The seller-side art and science of determining the amount of money associated with a given item of value, be it a service, product, or combination thereof.
Pricing considers both the amount of money to be exchanged between buyer and seller as a matter of profitability. It simultaneously factors in the brand messaging value of an item’s price.
Providing iterative, expertise-based guidance and advice that improves the ability of another person, or team of people, to perform a specific set of tasks
Reactively providing valuable services, specific outcomes, or other deliverables in response to requests from clients.
A freelancing practice may evolve into Expertise Consulting, which combines valuable skills and business expertise into custom services.
Consulting itself is too overused and therefore meaningless to attempt to reclaim. Instead, it’s useful to think about the following loose, overlapping categories.
Expertise Consulting Providing valuable services (eg SEO, product design, coding, etc) backed by strategic insight about industry/market/audience. (Also see Freelancing)
Productized Consulting Providing expertise as products: productized services, courses, training, or other deliverables that are tightly defined and priced. Productized consulting is sold and delivered in a standardized, low-friction way. Also known as ‘Product Entrepreneurship’.
Strategy Consulting Providing business expertise as a custom array of execution-optional, open-ended ideas, as opposed to specific recommendations, outcomes, services, or any other deliverables. Also known as ‘Innovation Consulting’. Similar to but not to be confused with Coaching.
Management Consulting providing analysis and specific optimization/efficiency advice and activities (such as accounting), as opposed to open-ended ideas and advice. Often overlaps with but not equivalent to Strategy Consulting.
Independent Consulting Owning – and marketing/selling – a business that provides the above forms of consulting, most often some form of Expertise Consulting or Strategy Consulting.
That which provokes significant and lasting emotional, spiritual, and intellectual surprise
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the French government’s Académie des Beaux-Arts held great sway over world culture through its annual exhibition of art, the Salon.
However, to make a long story short, the Paris Salon eventually died of irrelevance.
The plot
A tidal wave of new thinkers and artists grasped cultural change much better than status quo-enthralled Académie members ever could. The latter group shut the avant-garde out of their big show. Shunted to “off-broadway”, these artists organized a series of independent salons which, like the mid-2000s blogosphere, formed a Petri dish of new ideas. Tiny echoes of the French Revolution; democracy vs monocratic bureaucracy. Artists from this era would eventually go on to assert that the core competency of art was to stimulate not “the retina”, as Duchamp put it, but the mind.
This plotline is repeating itself more than a century later, as another academy’s big show, the Oscars, is also dead from irrelevance. Or if not dead, a sickly shadow of its former hale and hearty self.
For the past half-century, about 1 in every 4 US-Americans watched the Oscars, most years.
But in 2020, the Academy Awards face-planted almost as badly Ellen Degeneres (whose cringey pandemic-lockdown behavior stood in contrast to her polished, scripted stints as Oscars host). The 2020 Oscars had their lowest ratings ever, by far.
Then a few days ago, it got even worse – only about 1 in 40 US-Americans were willing to subject themselves to the 2021 Oscars.
Of course, that’s still a lot of people (9 million) but this 10x drop in viewership represents a seachange collapse in the cultural relevance of Hollywood and the larger entertainment industry.
This matters to you.
With institution-death comes opportunity for independents [creators, consultants, entrepreneurs…], whose core competencies lie, as with Duchamp, close to the mind.
* * *
This is bigger than the death of a single media event.
The Academy Awards has been the shining star of the film industry, which is itself the most important (ie. profitable) part of the celebrity-media-news complex. This complex integrates movies, broadcast and streamed TV, awards shows, late-night “comedy” shows, and journalism-entertainment.
The industry’s most important marketing asset is the celebrity, which is a profitably attention-generating persona projected onto a very famous person as if it were their actual personality.
It’s this business model that’s breaking down, not just the Oscars.
The Superbowl sells Mazdas, life insurance, toilet paper. But the Oscars has never been primarily about moving products. Its larger goal is to market the entertainment industry itself, by super-polishing its core assets. It’s like a Mercedes showroom event that worries not about selling cars but about reinforcing brand image. But far fewer people want to look at shiny cars now.
The upshot? Less status quo-influence on:
In short, the status quo has suffered the “Death of a Salesman”. One of its most effective ones, in fact.
The opportunity in this death’s wake is to emulate the Refusés from 19th century Paris by doubling down on being independent.
Because those 36 million people that aren’t paying attention to the Oscars anymore? Maybe a few hundred of them would rather pay attention to you.
