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

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 come to experts with challenges that they can’t solve. They’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit and it’ll take a ladder to get the rest. Or they’ve eaten everything on the plate except the vegetables and it’s going to be a slog to get through the rest of the meal.

Second, clients will not pay a premium for ongoing presence, long term. They will only pay a premium for episodic presence. The residents of a country welcome a liberating force more than the occupying force.

All this works if you standardize your data gathering, because only then can you make the comparisons easier to apply. You might play with that initial survey for a year until you get it right, but after that, you’ll want to land on one specific instrument that’s used with all of your similar clients. Which should be quite possible if your position

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

No middle ground: free to prospects … or high fees to clients.

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 p

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.”

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