Your clients typically have this need to compartmentalize what you do for them, separating the higher- and lower-level activities and then drawing inferences that put you in a box. Even more than the services you do for them, how you position those services will have a significant impact on the nature of the relationship.

If you’re open to the exercise of pattern matching, always start with yourself. Where have you consistently failed or thrived? What inputs led

Having embarrassed myself with no claim to expertise and having delivered confident, kind answers are two extremes that I will no longer choose between. I’d rather say no than pretend.

Your only real control is to withhold your expertise. And although withholding expertise is the only leverage real experts have, it can be a powerful one, indeed. Let me show you how this

While those are these three significant components within which you deliver expertise (money, profit, culture), there are other reasons why expertise itself is important.

Entrepreneurs in the expertise business — when faced with a money problem — just make more money rather than looking for efficiencies. Entrepreneurial experts are notoriously terrible at efficiency and cost control.

Fourth, your management and personnel issues are more pronounced in the context of implementation,

but maybe not quite amazing, you can safely assume that you’ll wrap up 1% of the opportunity. If you find yourself regularly snagging 4%, for instance, you can just view the extra as opportunity to waste on the way to higher pricing. So raise your prices until you’re down to 3% as new and existing customers self-select out of the running.

headaches, greater financial risk, additional people to manage, and so on. This last general principle for shaping the positioning of your expertise is too important to get lost at the end of this chapter, so we’ll look deeply at this in the next chapter: uncoupling the thinking from the doing, or uncoupling the brain from the hands.