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• Should you productize your services?
• If so, just one product or many – a “product ladder”?

I really don’t know. People I respect have wildly different approaches to this.

• Pia Silva: “Focus all your energy on making one great productized service (and one “intro product”); don’t publish your services on your site“
• Jonathan Stark: “Offer a product ladder offering multiple services; publish them on your site“

Which is the “right” approach? For you, for your clients? Both options above seem good and I think it depends which is best. Pia’s model is probably better if you’re:

• newer to consulting or content-creation
• risk-tolerant
• relish brand-building
• have a smaller audience or network
• less meticulous
• less given to a publishing practice

Whereas Jonathan’s logic’n’discipline approach might work better if you have been consulting for 10 years or more, are super-organized, and have a big mailing list.

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But forget about how. or whether, to package your services into products for a minute; that’s not the larger point I want to make.

The point is related to this rule from Venkatesh Rao: “Offer choices, not recommendations“.

A specific recommendation can be an illusory comfort. Thus, a consultant offers wisdom, instead of certainty, in the form of two or more great choices.

Part of this approach’s value proposition is that the client gets to contrast smart choices offered, like those of Pia and Jonathan.

This compare and contrast process may lead your clients to make valuable self-recommendations. More importantly, it may lead them to think more effectively about the right areas of their business.

You don’t always get to do this, though. Some of your work might still look like providing specific recommendations (ie deliverables). So look for your opportunities.

When’s the next time you will have the chance to offer wise choices instead of a certain recommendation? How will you frame your choices as strategies to consider, not deliverables to revise? And will you resist the urge to push your pet favorite?

Enjoy that challenge (:
Rowan

 

According to Deborah Levy, unwillingness to copy is a form of selfcentred-ness. This prevents you from, say, learning foreign languages and customs when you’re abroad. The Duolingo app, on the other hand, teaches you a new language by practically forcing you to mimic, like a parrot.

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Gary Halbert was a master of direct marketing, which it’s useful to think of as an obsolescent form of marketing belonging to the industrial era. But he was also a thoughtful person, a good writer, and a father who wrote an advice book for his son called, The Boron Letters. (Sounds like a Jack Vance novel).

I didn’t read the whole thing but used my Kindle app’s search function to go straight to the part about copying, to research a longer article on the subject.

Anyway, in The Boron Letters, Gary advises his son to learn business (not just advertising but business) by copying famous advertisements like this one by hand. Like 1000s of others have done over the eons, hand-copying the works of writers who came before them – “copywork”.

Well, it’s the same with digital products.

For example, say you are selling a book in 2021. (If so, you’re selling an ebook. The only difference is length and how you attempt to position it). The book’s front cover is a web page, not a piece of paper or cardboard or whatever. It’s something on a screen. Or many screens ideally.

Screen-as-book-cover has its advantages. For example, see how James Clear lets you download the first chapter of Atomic Habits before buying it – and gain him an email subscriber? It’s like Amazon but without the seizure-inducing UI. The point is – cardboard covers can’t do that.

If you’re making books or other digital content such as newsletter articles, ebooks, or whitepapers, consider copying James Clear approach. Merlin Sheldrake does this perhaps more artfully. But the “cover” of James Clear’s book works better. 

*    *    *

Gary Halbert also said that you will start to sound like whoever you are copying by hand. Of course. That’s not the punchline. If you blatantly copy Clear’s homepage, you will sound and feel like him, as though you were wearing a James Clear bodysuit and voice modulator. 

But as Gary Halbert points out, your peculiarities will eventually emerge and set you apart from whoever your copying. Because it’s creepy to fake being someone else for long. And you just have an urge to erase what doesn’t feel right.

If you don’t copy James Clear (or anyone else) as you make things, you will continue to sound like some undifferentiated mix of all of the other infinite content shoved down your brain every day. Your voice can emerge from that swamp, but more slowly, without the accelerant that the art of copying gives you.

Publishing is one of the pillars of independent consulting and entrepreneurship. Maybe not high-frequency publishing, maybe not even writing – but some kind of publishing. So the next question is who do you want to copy and why?

Bests
Rowan

 

A thought process and business practice that consists of closely examining a word we use in our business, deciding that we want it to have some new meaning, committing to the redefinition that comes out of that process, and publishing it in our marketing materials.

The practice attaches a 2nd (or 100th, as the case may be) definition of every word, term, or phrase that is important to one’s business.

Storytelling was originally an advertising technique but is now associated with brand strategy. It is also called, for added polish, Strategic Storytelling. This is a concept and a professional practice, as opposed to a copywriting technique. As such, it is a form of Strategic Consulting.

Strategic storytelling calls for creating stories about how people experience a brand. Thus, things like features, benefits, and UVP are revealed through characters’ experience with them in a brief story rather than through, for example, bullet points. Story characters could be customers, constituents, employees, owners, execs, etc. 

