I became a better advisor because I was trying to be observant and curious, and because I was always on the lookout for insight that could be applied across industries. It’s not either/or, but rather a powerful combination of deep expertise grounded in a very broad context.

The most notable firms have their own house in order first, and only then do they branch out and focus on client work.

Sufficient smarts. Not necessarily brilliance, but at least an ability to apply critical thinking skills. Lots of discipline. Distractions are death by a thousand cuts. I’m writing this right now on an island. It cost money and time to get here, but it’s the only way I can get this book out of my head onto paper. I fly into SDQ because it’s a quick

If you can’t have the hard conversations, you can’t be a good advisor. Impact requires courage. That ability to have those tougher, more intense conversations is what will endear your clients to you, but along the way it won’t be like some parade of adoration. There will be genuine frustration and even some dislike. Being conflict-averse is the

First, note the relative size of your largest client. If you are working for multiple departments or divisions of the same larger entity, they should be listed as a single source of work. You want that largest client to represent 15%–25% of your total fee billings. Larger than that and most of the clients that follow will be too small to generate

The better your positioning, the easier it is to give insight away.

You’ll get so close to the client that you lose your objectivity. You’ll become a part of their team and take too many things for granted. You’ll keep asking when and how rather than why.

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. It’s uninterrupted time because you’ve

If you want a more efficient method, package a service or two from your menu and charge more. And do it consistently. I should clarify that there is no innate reason that the package price needs to correlate with the hours it requires to complete that work. Not at all! The price is what it is—the only difference is that it’s high—and it doesn’t