Marketing Consultants

A lot of people talk about offering group coaching options as a way to create leverage around your expertise.

And that can be a great model for many.

But I also believe you can build highly profitable 1:1 advisory options that don’t always demand a lot of your time and energy before you need to go for more scalable options.

In this email, I’m going to share with you three ways to design highly profitable 1:1 engagements.

If you do it right, your business can reach several hundred thousand dollars without consuming all of your waking hours. I’m proof of this myself, so none of this is theoretical.

Below are three ways to design highly profitable 1:1 advisory retainers.

Option 1: The front-loaded retainer

In this scenario, you can front-load your engagements with higher fees since most of the heavy lifting and value delivered will be done in this phase of the engagement. After the original commitment period—6 months for example—you can then offer less involved and lower-priced down-sell retainer options to continue working with you.

This approach is especially useful when you work on large and complex projects and you anticipate that there’s not going to be as much of a need for your services over longer time horizons.

This method allows you to capture more value upfront and then have options for continuation at lower fees, if you both feel it’s suitable.

Option 2: The smoothed-out retainer

The second option is where you keep your prices fairly consistent indefinitely with the expectation that clients will need you for a long time.

In this scenario, your prices are kept fairly flat and consistent with what you believe your clients can sustain over a long period of time based on their cash flow and size.

Usually, the assumption is that results will take a long time to come to fruition, work will be steady, and you’ll need to iterate slowly as you go. So, your approach is to spread out your workload and plan for a longer-term engagement so you can be around to help the final results come to fruition.

Clients who have smaller budgets, fairly steady workloads, and/or will need to DIY much of the implementation over long periods are particularly ideal for this.

You’re giving them access to your brain for as long as they need to get a result—without breaking the bank—knowing it will take time for things to pay off.

With this method, it’s less about big projects and rapid investment and more about long-term strategic changes that need time for data to come in and for iteration to create a result.

Option 3:  The lightweight retainer

The third option is to make your services a no-brainer price that provides the 80/20 of access to you.

Maybe you offer unlimited email consulting over six months. Or personalized answers from you in a membership forum. Or a hybrid of group calls and 1:1 DMs in Slack.

With this option, people get light access to you but they get all the benefits of having access to your brain on their particular challenges. They may even get access to training resources you’ve created to help make your direct involvement less critical to their success.

This approach is ideal for scenarios where you’re working with individuals (i.e. coaching or mentoring) whom you can help 1:1 only if you can make it affordable.

You have to be careful with this one and manage scope closely to avoid it becoming a negative experience for both parties, but it can be a highly profitable way to give 1:1 advice—for you and them.

In closing…

Advisory retainers are all about the alignment of value, cash flow, and workload between you and your clients.

You want your clients to not feel like your fees are a burden—or if they are, they’re only a burden for a short while as they do hard things for short periods.

The best retainers are sustainable—for you and your clients. They’re not about squeezing the value out of each engagement. They’re about mutual profitability and alignment over extended periods of time.

If you want to sell short-term engagements or projects, it’s usually best you seek to extract (and provide) the highest amount of value possible within a shorter window.

After all, your expertise didn’t come cheaply to you, so you need to capitalize on it one way or another.

But if you want to sell retainers, the above approaches have worked best for me.

Did I miss anything? Got another experience to add? Did you have a lightbulb moment?

Reply and let me know.

—k

For the next month or so, Mindtrust members are undertaking a challenge to create a small knowledge product to sell on Black Friday.

It could be a mini-course, webinar, template, eBook—anything digital that can be sold infinitely with little to no marginal costs.

The goal is to de-risk it as much as possible by:

1. Creating something that doesn’t take long to make
2. Pre-selling, either by taking money before creating it or by talking about it publicly leading up to the date
3. Using real client questions (or audience research if easier) to validate demand before creating anything

If all you did was follow one or more of these three steps, the chances of you successfully selling a knowledge product would go up substantially.

In very meta fashion, I’d love to hear which product you would be most interested in (if any).

The topic ideas:

1. 10 ingredients of a high-converting consultant website
2. How to design your consulting service ladder
3. How to design a productized advisory service

Clicking one or more links will automatically register your vote.

I won’t hold you to buying anything, this is just to help me gauge interest.

