Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors: Covert Techniques for a Remarkable Practice

by David C. Baker

An expert is someone whose thinking is regularly sought and paid for.

An expert is more likely to listen than to talk. She observes to learn and build her pattern library, and when she is asked what she thinks, the din of conversation lessens a bit and faces turn to hear what she says. The observation is either new, or

familiar but expressed in an interesting way, but seven things are always true: The expert has a point of view (or perspective). The expert is concise. The expert is believable. The expert can answer follow-up questions without choking. The expert seems confident.

The expert holds many principles subject to later modification. The expert—in a work setting—believes the “how” is...

if you don’t have a proprietary means of applying your expertise, you’ll be unable to resist the urge to start solving their problem before you have been engaged. That wastes your time and knocks you off the expert perch.

One of the things that impactful experts do is make connections between disparate areas of knowledge. They see things in one field and apply them in another. Useful nuggets of insight are buried everywhere.

your focus will be on these four things in running the firm: shepherding the financial performance of the firm; hiring/molding key staff (if you have them); ensuring that new business is happening regularly; and strategizing for clients. If you have no team to help, you’ll be expanding this fourth one to a significant degree, but it is always the last thing you do. Strange, right?

Clients want to listen to advisors who have a provisional POV and not advisors who are too hesitant with a declared perspective. This requires a certain degree of mental health.

The great advisors provide four things, all wrapped up in a fifth, governed by a sixth. The four things are insight, objectivity, courage, and empathy, all wrapped up in a methodology unique to you, governed by a dismissive perspective about your own future—a disregard for how you will survive. Let’s look at each of those. You bring insight that very few other people possess. This insight owes to the prior decisions you’ve made about what work you will turn down so that you can go deep in one particular area. Insight comes from repeated

willingness to leave it all on the table and fail big if necessary. I’d rather be homeless than compromise on some of my business principles. We’re going to talk a lot about that.

think this is what Peter Block is saying. Don’t just be an expert in what you deliver to clients, but be an expert in how you talk about what you deliver to clients, too.

In many cases, the work I have done for a client is confidential, as my work with you will be. There are about two dozen testimonials scattered throughout my website, though, and you might be able to chase some of them down.

A client orientation kit—or whatever you want to call it—does just that: helps them sample the relationship before they buy. The format doesn’t matter too much, though I am drawn to the physical format and not just a digital one because it feels more substantial. As you think about building one for your prospective

Competence has almost nothing to do with raw talent. It has to do with discipline. Start with discipline and you can work on all the rest of it.

Seek meaningful conversations with authentic people.

View the truth as your friend always.

Quit thinking about implications. Just make decisions.

Define success and failure for yourself. Colleagues, competitors, clients, family, the world at large—everyone has an opinion of what your success should look like. But that’s backward. You decide what success looks like for you and then make the decisions to get there. Part of having an impact on your world is making decisions and not simply reacting to what the world wants from you.

“How would you describe my unique ability?” Use

Quit adding goals to your life. There’s just as much power in stopping something as there

is in starting something. You can’t just keep adding goals to your life and expect to meet them. Peel off the ones that are not likely to happen, then put your energy into the ones that are likely to happen.

Look for opportunities to say “no” to work that doesn’t deliver the same value as your best work. It’s the sort of work that doesn’t feel as good and for which the exchange of money doesn’t feel as right.

It will make sense, at times, to provide additional parallel services to the same clients,

don’t develop those service areas as a defensive move to protect your turf.

Confident, capable advisors are so comfortable with their deep expertise that they respect their clients enough to introduce them to other experts when they know that they can’t provide that same level of impact.

First, know your own story. Maybe your relative size as an advisory power is intentional. Maybe you enjoy doing the work more than you enjoy managing other people who do the work (that’s me). So

Don’t make it easy to write you off by being largely irrelevant.

“We are the liberating force that will drop in behind enemy lines and free you from the enemy. They are the occupying force that will set up camp and eat your crops and date your daughters.”