Terry Rice : Landing Fortune 500 Companies using "The Wedge Strategy"
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What are like three or four just general tips if you had 30 seconds with someone and they want to get more into these big corporate contracts? I think the most important thing is to use the wedge strategy. Just if you've never chopped down a tree before, the easiest way to chop it down is not by just hacking at it for hours.

You want to drive a wedge into one side, just a small wedge, and then from the other side, pull it down. So what McKinsey does is they offer audits as a wedge. So instead of saying, hey, give us millions of dollars for this huge project, they say, hey, give us a smaller amount for this audit that we'll do. And then afterwards, they'll say, hey, look, if you want help implementing this stuff, then you have to give us a bunch of money. My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life.

in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today my friend Terry Rice is joining us on the show. Terry, you may have seen in the past if you've watched my Amazon show, Amazon Prime 60 Day Hustle, Terry's a guest, he's an editor

editor and writer for Entrepreneur Magazine. And like me and probably you, he's an entrepreneur and he helps businesses grow. And today we're going to dive into how he helps big businesses grow. So he's doing some Fortune 500 consulting or big billion dollar brands. And we're going to talk about if you're in the marketing space, how do you land clients like that? So Terry, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Great. Well, let's dive in. I know we've known each other for a while, but if my audience listening don't know who you are, you mind just giving a minute overview of yourself and how you got here?

Yeah, sure thing. I spent the first 10 years of my career in corporate working at companies like Adobe and Facebook and some agencies. And then in 2015, I left to start my own company actually got fired to start my own company. And that's when I just really got scrappy in regards to building my own business, primarily doing digital marketing consulting, and then moving on to helping other entrepreneurs. And now I'm focused more on lifestyle design for high performers. And I have a program called Savage that helps people with that.

Right. And obviously, I know there's a lot of things we could dive into. And we met through, you know, more on the entrepreneur side. And obviously, our relationships growing from there. But for today, we're talking like you've done, you know, and every time I chat and catch up with you, you're doing another kind of consulting gig or something for like this big, massive brand. And I know a lot of people in my industry, you know, even myself, right, we saw and doing marketing consulting agency, we get a lot of small brands, but we always want to get the big

brands because generally they have you know more reach bigger bigger contracts all of those things so can you talk a little about some of the companies you've worked with and how they came about

Yeah, yeah, sure thing. And I'll start by saying this all happened by accident. And I'll tell you that backstory in a moment. But, you know, all the things Walmart, Amazon, Google, like, you know, I can keep going, but hopefully that that helps. And on my end, it's great to have access to companies that big because you have such a bigger impact. And as a result of that, you can make more money. So I'm looking forward to guiding people towards their process of getting these big contracts as well.

Yeah, great. So let's dive into the tactic side, right? Like this show is all about, you know, tactics and implementation and short episodes. So let's start with a bang. What are like three or four just general tips if you had 30 seconds with someone and they want to get more into these big corporate contracts? Let's start at the top. What would three or four big tips be?

Yeah, I think the most important thing is to use the wedge strategy. And this was made popular by McKinsey. So just if you've never chopped down a tree before, the easiest way to chop it down is not by just hacking at it for hours. You want to drive a wedge into one side, just a small wedge, and then from the other side, pull

pull it down. So what McKinsey does is they offer audits as a wedge. So instead of saying, hey, give us millions of dollars for this huge project, they say, hey, give us a smaller amount for this audit that we'll do. And then afterwards, they'll say, hey, look, if you want help implementing this stuff, then you have to give us a bunch of money. So

On my end, I accidentally discovered that strategy. Years ago, this private equity company reached out to me and they said, look, we're about to buy this e-commerce company for like $40 million. We know you're a digital marketing expert. Can you just audit it to make sure we're not buying a lemon? And I'm like, yeah, sure. So I went through that process.

