Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

business model

Have you ever considered being a mentor?

Have you ever considered offering paid mentorship to people “like you” from earlier stages in their journey?

I’ve heard this desire come up a few times lately, so I thought I’d ask.

Clearly, I’m one of these people. I’ve spent the last two years doing just that. It’s highly rewarding and worth pursuing, though it does have some nuances.

Some of the factors you’ll need to think about include:

  • How to know whether it’s a good idea for you 
  • How to test the waters without going “all-in” on the idea
  • How to package, price, and deliver your offering
  • How to offer it publicly without confusing your existing clients
  • How to find clients who actually want to pay for it
  • How to handle your first few mentorship clients
  • The tools and mechanics of delivering a mentorship program
  • Whether to do individual or group mentorship
  • And a variety of other non-obvious factors to consider

In my eyes, mentoring is a little different from coaching.

It’s typically aimed at people who are a few steps behind you on the journey and want to get similar results to what you’ve accomplished.

Coaching tends to be a little broader in terms of who you help and what you help them do. It’s not always about following a similar journey to yours.

My question to you: If I offered an inexpensive workshop on how to create, sell, and deliver a paid mentorship service, would you be interested in that?

Hit reply land let me know so I can gauge interest and possibly ask you a couple questions to help inform it.

If I get enough interest, I’ll put this together.

—kw

My unofficial definition of strategy

There’s a lot of definitions of strategy.

None of them are particularly clear or obvious. So here’s the way I think about it:

To me, strategy is about having one or more insights that you believe will give you a competitive advantage if applied, making many of the tactical decisions easy or obvious.

How you get to those insights is a story for another day. It might be a combination of research, data, knowledge of the market factors, product-related, instinctive, or any combination thereof.

The key is that when you have these insights, it’s easy to recall them and use them as a lens to make tactical decisions. They should also make a self-evident case for how they might help you win.

That’s a good a definition of strategy as any, in my eyes. It’s not the “right” definition, but it works in practical terms for the strategy work I do with my clients.

So what conscious (or unconscious) insight (s) drive your business and marketing tactics?

What’s your strategy?

How to scope a consulting service

The scope of any consulting service should be determined by the goals of your ideal clients.

If you start with an idea in your head about what people want, you almost always get the specifics wrong. You need real-world input from your ideal clients.

At very least, have conversations with people in your ideal target market. Understand their pains and the context around their goals.

Build backwards from there.

You can do this in your research process, it doesn’t need to be done exclusively during sales conversations.

If you get clear on the goals of your ideal clients using real-world input, the scope and price takes care of itself.

The 5 major problems with execution work

One of the biggest challenges I hear from marketing consultants is they’re getting stuck doing execution work instead of advising.

Managed advisory/fractional CMO services are a great way to ease into advisory work. In the short-term, it can be an exciting and highly profitable line of work.

But if you don’t manage to shift into pure advisory work, it will soon create a lot of unnecessary stress and it will hold you back from growing your business.

In this episode, I break down the five biggest problems (and the sub-variations thereof) with doing execution work as a marketing consultant.

These include:

  • Lack of time to learn, market yourself, and work on your business
  • Becoming an order-taker vs. being seen as an advisor
  • Being out of alignment with your clients’ interests
  • Feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and scatter-brained
  • No ability to scale your offerings and grow your business

This was a longer episode than usual, so I’ll talk about how to break free from execution in a future episode. I’ll also cover the significant upsides it creates for both you and your clients.

Execution is by far the most time and energy intensive thing you do, but is much lower value than you may think.

I’ll get into all that and more in future episodes. For now, give this a listen and let me know if you relate.

—k

Have a bias for action

When you’re standing still, all you can see is what’s around you. To get new information, you need to move.

But many of us get paralyzed when we’re not sure what to do. We think but don’t act. And then nothing happens.

If you’re willing to take imperfect steps, eventually you’ll find what you need to succeed. No mistake is unfixable.

So when in doubt, just move.

Try something. Create a proof of concept. Put out the feelers. See what happens. Adjust your strategy. Everything can be undone or adjusted.

Having a bias for action creates momentum—and momentum creates progress.

