes and don't let it bring you down. It's going to take three to five years for you to get to the point where you're really successful and growing, and then it should be doubling. If you have a good word of mouth, if you do a good job, people will come to you.
Speaker 1:That's so true. Thank you, Lisa. That is really great advice. How can our listeners find you if they want to check out your book, maybe Surviving the College Advocacy Process?
Speaker 2:Well, actually they can download it, they could purchase it or they could download a free ebook on our website. So under resources and our website is collegedownmentorcom, so you can find a bunch of resources on that.
Speaker 1:And I will link that in the show notes. Awesome, lisa. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story. That's my pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Business of College Consulting. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. If you did enjoy it, please leave a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, or share it with a friend in the college consulting industry. I'll see you next week on our new episode. In the meantime, take care.