The Big Question
Questions I get from consultants. And my answers.
Got this question from a reader (great question, thanks!):
“Luk, you talk a lot about reducing client facing time to invest more time in getting visible. Could you advise me how to reduce my 60-hour working week to free-up time for my marketing?”
“Managing your time is no longer about the clock. When you manage your time by time, you will never have enough time”. (Jim Fortin)
It’s what I’ve seen consultants do: working crazy hours ‘to get things done’. And the first thing most of them do? Trying to get more productive. They start searching for all sorts of productivity measures but never get there. It’s what I call ‘the backwards approach’ – band-aid-adding instead of symptom-solving.
It’s what Jim Fortin is calling ‘managing your time by the clock’. I love what he says in his podcast: "If you want to catch up and be productive and get things done, you must start managing your time by commitments (and not by the clock)".
Think about that. No commitment in consulting means keeping the options open. Zero focus. And when everyone is your target market, you will never have the time. You will continue to say yes to all incoming opportunities, which will constantly keep you in the project execution mode, which will leave you no time for marketing. No time for marketing means no business growth, which, in turn, puts you in survival mode – you feel a lot of uncertainty and risk, and you keep saying yes to almost everything to protect your income.
You find yourself in a vicious loop and it can feel desperate and discouraging – you want to get out, but you can’t see a path out. It’s exhausting and it’s burning you out in the long run.
There’s only one path out of the hole
The path: start with fixing the issue of focus and commit to a specific audience with a specific problem with a specific value proposition. Once you make the active decision (or commitment) of narrowing down your focus, you will automatically start fixing your time problem. That’s ‘symptom-solving’. I’ve witnessed this with every single consultant I’ve worked with over the past 2 years who had the problem of being an unfocused, non-committed generalist and not having the time to get visible.
Commitment is an opportunity to learn so many things that other people never learn within your area of expertise, to create the level of expertise that others will find almost impossible to compete against. Commitment will help you see your priorities more clearly. You’ll automatically cut out the noise and become insanely protective of your time.
It’s not overly difficult. I did it in the past decade (30% time to invest in getting visible) and I am doing it again (and even more extreme) in my new consulting business (30% in marketing, 20% free time to unplug, only 50% client-facing time).
Don’t forget: your focused competitor is only one click away and digital is how new business is won in consulting. Trust me, there are thousands of other consultants doing exactly the same thing as you. You’d better stand out to protect your future business and you can only stand out by becoming the expert in a narrow expertise domain and invest at least 30% of your time in doing your marketing. To be able to invest 30% of your time in growing your consulting business, you will need to radically, insanely, strikingly, acutely protect your time.
The big 3 symptom-solving approaches
A few of my clients are generating revenue multiples of 5x or even 10x compared to other consultants doing pretty much the same thing. Why is that? These consultants freakingly obsess about these 3 symptom-killing approaches:
● Radical focus (or commitment): one single audience with one prototypical pain point with one specific value proposition. They say no to anything outside their narrow focus or expertise domain.
● Upstream positioning: providing C-level strategic advisory, performing highly specialized diagnostic or audit-based services, developing roadmaps for transformation/change. No downstream, activity-based implementation work. See my article about upstream consulting work.
● Packaging, productizing, standardizing your consulting services. Offering highly customized services is the biggest draw on your time I could think of. Wrapping your services up into clever packages also makes it easier for your client to understand what you’re offering and it helps them to make faster decisions. And by packaging your services, you also clearly and deliberately showcase your area of expertise and help others to easily recommend you.
Having enough time to do your marketing as a consultant is a side effect of excelling in these 3 'symptom-killing' strategies. Do not start your productivity journey backwards, managing your time by the clock. Whichever system you create that way will fail. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next month, but it will come down crashing.
Get over the fear of commitment and realize the beautiful potential it holds.
The next Big Q will be about packaging, productizing, standardizing consulting services, the #3 of the symptom-killing approach (see above). Stay tuned and enjoy the summer!
