406 - Elliot Murphy on Abundance Mindset and Providing Value to Your Clients

Today’s guest is Elliot Murphy. Elliot is the founder and CEO of KindlyOps, a DevOps and compliance consultancy for regulated industries. Elliot and his team specialize in GDPR, HIPPA, and FDA requirements and creating compliant infrastructure for clients on Amazon Web Services.

After being laid off from his role as CTO for a healthtech startup, he took his 20 years of business experience and put it toward figuring out how he could start his own business without having to leave his small town of Portland, Maine.

As Elliot was filling out job applications, he realized that many of his skills were portable across industries. After reading a book by Philip Morgan on positioning, he was able to take those skills and start niching down his services.

Due to shifts in the industry and more of the compliance process being out-of-the-box, his team has started looking for the things that cloud services can’t automate, which ended up being the more human parts of the compliance - more consulting than implementing.

Admittedly, Elliot is not great at marketing and sales, but he focuses on the elements he is good at, which is word of mouth. He speaks at conferences and is always looking for companies that are very likely to have a problem that he can solve.

Elliot is currently working on productizing some of his services to help smaller clients, and an open source governance and compliance product.

In this episode Elliot talks about:

• How he was able to niche down both his services and his client-base by focusing on an unpleasant part of business.
• Having an abundance mindset and how that can help grow your business and improve community engagement.
• Firing the biggest client he ever had and the positive affect that had on his employees and his business.

Main Takeaways

• Finding a specific problem to solve and being able to articulate that is more valuable than just being able to list off a bunch of skills.
• The value proposition is a huge aspect of building a company. If the input and output is the same regardless of the client then you have to focus on which clients find more value in the work being done and target them specifically.
• You have to take an active role in filtering out clients that aren’t the right fit for your services, so it’s important to have clear and unambiguous messaging.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• KindlyOps
• Amazon Web Services
• HavenGRC
• Contact Elliot
• The Positioning Manual by Philip Morgan