Give them the audit. And they're like, it seems like you've never done this before. And I was like, yeah, you're actually kind of right. They're like, can you give us a format that you can use over and over again? Because we want to use you to pre-qualify all our deals going forward. I was like, okay, cool. I got to create a system around this. So I did that. And that's why I'm encouraging everyone else to do this too. Because once I did that, they're like, can you give us quarterly audits to let us know how we're doing based on your previous recommendations? Yeah.

So the cool thing about audits is you land one that can easily turn into four. And then on the back end, you could say, hey, look, if you want help implementing this stuff, I can consult you as well. So for anyone listening, that's the easiest way to get involved with big companies. Just offer them an audit, you know, smaller dollar value, prove your value. And then from there, you can ramp up to bigger deals.

yeah and i mean even like we teach similar in a different way like we always you know even with our sales teams and stuff we always follow like what i call a teach to sell method right where we're here to genuinely help show you everything you're doing well show you all the gaps show you things you should be doing and then look if we can be a part of filling those gaps for you and help you do that in a quicker faster and more accurate way great here we are right and

I like that's the only way I really like to sell. We don't pressure sell or anything. And it's kind of the same here, right? Same psychology of, hey, this is everything that you may be missing and why that can make a big difference and how much you can make if you implement those things. And if you want my help to do that quicker and faster and, you know, following my strategies so you have more certainty, then I can come in and do that. Yeah. And that initial interaction builds that trust, making it so much easier to get big deals and

And another wedge that I discovered on accident was working with marketing agencies. So I would do workshops on Facebook ads, digital marketing, so on and so forth for the new hires. But the thing is, agencies sometimes have a high turnover. So they're calling me back like the next month, the next month, the next month, train more people.

And people tend to leave agencies as well. So when people go to a different agency, they would say, oh, yeah, bring that guy, Terry, in to go ahead and train us. So, again, I would do these workshops, but then I'd also stay with a retainer to consult them going forward. And they're working with big brands, right? They have their multiple.

they're managing these multimillion dollar contracts. So therefore I could charge in proportion to that as well. Yeah, that's great. So that works for the bigger agencies that, you know, like the New York agencies and stuff that have these big deals, you know, if they're getting a million dollar contract, they don't mind cutting you a check for 50 grand or whatever, right. To come in and make sure it's, it's on track.

Yeah, it's funny. One time this company reached out to me. They had like, it's like a small budget, like an $80,000 budget for some Google campaign. And they call me the day before it's supposed to go live and like, what should we do? And I'm like, yo, give them their money back. Like, I don't have time to teach you how to do this in a day.

But that's what happens. Like if you can just fill that void for people, because this was a branding agency, they had no idea how to do direct response marketing. So if you can find an organization, in this case, an agency that already has access to these big companies, but they're missing something you can fill, then it's a done deal because they need you to retain that client.

And I think that's so important because if you're listening and you're in my industry, you have this assumption that everyone's like a master and knows it. But when I've got bigger and started to see this happen too and been brought in as a consultant like you, there's a lot of these old school agencies like big New York offices and well-known New York agency names.

They've been in the game 30 years and they're transitioning from TV, radio, paper ads when they have the big clients that are paying them $3 million a quarter or a year or whatever. And they're getting asked to do these newer things that we as digital marketers and direct response marketers and influencers know very well. And they don't really have a clue. And they hire a bunch of college grads to try and do it. And those people don't really have a clue either.

And then so there's that missing gap from that lead strategy. So there is, and it's a great foot in the door, like you said, and it can lead to more contracts. So I love that. Yeah, let's go deeper on this real quick. Just a double click. So with those big companies, you're going to be sometimes surprised to your point at how much they don't know. I'll give you a real example. I went down to consult Walmart, like in their headquarters. It's Bentonville, Arkansas. Went down there to consult them.

