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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:

1. indie consulting and entrepreneurship, especially with respect to
2. sales and marketing

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..

• Hungry
• Persistent
• Effortful, at least in sporadic high-energy bursts
• Self-confident

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:

• the consultative seller
• the creator of new ideas about what and how to sell
• the one who sells ideas
• the one who attracts new opportunities

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:

1. moving from paycheck land, skills in hand, to kill-what-you-eat land
2. moving from selling skills to selling a hybrid of skills-and-strategy
3. moving from selling skills-and-strategy to selling products
4. moving from selling skills-and-strategy to selling pure strategy

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:

1. Linear thinking. A while back I wrote that website redesign is a state of mind as opposed to a one-off project with a beginning and an end. When you embrace this reality, you worry much less about launching now and revising later.
2. Being thorough. Being thorough is a good thing, right? Wrong. Not when everyone tries to put everything they know into the business website. Take a small business of experts. Let’s say 10 people. These people could each right 100 blog posts about what they know. That’s 1000 blog posts worth of what the company knows. Aside from being time-consuming, this causes hard-to-navigate bloat and weak content. 
3. Unclear positioning. This is related to #2 – the more content you launch with, the easier it is to lose thematic focus. You might have many product lines, many services, many great employees, many types of clients. That’s all great. But there should be one theme to rule them all. It should echo repetitively throughout your website. When you try to weave multiple themes, you end up stepping in the tarpit of weeks spent crafting intricately complex headlines and taglines.
4. Perfectionism. One or more perfectionists are dominating the process and making incredibly convincing arguments – to themselves and others – why the web needs to be delayed. This is because they are afraid. Not to sound trite, but don’t be afraid. Or at least recognize perfectionism for what it is.
5. Meetings. Avoid open-ended meetings while you are launching. They are a platform for perfectionism and second-guessing to fester. On the actual web design and development side, opt for Agile style standup meetings that spur momentum rather than kill it.
6. Editing. This might be perfectionism, or it might just be a genuine love of editing. Or it might just be comfort with the feeling of being in a creative, pre-launch zone. Whatever the case, in this phase the site content, imagery, spacing, navigation, and everything else, is edited, added to, and re-edited in never-ending cycles.

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

In web app development, perhaps the best known “framework” is Bootstrap. It makes it easier to build a web app’s “front end”, which is what you are looking at right now. The Symfony framework, on the other hand, lets you build an app’s backend. Still other frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, help you build both. 

These “computing frameworks” save massive amounts of time, heartache, and risk by providing you, the web/app maker, with rock-solid, standardized, exquisitely well thought-out building blocks. They make it easier for software to eat the world. They make it so that websites that used to cost 2 million dollars now cost $50,000.

You might want to think about the frameworks you use – or about making your own.

Your framework doesn’t have to as grand and ambitious as Ruby on Rails. It can be tiny, actually, as long as it helps people make or do something of value. Actually, smaller is better – most computing frameworks become so cumbersome they defeat their own purpose.

And your framework doesn’t have to be about building something concrete, either (web apps are physical objects, ultimately – they are built out of microscopic pieces of carbon).

Now, if it is about building something physical – that’s also great! A framework for making fruit juice, perhaps. I hope you decommoditize the world.

But your framework can also be conceptual, which is helpful when you create complex creative and technical solutions.

A shining example is the Storybrand framework.

Like Bootstrap, Storybrand is used in business. It helps you build a business story and extract messages from it that you can use in your marketing.

In the Storybrand framework, there are four essential characters. See if you can spot them.

1. A Character
2. Has a Problem/Villain
3. And Meets a Guide
4. Who Gives Them a Plan
5. And Calls Them to Action
6. That Helps Them Avoid Failure
7. And Ends in a Success

Sidebar: Storybrand’s creator Donald Miller did something pretty clever here – he made the building blocks of a Storybrand “brandscript” also serve as the chapter structure of the book. Maybe you can write out your framework as a miniature story as well?

Anyway, did you find the four characters?

• Hero – this is what you call a character who avoids failure, ends in success, and thwarts a villain
• Guide – this is what you call a character who helps the Hero
• Villain – you know who this is
• Customer – this is another word for success*

*In fact, “And ends in success”, could be, “And ends in a customer”.

In the conceptual frameworks we create as consultants, we’re the guide. Our customer is the hero (not us).

If you have those two basic pieces in place, you’re on the right track.

It could be as simple as an intake questionnaire, an interview process, or a document that your customer fills out. Alternatively, it could be a complex, 6-month process that combines your consulting, your training course, your software products, and your services.

Here’s the main thing about frameworks – provide useful building blocks, make it simple to use, tell it as a story, have your customer win in the end.

Very best,
Rowan

 

 

 

 

Messaging is the clarification of value using words, images, and other contextual hints, in order to impact how people think or feel about a brand, its products, or just its projects and initiatives.

If it doesn’t affect or reinforce positioning, it’s not messaging.

Also see Positioning, Brand Messaging, Copy, Propaganda, and Strategic Narrative

The medium is the message 
~Marshall McLuhan

People mistakenly use messaging interchangeably with copywriting but they’re different in two specific ways.