Other common business-world synonyms include the slightly more abstract concepts, Narrative Messaging and Strategic Narrative. 

An umbrella concept under which all forms of communications, from messaging to advertising to publishing to “talking points memos”, are supposedly guided and united by strategic imperatives. Largely used in the context of the military, corporate manufacturing, and Fortune 500 in general. More closely related to Propaganda than to the term Communications by itself. 

A form of Messaging which focuses on human characters experiencing emotions related to a brand. The experience may be implied rather than described; a plot isn’t necessarily required.

You could argue that its synonym Storytelling is more concerned with creating narratives with an actual plot arch. In practice though, storytelling, strategic storytelling, brand story, and strategic narrative are largely interchangeable in business.

The propagation of points of view, perspectives, and/or facts that are false and misleading. Propaganda attempts to create agreement among a great majority of its audience while benefitting a small minority of it. Propaganda tends to favor the status quo.

Imagine spending the night at someone’s house and your host has taken time from his schedule to read a book about you and your world.

If you spent the night at Teddy Roosevelt’s White House, you might have expected him to trot out hunting trophies or war stories. Maybe he did – but only if he knew you’d be interested. Or that’s my guess, at least.

That’s because every time he invited a guest to spend the night at The White House, he read a book about them before their visit. Maybe a book they’d written, or a book about their country or region, or one about their profession, industry, hobbies, or interests.

This was more than about ensuring good dinner conversation, of course. 

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Now consider 3 of Venkateh Rao’s 42 imperatives for indie consulting:

Learn what’s unique about the sector and its history

Learn the sector’s paper-napkin math and unique measures of itself

Demystify the industry’s science and technology stack for yourself

And ask yourself – do you think Teddy Roosevelt ever failed to grok these basics?

I don’t think he could have broken up the rail and steel cartels if he hadn’t known their numbers, the history, the science and technology.

I don’t know if Teddy Roosevelt was a good person, but I know that he faced down people even more formidable than Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg combined – and prevailed. As did a thriving economy left in his wake.

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The One Book Rule is dead simple: for every one of your 5-10 important clients in a given year, read one book pertinent to each. This is totally experience-based advice, by the way. 

Feel free to augment that book with blog posts, films, documentaries, white papers, podcasts, etc. I watched The Notebook when I had an Alzheimer’s research client. Just don’t skip the book. If you don’t like reading, listen to it.

What is pertinent? Anything that helps you understand the client – their business model, their industry, their customers, their solution. 

What’s not necessarily pertinent? Stuff that makes you or your company a better person or business person. That’s great material, of course, but the One Book Rule is about understanding the client’s world. (Imagine Teddy reading a book about how to be a better leader instead of a book about his guest – no.)

What’s a “most important client”? You have to define that for yourself. But this is a useful frame if your business model is to serve dozens or even hundreds of clients per year, as opposed to the traditional consulting model of serving 5 to 15 or so.

Why a book?

A. Depth of engagement in an activity (most business books take at least 100 hours to write) lets you pull insight out of it. Check your Audible listening times:

• Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss – 8 hours and 7 minutes
• This is Marketing, Seth Godin – 7 hours and 2 minutes
• To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink – 6 hours and 5 minutes

A good book, even a short one, takes 6 to 8 hours to read aloud without stopping. Imagine scripting yourself speaking for 6 hours straight and everything you say is value. How much goes into that.

B. Hardly anyone else does this, so you will set yourself apart. This takes you beyond sine qua non’s such as the basic industry numbers, the tech stack, and company financials. You want to bring 1000s of little ideas to the table, or be able to.

And of course, you get bonus points if you find a book few others have read (“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking”, says Nagasawa in Norwegian Wood).

And on that note, I’d love to hear what you’re reading (:

Rowan

 

 

 

 

“I help businesses answer that question.”

This is sometimes my response to, “What do you do?”

Not always, actually, but this response works when:

• the person has asked with more-than-polite interest and might humor me
• I’m also in the mood for a conversation
• I sense the person won’t like or grok the earnest, “LinkedIn bio” answer

What do you do?

I help businesses answer that question

This might provokes a little mirth, followed by a follow-up question:

haha, ok but no, really, what do you do?

or better yet:

ok, and how do you do that?

From which point the conversation can proceed in many different ways.

One takeaway is that “elevator speech” is a misnomer. It should not be a speech, a pitch, or a statement. Or a blurb resembling any of these. Even when a potential investor or client directly requests a short pitch – don’t do it. You’re not a performing monkey. Instead, throw out a hook that kickstarts a back-and-forth exchange. This works both in copy and in conversation. 

Once the hook works..

How can you direct elevator exchange conversations so they benefit both sides?

If you sense interest, guide them towards figuring out what you do for themselves, with your help. Let them make their own definition. Analogies work really well here.

What do you?

Have you heard of Chuck E Cheese?

Yeah..