And first of all, I was surprised that the snacks weren't better. Like it's Walmart. You have access to like literally everything and the snacks were subpar. But other than that, like they suffered from groupthink. Right. So since they all work together, live together in this micro community, there are no new ideas coming in. So to your point, like you don't have to be necessarily smarter than the people that you're consulting. You just have to have a different perspective that they're unaware of.

yeah yeah and i mean look that's the curse of every company as you grow as you get set in your way even we you know we get past 10 million and into tens of millions it's like you always know you're missing things but you're so focused on the things that are working as you should be and sometimes it helps just someone comes in and reminds you you should be doing this or they can help lead that bit that you know you should be doing but you don't do it and it's kind of like

you know, why people hire personal trainers, right? It's like even fit people hire personal trainers because it's like the personal trainer forces them to stretch twice a week, which they know they should be doing, but they don't really do it because they're doing all their other workouts. So I do see a lot of value in that. And I think that's important to understand. And I just want to come back to the, you know, that's kind of like obviously going through the agency route. And we talked about these audits for the bigger brands.

But I know people listening are like, okay, well, it sounds great. I could easily do that on my area of expertise. How the heck do I get a hold of them, right? Am I cold emailing on LinkedIn? Am I finding the marketing manager on LinkedIn? Am I going to walmart.com, the website? And then again, the help, you know, tab, what, what do they, how do they start that reach out process?

Yeah, I'll give two options. One is a bit more involved, but speaking is a great way to get involved. So speaking is a great wedge. And if you're speaking at an event for a private company, what I would ask you to do is after your talk, survey the audience for feedback and ask what topics they'd like to dive deeper into. Then go to the organizer and say, hey, by the way, 80% of your employees want to learn more about this. I'd like to consult you. So again, I'm kind of fast forwarding to that part, but speaking is a great wedge.

True point. How do you get in front of these people? You got to work for it, right? So I think LinkedIn is a great platform, but I would ask people to practice strategic patience. So instead of just reaching out and saying, hey, Kevin, hire me, what I would do is look for people that are active on the LinkedIn platform and just start engaging with their content and

Engaging, leaving good comments. And by good comment, I don't mean facts or 100. I mean like a good comment that shows your area of expertise and include a question with that comment because questions start conversations. This is actually how I've landed speaking gigs and consulting contracts.

just by going on LinkedIn and engaging with my target audience, these prospects. And within 30 days, you have an idea as it's going to work or not. So what I would say is look for people that work at that company. They don't have to be the person who hires speakers or hires consultants, just someone active on the platform. So you have an excuse to keep on engaging with them. As you build a relationship, you can actually eventually say, hey, by the way, as you may know, I do this. Do you know who I should speak to?

Yeah, I like that. I like that. So, and I think, yeah, a lot of them hang out on LinkedIn. And one tip I got, like, I haven't done this a whole bunch, but one of my friends that runs a big agency for like big, big brands is he says, you know, there's a lot of like the middle marketing managers where they need help. They're getting set KPIs, they're getting swum, they can't keep up and you build relationships with them. And if you have a good agency resume awards, you're going to get a lot of people.

they'll often kind of bat for you if they want help in a certain area. So he said he had a lot of success. Again, this isn't me doing it, but this is someone that built a big, like big, big, like multi eight figure, nine figure agency. He said he had a lot of success.

kind of, you know, getting his resume, not his resume, but his brand's resume really good, winning a bunch of awards, having it make it look super prestigious because then it's much easier when the marketing manager or someone takes it to the CFO or the CMO to get approval. It's like you look good, right? So have you kind of found that or any comments on that?

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. You have to think to yourself, like, who will look good because they hired me, right? It could be an intern. You know, it could be an intern. Seriously, like, who's going to get credit for saying, look, I brought Terry in. I brought Rudy in. And I think if you open up your eyes a bit more, then you're like, well, these people are actually much more accessible than the person who actually hires people in my position. Like, go for people like you said, the men. These people are just like nine to five, right? They go home and watch Netflix. They're not like as crazy busy entrepreneurs a lot of them. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And then once you do start getting these deals, I mean, get loud about it on social. I mean, you don't have to like brag, but just say, hey, I'm proud I accomplished this. My client's doing that, so on and so forth. So it creates a flywheel where you become known as the person who does this and then you're getting more inbound leads as opposed to hunting as much. Yeah.

