The Business of Expertise Quotes

“we can’t read our own label from inside the jar.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“If people aren’t losing sleep over their need for expertise in a way that makes them desperately want to hang out with other people suffering from the same issues, it’s not a good focus for your expertise.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Expert positioning is bold, proud, and (nearly) permanent. That’s why it’s called branding, because real branding is what you do when you can’t tell the cows apart from each other (or all the experts look alike).”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Any single person doesn’t have the time or money to be a heart surgeon and dentist and physical terrorist (er, therapist) concurrently, and so they pick one, and without a second thought. This flirtation with “unpositioning” takes place at the lower rungs of the expertise ladder, and that fact alone is pretty telling.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Gravitate toward world citizens, too. Those are the people you want in your life. If you really want to have an impact in the world, learn from people who are world citizens, who think globally, who don’t think that the U.S. or some other country is the center of the world, who have traveled extensively to undeveloped nations. Or Mississippi. They touch the subtleties and textures of the world.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Horizontal expertise paints on a far-reaching canvas. Say that you are an expert known worldwide for helping CEOs manage change in disruptive environments. Your expertise doesn’t come from understanding a vertical industry, like mining or media or consumer electronics or transportation. You just need to be sufficiently sharp to learn enough about a given industry to know how to apply your expertise in a given setting. In effect, you can work with any viable CEO candidate who wants to learn — regardless of the industry — as long as the primary challenges are defined horizontally, such as navigating deep change in the middle of disruption. Today you’re working with C-level executives at Samsung after their phones are banned on all airline flights, but next month you might be working with an executive in the hospitality industry facing a hotel worker strike. Or health insurance executives navigating an uncertain landscape that can never really see farther than two years. Each of these engagements is interesting because you have to apply your expertise to a new setting. But as much as you are learning, you’re taking two steps back for every three steps forward because much of what you learn with each new engagement is just the bare necessity in order to even be relevant. It’s interesting but challenging. Thrilling but exhausting. Engaging but distracting. There are cases, of course, where new clients regard your broad expertise as a significant selling point. They like that you can apply consumer insights to a professional B2B setting, or that you can help apply change management to consumer engagement. The first advantage of horizontal expertise, then, is how the application of expertise to many verticals always keeps the expert engaged and learning.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Third, vertical positioning benefits from common venues that spread the word about your firm, like conferences, awards, trade publications, and shared vendors. Your prospects want to learn from each other, so they network in different ways. The more effective your work, the more they talk about you, efficiently spreading the word about you. All this cross-pollination follows vertical positioning, translating into great organic referral growth, which is a significant source of new business in every field of expertise.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“There’s a time and a place for confidence, but your army (confidence) can’t march too far forward of your supply lines (expertise) or you’ll be caught without what you’ll need in order to win the war. There’s a healthy stretching that always pulls you forward, but you have to know enough about your field of impact. Crafting a positioning should tend toward the honest and boring side of this balance. Start by detailing your successful experience, and you can define that in two ways. As you list these instances, concentrate where you’ve been effective on behalf of a client and also made money yourself. I suppose you could add the element of where you’ve enjoyed the work, too, but the truth is that you’re not likely to even list these instances unless that happens to be true. So concentrate on impact and revenue. Eliminate any where both weren’t true. Don’t worry too much about recency, either. Prospects aren’t going to write you off if a particular demonstration of your expertise is more than three years old, for instance. They don’t look that deeply at the claims you make, and you, the expert, are far tougher on yourself than they will be. As we talked about in Foundation Chapter B, you’re attempting to craft a positioning where you are less interchangeable so that withholding your expertise carries some meaning. Think of the options as a spectrum, with the right side depicting a completely undifferentiated firm (I’m an accountant) and the left side depicting the most focused firm you could imagine (I’m an accountant who works with U.S.-based multi-location casual dining brands). At the beginning of this exercise, you are toward the right, wanting to move toward the left and be more differentiated than you are now. You’re aiming for fewer competitors so that your expertise supports a price premium in your work. As you march from right to left, you want to make a complete journey and make really smart positioning decisions. As you work out the intricacies of the positioning journey, there are two forces that slow your progress: one good and one bad.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“If you carve out an expertise business that fits who you are, takes advantage of your strengths, and minimizes your weaknesses, it’s more sustainable. That’s good for you, for obvious reasons, but it’s good for your clients, too, because you’ll be around to help them over a longer period of time, getting better at it as time passes.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“After looking at 1,340 examples of successful experts, the only consistent trait was that they were risk-takers. That means that they were wrong a lot — but that they were usually right about the important things.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Have an impact on your clients; i.e., do effective work. Make money for yourself as the primary shareholder. Create a culture that complements what you care about and fosters what you are hoping to accomplish. Enjoy your work. There’s an interplay among these four things, and every day you make decisions that prioritize one over the other, which is appropriate. Those priorities can change on a daily basis, too, but when you look at how they balance out over long periods of time, where do you start and what might you be aiming for? Let me suggest the order that might work best over the lifetime of a business, in descending order of importance: Make money. Do effective work. Build a strong culture. Enjoy your work.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Values are the non-negotiables in our belief system that would never change regardless of the setting or external pressures. They are best discerned by observing our actions, which reflect our character. Values stem from who we are. They would show up in whatever sort of business we were running. Purpose is the reason why our particular organization exists. (Later in life, the same values might lead to a different purpose, mediated through a different business.) Mission is how the organization will achieve the purpose for our existence, based on the values that we share. (Any given purpose could lead to multiple missions. Your mission is how you choose to implement your purpose.) Vision is the destination. It’s what the end result will look like if my values lead to a certain purpose whose mission my organization exists to fulfill. It connects purpose with impact. (This is the huge, wide-ranging vision that drives you forward. It’s aspirational in nature.)”