Note: This post was the topic for today’s Mindshare Mentorship, a private podcast helping marketing consultants package, sell, and deliver their expert advice—not just their hands. Learn more and consider joining the community at Mindshare.fm.

When you get paid to do implementation work, you’re ultimately being paid to solve a problem.

Maybe it’s anything website or content-related. Or maybe it’s more broad, like anything marketing-related. Anything within that purview becomes your problem.

In other words, you own the entire problem of X for your clients.

The challenge when switching to advisory work is that you end up facilitating the solution instead of actually doing it for your client. That means someone still has to actually do the implementation.

But as an advisor, whatever your scope is, it’s still your problem to solve.

Regardless of the roadblock that comes up, you will move mountains if you have to.

That might mean finding new freelancers or agencies to implement, doing wireframes or proof-of-concepts yourself, training people do to things in-house, teaching people how things work, or anything else that needs to happen to get the problem solved.

After all, what you’re selling is a solution to their problem. Nobody pays for half a solution.

Personally, I charge a fixed price for what I do. I don’t want problems to get more expensive for my clients than anticipated. That just adds a problem to a problem.

If it means I need to put in overtime to get the problem solved, that’s the risk I take. I own it and find solutions.

From the client’s perspective, they get the assurance that for a fixed price, the problem of X is solved (marketing, design, strategy, leads, whatever).

The feeling of buying all-in services is very reassuring.

But if you throw your hands in the air and make any part of the problem your client’s problem, you’re providing an incomplete service.

“That’s not my job” won’t cut it if it’s part of the problem you promised to own.

People pay a lot of money to make their problems someone else’s. The more you do that, and the bigger the “problem” is, the more you’ll get paid.

If Elon Musk can send rockets to space and back, you can create a systemized approach to the work you do for your clients.

It doesn’t mean you need to follow your process exactly the same way every time. In fact, you never will—that’s not how life works.

But it should provide structure and consistency that produces similar results each time you run it. It should also get more refined over time.

Sure, you will need to adjust for the particulars of any situation and do some maneuvering based on what’s happening.

But that doesn’t preclude you from having a process to work with that gets smarter each time you apply it.

All great consultants have a methodology. Especially, ones who work in a niche—that’s where it really takes off.

Get into a niche, formalize your process, run it a bunch of times until it reliably works, then package and sell it without your direct involvement.

That’s it. That’s the playbook for successful consulting in a nutshell.

Good positioning hurts when you first try it on. And it should hurt, at least a little.

Why? Because good positioning is tight and narrow. It’s specific. It solves particular problems for particular kinds of people.

It should feel like you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.

And the reality is, you are. If you’re doing it right, you’re leaving MOST of your potential opportunities on the table by saying no to most things.

And yet, counter-intuitively, by saying no to most things, you say yes to many more.

The challenge most consultants have is they can help a LOT of people do a LOT of different things.

If you’re good at marketing, for example, you can solve marketing challenges for a wide range of clients.

The problem, however, is that your clients and prospects have choice. And the more choice they have, the more interchangeable you are.

Which brings me to the reason you want to have a narrow focus.

By focusing narrowly on one particular target market, and then solving one particular problem for them really well, you immediately remove 99% of the competition.

The choice for your clients becomes either choosing you—the one who only solves their precise needs—or all the other options who claim they can help anyone with anything.

So which will you be, the interchangeable supplier who claims they can help anyone?

Or will you be the consultant who appears out of nowhere with the exact solution your ideal clients are looking for?

The choice is yours to make.

P.S. I recorded a deep dive on this topic today in the Mindshare Community.

If you’re a marketing professional who wants to sell your expert advice—not just your hands—then I highly recommend you check it out and become a member.

As an advisor, you have a duty to be honest and forthright with your clients.

And when your client wants to do things you don’t agree with, you have a responsibility to say something—even if they don’t want to hear it at first.

There will be times when your client wants to do things their way. Maybe it’s what they feel comfortable with or what they’ve always done.

But they hire you for results, right? So it’s on you to make sure they get them.

As a consultant, you are in the unique position of having seen inside a lot of businesses. And with that, you get good at spotting patterns and inconsistencies.

You begin to know what will work and what what needs to be done even before the data is there to show you.

That’s how expertise is formed. Humans are expert pattern matchers, after all.