Firstly, copywriting tries to convince someone to take (or decline to take) a specific action, usually now or in the near future. Messaging, though, is inherently more long-term and it may not care at all whether it results in a specific action. 

That’s because the purpose of messaging is to create new understanding or belief. Copywriting doesn’t necessarily care about that.

In Brand Messaging, for example, the messages in question are more or less constrained to the brand’s identity: “this is what the brand is about, stands for, has expertise in, or where it comes from”.

All of which might eventually lead you, the message recipient, towards a broad, flexible range of actions/non-actions. But that’s the secondary, not the primary, purpose of messaging. If you look at it that way, the long-term value of good messaging will far exceed that of good copywriting. 

Secondly, copywriting is limited to written words, with some small allowance for how those words are presented with respect to spacing, font type, etc. (which quickly overlaps with design).

You write copy, you make messaging. 

Sidebar: it’s easy to make the case that Benjamin Franklin practiced modern copywriting during his long career as a printing press entrepreneur. He wrote not just political essays but ad copy and set the type for both; he knew the advertising business well. He experimented greatly with spacing, in a way that surprised his contemporaries yet made his publications easier to read. Perhaps this is why the Declaration of Independence, written by Jefferson and copyedited by Franklin, was visually bold compared to similar artifacts from that era. Its layout was part of its messaging (“message: the people making this declaration now observe their own bold standards“). 

But the point is that copywriting exists solely as words (thus it’s impressive when well done), whereas messaging always consist of words, or maybe lack thereof, delivered in a specific, deliberate context. Messaging might be wrapped in any number of contextual clues, from medium, as McLuhan clued in on decades ago, to physical location, to clothing, to format, to color, to voice, to timing. And more – there’s no limit to context.

The selection of speakers and performers at the presidential inauguration, for example. The selection itself was a part of the event’s messaging.

It has to be said though, that this was an example of clumsy messaging revealing the myopia of the Neo-Liberal establishment. It wasn’t quite as dull as the new president’s speechwriting, but something was off – the word unity fell flat. Messaging doesn’t always work.

So the next question becomes: should the person who writes your business copy also make your business messaging?

Very best
Rowan

While discussing the current, industrial-era “elite”, Venkatesh Rao has this to say about the elite’s counterpart, the masses:

The world measures you. Height, weight, gender, wealth, skin color, zip code, credit score, criminal record, degrees, job titles, parentage, and so on. This is what makes you part of the industrial-age masses. 

For me, this sounds familiar. It sounds like the century-old practice of database-driven demographic targeting, recently supercharged by Big Tech’s collective mass-appropriation of private information. You could also say, “Big Tech takes your measure. Height, weight, gender, wealth”, etcetera.

This type of analytics-driven digital marketing can be a bit slimy (not always). Do people really understand Facebook and Google’s Terms of Service? Or do they just want to see family photos or find income? It depends.

A less-conflicted form of digital advertising is retargeting. All you need to know to retarget is, “did this device-user recently visit my site and almost buy something?“. Don’t need to know pedigree, genotype, credit score, or phrenological measurements. But retargeting doesn’t help fill the “top of the funnel”.

And let’s be honest, mass-marketing and advertising will keep slicing and dicing people as long as it’s allowed to. Running demographically-targeted ads on Facebook/Instagram is world’s most effective form of cold selling (which retargeting isn’t). Cold ads work.

In fact, thanks to the Internet, we are living through the height of “industrial marketing”. 

Yet at the same time..

1. we have to ask how long will industrial internet marketing last – and will it crash and burn or diffuse slowly?
2. we’ve already entered a new era of marketing that is also – paradoxically – hastened by the Internet: post-industrial marketing

What does that look like for independent consultants and entrepreneurs?

Simple answer: a content marketing practice. ‘Building a Storybrand’ won’t enough (though it helps!).

Better answer: not sure yet. But here are some ideas.

Learning. Probably some kind of structured self-learning practice that forces us to make better products and design better services, among other things. I met a woman in an Akimbo workshop who “was in a PhD program” – of her own creation. Because there was no Dharma PhD program on the market. Another name for the program is “Independent PhD in the Philosophy of Mindfulness”. It consists of practice, scholarship, teaching and discourse, each of which she mindmaps on her site.

Connection. This means some kind of content marketing practice that connects what your business does, or your opinions as a business owner, beyond what you now think of as your client base and your peers. We have to figure out a way to connect what we do to the broader world that you would never see at an industry conference.

Paradoxically, the things we make or do will still need to apply for a small group of people. But the connection with the broader world will help you clarify why your business exists and make it more appealing to that small group.

Make-and-advise mentality. Speaking of what we do and of content marketing,  the mindset of consultants (and product developers) should be: I make things and I advise. By make things, I obviously don’t mean the plastic garbage on Shark Tank. I mean make content. But I also don’t mean the lead-magnet type of content products that have been standard the last 10 years. The bar will be a little higher.

All of this will take a Hunger Games level of guts – because what if it’s not just a “crazy year” but a “crazy decade”, as seems inevitable?