I own a place that’s like Chuck E Cheese but it’s not for kids – we serve alcohol and we don’t have clowns and balloons. It’s called Big Barrel.

Hah, got it! So like, Chuck E Cheese for adults?

Ok, I cheated a little with that example. Consumer brands are always easier to explain. Even if no one’s ever heard of them.

But what if you’re a software or consulting business that does something complex and B2B-ish? How do you elevator-exchange that?

What do you do?

Well, you know those crazy wall diagrams with lots of strings, and photos, and stuff – like on detective shows?

Yeah, ok…

Well, I make diagrams like that for private equity firms. I’m a data scientist, I make sense of business metrics

Ahh, so you’re like a business-data detective? 

That’s not a bad outcome for a 30-second elevator exchange. The tagline convention of “_____ detective” is hoaky through overuse, so it won’t do as a slogan – but in conversation, it’s a great way to explain what this person does.

Note that the entire exchange passes Jonathan Stark’s Soggy test; it is specific. It comprises what he’d would call a Laser-Focused Positioning Statement.

I am a data scientist who helps private equity firms to make sense of business metrics. Unlike my competitors, I have an unusual detective-murder-board approach to reporting.

The problem with LFPS is nobody talks like that; it’s a statement that tries too hard to be accurate and complete. Thus, it might not lead anywhere conversationally. Whereas your conversational exchange is more likely to invoke a follow-up question: 

• OK, so what business metrics to PE firms need to track?
• Are you hands-on with the data itself, where you can actually clean and transform data?
• Do your reports actually look like a crazy detective’s murder investigation diagram?

And so on. To get a quality question like one of these, leave something unanswered. Be specific without falling into the mental trap of “accuracy” or “completeness”. Don’t be too on the nose; actually – say as little as possible. The goal is general understanding and curiosity – forget accuracy.

Feel free to try it on me, what do you do?

Best
Rowan

What do these two paths have in common?

• Freelancer (solo) -> Expertise consultant -> Strategy consultant
• Agency/Shop owner -> Expertise consultancy owner -> Strategy consultant

Obviously, they have the same concluding point. But they also share two key tipping points.

More Specialized Knowledge Than Clients

The first and most important tipping point is having more valuable industry knowledge than most clients. Through work and study, freelancers and agencies begin to know more about an important aspect of their client’s industry than most of their clients do. This is about more than technical skills.

For example, I worked in fundraising and marketing for universities, hospitals and other nonprofits for a total of about 13 years, both for a large software and services firm and for an agency/consultancy that I co-owned. At some point in that 13-year period, it became clear I knew quite a bit more than my clients about the technical aspects of nonprofit marketing and fundraising. Later though, it also became clear that I better knew the strategy behind that. 

The ‘more knowledge’ tipping point happens organically, mostly through doing the work over and over, but also through self-directed study, such as reading and writing about books (like Dan Pallota’s Uncharitable, in my case) or writing about your work. As a rule, for each major engagement, you should read one book and 5 articles corresponding to it. The study part is essential for grasping how your domain knowledge is related to the industry’s bigger issues.

Of course, fundraising and marketing are just two facets of managing the success of, say, a university. You don’t need to know more than your clients about every part of their business, but you need to know more than they do about at least one or two important aspects of it.

Different Mindset than Before

That by itself isn’t enough though; you need a change in mindset too, among other things.

When you own an agency, this mindset shift can be a little easier because you naturally assume the role of advice-giver. Sometimes clients will even try to pay you for your advice, “we just want to pick your brain for an hour; we know you’re busy so we’ll pay you”.

Of course, clients may try to acquire your advice without adequate compensation. This is especially true if you are mired in the tarpit of hourly billing. But that’s a separate issue; the point is that someone will pay you for your advice.

Then the spark happens, “what if I did a bunch of these brain-picking sessions each week, could that be my entire business?”. The tipping points of acquiring more knowledge than clients may happen gradually but this one usually happens in an instant.

The problem with that business idea is that most clients actually want your advice coupled with your ability to deliver some execution on it. Or the problem might be that you enjoy running an agency or even doing the work yourself if you are solo. Or maybe you find that you can’t even generate insights without at least approaching the problem first from the perspective of the skilled services solutions provider.

This is why it’s tough to jump from a highly-skilled freelancer or agency owner to a Strategy Consultant overnight. And almost impossible without either (a) an established publishing practice or (b) an Alan Weiss-style credentials (Ivy League-ish MBA and/or prestigious brand name work history, etc.)

Which is just fine because the in-between point, that I define as Expertise Consulting (“valuable services backed by strategic insight about industry/market/audience”), might be the place you want to stay for now. 

Have a great week ahead (:

Rowan

 

PS. I think you’ll agree that the word “consulting” is so fraught with negative associations and over-use, that it’s almost impossible to define? That’s why I find it useful to break it down into certain categories of consulting. If any of these resonate with you (or don’t), I’d be curious to hear why or why not.