Here's the latest Edition of 'The Authority', helping consultants grow their revenue by sharing intriguing educational stories.
It’s my ultimate aspiration to create a bubble of calmness with this bi-weekly ‘think piece’, a place of stillness in the face of everyday stress. A chance to reflect on what really matters in your consulting work.
The Big Question
Questions I get from consultants. And my answers.
Question #12: I received this question from a reader (thanks!):
'How can we best protect our time to enable us to invest in getting more visible as a consultant?'
I am obsessed with organizing my work to free up time for business development. I’ve always set myself the target of creating actions that will lead to at least a 20-30% in available time to devote to my content marketing and business development.
The consultants I am helping to grow their consulting practice, all get a 75/25 target: 75% client work, 25% growing/improving their visibility.
But to get to the 75/25, you will have to reengineer your way of working. It means redefining your approach to consulting: finding your niche, clarifying your positioning, staying upstream with your offering, and repackaging your service so that you’re no longer doing all the operational work for your clients.
I am damned serious when I say that 50% of my past success as a consultant was my state of mind to be able to free-up 20-30% of my time to grow my consulting business.
Here are my three favorite and time-tested approaches to saving time:
Focus: narrow down your field of expertise. In addition to being a smart business strategy (generalists are racing to the bottom), it also saves you time as you don’t have to dilute your attention and try to learn a million different things to satisfy incoming requests. Say ‘NO’ to incoming requests that don’t align with your narrow focus. Without focus, I would have been lost in the past. Don’t forget, your specialized, focused competitor (sharing his detailed expertise) is only one click away from you.
Staying upstream: package your expertise into a 'strategic system' and price it as a premium diagnostic service (upstream being strategic versus downstream being operational/implementation support). To be able to achieve the 75/25, you have no other choice than to stay upstream.
Standardizing your consulting service(s) to the max: Many consultants are still providing highly customized services rather than standardized (upstream) packages (and are afraid to move to highly standardized approaches). Even if you focus on a single expertise domain, you may still have a hard time packaging that expertise into an easy-to-sell system. If you don’t have a packaged system, you risk moving 'downstream' quickly and you will never achieve the 75/25, crucial to get visible to grow your consulting business.
There are two articles that I strongly recommend you read, where I address this very topic in more details:
An interesting question for the next edition: I received this question from a reader (thanks!):
'What are the common mistakes or watch-outs when developing thought leadership as a consultant?'
Would you like to send a question for one of the following newsletter editions?Please send it to me here.
The Disturbing Truth
Unsettling revelations from experts I admire. And from myself.
Every Monday morning, I am sharing a consulting-related advice on Linkedin to start the new week.
These advices reflect years of my passionate thinking about the consulting profession and span one year of writing. I've mixed my own quotes with carefully selected quotes from experts I admire and you may never have heard of.
Here are the quotes from the past 2 weeks. Let the inspiration be with you (if you let it).
Topic 16-11-2020: Embrace the power of 'NO'
The biggest authorities in the world relentlessly say ‘No’ in order to protect and maintain their narrow positioning. “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say NO to almost everything.” (Warren Buffet)
Topic 21-11-2020: Protect your narrow positioning and time
I’ve seen many consultants fear to say ‘No’ to ill-suited opportunities in order to please a client (and/or earn an income), compromising their market credibility and ultimately seriously compromising their future consulting growth. As consultants, we need to be ruthless in discerning what is important and what is just noise. (Luk Smeyers)
The Irresistible Content
I write a lot. Here's the update from the past weeks.
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky are the creators of Google Ventures' renowned ‘design sprint’.
They are the masters of organizing and managing time. This book is spot-on when it comes to the struggle that I witness many consultants experience – constantly being busy, overworked, and programmed to be reactive towards any and all incoming requests as if your life depends on it. Never achieving the 75/25 to grow their visibility and their consulting business (see above in The Big Question).
As the authors explain, ”Make Time is not about crushing your to-do list, optimizing every hour, or maximizing personal productivity. It’s about rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction so you can focus on what matters every day.”
The 3 main things I learned from this book:
Change your default settings: Those familiar with me, know that I’ve always been obsessed with maintaining my 75/25 time distribution (75% client work, 25% growing my visibility) at any time during the week. I have gone deep in finding strategies and tactics to get there. This book has been another help (together with a few other books, summarized in my ‘book blog’) the past 2 years in improving again. It confirmed to me again, to save time, we all need deliberate strategies to change our default settings. People always look strange when I tell them I have ‘a time strategy’.
