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If you’ve read Storybrand, maybe the hero-villain-guide paradigm hooked you. To summarize for those who haven’t read it:

• you’re not the hero (of your brand story)
• your customer is
• you’re just the guide
• and only together can you defeat the villain

So how do you talk about your brand without casting yourself as the hero? Or do you.

This is a keen question in the world of B2B startups. In this world, there are two major types – spinoff startups and plain old startups.

1.
Spin-off startups are founded by owners (or sometimes execs) of established solutions businesses of some kind. Like Basecamp funded by the services of 37Signals, a web design and development company.

There are tens of thousands of other anonymous examples – software firms, consulting firms, digital agencies, and even less tech-related businesses: law firms, mortgage brokerages, insurance companies, logistics companies, medical companies, and so on.

Based on new market problems they observe, such businesses often get the idea for a specialized kind of solution, usually packaged as a SaaS product, mobile app, a two-way marketplace (the hardest to pull off), or a web-based, productized service. It’s a new way for them to monetize their expertise.

Spin-off startups are also usually run by an experienced team, a hunting party, who knows how to run a successful business together – and how to hire talent to help them do so.

By the way, this is the better kind of startup client to engage with as an independent consultant. As vgr says:

Choose hunting-party clients over individuals or impersonal organizations

2.
Startup companies are the weird kind that everyone thinks of when they hear the word “startup”.

These have largely become a way for the investor classes to transfer wealth from one generation to the next. And on a similar token, startups are ways for enterprise businesses to expand to new markets or at least dabble in them.

In rare cases, startup investors do effect the transfer of wealth to middle-class founders without significant corporate experience. Rand Fishkin documents how the worlds of millionaire investors and middle-class dreamers collide in Lost and Founder.

In even rarer cases, founders are bootstrapped (not funded by investors or by the profits of an already established business). In the B2B world, it’s hard to bootstrap a product solution without having first built a consulting or other services business and thus learned a few ropes.

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It’s hard for bootstrappers to cast themselves as the guide instead of the hero, especially once traction is achieved. Because they are kind of heroes.

It’s equally hard for founders of funded startups to resist hero-dom. At least in my experience.

Looking for some data to back up that hunch, I had a quick look at the description text of funded Ycombinator startups in the B2B category.

If you filter for young startups (10 or fewer employees) and compare that with mature startups (200 or more employees), you’ll see a clear trend: you.

In the mature startups’ description, one observes the use of the word, “you” or “your”, either explicitly or by implication. This is because they have learned to cast their customers as the hero and their solutions as the assistant, per the Storybrand paradigm.

Of course, it’s easier for them to do so after they reach market and/or VC-world validation. Before that happens, they’re still pitching themselves to investors. Fundraising instead of selling. And on top of that, they have the media celebrating startup founders as cultural heroes. Or the startup world micro-media of social media accounts celebrating their successes.

This validation not a bad thing per se, but it apparently discourages them from thinking about how their customers as heroes – dealing with real life pain-in-the-ass villains.

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See how much easier it is for the spinoff startup brand, with founders coming from a long-term services firm? They don’t need the validation because they’ve already built a sustainable business. They don’t need to be the hero all the time because they’re used to being the guide. That’s basically what consulting is.

In fact, they’re happy to be both the guide and the hero.

Thus they have solved the hero’s dilemma, which is realizing that every hero has to step into the guide role from time to time. And vice-versa.

Now let’s zoom out from the startup world – whatever your business, do you cast yourself as hero, guide, or a little of both? 

Have a great weekend (:

Rowan

 

 

Quick tophat: a warm welcome to those of you who joined via Venkatesh Rao’s final Art of Gig’s post, glad you are here (:

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Since I was a latecomer to Art of Gig, I had to set aside time this weekend to devour some early episodes. To my great satisfaction, I found one of my favorite subjects: rules.

I’m a simple person: I see a list of rules for independent consulting, I click.

