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They simply cannot walk away from someone who understands their world to that degree. Your solutions just flat-out fit. There’s such power in this that it must come from you in the very first conversation (and not an email).
diving straight into a place where you understand and they trust you.
This only happens if you have worked with so many firms like theirs that this is second nature to you.
Excess opportunity makes the choice easier; it doesn’t require nearly as much courage to choose between two as it does to turn down your only option.
Caring too much can hurt you because it can override your logic. You might care a lot because you need the money, because it’s a fun project, because employees are pushing you to do it, or because you’ve always wanted to break into a new space that this opportunity might enable.
Black-box models give you a proven framework. It’s systems thinking that gets right to the heart of the matter and establishes the right context.
The best advisors know how to interpret data well, yes, but they also bring unassailable data to the table.
It was a long, hard slog to get to the point where every engagement was fully prepaid, whether that was from Toyota or a one-person firm working from their home, but there has never been an exception in the last few decades of work.
prepayment preserves objectivity,
Your leverage comes from flexible scope. You can’t have this without the former point (prepayment). Flexible scope allows you to curry favor by doing more than they expect, but mainly it allows you to define scope in a manner that retains the profitability of any given client relationship.
Don’t maintain a level of caring that cannot be sustained for decades. Don’t care more than the client cares, even though it will pain you to do so.
But in other cases it’s just not a good idea to care more than they do because it is not sustainable.
Every advisor has a finite number of times when they can care more than the client. It’s like a fixed number of poker chips in a beautiful wooden box.
Is the client disciplined in getting her homework or responses to you?
Is she disciplined at making your check-in calls?
She’ll ask you to re-present your suggestions or will pass them along without wrapping them in the appropriate context.
Don’t be any more willing to rearrange your schedule than they are willing to rearrange theirs.
You must achieve and maintain the higher ground or you are no longer the expert and you’ll quickly feel disrespected and deflated. And rightly so.
Key
But successful advisors are looking for efficiency, impact, and revenue. Working with clients is a constant game of triage. “Is this client going to live? What’s the single best thing I can do right now to keep this business alive? Does this person even care?”
Great summery
Your job is not to help them care. Your job isn’t even to create change. Your job is to correctly assess a situation and then give clients the very best possible tools to effect change on their own.
Since then I’ve come to argue that an expert (in this context) is someone who is regularly paid for his thinking. An entrepreneurial expert is an expert who is also a risk-taker in that he has created a firm that sells that thinking. I talked about this in the first chapter
Clients come to experts with challenges that they can’t solve. They’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit and it’ll take a ladder to get the rest.
An order taker takes direction from the client. The client presumably knows what’s required and simply needs help with the execution or implementation or application.
Clients will lose because their ideas are always the best ones.
Clients will quit listening to you because they put you in a box labeled “doer” instead of “thinker” and they’ll view your advice as little more than a distraction.
You’ll get so close to the client that you lose your objectivity.
You’ll be too stuck in the present, rather than taking a wider view and leading them through how they can change their future by doing different things in the present.
In the real world, a new client chooses to work with you based on your reputation and their best prediction of what it will be like to work with you. All the positioning stuff is just table stakes: It won’t close the gap, but it gets you in the game.
My perspective as the guide has to include very careful listening, doing my best to get the advice right, and courageous objectivity. I always add that I work really hard at all those things. On their side of the table, we’ll get the most done if they are disciplined, transparent, and open to change, and I ask them to do their best to work that way with me. It’s not an equal partnership but rather a balanced one where each of us does our job.
Key
They must have the power to make decisions without needing to build consensus with decision-makers. The money can’t be too precious, where expectations are so high that it’s nearly impossible to meet them. And ideally they have worked with a professional advisor before or they aren’t going to be familiar with how long results can take to actually surface.
If you don’t have one based on your previous work, you’ll embark on some fresh research to shed light on the client’s challenge.
Your pricing (including hourly rate, scoping decisions, and value-based pricing, if you use it) is far less important in making oodles of money than your efficiency in stacking engagement after engagement, and without customizing each one.
I’m trying to illustrate that there’s great value in the efficiency made possible by productized service offerings that don’t need to be rethought every time you initiate a client relationship.
You’d commonly call this a diagnostic or a roadmap or something else that points to research and analysis.
My stop light assessment
So that’s the first reason you involve the client in the work: so they can learn more effectively.
But if you concentrate on the right things, you don’t have to do much for the client. Your insight is direct, on-point, and actionable.
You are there exclusively as a guide and not a doer. You’re there to facilitate learning and behavioral change. You aren’t there as an extension of their staff to help them get through their to-do list.
Critical
On about a half-dozen occasions I’ve discovered that myself. I ignored the lack of compliance and engagement and fell in love with the money.
I was resentful that they were wasting my time and their money. It’s a terrible feeling and you’ll hopefully have sufficient opportunity lined up that you can just drop those clients like a hot potato.
Why will your clients listen to you? Partly it’s because they’ve already paid you a significant sum and they don’t want to waste that! Partly because you’ve clearly demonstrated that you really do understand their world. And partly because they are stuck; they’ve tried but can’t seem to climb out of the hole they’ve fallen into.
But when it gets down to the real meat of your work with a client, there’s really no substitute for observational insight and demonstrable data.
Never mind that it’s nearly impossible to measure attitude, collaboration, cultural health, etc.
Gather your own data from the client—data that doesn’t already exist—and interpret it for them. The best example of this would be employee or customer surveys.
Clients listen more carefully when they see how well you understand their situation, but they won’t be happy with their investment until you improve their situation.
Key point
Overwhelming a client with data can be worse than sharing no data at all.
There is no quicker way to learn the inside of a company than employee surveys.
Your goal is never to be right but to be accurate, and your client deserves the truth, even if it doesn’t necessarily serve your self-interested goal.
Good advice
Your goal isn’t complete accuracy but directional and defensible accuracy.
Key
It’s okay to hurt feelings in the interest of efficiency.
Because of that, this second group should be comprised exclusively of people who can safely hear your recommendations and also process them. They can also be trusted to keep appropriate ideas confidential.