The busy bandwagon: There are 2 phenomena at work in our daily lives. The first is the Busy Bandwagon. This is the modern mindset telling us that we need to jampack as much work as possible in a day. It pushes us to be extremely productive and this desire to be productive just leads to more busyness. To be honest, I had never thought about productivity in this way. Productivity leads to overload. Something to reflect on.
The rise of the infinity pools: No other book or article has ever explained it so well to me: our social media accounts, news apps, and the Netflixes of this world, we keep scrolling through them to death. These infinite pools, according to the book, are THE biggest time wasters in our lives, and statistics back it up. Why don’t you check the time you’ve spent on it last week? It’s a scary exercise and I am doing it week after week.
What’s worse is, says the book, that the Busy Bandwagon and the Infinity Pools have joined forces to become a monster-like duo of time destroyers. The book really made me think about those moments, exhausted by the Bandwagon and the risk I start passively soaking up the Infinity Pools content.
The result, according to the writers: endless tasks and endless distractions, with us, bouncing back and forth between the two all day long.
I also recommend checking out the list of tools Knapp and Zeratsky list on their website that you could utilize to improve your efficiency and alter your behavior from constant business to mindfulness.
The Inconvenient Number
Visible Authorities have a better pipeline. The evidence.
Marketing Automation. It may seem like a broad concept and a rather intimidating one for those who are not investing much time into marketing. Yet, for consultants, marketing automation is crucial!
4 in 5 users of marketing automation are able to increase their leads and 77% see an increase in conversion.
Why is that the case? Why do you, as a consultant, absolutely have to create a marketing automation system? Three main reasons, really:
It saves you a whole lot of time. You don’t have to do the same menial tasks over and over again.
It helps you make your marketing efforts more systemic. That’s pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?
It provides you with data on what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to consistently improve your marketing efforts.
A sneak peek behind the curtains of my business. Luk's lab.
Openly sharing my expertise and learnings didn’t hurt me. It has built my consulting business the past decade and it has - after 12 months already - built my new business. It’s incredible.
Sharing expertise works as an undeniable business model. I’ve seen a lot of proof for that. Growing a consulting practice is all about building visibility and trust. The challenge though is not developing valuable content as such, it is developing content that harvests traffic and leads to your website/blog. After all, you are running a business, don’t you?
When I started writing a decade ago, not many were doing it, and publishing short case studies was attracting huge traffic. Amazing.
Gradually, the world became content-rich, and sharing know-how is now a given, unquestionably in the (overcrowded) consulting space. Standing out as a consultant means you will need to do what others are not doing, or unwilling to do yet.
That’s why I am so frantic about monitoring the quality of my content. Here are the 3 most important content-related KPI’s I am (currently) fanatically tracking. These KPI’s will evolve over time (much more lead-generating focus) but I will explain this in one of my next newsletters. Right now, I focus on:
Reading time on my blog pages: currently, the time readers stay on my blog posts averages at 4 minutes! This really is a top score and helps me to assess the quality of my content. I review this on a monthly basis.
Sources: it’s absolutely critical to understand where readers are coming from so that I can adjust my content distribution strategy. Right now, this is my approximate source distribution: ⅓ via social media, ⅓ direct traffic, and (hell yeah!) ⅓ organic traffic. I monitor on a weekly basis.
Organic traffic growth: you may have amazing expertise but, your prospects will never find you if Google isn’t showing your website in the search engine. With a robust content strategy, I was able to witness a significant rise in traffic, visibility, and new leads connecting with me. I monitor this on a monthly basis.
The Inevitable Learning
The programs I am teaching. To become a better consultant.
My brand new 30-Day Program: In the 30-Days Group Program, you will learn the behind-the-scenes strategies and powerful tactics that I've used to launch and grow my own consulting business. And they can work for you too. It'll be a virtual GROUP PROGRAM, starting monthly, 4x online 2-hour training sessions, life-long access to the recordings, and exclusive Q&A access to myself for 4 weeks. A new group starts in Februari. Here's the link to the info page.
My Accelerator Program: I have A LIMITED NUMBER OF SLOTS in 2020 for senior consultants eager to attract their ideal customers and grow their consulting business consistently. The Accelerator Program starts with a full audit of your market positioning and covers the necessary long-term improvements and quick wins. The number of participants for this 1-2-1 virtual training is limited. Access on a first-come-first-served basis. Here's the link to the info page with the program content. You can book a call on this info page to discuss your participation.
My Mastermind Retreat: Due to Corona, all 2020 Mastermind Retreats are on hold right now. I got several questions from candidates to join. Please get on the list and I will keep you informed as soon as I can go ahead again. Here's the link to the program content with the button to the waiting list. Thanks for your patience!