Towards the end of Venkatesh’s reflections on what the new elites will look like at the close of this decade, he asks, if you want to be an elite, what kind of elite? If you want to be a non-elite, what kind of non-elite? Because both are up fro grabs. But this will take courage. As he puts it.

To lead is to ultimately function as a model to non-elites on how to live, and not just live, but live with, for want of a better word, courage. Since that’s what it means to be the measure of the world, take risks, and deal with uncertainty. Otherwise you’re just a parasite pretending to be a lordly predator. And there’s no real way to fake this. People can tell when you are living courageously.

The Dharma PhD student (here’s her independent PhD formula, if you’re interested) is example of the kind of courage we need. Beeple making and publishing a piece of digital art every day for 13 years is another example. A fairly famous musician, Nick Cave, publishing an email newsletter after his son died, and discussing that tragedy openly and artfully, is another. 

There are many examples of the courage we’ll need to figure out what post-industrial marketing looks like; I hope you find one that resonates with you.

Meanwhile, have a great weekend (:

Rowan

 

 

All words have multiple meanings, but often a single meaning stands out as the most useful. But that’s not the case with value, whose most useful meaning is hard to detect. 

Look at the ways we use the word value in business:

value shopper
value proposition
value-added
value capture
value selling
value creation
value chain
value conversation
valuable conversation
valuation

Price, profitability, and money run through these definitions to varying degrees. But behind them all is one constant: emotional experience. At least for an independent businessperson.

value is the emotional experience something creates and sustains

So while value is subjective and unquantifiable, it is not just a “perception” that our minds hold. Value is a quantification of the way we feel during some part of a life lived – including our business life. That’s what matters.

Of course, that emotional experience is often connected to money in some way. But it’s never a 1-to-1 equivalent.

After all, money has only existed for 5,000 years. Was there no value prior – was there no price? The last time I checked, the price of God’s favor to Abraham was Isaac, not 50k. 

Note that you can also define value as the monetary price you buy/sell at or as the monetary profit it has the potential to create (ie valuation). These money-formulas for value are useful hacks. And sometimes it makes sense to stop at the useful hack meanings, and not dive deeper. But not when it comes to value.

Because if your emotional experience varies wildly, as these money-formulas of value stay the same, are they really accurate?

This is the thing: don’t let people force you to define, discuss, or price your work only as a number. Insist on holistic value and if you’re not getting it, sell something else, find a better customer, or create a more valuable conversation.

And have a great week ahead,
Rowan

Ultimately, value is the net positive emotional experience something creates and sustains.

Notes

• Value is subjective 
• All kinds of value constantly fluctuate
• Value is usually primarily expressed as a monetary quantity
• But value is unquantifiable
• Value is similar to, but never exactly equivalent to, financial profitability
• Value often carries an element of surprise

Thus you can define value as the price you pay for something, or the profitability it creates – as long as those aren’t entirely defined monetarily either.

An unexpected, hidden, or deliberately layered-on side benefit

Usually, this benefit is for the buyer or end-user of the thing, but it can benefit anyone connected to it – maker, seller, investor, partner, etc.

Mike Tyson has said,

“everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

No one could put it better, but let’s extend the thought:

“everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face… at which point their thinking is paralyzed by non-strategic fight-or-flight responses. These can only be overcome by a response that is equally deep-seated and instinctive. Plans don’t cut it”.

In other words, you need more than the panic plan baked into your genes. You need a strategic plan that you learn through practice, training, preparation, etc. Some call this muscle memories. Though for our purposes, we’re talking about muscle memories that mostly happen above the neck.

In consulting, you most need these instincts when you negotiate a contract. Because it’s when money is on the line that you get (metaphorically speaking) punched in the face.

This is why some sales training programs have participants workshop the negotiation and sales process over and over again. Wax on, wax off, except while communicating complex ideas. Hundreds of scenarios and responses are practiced.

Another approach to creating intellectual muscle memories is to define in published writing the terms you use during such conservations.

That way, when someone asks you, “well, what do you mean by ______?”, you already have an answer to fall back on. An answer based in a definition that has been exposed already to the public. Maybe you’ll use it, or part of it, or maybe you won’t. But you have a baseline definition, that you wrote, to fall back on should your off-the-cuff analogy or explanation fail to hit the mark.

This is the way we do ______ at this business. This is the way we define _____ at this business.

And this serves you not just in initial communications, but through the lifetime of a consulting engagement or anywhere else you might be conversing.

What if you took it a step further, though, and presented your meanings as definitive definitions? In other words, as dictionary definitions. 

After all, what is a definition but a helpful, contextual hint at the meaning of a word. As the linguist and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky has said,

“What we call definitions are not definitions … they’re just hints that a person who already knows the concept can use to understand what’s really going on”

So when you tell someone what Human Resources really means in 2021, or what DevOps actually means now in the cloud-era, or what digital NFT art is, you’re not necessarily redefining those terms. You’re simply adding a layer of meaning – a  hint – as to what they mean.

Your conversation partners will admire and take comfort in your certainty – and sometimes they need a new hint to understand what you’re talking about.

Very best
Rowan