A profitable persona projected onto a famous person through the media and news industries
In the context of independent consulting and creative work, research is small-scale, non-academic, and typically qualitative as opposed to quantitative. Thematically, it’s both specific and general. Its primary goals include reducing client risk around making decisions and generating new options/outputs. It is both an activity – materials-gathering – and a type of structured thinking.
An early precursor to the modern-day “business and personal development” book was Machiavelli’s The Prince, in which you find the “fox and the lion” meme. For Machiavelli, they were metaphors for mindsets you should adopt as a ruler. Intimidating like a lion, perceptive like a fox. Of course, he suggests you adopt both mindsets.
“… choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves.”
Whenever you find the lion and fox pairing in anything you’re reading or watching, it almost always derives from the passage above rather than from Aesop’s Fables or the Bible.
I’m not so concerned with ruling a feudal state though, or ruling any else besides yourself, for that matter.
Business writers use the lion and fox to talk about ruling over workforces or navigating workforce politics.
I’m going to use it to answer the question people ask me, how do you become an independent consultant? This essay tries to answer that question while also recognizing its variant: how do you become an independent freelancer?
So we’re talking about the fox-and-lion in the context of:
And we’re assuming you already have economically valuable skill – so while that is a prerequisite to becoming independent, I don’t address it here.
Here’s what I think and this is also the essay’s tldr: sell like a lion, market like a fox.
But how specifically? By doing really hard things that you are afraid of over and over. I explain below.
Lions
Scientifically speaking, I don’t know any more about lions than Machiavelli did, apart from casually watching nature shows. I see why they have a reputation for bravery, as they fend off packs of menacing jackals, protecting themselves or hoarding the carcasses of their fallen prey. Either that, or these nature shows have great film editors?
I also see that lions are often hungry, literally. A few days full, but most days very hungry. Moreover, they’re hungry and desperate – eat or die; they have little safety net or job market to fall back on.
To become an independent consultant who actually sells, you have to be hungry like this. This is especially true for anyone who has no paycheck/workplace consulting background, or MBA network, and thus fewer connections.
Most “outsider” indie strategy consultants bootstrap into it by freelancing: selling skills in the form of custom services gigs. They may have plenty of word-of-mouth demand for skills, but probably less for strategy, which is essentially what a consultant sells (or more commonly, some blend of skills and strategy). That has to be fought for.
And this is where the lion in you comes in..
The last is the most important. You must manufacture an excess of nearly-absurd self-confidence in the value of your professional skills or strategic thinking. You have to know that you’re the best option available. It’s like Damian Lillard knowing he is the best basketball player on the court, even when playing against Lebron James. It’s not rational, it’s an attitude thing.
And that’s how you get started selling.
But is it enough? Not even close.
Once you know how to adopt the lion, you make a hard change and become the fox.
This is partly because you can’t be a hungry lion forever. We’re not wired that way. We’re group animals who have always found new ways of acquiring calories and other forms of wealth.
Secondly, lions only go so far in business – once people learn your act, the hunger, effort, and persistence become easier to thwart.
Foxes
Most important part first: the fox writes.
And not only that, but the fox publishes what they write. As a writer, the fox is the marketer to the lion’s sales closer, but also:
But as Machiavelli suggests, you must adopt both animals’ postures. The courage of the lion lets the fox write without training in how to do so. Ego? Forget it and sacrifice it. Never looking stupid? Forget it. Never repeating yourself? Never boring anyone, never making someone disagree with you, never annoying someone? The lion-hearted fox is brave enough not to care about any of that.
In the ambitiously titled, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World, author Walter Kiechel profiles one of the pioneers of what I call “manufacturing strategy consulting”, Bruce Henderson. Henderson was an iconoclastic, brainy academic and the founder of Boston Consulting Group. Kiechel reveals that during BCG’s first 10 years, Henderson wrote over 400 articles, much like a hyper-productive tenured professor might. He had an editor (1 of the first 6 full-time BCG employees) but he wrote all those articles himself.
This was unheard of in that era and is still rare – to publish almost 1 substantive article per week over a decade is unusual for any individual. Compare that to the McKinsey Quarterly, founded in 1964 possibly in response to Henderson’s weekly journal begun in 1963 – Henderson alone published 10 times as many essays as McKinsey did journals.
Bruce Henderson was by all accounts a lion but he was definitely a fox.
