- Entrepreneurial expertise is successful if you move the needle on behalf of respectful clients who align with your mission, who willingly pay a price premium for your non-interchangeable expertise, let you direct the process as experts, while keeping you significantly engaged to keep learning and growing.
- Client controls if they push back on your advice until you relent. Or they shield a decision maker, claiming they are speaking for that person when they in fact are not.
- Good positioning makes you noninterchangeable.
- How compelling your positioning is is a measure of how long it would take to find a replacement meeting a standard.
- The only control in the relationship you have is withholding your expertise. And if it’s easy to find a replacement for that expertise, you have no control at all.
- Poor positioning: accessibility, “free introductory call”, eager to give away expertise, free assessment, etc. Screams lack of confidence.
- Lack of belief: discounting your fees, modifying your terms, allowing unusual invoicing procedures, providing advice before an engagement is crafted, letting clients determine the problem while just looking to your for transactional solutions, presenting multiple viable solutions and letting clients choose (ceding expertise), changing positioning to fit what prospects want to hear.
- Choose opportunities that allow you to compromise less and be more of an expert.
- The minute you upsize your capacity to handle the additional opportunity, instead of cleaning up your client base with every new business win, you lose the ability to say “no” to clients who aren’t a good fit because you feel pressure to feed that new capacity that you’ve built. This temptation to match capacity to opportunity is made worse because of our cultural love of growth and the sheer lip pain associated with mouthing the “no” word in an entrepreneurial culture.
- The goal is not big and profitable, but impactful. Having more capacity (i.e., a bigger firm) brings additional management pressure, additional financial risk, and additional pressure to keep the sales machine humming.
- As your opportunities increase, don’t respond by matching your capacity to meet the additional opportunities. Have more “no” conversations.
- Good positioning allows you to compare similar situations and then notice the patterns that lead to expertise.
- We gravitate to where we excel.
- List out segments where you do not yet have a thoughtful point of view. Knowing what you don’t know gives you permission for that confidence about the things you do know, and in the process allows you to be honest about what you don’t know. “Honestly, I’ve been asking that same question and I don’t think I have it figured out yet.”
- Find a motivation to develop a position: speaking engagement, repeatable section in proposals, article, seminar, handout for predictable conversation intersections.
- These points of view that you develop will be the frequent launching pads for myriad opportunities in the future and you’ll sleep better knowing what you don’t know.
- Your expertise business exists to, in order: make money, move the needle on behalf of clients, and create a culture where people can thrive.
- Build a business that delivers the value that others enjoy paying you for.
- Enjoy your work and be disciplined about the parts that you don’t.
- Note that your own standards for effectiveness will almost always be higher than theirs, so give yourself grace if it slips a little bit once in a while.
- No one will listen to an expert unless they are expensive. Money is the currency of respect.
- Enjoying your work is great, but it’s a byproduct of doing many other things right, and it’s dangerous to make it a demand. A strong practice involves doing things that aren’t fun by need to be done. If you love what you do, be grateful.
- “The power of actionable insight is what drives me to never stop learning and to always find more interesting ways to slice through the clutter. I want to help people. I want to see the light come on in their eyes. I want to see them get excited about an answer that up to that point has been elusive. I want to help someone make small corrections now and understand how it will impact them later. I want to clear a mental path for people so that they can then navigate the maze on their own, aware of how their choices now will impact them in specific ways later.”
- Successful experts are consistently risk-takers. They’re wrong a lot, but right about the important things. They always make decisions, not so afraid that they freeze, unable to risk the consequences of making a decision and then being responsible. A leader’s job is to make decisions! Step out of your desire to always be right and instead research and take some risks.
- A key time to make a decision: when you see an opportunity your firm is small enough to quickly pounce on. Big firms have some advantages, but being nimble is not one of them.
- If you get into the habit of correcting your bad decisions quickly, you’ll get comfortable making more decisions in the first place.
- Your primary weakness comes from overusing your primary strength.
- Perfect balance is boring and inhuman. Your goal is intentional imbalance.
- You are not a leader because you have better insight, but because you make decisions.
- Consultants who interview employees at client engagements look brilliant early in the process — on the front lines.
- Experts want to be right, entrepreneurs need to take risks.
- If you are doing something that comes naturally to you, it’s energizing.
- How do you define success? Doing so based off the size of your firm is ridiculous. Success can be one-person or thousand-person.
- Make decisions in a world that makes too many for you.
