Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors: Covert Techniques for a Remarkable Practice

The consulting life is a constant challenge. You’re standing naked in front of people who’ve tried their best to figure it out but are stuck. You are with them, but you are pushing them upstream into uncomfortable places. You’re a human with all your own challenges, but you have to let them feed off your own (sometimes contrived) confidence.

I’ve used “tradecraft” in the title because it’s about technique. Technique is what makes insight applicable and thus valuable to your clients, and part of your positioning is how you do your work.

Leadership, consulting, and parenting are the three unheralded forces in our world.

An expert is someone whose thinking is regularly sought and paid for.

The expert has a point of view (or perspective). The expert is concise. The expert is believable. The expert can answer follow-up questions without choking. The expert seems confident. The expert holds many principles subject to later modification. The expert—in a work setting—believes the “how” is just as important as the “what.”

First, make sure your positioning is not interchangeable with more than 200 other advisors, but make sure you can find at least 10 other advisors who do the same thing as you. Not who do it the same way as you, but who do the same thing as you. As a secondary check on your positioning, make sure that there are at least 2,000 addressable prospective clients, but no more than 10,000.

Second, have a simple lead generation plan. This must include the regular development of insight that’s disseminated somehow, but you’ll need at least one higher-impact tactic that fits your personality and takes advantage of the context in which you work: speaking engagements, events, research reports, a book, etc. The goal is to secure more opportunity than you have capacity to serve, because the delta between the two represents your ability to say “no” and maintain more control over your client base.

Third, understand your financial performance. Know exactly what to track, and keep an eye on your cash cushion especially. Reduced to its very simplest, try this. Create a spreadsheet called “Time to Starve.” Add up these things: Cash (what’s in the bank) Savings (set aside for a rainy day in a business account) AR (accounts receivable: billed to clients but still outstanding) WIP (work in progress: work completed but not yet billed) Sales (work that you’re >80% certain of landing)

Fourth, develop a cadence to foster accomplishment.

The idea is to divide your week into three kinds of days. The first kind (Preparation), which will comprise three or four days of each week, are the days when you get things off your plate or clear the deck.

The second kind of day (Contribution), which will only be one or two days per week, is when you get real work done. These are the days when you are changing your world. You write your marketing plan or you invent a new service offering or you shape some original research for a talk you’re going to give.

The third type of day (Perspective) is the weekend, for most people. It’s when you become a normal human again, reconnect with people, pursue hobbies, do physical labor, read, and largely forget about work.

Fifth, cultivate a broad generalist context for your deep specialization.

One of the things that impactful experts do is make connections between disparate areas of knowledge. They see things in one field and apply them in another. Useful nuggets of insight are buried everywhere.

shepherding the financial performance of the firm; hiring/molding key staff (if you have them); ensuring that new business is happening regularly; and strategizing for clients.

The four things are insight, objectivity, courage, and empathy, all wrapped up in a methodology unique to you, governed by a dismissive perspective about your own future—a disregard for how you will survive.