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“First, articulate the kernel segments for which you don’t have a thoughtful point of view. Just knowing what you don’t know gives you permission for that confidence about the things that you do know, and in the process allows you be honest about what you don’t know. Heck, just whip out the list when a client asks a question about anything on it. They are fine with advice-givers who are human, and merely saying “no” from time to time can give real meaning to your “yes” statements. “Honestly, I’ve been asking that same question and I don’t think I have it figured out yet. [Reaching down] Here are my notes so far, and this will provide that opportunity to finally figure it out. Any thoughts along the way would be welcome. Thanks.” Second, determine all the methods that would motivate you, as a unique individual, to develop a given position. This might include a public speaking engagement, a repeatable section to include in proposals, an article you can place for publication, an interview with a journalist seeking expertise, a seminar you will teach, some internal training to prepare for, or a handout to be used at predictable conversation intersections when talking to clients in person. Third, group the topics by platform, order the topics in each group by descending level of importance, and assign a date to each item. About that: You cannot fully explore one of these topics and then craft the language to present it in less than two weeks; typically it requires a month or two. Fourth, ignite the research (less than you’ll guess) and insight generation (more than you’ll guess) by articulating a compressed 2,400–3,600 words for each topic. Fifth, begin what academia calls the peer review process. Release it to the brutal public for feedback, disagreement, and “this strikes me as right” commentary. If nobody reads your blog, that’s like winning a race with no opponents; you can just skip that and cast it far and wide instead. Email it to everyone not already tired of you and wait. Or just let that one cynical employee eagerly make you wince as they’ve always dreamed of doing. Sixth, over the following years, strip out what later seems like filler and replace it with more substance. Work on it long enough each time to make it shorter and shorter.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Before further developing this idea of the two paths (innate confidence or bumping into opportunity), I want to pause and explain more fully what I mean by “not believing in the value of your work.” Some of you probably read that but don’t see yourself on that path when in fact you are. You feel like you have confidence in how you value your work, but the evidence doesn’t support it. There are certain business practices that stand as clear evidence of that lack of belief: Discounting your fees. Modifying your terms. Allowing unusual invoicing procedures. Providing advice before an engagement is crafted. Letting clients determine the problem while just looking to you for transactional solutions. Presenting multiple equally viable solutions and letting clients choose, ceding your expertise. Changing your positioning to fit what prospects want to hear (in presentations and proposals). The list above is truly “business as usual” for experts who see themselves in the service business, but it doesn’t have to be that way. While most follow that path (the ones who try to rub shoulders with more opportunity), some do not (the ones who have a strong innate belief in the value of what they do).”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“In a way, positioning is fake for a brief period of time. You’ve noticed just enough patterns to gain some credibility. Then you make the most of that driver’s permit to keep exploring, keep learning, and keep articulating insight. Eventually it feeds on itself and then you step into your expert clothes and really fill them out.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Your only real control is to withhold your expertise. And although withholding expertise is the only leverage real experts have, it can be a powerful one, indeed. Let me show you how this relates to the second basic component of positioning: Good positioning makes you noninterchangeable. Imagine a somewhat difficult conversation with one of your existing clients. You’re uncomfortable with the direction they want to pursue, particularly since you know they’ll be holding you partly responsible for the results. You make your case carefully but passionately. You feel strongly that this is a mistake, for all sorts of reasons. The client presses and presses, but you don’t relent. There’s an honest disagreement. It’s not that you don’t know where the other party stands. No, you are both clear about that and just disagree. Eventually, the client says — after three years of working together, no less — that they are noticing an increasingly different perspective on how to impact the future and maybe it’s time for a fresh approach. Essentially they want to sever the relationship and move on. This usually doesn’t come out of the blue. It’s likely to have built up over time until the client gets to this place where they seem to be looking for opportunities to disagree with you. Nevertheless, the expert (you) has reached a turning point with the other controlling party (the client). As this crack in the surface widens, and it looks less reparable than earlier disagreements, the client entertains the possibility of replacing your expertise. They’ve surveyed the landscape of firms like yours and they aren’t that worried about finding an expert who will be a little more cooperative and helpful (as they read the disagreement). So what has seemed increasingly likely does, in fact, occur, and the client severs the relationship with your firm. That point is when the stopwatch starts. Tick, tick, tick. It keeps running until that same client finds a suitable (or even better) substitute for your expertise. But here’s the thing: The client is the one who defines success in that venture. When you hear about who they found to replace your firm, you may scoff and mutter about how inadequate the substitute expert is, but you don’t get to do that. “They hired who? [Snicker.] I saw their work for XYZ and was not impressed. The client will quickly find out that we weren’t so bad after all and that what we’ve been saying makes sense. There will be an initial honeymoon and then it’ll be just like it was with us.” It doesn’t matter.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Your only real control is to withhold your expertise. And although withholding expertise is the only leverage real experts have, it can be a powerful one, indeed. Let me show you how this relates to the second basic component of positioning: Good positioning makes you noninterchangeable.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Without pattern matching, there is no intelligence. Without similar scenarios, there is no pattern matching. Without a tight positioning, there are no similar scenarios. Time and time again, you’ll come back to this realization, and it will form the basis of everything you do.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth

“Pattern matching, or reverse pattern matching, is foundational to expertise.”
― David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth