A day in the life of a customer success consultant | TDSU Ep. 67

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What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, Rob, with us. Rob, do you wanna say hi? What's up, ladies and gentlemen? Glowing.

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Glowing. Is an aura behind him. He's just backlit poorly for this format.

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I think backlit well. I think my backlighting is outdoing me. It is.

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Well, we can't see your face, so maybe that's for the best. It's better that way. I look better in the dark.

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And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Rob, it's just you and me.

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And I've got a question that should be close to your heart that I think you'll be able to answer with relative ease. Are you ready? I'm nervous, but I'm ready. This is a gift to you.

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I wanna know, what's your favorite thing to do as a consultant? Ooh, ooh, that's a good question. That's a real good question. There's a lot of complexity to being a consultant, especially like a solo consultant, right? Because you're responsible for all the different little bits and pieces of the business down to even like the bookkeeping and stuff like that.

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I love getting to make playbooks that have been on the back burner for a team for months and months, if not years, right? That's the cool thing that a consultant gets to do is come in and say, hey, what do you guys think about NPS? Or something like that. And they're like, oh yeah, we heard about it or we thought about it or, you know, it just kind of like died in the ether, right? Now, this is not me advocating for NPS because I know there's pros and cons and opinions and blah, blah, blah. Haters, please wait.

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Do you want me to tell you how I feel? No. I said haters, please wait. But the cool thing is just getting to be the catalyst that unsticks a situation.

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Another thing too, like this is a little different, is getting to, can I, before you go ahead, I'll give you a number too in just a minute, but go ahead. Do you, is it because you wanna be the hero? Is it the outcome or is it just the fact that you get to, it's like this added firepower and maybe the excitement or the enthusiasm that creates for a team? No, I think, yeah, I think it's, in another life, I feel like I should have been a therapist, right? I studied psychology for a reason. I get so much meaning from when I feel like I helped coach somebody through a breakthrough and that's what happens in that moment.

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You can just have these incredible moments where you break through the mold and all the habits and the day-to-day workflows. That's exciting. And help them level up as I'm assuming is sort of the implication there of like they've made a step forward.

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Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, point number two.

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You want me to hit you with it? Because I already forgot what it was. I, pick up a new one. I think as an extension of that, there are some really cool moments where I have the opportunity to get deep into why someone's behaving a certain way, whether it's a customer or an employee.

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That's always a cool thing. I don't know if this quote lives in this podcast, but there's a phrase when it comes to raising your children that goes, don't steal their struggle. Have you ever heard of this? No, no kids, baby.

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This idea of you can't do everything for someone, you can't, you've gotta lead them, you've gotta teach them how to fish as the more standard way of thinking about it. You've gotta help them create learning opportunities for themselves, development opportunities for themselves. You can't necessarily develop a person.

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I think that goes back to your point. You can help them see the way, but in a lot of ways they still have to do the hard work. I guess what I think is interesting is both of your answers seem very psychological.

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It's not about getting to see a bunch of different companies in action. It's not about getting to sit at the table with the CEO. None of that means anything to you.

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It's really more about understanding how people tick and helping them untangle their brains a little bit and get better. I think that's, I wouldn't say none of that clicks. I actually, sometimes I feel like the catcher in the rye and I'm just trying to save customer success from running off the cliff, but I don't think that highly of myself necessarily.

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I think that the key for me is really around, to your point, it's around psychology. It's around education, right? I would love to be a teacher someday, but there's this whole issue of teachers not getting really paid what they deserve, which was kind of a sticking point. And it was kind of interesting because I chose to study psychology because I actually wanted to study philosophy and I was like, well, I need a more structured framework for how to think about the world than philosophy, so I moved to psychology.

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And then I was like, okay, now I need a practical, structured application of psychology and then it turned into, ultimately, with a few steps along the way, customer success. So for me, yeah, I mean, that's probably true, the observation that you shared. Now I get paid for it, so that's always fun.

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You're married to a psychologist too, right? Does she ever say, this career is damaging you psychologically? My career? Yeah, yeah, she encourages me to cut back a little bit. I don't mean that. I just mean like you're banging your head against the wall, dude.

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Like, you're never gonna, you're never gonna win. No, I mean, she does therapy with teenagers, so, and she married me, so she gets it. Yeah, she's living with a teenager.

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Here's a question for you. What don't people realize about consultants? Now, if I narrow that down to businesses like mine, it's they don't realize how much you have to be willing to love risk. Like, you have to love risk.

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If you're a consultant, you have no idea what your income will be six months from now, let alone a year from now. Like, my 2025 income can swing 50% in one direction or another. I have to be okay with that, right? And I have to take actions now to prepare for that.

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So I'm building pipeline. I mean, I have deals that I've been working for the better part of the last year, right? And not everybody likes that. Not everybody likes networking and business development.

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I happen to love that stuff myself. It doesn't actually feel like work to me. I just show up and, I don't know, things eventually work out.

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But yeah, that was a surprise to an extent for me. I have been known to speak dismissively towards consulting. Do you think that's prevalent? Do you get any reactions from folks when you say that you're a CS consultant? And maybe how do you navigate through that if you do? So I don't think I've gotten negative reactions, fortunately, at least not yet.

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But I think that sentiment arises when there's a lack of application to the scenario that someone's in. Because honestly, and I think very highly of other consultants, and I encourage people to go down this route. And I always encourage them to talk to me too.

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I think this is an ever-expanding pie that, and there's a lot of market to go around for more consultants. So I'm happy to help anybody thinking of going down this path. But the problem is that without really specific practical applications of frameworks and theories to situations, a lot of times consulting advice just kind of comes up, comes off as like a post-game sports interview where it's just, yeah, you know, just gotta give 110%, you know, try to eat a little humble pie, and you know, you'll, you know, stay in love.

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Grab the back, grab the brass ring. Yeah, exactly. It just sounds like these platitudes that don't actually work.

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And you know, you see this when you go on LinkedIn, and it's like a picture of a pack of wolves, and it's the leader leads from behind. And it's okay, how the hell is that gonna help me in my day-to-day, right? Like, I get it, in theory, it's great, it's cute and all, but like the actual application in my one-on-one or in my, you know, any other situation, like when I'm talking with a customer, when I'm talking with my manager, whatever, a lot of it, that's where I think a lot of things fall short and that causes a lot of like saltiness around consultants. I think the classic and very timely example is the, everything you hear about this McKinsey project that New York City just went through, that I think they started in like 2021 or 2022, it was like multiple millions, it may have been tens of millions of dollars paid to McKinsey to determine whether New York City should start putting their trash inside plastic trash cans and not just in bags on the street.

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And wouldn't you know, they decided that they should go in trash cans because it's like less gross and disgusting and looks better and attracts less pests. Like you didn't need $45 million or whatever it was to determine that. Well, you know what, they deserve it.

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McKinsey? Someone's got to look out for them. They put in a lot of work, right? Yeah, no, but I think overall consulting, it's like, it's intense, it's really exhausting task switching between clients, but it's high variety, it's really validating and it can be really fun. I think it requires the right lifestyle to support it, right? Like it's hard if you have people relying on you for a consistent paycheck and stuff, which I don't, but it's fun, it's fun, it's a blast.

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That's cool, man. Well, that's our time. I just wanted to get inside the mind of Bobby Z and understand what it's like in a day in your life.

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So appreciate it, man, but we'll have to say goodbye for now and maybe we'll do a round two later on. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media.

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Until next time. Hey folks, it's Dillon here. Thank you for tuning in as always.

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