Marketing Consultants

Ever notice how things in your life just seem to accumulate?

Your garage fills with stuff, your closet begins to swell, your storage eventually becomes a “things” graveyard.

It’s no different in your business. Which is why we must consciously ask ourselves, how do I achieve more by doing less?

For you, it might mean offering fewer services. Or working with fewer clients. Or niching down even further.

It might mean doubling down on one or two marketing channels and ignoring the rest. Or stripping your website down to the essentials to make your core message clearer.

Whatever it is, I believe you can have a lean, minimalist business if you try. I believe it’s vital as a consultant to run lean and mean.

The benefits of doing fewer “things” is you get to ease your cognitive load. You get to sharpen your expertise. You get to be more organized, and deliver a better client experience. You have breathing room to think, learn, and explore. You get to grow at your own pace.

As a consultant, all of these things add up to more money than if you try to grind out every last dollar from every last area of opportunity.

So what unnecessary things can you eliminate? What complexity have you let creep in during the whirlwind known as 2020?

Spring is here, have you done your spring cleaning yet?

I told myself I’d write this post by 11pm.

It’s now 10:54 and I’m just getting started.

But here’s the thing: constraints work. If you set parameters around what you plan to do, there’s a good chance you’ll actually get it done.

If you’re still procrastinating on that thing, just set some limits. Force yourself to work within them.

Constraints breed creativity. They also force you to actually get things done.

Use constraints to your advantage.

(Hitting publish at 10:58pm)

Most content marketing out there is general in nature, which is why most of it gets ignored.

But if you take those same general ideas and translate them into the language of your ideal clients, you’ll start to notice more engagement and interest from the people you’re seeking to serve.

When you localize your ideas, your content becomes richer, more nuanced, and more applicable to your ideal clients’ situation.

Your readers learn over time that your content is relevant to them. It’s not just another general marketing blog or podcast.

They subscribe, like, follow, share, and engage.

That’s because they see you as signal in the sea of noise. They notice how you do the work of contextualizing ideas to their specific situation—making it more actionable, valuable, and easy to understand.

Take those broad ideas and put them in the language of your ideal clients.

You’ll notice far more interest and engagement from those who may one day become your clients.

This is your Friday preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a Mindshare Community membership. Sign up for a free 7-day trial to level up the way you run your marketing consulting business.

I talk a lot about having a Methodology in your advisory business. A checklist of sorts that lets you deliver consistent and repeatable results for your clients. It usually is comprised of projects, processes, and things to do/review/audit.

I also talk about your Operating System, the thing you or your clients use to run their marketing program based around the ideas you teach and implement with them.

But I don’t always talk about how to leverage those two things in freelance or agency (execution) business.

In this episode, I explain how those two pieces become assets to your business, whether you’re an advisor or you do execution work.

I also talk about how I organize those assets in a tool like Trello, Asana or Basecamp—and why it becomes so useful to do so.

As always, the goal is to free up your time, create leverage, increase profit, and deliver consistent and repeatable results for you and your clients.

Listen in and stay tuned for more examples on the subject.

I talk a lot about working with your ideal clients. It’s critical to you happiness, work satisfaction, and overall impact.

But here’s the nuance: there’s no such thing as a perfect client.

Your clients aren’t perfect and neither are you. The projects never go exactly as planned, either.

The best thing you can do is bring your best self (and work performance) to the table every day.

Your ideal clients should be generally flexible and willing to work through challenges constructively. There should be a culture of collaboration, not blame.

They should respect you, your time, and your process. And you should respect them, their time, and their subject-matter expertise.

You should also trust one another.

But even still, your clients will never be perfect any more than you will be. The question is, what kind of imperfections are you willing to put up with?

To me, I’m willing to push through difficult periods or stressful situations as long as it doesn’t become a permanent state of being.

Website launches, strategy overhauls, navigating troubled financial times—these are but a few examples of things that create stress. They’re to be expected. It’s what you’re paid for.

But if you find yourself losing sleep, feeling terrible, or generally being treated like a subordinate for a prolonged period of time, it might be a sign you need to make a change. For your benefit and theirs.

No client is perfect, but some clients are more ideal than others. Some are even pretty great.

The good news is, you set the standards on who you work with.

When I was in university, long ago, I went through a Tony Robbins phase.

His book, Unleash the Power Within, had some ideas that were completely foreign to me—from neurolinguistic programming to food pairing and all kinds of other “life hacks”.

I was young and impressionable, and this stuff was like nothing I had encountered before.

Anyway – one of the things that stood out to me was the idea of modelling success. The idea is if you want to succeed, the easiest way is to find someone doing what you want to do and model their behaviour.

Today, I have many role models. I look at people in business and other areas that resemble the kind of life I’d like to build and I use them for reference in helping me get there.

This helps guide my actions—at least a little bit.

If you’re fuzzy about your future and how to get there, you might want to consider stopping right now and think of three people whose life or business you’d like to model—at least in some small way.

You don’t need to know them, you just need to be able to study or observe their actions and habits.

Knowing what you’re trying to accomplish is 80% of the battle. Once you know, you can find people who’s actions you can model to speed up the process of getting there.