Got other ideas for me? Hit reply and let me know!

Thanks in advance.

—k

There comes a time when we need to spend money on our business.

That might mean investing in a quality designer. Or web developer to improve your site. Or buying a course or hiring a coach when you reach a plateau. Or spending money on better tools for the job because it improves the client experience.

People judge our work based on what they see, not just our ideas.

If your website looks cheap, your clients will assume your work is, too. If your marketing is lacklustre, your clients will assume it will be for them, too—especially if you’re a marketing professional.

If sales conversations aren’t structured or you seem to lack a real process during your engagements, good clients won’t stick around to let you learn on their dime.

People are smart. They can smell it when you’re not investing in your business. Like the barber who stopped upgrading their shop 20 years ago—and who still charges those original rates as a result.

It can be tempting to pull all the profit out of our business each year. But you might generate more of it if you take the mindset of investing in your business.

After all, your clients are making an investment decision when choosing to hire you.

What investments are you making in your business?

What if your home page wasn’t about you?

What if it was entirely focused on your clients and their needs?

What if it centred on giving value through educational content vs. pushing people to your products and services?

Would people be more or less likely to want to learn more about you?

Would it generate more inbound opportunities or fewer?

Some questions I’m considering.

Let’s say your car is having troubles. So, you take it to the nearest mechanic to get it fixed.

They have no idea you’re coming, but they’re already equipped with a wide variety of tools, parts, and expertise to fix most common issues.

As an advisor, your methodology is like a mechanic’s garage.

It’s your toolkit and your reference manual. It’s your go-to suite of tactics, training, benchmarks, systems, ideas, processes, frameworks, templates, examples, and more—all things you’ve tried and found over many years.

Like a well-run car garage, you want everything to be documented, organized, and at your fingertips for each engagement. You develop it slowly over time.

You’ll probably organize it the way your brain works. That part is up to you, but you need some kind of structure.

You could organize it by phases in an engagement, or by category of idea (i.e. channel-specific marketing tactics), or as a framework (i.e. awareness, consideration, nurture, conversion).

Like artificial intelligence, your methodology improves and gets more detailed every time you apply it with a client.

I use Trello to isolate and organize my go-to ideas and processes. You can use what you want—a spreadsheet works. I like Trello for this because it allows you to add rich content to each card.

Some of the cards in my methodology simply have a single idea written on the title so I remember to consider them.

Other cards link to additional resources, training, or even the necessary sub-steps right within the card.

The point of all this is to give you a suite of options to consider at any point in your engagement.

You might show your board to clients, checking things off along the way (which is what I do), or you might keep it for yourself as a reference throughout your engagements.

I’ve even shown mine prospects during sales conversations and wow’ed them into hiring me. They knew I wasn’t going to wing it on their dime and I was bringing real ideas to the table.

Putting everything in a tool like Trello or a spreadsheet allows you to check things off as you complete them. You can look back and track progress, surprising you and your clients with just how much you accomplish.

If you don’t have your own playbook or methodology, I highly recommend you begin documenting it today. It’s a multi-year process that compounds if you work on it consistently.

Create one or get access to mind with AdvisorOS as a starting point to build on.

—k

Notes: you don’t need to take them, but it’s smarter if you do.

When I’m running a consulting engagement, I do my best to keep notes on our discussions. I include takeaways, next steps, and use it as a central source of truth—linking to other key documents we’re collaborating on.

It’s not just so I can remember where we left off after every call, although that’s important, too. It’s to be able to track our thought process, our progress, and get clear on our agreements after each call.

It can also be a great way to look back after 6 or 12 months, see what we accomplished, show my clients how far they’ve come (and the value of our work), and potentially even use it to write a case study when the engagement is all said and done.

There are two kinds of notes I suggest keeping: the kind you take and the kind your client takes.

If I’m writing notes, they’re for my eyes only—I don’t share them with the client and I write differently. They’re messy but they work.

If I’m working with, say, the marketing manager of my client, I’ll suggest they take notes to document our call agendas, decisions, and tangible next steps.

Call notes might seem like a burden to use, but they’re critical to running an effective advisory business, in my opinion. Even a few notes can be helpful as a reference later on, you’d be surprised.

After all, can you imagine a doctor or therapist not taking notes about your visit?