Maybe that’s because there’s no standards-body or degree program for the indie consultant. We need to make up our own doctrines as we go, and it’s massively helpful when someone does that for us. Whether we agree with each and every item of a given doctrine is beside the point. They’re a welcome framework, playbook, manual; we’ll figure out how not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I’ve tried to figure out what business manifestos (doctrines, manual, etc) have in common by comparing The Communist Manifesto to the kind of manifestos you find in modern business and personal development books. Five things:

1. an assumption of universality in the context of a specific group
2. a statement of unavoidable problems
3. a bias for solution-fairness
4. the promise of otherwise unattainable benefits
5. a clear path to systematic changes in behavior

If that sounds appealing to you, then Philip Morgan’s indie consulting doctrine on indieexperts.io may be useful to you.

Just as Win Without Pitching was over a decade ago.

And the 42 Great Imperatives might also be now. Like WWP, the 42 Great Imperatives has tremendous clarity and authority. But it’s also very specific and comprehensive (and quite a bit newer).

It puts into words many half-formed suspicions about independent consulting that have bounced around in my head for years without a specific definition.

To take just one example:

Solve for industry-level questions, not organization or world-level answers

True! It’s enlightening to ask, how does this relate to the entire world? And it helps your practice if you’re looking for meaning in addition to profitability. But your client hired you for the latter.

It’s also tempting to solve organizational problems – but when you get mired in operations or efficiency, you have less energy to exert on juicier profitability problems.

People sell to industries or audiences not to the whole world. So the question becomes, how should the industry be doing things in the near future? How will the audience behave in the near future? Powerful brand messaging lies in the truthful answers to those questions.

Other examples from 42 Great Imperatives that I loved:

Never assign homework the client didn’t ask for

Never accept homework you didn’t ask for

Avoid polished deliverables

Document through communication (such as email), not documents

Do not claim unambiguous value addition amidst ambiguous outcomes

Retrospectives of whole outcomes over personal value-addition estimates

Train your memory to remember an hour of conversation without notes

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

Discourage use of purely internal jargon in how clients talk to you

Learn more from every client than they learn from you

Generalize what you learn for public consumption, but not too soon

Reading and reflecting on these, I ask – how can this person know me so well? Or know what it is I need to practice so well?

Through his own experience, study, and writing of course.

It’s like David C Baker’s, “Drop and Give Me 20” mandate. This asks you to be able to provide, at the drop of a hat, 20 observations about your clients and their industry. (A reference to Army drill sergeants ordering soldiers-in-training to instantly perform 20 push-ups/press-ups.)

These 20 insights are based on observed patterns and double as insight and advice. As David says,

As you read your list of 20 things to me, nearly off the top of your head, will I have some aha moments? Will I learn something?

Now mash that up with the famous piece of writing advice from Du Maupassant:

“Go out into the streets of Paris and pick out a cab driver. He will look to you very much like every other cab driver. But study him until you can describe him so that he is seen in your description to be an individual, different from every other cab driver in the world.”

This is the true task: description. Except in David’s paradigm, spending a day in the streets isn’t enough; instead, you might spend years or even a decade – like Venkatesh’s decade as an indie consultant. You describe your industry as an individual, different from every other. And have a very specific idea of exactly what she should do.

There are two primary groups we can speak to this way, people like our clients and people like us. (And let’s be honest, here, there’s more and more overlap between these two groups.)

So far we’re mostly discussing great rules for us, as independent consultants or perhaps creatives.

But what about your rules for your clients? If you were asked to “Drop and Give me 20” (or 42 if you want to go next-level) about them, what would they be? What should they do next year – or stop doing?

Talk soon,
Rowan

 

 

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.

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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:

• products we buy
• the services we buy
• our cultural values
• our political views
• our lifestyle

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.

• organize events independently
• build networks of complementary talent
• write and talk about your work
• take responsibility for your own sales and marketing

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.