Where’s Your Gold Rush?

Have you come across the show Gold Rush on the Discovery Channel?

Parker’s adventures in the Klondike area of the Yukon, searching for that elusive seam of precious metal are a great example for consultants who want to grow their business!

Where’s that thar gold?!

Gold is thought to have been produced from supernovas exploding and colliding and to have been present in the dust that our solar system was formed from.

Because the earth was molten when it was first formed, almost all the gold in the earth is thought to have sunk into our planet’s core, so it’s theorised that gold found in the earth’s mantle and crust has been brought here by asteroids that have hit Earth, though this possibility is up for discussion.

Whether stars, asteroids or internal forces brought gold to the surface of our planet, it can be found in the form of flakes, grains and nuggets within seams of quartz and other minerals, which when eroded by weather or water, deposit gold dust into streams and rivers where it collects and can form into larger nuggets.

The first significant gold rush in the US was in 1799 in North Carolina, but it was the California gold rush of 1848 that captured our imagination.

Early prospectors panned for their gold which is one of the simplest ways to extract treasure. River bed is scooped into a large pan, wetted and agitated until the gold sinks to the bottom.

This method is known now to not be very lucrative but it can be a helpful way to find larger deposits.

Parker Schnabel and his Gold Rush competitors find gold by shifting and sifting huge quantities of mud.

Every season he spends $2 million dollars just fuelling up his huge trucks which include excavators, dump trucks, trommels and sluices. A bulldozer at the scale he needs costs $1.2 million - digging through permafrost is hard work!

In order to extract an ounce of gold, Parker needs to excavate “enough dirt and rocks to fill half an Olympic swimming pool.” and in spite of all this effort, that ounce is only worth $1500! He has to shift a lot of swimming pools full of mud to cover his basic costs.

Parker credits ‘good decisions’ as the key to gold success, make a bad decision and you’ll go home empty handed.

So far, so familiar!

How do you get to that precious seam of Ideal Prospects that will transform your business?

Are you currently panning for gold? Excitedly finding the odd flake or nugget that keeps you going for a stretch before it runs out and you have to head back to the river bed, getting cold, wet and disheartened?

Or are you sluicing, dredging, shifting and sifting through huge quantities of aggregate, investing in the heavy-duty equipment you need to find that sparkling seam of precious metal?

And do you have a way of telling fools gold from the real deal?  

All that sparkles certainly is not gold in the consultancy world, it’s essential to have processes in place that help you identify prospects that will cost you more in terms of your time and investment than they are worth.

When you do find the lode that starts showing promise, do you have a way to maximise your extraction capabilities or do you move on too quickly to new pay dirt and start digging all over again when you hit a gold free patch?

Identifying your Ideal Client and creating signature frameworks help you mine faster and with more precision.  

They mean you can break down the ore in which your gold is hiding, shifting and sifting through prospects faster and more efficiently than the gold panners of old.

Prospecting for pure gold is hard work and requires huge amounts of energy and investment, far more than we think is necessary when we first start up our consultancy and win our first client!

We have to dig, sort and move continually, knowing that not every seam we find will give up it’s treasure willingly but that we mustn’t let a bit of permafrost or a broken-down trommel stop us in our tracks!

Keep prospecting intelligently, focus on the seams of business that you can mine most efficiently. Look for signs that there may be a few more flakes than you think and invest in the systems, people and processes you need to turn that mud into revenue and more importantly, profit.

#prospecting #marketing #sales #consultancy

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Thanks to Wikipedia for most of the facts in this article, any errors are entirely mine and I have donated to Wikipedia in thanks for the freely available information they make available to us all every single day.

https://www.tvshowsace.com/2019/10/03/gold-rush-parker-schnabel-reveals-how-much-it-really-costs-to-mine-gold/