And one other thing I found fascinating when I was chatting to my buddy about this was he said one of the big things too when they're bringing you on in big companies is they want to have, they want your resume and like everything you've done and achieved and your awards and stuff and

everything to look so good that if you screw up, they're not going to get fired because that's the big concern for them, which I never thought about being an entrepreneur. Right. But apparently he said a lot of them, they're big warriors. They'll bet vouch for you. You come in and flop or drop the ball and then they're going to get in trouble from the CMO, the CFO and get fired. So just an interesting thing I would add there, which is kind of fascinating to me.

Yeah, it's risk reduction, right? Showing people, hey, look, there are other people besides me that vouch for me not being bad at this stuff. And the more you can do that, the better. And that's why those case studies, those many case studies on your LinkedIn work so well. And at the same time, like, again, like once you finally do get these clients, I'm skipping ahead a little bit, ask for referrals, right? So I have a newsletter that just only goes out to my previous clients. Once a quarter goes out saying, hey, is there anything I can help you with? And is there anyone else who should be helping as well?

So create a system around this where you're getting these inbound leads proactively because you actually have that referral system set up. I love that. And what about, you know, as we come to more towards the end of today, we talked a little about, you know, using LinkedIn, doing the outreach, get into the events, all of that sort of great stuff. When you are doing the audits and then you get someone like a company goes, a big company, right? Let's say a big billion dollar brand says, oh, yeah, I like it.

How the heck do you charge, right? Like, you know, let's imagine all the people listening are charging five grand a month in the marketing world for stuff. Do they throw out a hundred grand contract, a million dollars? Like how do they structure these deals in a bigger setting?

Yeah, I mean, you got to charge a true value, first of all, and I know that's like a difficult statement to quantify, but I think the mindset sometimes going to these big deals is that, oh, I can't charge $50,000 or $100,000. I never charged that much before. You have to think about the outcome of the help you're giving them, right? So when I went down to Walmart with their not so great snacks, I was like, oh, I can't charge $50,000.

the information I gave them helped him sell more socks, shoes, like all that stuff, like millions of dollars. So if you want to, you have to just realize that the value of your knowledge is contextual. So if you want to change more, then you need to change the context in which you're offering that knowledge, right? So if you can quantify the ROI, which I know can be challenging, then you would want to have like a five to seven X multiplier, right? So meaning if they're paying you a dollar, they should make five to $7. But that means you have to ask

questions, you can't be afraid to ask questions either. Otherwise, you're gonna have no idea how to price it out. You can also just ask around to like, hey, how much did you charge for this deal? Or how much did you pay for this deal? But you got to realize the long term impact of your of your knowledge, and not undersell yourself. So even when you come to that number, I'm going to ask you to charge that number that you're afraid of.

and then add 20% to it. Like there's so much. Go ahead. No, I think it's so important too because you got to change your mindset when you're like, you're charging five grand right now to a small business that's spending 15 grand a month on ads. But when you go and work with a big company, you know, you charge it in 50K, it could make them $5 million pretty easily, right? So it's like wildly different scenarios and you have to understand that going into it.

Yeah. And the thing is like, they have employees that are paying way more than that and they have health insurance and all these other things. So it's like, look, I am cheaper than hiring a nine to five employee in most cases. And I'm also more expendable if you decide, Hey, you know, we're all, we're all done with this. So what's never happened to me before is like, I've never given someone a price to,

too high and they just said f you afterwards they're normally like okay we can't afford that but we can't afford this like no one just dosed you as a result and i'm not saying lower your price just either add something or take something away and when you add something it shouldn't take up too much energy on your end and we take something away it should be in proportion to the amount of money that they can't afford to pay based on your original budget yeah love it so last couple of questions um

that I have more for you personally now as well on top of the corporate side. I always love to ask these as we get to the end, you know, because as an entrepreneur, you've talked about this one area, but like many entrepreneurs and all of us, you've learned a lot of wisdom through the years in many things. So I have a couple of more general questions. So I'd love to know, you know, you talked about the successes, these big brands, but I always ask everyone, what's one of your biggest failures and lessons from that?

