The Big Question
Questions I get from consultants. And my answers.
Question #8: I received this question from a reader (thanks!):
'How can I save time as a consultant to re-invest in building my visibility?'
For those who know me a little bit, I am obsessed with organizing my work to free up time for business development, and I am on a ruthless search for productivity gains, systems, and processes. People are always surprised when I tell them about ‘having a time strategy’.
Here are my 3 biggest time-saving approaches, time tested a decade long:
1. Focus
I already talked about focus in the previous ‘The Authority #7’, but more from a marketing perspective.
And here’s the focus rationale from a time-saving perspective (maybe you should go back to my ‘Big Question’ in the previous newsletter anyway). In #7 I’ve explained the development of the critical components of an expert positioning:
- Your unique expert story (combining specific expertise, experience and credentials) to build trust with your prospects
- Your positioning statement, explaining exactly who you serve (your audience), what outcomes you deliver, and your ‘DOT’, driver of transformation: the way you bring your clients from point A (problem state) to point B (problem solved). See also my LinkedIn post.
- Your POV (point of view): explaining the current and future trends in your market or expertise domain that will impact your clients (and you should know everything!)
- Your social proof: hard evidence that you can make the client transformation come true, e.g. by publishing and sharing case studies on an ongoing basis, research data or problem resolution recommendations from your clients
Can you imagine doing all that work for multiple expertise domains and still finding the time to deliver your client work (and remain credible)? Impossible! If you keep saying ‘Yes’ to everything because you’re either scared of losing opportunities or you just want to be nice to your existing clients, you’ll never have time to structurally grow your business.
As a consultant, you need to fully grasp the details, the background, the context, the relationships, the trend(s), the characteristics, the frequency, the volume, the typical stakeholders involved, etc. of the critical pains of your target clients (in your narrow market). If you cover multiple expertise areas, that’s totally impossible to accomplish.
The world's biggest authorities relentlessly say ‘No’ to protect their time and maintain their narrow positioning. Focus!
2. Staying upstream
In their striving for visible authority, I teach consultants to remain productive (and save lots of time) 'by staying upstream' as much as possible: packaging their expertise into 'a strategic system' and to price it as a premium diagnostic service (upstream being strategic versus downstream being operational/implementation support).
As authority you'd stay (far) away from implementation work, that’s how I ‘survived’ the past decade. Strategy, roadmapping, diagnosing. That’s your new mindset to save time as a consultant (and authority).
3. Standardising your consulting service(s) to the max
Many consultants are still providing highly customized services rather than standardized packages (and are afraid to move to highly standardized approaches).
Even if they focus on a single expertise domain, they may still have a hard time packaging that expertise into an easy-to-sell system.
As a result of not having a packaged system, they risk moving 'downstream' quickly (highly customized, difficult to scale operational/implementation work) in their consulting activity rather than “staying upstream” (standardized, strategic, diagnostic higher paid work – process and value-driven, much easier to scale).
Offering highly customized services is the biggest draw on your time I could think of and it is also immensely difficult to reverse that downward spiral. It will burn you out one day, watch out!
Here are a few more time-saving benefits of packaging a service that I learned over the years:
- It reduced the time it took me to develop a plan of action;
- It reduced the time I spent explaining the service and the pricing;
- It reduced the time clients spent on decision making;
- It reduced the time lost due to implementation scope erosion, typical for customized approaches (spending far more hours than planned and extremely difficult to give client pushback);
- It solved problems in a time-saving repeatable way (which also led to better pattern recognition, thus deepening the expertise);
- It reduced the time to train and align team members, freelancers, or colleagues who were supporting me in my work;
- It reduced the overall amount of time I spent working on client accounts, freeing up time for business development.
CONCLUSION: Not having (making) enough time is a mindset!
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. 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.
If you really want to develop your consulting business, you will have to get rid of the vicious mindset that tells you ‘I don’t have time to win more clients’ or ‘I don’t have time to nurture my existing clients’.
Related content:
An interesting question for the next edition: I received this question from a reader (thanks!):
'I work in a large consultancy firm and would like to get more support from marketing to improve my external visibility. How can I best collaborate with marketing?'
Would you like to send a question for one of the following newsletter editions? Please send it to me here.
