From Selling Research to Guiding Million-Dollar Decisions with Aaron Cruikshank

Aaron Cruikshank

After more than two decades as a consultant, he grew his firm to over a million dollars in revenue with a team of 17. Now on paper, it looked like success, but behind the scenes, the business wasn't nearly as profitable as he would have liked.

Aaron Cruikshank

Well, today, he's approaching seven figures again with the equivalent of roughly three people and a dramatically different business model.

Aaron Cruikshank

No, I mean, I started 24 years ago and I and I honed in on this market intel thing more like 2016, 2017.

Aaron Cruikshank

And this is something I talk to people about because I do these workshops for free sometimes on how to tap into the hidden job market and I see one of the traps that people fall into is getting too narrowly focused on job titles.

Aaron Cruikshank

And they lost their funding and I still had a job, but I had nothing to do and I was getting extremely bored and so I just started phoning up people that I knew in my network and said, hey, this work that I used to do that was paid for by the government that they no longer pay for.

Aaron Cruikshank

Like chat GPT, Claude.

Aaron Cruikshank

Yeah, I mean, we used to be way too reliant on other people's platforms.

Aaron Cruikshank

What we tend to focus on at my company is market intelligence, which is that bigger forward-looking predictive modeling type thing.

Aaron Cruikshank

I think a big switch for me was reading that Red Ocean, Blue Ocean, the Blue Ocean strategy book where it was saying, if possible, try to identify a niche where there's not many people occupying it.

Aaron Cruikshank

Well, not to sound too much like I'm towing the company line here, but I did learn a lot when I did the consulting success program in 2017, helped me focus a lot on outcomes driven sales and that kind of thing.

Aaron Cruikshank

One of the hardest years we had was 2023.

Aaron Cruikshank

Honestly, Michael, like when we were at 17 people doing a million plus, we weren't profitable.

Aaron Cruikshank

Two of them I'm going to have to point to AI, unsurprisingly.

Aaron Cruikshank

The difference is they may never actually see your website.

Aaron Cruikshank

whereas two years ago, I would have said return on investment for doing events, not great.