Yeah, that's a good question. Let me, um, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll fill this one out. My biggest failure was getting fired from Facebook.

And this was about 10 years ago. And I went through an identity crisis where I didn't know who I was without a logo on my resume. So that was a super, you know, obviously challenging moment. And I, you know, I was going through it because I had my first kid was on the way, like my dad passed away, like all these things were happening, but I just stuck with it. And, you know, like,

that everyone tells you that, but within 18 months, I was actually making more money than I made at Facebook and bring in like 20, $25,000 a month. So I learned that I don't need a logo on my resume to be successful. I learned to own my identity as opposed to having someone else assign it to me. And I also learned how to encourage other people that are going through the same challenges because I've been through it before and know how to get through it successfully.

Yeah. And at the end of the day, eventually you build your, well, you are the logo, right? You build your own brand so big that you've got your own logo. So I love that. Next question then. Again, a bit of a question where you go back in time and reflect back. If you could go back to your younger self and give yourself one piece of advice, maybe it's similar to what you just said, what would it be? Quit being so cocky.

I was cocky for no reason, like from a young age and even in a college because like I was a bouncer, I was an athlete and like that just kind of carried over to like my adult life. But when you do that, sometimes you're just like there's an insecurity that you're masking. And I should have spent more time addressing that insecurity as opposed to trying to sound cool all the time.

Yeah, and I think it's important because a lot of people ask that question. They say the opposite way. You have to believe in yourself, right? But there's a big difference between like the outer surface. I think what you're saying cockiness and the underlying like belief in yourself. And sometimes you see, especially with athletes and stuff, the outer surface cockiness is to actually cover up the inner surface true belief that I think we all have to work to develop because I think a lot of people are great, but they don't actually believe that they're great athletes.

Yeah. And the funny thing is I had nothing to be cocky about. I mean, I had like no money. I sat the bench under the Division One team like like there's nothing, nothing going on. It's funny. Yeah. And the next couple of questions. So just to summarize today, three tips to leave this episode for someone that wants to maybe start pursuing these bigger clients.

Yeah, you got to use the wedge strategy. And there's three wedges. The first one's going to be audits. So you do an audit, it's a lower price than your full service, but it gets you in the door. Another one's going to be training, training and workshops, and then afterwards say, hey, what else can I help you with? And the last one is speaking. So you're doing a private keynote for this organization, surveying the audience saying, hey, what do you want to learn more about? And then going back to the organizer and say, I'd like to teach you more about this stuff.

Love it. Love it. And last question, where if people want to learn more from you again on your email list, follow your content, LinkedIn, how do they find you? Yeah, yeah. So LinkedIn, I'm active, I post every day. And the best way to hop on my newsletter and follow my content is by going to the savage life.co. I'll say it one more time, the savage life.co. Love it. And we'll put it in the show notes. Terry, any final comments before we wrap today?

Rudy, I'm so surprised you made it through this conversation, especially talking about personal training without telling people how jacked you are these days, man. Like, hang it over. It's like you're a testament to what happens when you put your mind to something and don't just talk about it. You're actually about it. So for everyone who's listening, I know you've seen him like just shout him out next time. He's on Instagram or whatever it is because you're putting in the work, man. And it's so good to see.

Appreciate it, buddy. Good to catch up with you as always. Thank you so much for breaking that down today. I love this episode. So many people ask me about this. It's great to condense into one thing and yeah, keep crushing it guys. Hope you enjoyed it as always. Keep living the red life and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.