- We struggle with good positioning decisions since risk-taking entrepreneurs can hardly bring ourselves to say “no”. We see some opportunity and quickly minimize the risks and proclaim how much potential we see. In the land of opportunity, every opportunity is a challenge we want to conquer. Saying “no” feels like defeat and cowardice. We’re afraid that “no” will put us behind all the other entrepreneurs who are chasing growth.
- Don’t be more in love with opportunity than with competence.
- Best place to focus your expertise: do people lose sleep over their need in a way that makes them want to hang out with other people suffering the same issues?
- Positioning is public and it must be declared.
- A test for positioning: your website. The “waffling expert” wants a more generalized site so they don’t risk turning away any opportunity before they get a chance to compromise.
- Private positioning may give you a warm fuzzy feeling, but nobody is going to notice.
- The positioning process is painful. It requires introspection, outside advice, a bit of consensus building, quite a bit of time, and some money. Don’t put yourself through it every couple of years.
- The less impressive your locale (yep, Fort Wayne), the more important positioning will be to your firm.
- Does your website confirm the notion of your expertise, or will the statements lead visitors to think that you’re just marketing to multiple targets?
- Your positioning is built on thinking and not the doing. The doing is valuable because it’s attached to the thinking. But it’s also where there’s more price pressure, more client headaches, greater financial risk, additional people to manage, and so on.
- There’s no simple way to avoid providing both thinking and doing. And unless you combine them in a manner that carefully focuses on your positioning, you’ll be swimming upstream all the time, wishing for a different kind of client relationship.
- Focus less on implementation on your website. Shift images, presentation, etc. to the thinking process, not the doing.
- If a client has limited time/money, what do you reluctantly compress at their insistence? Often it’s the analysis and strategy in order to dive into the implementation. But that means short-term solutions!
- Are you guiding, or reactively getting information you’ll need in order to fulfill implementation requests like a waiter?
- Where are clients stepping outside their relationship with you to buy related services? If it’s on the downstream side, great. Let someone else implement. The upstream side is the problem, meaning your positioning is weak.
- Implementation-alone engagements draw in your worst clients. They view you as an extended staff they can order around. They’re not there for a diagnosis or prescription — you’re just the pharmacy.
- Unbundled implementation is what draws the most competition!
- An implementation business requires high efficiency and low cost for profit. Entrepreneurial experts are notoriously bad at these. When faced with money problems, they look to make more money, not to increase efficiencies.
- Implementation focuses make personnel issues more pronounced, especially since you hire less experienced people who need more training.
- Implementation is a people intensive business, so more of your financial risk is concentrated on this side.
- Deadline pressure is more concentrated on the implementation end. Strategy precedes implementation, and if deadlines get stretched, implementors make up for it.
- Strategy + implementation valuable since clients sometimes want one-stop shopping — easier to deal with one partner. Provides more accountability with a single vendor. And there’s clear continuity that comes from buying implementation from the same people who made the recommendations.
- Start every first-time engagement with an assessment of the situation and what they need in great detail. After that point, they can hire you to do it, hire you to manage another outside entity to do it, or do it themselves. Unbundle them. Otherwise, it smells of desperation using upstream services (strategy) as a loss-leader to actually sell downstream services (implementation).
- Drop the irrational fear that to keep a client, you have to meet all their needs. Trying to meet them all brings a loss of credibility.
- Close off the entrance to implementation without first going through the strategy entrance.
- When you really need an expert, they tell you how it’s going to be at every step of the way and you’re along for the ride. You have all the permission power, but they have all the process power.
- If you’re an order-taker and not yet an expert, think about diving deeper to save your clients from themselves.
- No good answer ever starts without a good question.
- Spread your expertise like an aerial spray, but then charge a lot to apply it specifically to a client situation.
- Experts are not too busy to articulate thought leadership. If you don’t have the time to write and speak, you aren’t making enough money. If you don’t know what to say, you’re not yet an expert. If you don’t know how to say it, you haven’t practiced enough. Having the time to write sends a powerful message on its own.
- Experts are not always available, regardless if it’s to pick our brain or a proclaimed emergency! If you’re too familiar and “one of us”, you’re not deserving of extra attention.
- Aim for a delicate balance of relaxed and confident expertise with a kind willingness to help, as long as they’re ok with the fee and your process.
- Tell prospects what they shouldn’t hire you for so they’ll find it easier to believe what they should hire you for.
- Spending your best efforts on a single client makes you become irrelevant. You need to consistently help your clients see things in new, helpful ways.