You can harness momentum, but you can’t steer a parked car.

Put in the grunt work

Being able to sell advisory services is usually a product of doing execution work for a long time.

You’ve done it so long that it no longer makes sense for you to use your hands. You’ll be too expensive.

Which means your value is in knowing what and how things should be done, and then facilitating the execution with your clients.

If you’re struggling to fill your roster with advisory clients, go back to the basics. Put in the reps doing execution work. Phase into advisory services.

Sell grunt work until you can sell your head instead.

P.S. I talk a lot about phasing into advisory work. Join the Mindshare Community to listen to a private podcast episode where I talk about this and similar topics.

What is your universal value proposition?

My core value proposition to help marketing consultants build and run a profitable advisory practice.

My coaching, membership, training, community, and even this email list are designed to help you do just that.

In other words, it’s all unified. One universal promise. All touch-points designed to help you do the same thing.

Sure, there’s lots of nuance in what I offer. I talk about creating leverage, specialization, designing your business model, marketing—all the tools you need to increase the success and profitability of your marketing practice.

Sometimes, I even talk about mindset, or soft skills, or even unrelated topics entirely. We’re not all logical and one-dimensional.

The point is, with everything I do, my goal and promise is to help you achieve that single outcome. That’s my universal value proposition.

Do you have a universal value proposition? Hit reply and let me know.

Thinking in “units”

Imagine you only had ten units of client time per month.

Every 1:1 client you worked with was one unit, every group coaching cohort was another, your memberships were another, and maybe even the products you sell were another.

Once they were sold out, you could not take on any more work.

How would your business look in terms of focus and profitability?

Would you feel more or less organized? More financially secure or less? Limited or empowered?

I view my advisory business this way and it has many benefits:

  1. No single client leaving could dramatically impact my revenue, and that gives me peace of mind.
  2. I structure my offers to be delivered evenly and consistently each month to reduce difficult spikes in effort.
  3. My cognitive load is limited to a fixed number of engagements, which allows me to remember details, do good work, and not feel overwhelmed.
  4. I ensure every new client fits the profile of the type of person I want to help, allowing me to learn and re-invest my knowledge back into a similar group of people.
  5. I ensure every new unit I sell is as or more profitable than the average AND/OR is more aligned with the type of work I want to do.
  6. The fixed (albeit slightly flexible) nature of it builds in constraints, which makes me more creative about how I design, deliver, and price my offers.

When you think of your business as having limited units of available inventory, it forces you to get clear on how the parts work together.

It allows you to design a business you want and an experience clients love.

When you think of it as “I’ll sell as much as I can until I can’t sell anymore”, your business will tend to lack focus and may end up running you.

That’s what works for me as a solo advisor.

What works for you?

The constraints being a fractional CMO (audio)

This is a preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a free Mindshare Community membership. Join today for more members-only content and community.

If you’ve done any fractional CMO/freelance head of growth/managed advisory work (as I like to call it), you’ll quickly notice how much it limits your time to work with multiple clients and do your own marketing.

In this episode, I unpack a few topics, questions, and constraints brought up by member Rob in a private discussion (with his permission to respond via podcast).

Rob currently does some execution work and is getting opportunities to do more involved fractional CMO work. As a result, it’s difficult to find time (and justify spending it) to market himself.

I talk about things like:

  1. My thoughts on selling days per week/month
  2. The risks of selling most of your time to a small handful of clients
  3. Hiring marketing managers instead of being the one to manage
  4. Focusing on selling advisory level as soon as you can
  5. What to do to market yourself when your time is limited
  6. And a lot of other limits, constraints, and ways of dealing with fractional CMO work in your business

Give this a listen and let me know what you think!

—k

Documenting everything you know [EP. 160]

This is a preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a free Mindshare Community membership. Join today for more members-only content and community.

As I wrote about the other day, one of the most critical aspects of scaling a consulting business without hiring a team is to generate assets from your ideas and expertise.

In this episode, I break down how and why you should aim to document all your ideas and processes in your business to help you create leverage and grow without working harder.

If you’re reading this via email, click here to listen to this episode on the web or join Mindshare to listen to more episodes of the private podcast.