A lot of what I talk about is helping marketers go from “grinding out deliverables on a deadline” to selling strategic engagements, advisory services, and teaching what you know.
In other words, it’s to become strategists, not just implementers.,
The longer I do this, the more I realize that most strategists do a little bit of everything.
Almost all of us do.
I’ll pick me as an example. I started advising in 2017 and began phasing out my web design and digital marketing agency work in the years that followed.
But even today, I host more than a handful of websites for legacy clients and my team manages website changes and maintenance for me on auto-pilot.
It’s been a while since I did the math, but I’d guess this work adds about $20k/year profit to my business with only occasional intervention from me.
The reason I still do that kind of work is that it’s largely done without me. I was very involved when I designed and built the site for those clients originally, but now that they’re in maintenance mode, it takes very little involvement from me unless the clients want to add significant new features.
I also advise half a dozen consulting clients, mentor several marketers in various capacities, and sell training and education to them as well.
I even have one interim CMO client, which means I’m spanning the full spectrum of done-for-you, managed consulting services, advisory services, and education products.
And I’m not alone in this.
Several members of the membership also sell some combination of done-for-you services with advisory and education parts of their business.
When I got started doing this mentoring thing, I thought I’d help people transition out of doing the execution work and into doing advisory/education work.
Selling expertise, not your hands.
But the more I study the reality of my business and the many strategists I encounter, the more I realize it’s a spectrum that many (most) of us involve ourselves with at various levels simultaneously.
If you’re looking to make the transition from selling purely your hands to more strategic and leveraged offerings, the best thing to keep in mind is that it won’t happen overnight.
You start with a single strategic engagement that doesn’t involve the long tail of execution (which you may or may not also do separately).
Or you package interim CMO or advisory services on a new site and transition leads over to it, keeping your current thing intact.
Surviving as a consultant is about just that: surviving.
It means doing what sells while slowly introducing higher-level engagements to your offerings—whether on your current site or a new one.
It’s about overlap and transition, not a major leap of faith. This is the way of the emergent strategist.
If you need help with this evolution, you’ll be in good company with the membership—a hybrid of mentorship, training, and a community of marketing strategists doing this exact thing.
Maybe I’ll see you inside.
—k