Along with McKinsey, and BCG-offshoot Bain, his business went on to do “great things” – their collective historical legacy will be helping corporate, globalist America cleverly undo FDR’s social democratic America piece by piece. And get stinking rich doing so. Few foxes ever stole more eggs from the henhouse. (Quite the “secret intelligentsia”, eh?)
Maybe you want to do more than steal eggs, but Henderson set a good example for any consultant of the effectiveness of a writing practice. It set in stone his reputation as a left-brained intellectual and let him become widely known beyond his company and customer base – in this way it was an excellent content marketing strategy.
Henderson’s publishing practice didn’t preclude him staying hungry, persistent, bold – on the contrary, it complimented those traits nicely.
There’s one more thing that foxes do that lions don’t: specialize in specific kinds of opportunities. When family farms died out, and henhouses with them, foxes had to move on to campgrounds. How do they steal the Clif bar from the North Face rucksack? By specializing. And the more they write about it, the more ideas they get for how to do that well.
Cubs
To anyone starting out, be a fox cub first. And a lion cub. And by starting out, I mean leveling up:
This means practice selling and marketing the next thing while still making money from the current thing. Pretty straightforward advice.
I also know people who have made all of these jumps without a publishing practice to speak of. That’s fine but it’s hard mode and it’s going to get harder – especially for those of you in bucket (a).
So practice writing and publishing something frequently before you quit your job. Think you’d rather podcast or make videos than write?
Smile, you’re still in the writing business (:
Those great video essays on by your Favorite YouTuber? They are written. Same for podcasts.
Ah, but what about those great interview format podcasts with “spontaneous” conversation? Yes, it is spontaneous (well, sometimes) but the conversational matter trades on ideas developed through writing practices on the part of both host and guest. Joe Rogan was a standup comic who wrote his material. Most of his guests? Similar story.
In short, the fox cub publishes so they can grow up to be a real fox. 100 published pieces of content totaling 50,000 words in a year isn’t a bad goal.
And the lion cub moonlights. Jason Fried sold newspapers at 10 but if you didn’t have early sales experience, you must sell something (ideally your skills or content) on the side while still holding down a job.
Fear
In Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers, he laments that we talk to strangers in fear. According to the data that Gladwell analyzes and presents in the book, US police kill so many people unnecessarily for this very reason. He encourages an institutional shift away from fear of strangers towards trust and goodwill for strangers (along with and end to gotcha-policing that penalizes technicalities).
In the same way, both the lion and fox cubs have to overcome the fear of speaking to strangers. You market to strangers, you sell to strangers. Some of them you will get to know, some will become clients, friends, partners, etc.
It takes great courage to call strangers on the phone. But then it gets easier. It’s not a great business development technique, but it is great for lion-training. The same is true of publishing online.
Of course, the fear never really goes away. That’s just part of being a fox and a lion.
To your success,
Rowan
If your website isn’t launching your business isn’t launching. If your website isn’t relaunching, then your business isn’t relaunching. Or you’re not intro’ing your new products or services. Your new brand identity. You’re stuck.
I’ve contributed to over 1,100 websites and web applications since the dotcom boom. The majority got stuck, which I define as taking longer than 4 months. There’s only one valid (and quite rare((I acknowledge that some people merely enjoy taking lots of time to produce websites. They have no external time dependency. They have no budget constraints. They enjoy the process. If that’s you, then bless you – and take your time. But you’re also an outlier!))) reason for a new site taking more than 3 or 4 months yet this is still a common occurrence today. And a small site can take less than a week, if you’re willing to invest in that outcome. That includes everything: design, write, build, and launch.
Agencies that bill hourly or monthly don’t mind it taking longer, of course. Or employees who need busy-ness. But setting aside self-interest, here’s why I see website launches getting stuck from the business owner’s perspective:
Try this instead – take these momentum-assassins and make them rewards for launching.
Let your grammar-freak spell check after the site is launched. Let your web developer optimize for speed after the site is launched. Let your marketing person optimize for SEO after the site is launched.
You can even hold a long, open-ended meeting about how to make the site even better after the site is launched.
And here’s the best one: content thoroughness. If only all your employees – and you as the business owner – had the courage to share everything you know as portable content (in writing, audio, imagery, or video).
Or even just what you know that occurs to you pre-launch. You can even look at the redesign process as a an opportunity for content marketing ideation. That section you wanted to add, edit, red-edit, debate, etc,, about your discovery process? Make it into content. Same for deep-dives into your services and solutions.
I’d keep a list of ideas like that – getting to use it is your reward for beating the 4-month deadline.
Have a nice launch (:
– R