And that means you’re in a unique position to be their guide. You’ve seen what works and what doesn’t so many times that it becomes second nature.

It’s just in you.

So when your gut, head, or heart doesn’t agree with the direction your client wants to take, it’s your job to stop things in their tracks and speak up.

Your job is to help them see the patterns you’ve discovered, then dig into data and examples to make the best possible decision with your client.

If you don’t speak up when things are hard, you have no business being a consultant.

I went to get my car maintained today. And what was supposed to be a ~$400 visit turned into a $1,700 visit.

It turns out my front brakes were at the end of their life and my rear rotors (?) were rusted out.

Whatever that means.

And when they called to confirm the new price, I had no idea whether they were telling the truth about my car.

Or whether the price they quoted was competitive.

Or even what questions to ask about what my options were. So, I did as most non-car people do and said, “okay”.

What’s the moral here? Well, even though I trusted the car dealership I went to, I still had no way to verify what they were telling me.

And as someone who’s not an expert on cars, I didn’t even know what questions to ask. All I could do was put blind faith into what they were telling me.

Which is fine this time. I don’t suspect foul play and I assume they are honest.

But the feeling spending thousands of dollars—without any clue whether I needed it today, what my options really were, or what half the things they did for my car even means—is not a pleasant one.

Which leads me to my point: your clients are not marketing experts. They have various experiences accrued over the years (often including several bad ones). But they’re not technicians.

And yet, every month they pay freelancers, agencies, and consultants costing their business tens or hundreds of thousands per year on the basis of trust and as much due diligence as they can muster.

These are people selling advice (what to do/fix) but also implementation (which they get paid more for).

Which is all the more reason we (as an industry) need more marketing advisors. Neutral, third party professionals who can be the advocate for their clients. People who have a fiduciary standard of care for their clients.

When you buy something you don’t understand once and a while, you can get by on a little blind faith.

But when you’re spending tens of thousands or more per month on your marketing, it would be nice to have a neutral expert who doesn’t get paid more to do the implementation work.

Getting paid to give advice AND sell implementation naturally forces clients to assess your judgement based on your interests and become their own advocate.

But they should not need to, nor are they equipped to do it properly.

In my view, selling advice and NOT implementation makes you a truer partner. You have no financial interest in suggesting any more than they need.

The difference is subtle, but if you think of it from your clients’ perspective, it’s valuable.

I’m trying something new here.

I’ve never done any kind of Black Friday deal for my own business before.

But I was thinking about it today and figured on a whim this evening I’d give it a try.

So, for anyone who’s interested in joining my new Mindshare community, now will be your best time.

But before I get into the offer, I’ll share what it’s all about.

The focus is helping marketing professionals:

1. Attract more clients & opportunities
2. Sell advice, not implementation
3. Choose and build in a niche
4. Systemize and sell their process
5. Sell group programs & memberships
6. And a whole range of other outcomes.

Here’s what’s included:

1. Private podcast with actionable ideas for marketing consultants
2. Resources and templates (i.e. proposals, onboarding questionnaire, client KPI dashboard)
3. Tight-knit community of marketing consultants learning from each other & sharing what works

If you’re wondering if this is for you, people in the group identify as some or multiple of the following:

• Marketing consultants
• Fractional CMOs
• Freelancers (writers, designers, developers, etc.)
• Strategists in various forms
• Agency owners
• Agency employees
• Brand experts

So there you have it. My first Black Friday offer on a complete whim. I hope you’ll join us.

Go to Mindshare.fm and use promo code VIP5 to lock in the original monthly pricing for life (valid until Monday).

Or choose the annual option for the best any-time price if you plan to write it off and want less paperwork. No promo code required on the annual price.

You also get a 30-day trial window, so there’s zero risk and all upside. No brainer.

And there you have it, that’s the offer. See you inside.

If you’re in marketing, people aren’t really buying:

• A better strategy
• New branding
• Stronger website copy
• Fresh web design
• Good code
• More content
• Slicker videos
• Higher rankings
• Cheaper tools
• Faster systems
• More emails

…they’re looking for:

• More money
• Less risk
• Increased confidence
• Better relationships
• Reduced stress
• … and who knows what else

So why is your website copy all about what you sell and not about how it gets them what they actually want?