My notes template and more are included in the AdvisorOS, in case you were curious.

—k

I recently interviewed Kevan Lee, the former VP of Marketing at Buffer and currently Senior VP of Marketing at Oyster.

Kevan is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to leading tech startups to significant growth. To give you an example, he helped Buffer go from $5m to $20m in annual revenue and 100,000 new customer acquisitions per month.

In his first year at Oyster, he helped the company 20x its revenue and build a marketing team comprising over 50 people.

He’s also involved as an educator and advisor with Reforge, On Deck, as well as a past contributor to ProductLed, and more.

In this interview, Kevan and I explore the realm of advisory work.

We cover topics like:

1. How he approaches advisory work while having a full-time gig
2. How he views mentorship and why it’s important to him
3. How he prices his advice—and what he’s learning in the process
4. His experience on the buyer side of equity for advice compensation discussions
5. How he packages his ideas into a playbook that he shares with paying Substack subscribers
6. And a lot more…

This conversation was a fun exploration of the world of advisory work. And like all of us, Kevan is still figuring out what works best for him.

You can follow Kevan on Twitter at @kevanlee and subscribe to his Substack at kevanlee.substack.com.

Give this a listen and subscribe to get more interviews like this in the future.

—k

Let’s talk about the advisory client kick-off email.

Your client says they would like to go ahead with you. That’s amazing! Now it’s time to put your best foot forward.

The first step will be to send them an email to set expectations and get the ball rolling. This email is super important because it shows they can relax—you have a system and you’re not just winging it.

A simple text email is all you need for this step. Bold headings down the page for each item they need to be aware of or act on.

Include things like:

• How to book the first call with you (or suggest a few times)
• A link to a simple questionnaire they can complete
• When invoices will be sent, how to pay, and when they are due
• What (if anything) you need access to so you can do your work (i.e. Analytics)
• What (if any) resources they get or need to review—and where to find them
• Re-iterating any important parameters or restrictions (or lack thereof)
• Re-iterating ways to contact you, your personal contact details, invite link to Slack, etc.

The goal here is three-fold:

1. To properly set expectations about key details of your service
2. To show them you are organized and run a well-oiled service
3. To instill trust so they can relax knowing you’ve done this before

None of this info will be a surprise to them—it’s all things you’ll talk about during your sales calls.

Having a kick-off process that covers everything your clients need to know will help them feel like they made the right decision to hire you.

Get this wrong and buyer’s remorse will creep in. Because after all, nobody wants to buy advice from someone who doesn’t have their stuff together.

—k

P.S. This is part of a series on the core templates you’ll need to successfully sell advisory services. My goal is to give you enough info to create your own. You can also pick up my Advisor Operating System for less than the price of a nice dinner for two.

Giving advice for a living could mean a wide range of things.

For you, it could mean coaching, consulting, mentorship. For others, it could apply to a wide range of other professional contexts, such as medicine, therapy, legal, or financial advice.

For the sake of clarity, I’m primarily defining advisory work as selling access to your brain.

This includes access to what and who you know, as well as any supporting assets you own, like training, examples, and templates you’ve created.

Advisory work is distinct from consulting, which often gets grouped with “hands work”. That’s a different thing.

Being a smart set of hands who advises while doing the work is closer to traditional definitions of consulting than advisory work. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m just trying to draw a distinction to give context to what follows.

Over the next few days, I’m going to walk you through essential ingredients of my Advisor Operating System to highlight why they’re so important to an advisory business model.

We’ll talk about the importance of things like onboarding new clients, keeping good notes, bringing a documented methodology to each engagement, co-creating a performance dashboard, and a wide range of other ingredients that will make you more successful as an advisor.

Nothing you need to do right now, just stay tuned as I go into detail on some of the ingredients you’ll want to create (or copy) as you embark on your advisory work.

—k

A while back, I came across this Instagram Reel.

It’s a pizza place (apparently featured in the movie, Eat, Pray, Love) that serves some of the “best” pizza in Italy.

Whether that’s true or not, you can tell by watching this the pizza will be respectably good—even by Italian standards.

They only sell four kinds. If they sold more, I’m not sure it would be the same vibe or quality.

Sometimes, simple and consistent beats fancy and complex.

—k