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

by David C. Baker

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.

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 application, which comes from positioning.

Your clients are too close to things and your objectivity (i.e., distance) gives you a reliable perspective. As much as they try, they can’t step outside of their own reality and see what’s really happening. Being an outsider is part of what makes you valuable.

Don’t pretend to understand everything about your client, and certainly don’t apologize when it’s obvious that you don’t.

Having insight and objectivity—without courage—is like losing the launch code for a missile when you most need it.

When you do all the hard work to understand what’s going on and you don’t share it—effectively—you negate your role.

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Empathy is courage … delivered without permanent harm.

Empathy inspires change, not because you’re some rah-rah motivational coach but because they see the truth and the success path you’ve charted smacks of believability.

The most effective advisors don’t care too much about the wrong things (being liked, having a locked-in future, being around for years). They do what’s right regardless of where that takes them.

you’re a multi-capable person who could excel at four or five things, but you’ve let some of those dreams die while you do this.

if you bring that same level of desire to any specific new business opportunity, you’ll invest too heavily in the sale, underprice the work, fudge the suitability of the fit, and a dozen other things.

You must care a little less about winning the business than the prospect wants you to take him on as a client.

The more insight you publish for free, the less you need to invest in the sale.

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.

Experts are not order takers because they understand that the client probably knows what they want, but that they don’t know what they should want.

You are selling objectivity, which comes from externality.

They are inside their own jar and can’t read the label.

You are selling knowledge, which comes from focus.

Your strength comes from having seen this before and knowing how to fix it.

You are selling perception, which comes from self-awareness.

it’s hard to be that present in a client relationship and retain your objectivity. The longer you are around, the more you are part of the problem and not the solution.

Second, clients will not pay a premium for ongoing presence, long term. They will only pay a premium for episodic presence.

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Your mental model must not depend on “accomplishing all the right things” but on “doing most of the right things,” regardless of the result.

So go into advisory relationships knowing exactly what you are selling. And try to find clients whose desire to buy matches your desire to sell so that you are aligned.

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. Each time you decide to care more than the client, you use one of those chips, which you will never get back. It’s gone forever, and it’s not a renewable resource. For reference, I think I have about 200 of those across my entire consulting life.

You want that largest client to represent 15%–25% of your total fee billings. Larger than that and most of the clients that follow will be too small to generate profit and to let you get deeply enough into their situation to move the needle on their behalf.

You might ask what that has to do with your tradecraft and doing effective work for clients. The answer is that any client that is too big will typically turn you into an order taker as you move from expert to server in order to keep that client happy out of fear of losing them; and smaller ankle-biter clients aren’t going to be profitable if you stay within the budget, and they’ll be responsible for lots of wheel spin without much traction.

Why not tell them what it will be like to work with you and reduce their anxiety about leaving the devil they know for the devil they don’t?

A client orientation kit—or whatever you want to call it—does just that: helps them sample the relationship before they buy.

Partnership: Is the relationship a partnership that is best described as a collaboration? How much of your work bleeds over into coaching? I like to explain to clients that we’ll only be effective together if each of us has the right perspective. My perspective as the guide has to include very careful listening, doing my best to get the advice right, and courageous objectivity.

Client qualifications: What type of clients get the most out of your work? Besides the things that I’ve just mentioned, there are some facts (vs. approaches) that predict success.

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.

Point of view: While you can’t promise to always be right, you can obligate yourself to express a helpful point of view. 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.