You’ll still end up with your own unique future—we’re “imperfect mirrors” after all, as Derek Sivers says.

So, who are you going to start modelling?

There’s something you’re procrastinating on.

Maybe it’s something that resembles the next level in your consulting business. Or it’s something you’ve never done before.

It’s within your reach, but for some reason you never get around to it.

What is it?

For me, it’s putting together an info product for Mindshare—an educational community, coaching, and resources website I’ve been iteratively building out over the past several months.

Mindshare currently has a membership community, with some resources included. That was the first milestone.

I recently soft-launched some coaching services, which are due to officially launch this week. Super excited about that and early feedback has been great.

My next milestone will be a small info product. It’s something I’ve been procrastinating on but I’m also super excited to tackle. So I’m going to do it.

So what’s your next milestone?

What are you procreating on that would take you from zero to one in a new or improved direction?

Chances are, it’s not as complicated nor as difficult as it feels. 

The best thing you can do is get started on the smallest, “crappiest” version of it and then make it better. It will be better than you think, I promise.

Commit yourself and put your intentions out there. Good things happen to those who act.

Hit reply and let me know your next milestone so I can hold you accountable. 

I recently read an interesting article on Harvard Business Review saying there are only four kinds of value propositions:

1. Best quality
Your company provides the best quality product or service in its category.

2. Best bang for buck
You don’t have to be the cheapest, but you do have to provide the most value for the money spent.

3. Luxury and aspiration
Promising an experience of the wealthy lifestyle to aspirational customers. Something about this one feels fuzzy and bleeds into “best quality”, from my view.

4. Must-have
One of the better propositions—your category is a “must-have” solution. It doesn’t mean you don’t have competition, but the leader in must-have industries will take home a worthy prize.

Now, this is an interesting thought experiment. But to me, part of your value proposition involves how you position yourself relative to your competition.

Best quality, best bang for buck, and even the luxury and aspiration value propositions are fairly subjective and hard to defend.

Must-haves would be a category value proposition, like being a doctor or lawyer. No differentiator there.

I prefer to focus a value proposition around the areas that make you distinctly better for your ideal clients.

By doubling and tripling down on the thing that you do best, you build a competitive advantage around it. It becomes your moat.

But you can’t do all things, so you need to pick one or two and go all-in to have a chance at being a market leader.

If you want to read a more fascinating version of strategy, positioning, and value propositions, check out the book Trade-Off by Kevin Maney.

It changed how I view the world and made far more sense to me than this list. It doesn’t replace these ideas, but it does offer something more practical and comprehensive, in my view.

 

Every professional needs a north star. A principle to believe in that, if they focused on it, would make everything else fall into place.

For many, it’s customer-centricity. This is probably one of the better places to end up. You won’t be in business long if you’re not the best at solving your clients’ problems.

My north star is related but a little bit more nuanced. Mine is being an advocate for my clients.

When I consult with my typical small business clients, I see myself as being their protection against the rampant volume of poor quality marketing out there.

My goal is to bring transparency to the table, to explain things as a neutral and trusted guide, and to help advocate for my clients’ needs and interests.

That means leaving money on the table. During an advisory relationship, I don’t mark up the time of the people I recommend to do the marketing execution work.

I also don’t take finders fees, affiliate commissions, or any other such kick-backs—even when it would cost my clients nothing for me to do so.

I referred over $100k in business just last year for the second year straight. These could be meaningful contributions to my profit if I took a percentage.

But then I wouldn’t be as neutral in my engagements as I am. There are no conflicts of incentives, meaning I get to focus on giving the best advice possible, without worrying about how much I’ll be compensated for it (or not).

The result of this approach is subtle but tangible. My clients don’t know they would even value it until they experience it.

And because of this choice, my clients trust me. They know I’m leaving money on the table to remain neutral about how work gets done and who does it.

The best marketing consultants are advocates. They aren’t all fiduciaries, but it’s the better way, if you ask me.

Be the advocate for your clients.

You don’t need to love your work to be successful as a consultant.

But if the work you do drains you, it might be time to reconsider either what you do or who you do it for.

After all, you got in business to do things your own way, right? Why not build a business you actually enjoy if you can succeed either way?

Here are some signs something needs to change in your business:

1. Monday mornings give you a sense of dread about the week ahead.
2. You don’t really like your clients overall, for whatever reason.
3. You feel drained at the end of every day—even if it wasn’t a particularly difficult day.
4. You procrastinate on core tasks that are relatively easy once you get down to them.
5. You don’t feel like learning and exploring your area of focus in your spare time.
6. Work feels like work—something you need vacations and regular breaks from.
7. You’re generally stressed out—during and outside of business hours.
8. Your work doesn’t have meaning—it’s just a thing you do for money.
9. Your gut tells you you’re out of alignment and that something needs to change.

These are just a few signs and symptoms that you’re out of alignment with the work you’re doing.

You can succeed for a while like this—especially if you’re particular persistent, stubborn, or unwilling to change.

But if you want to be in this business for a long time, become an industry leader, and generally enjoy your life, you’re better off making iterations (or massive changes) until you’ve landing on something that lights you up. 

Otherwise, you might as well go get a job somewhere.