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

There are many viable definitions for that word, but I’m referring to a very specific person here: An expert is someone whose thinking is regularly sought and paid for. That’s different from your father-in-law who opines about everything, without invitation, as if he has a prepared speech, and every pause in what has been to that point a conversati

In the real world, a new client chooses to work with you based on your reputation and their best prediction of what it will be like to work with you. All the positioning stuff is just table stakes: It won’t close the gap, but it gets you in the game.

You are selling objectivity, which comes from externality. One of the only reasons you can actually help them is that you are not in their world. They are inside their own jar and can’t read the label. You enter that world and you see the label clearly. It’s not that they aren’t capable of reading other people’s labels—just not their own. They are

Second, clients will not pay a premium for ongoing presence, long term. They will only pay a premium for episodic presence.

The first opportunity is when you are initially discussing the engagement. You’ll want to give the prospective client multiple options for the engagement, each one priced and scoped differently. You’ll probably have a good idea of what they should hire you for, but it’s still helpful to most (not all) prospects to hear the options. You’ll also be p

A client orientation kit—or whatever you want to call it—does just that: helps them sample the relationship before

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

what you should be talking about is whether you are a mutual fit and how you will go about solving their challenge. Nothing else.

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.