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title: My new bi-weekly 'think piece' for consultants
description: In 'The Authority', Luk Smeyers' bi-weekly newsletter, he shares intriguing educational stories to reflect on what really matters to grow your consulting business.
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'The Authority' bi-weekly newsletter shares intriguing educational stories to reflect on what really matters in your consulting work.

| View in browser   Luk’s Bi-Weekly 'Think Piece' For Consultants       Edition #8 - September 30, 2020        Dear reader,  Here's the latest Edition of 'The Authority', helping consultants grow their revenue by sharing intriguing educational stories.   It’s my ultimate aspiration to create a bubble of calmness with this bi-weekly ‘think piece’, a place of stillness in the face of everyday stress. A chance to reflect on what really matters in your consulting work. The Big Question Questions I get from consultants. And my answers. Question #8: I received this question from a reader (thanks!): 'How can I save time as a consultant to re-invest in building my visibility?'   For those who know me a little bit, I am obsessed with organizing my work to free up time for business development, and I am on a ruthless search for productivity gains, systems, and processes. People are always surprised when I tell them about ‘having a time strategy’.   Here are my 3 biggest time-saving approaches, time tested a decade long:   1. Focus   I already talked about focus in the previous ‘The Authority #7’, but more from a marketing perspective.   And here’s the focus rationale from a time-saving perspective (maybe you should go back to my ‘Big Question’ in the previous newsletter anyway). In #7 I’ve explained the development of the critical components of an expert positioning: Your unique expert story (combining specific expertise, experience and credentials) to build trust with your prospects Your positioning statement, explaining exactly who you serve (your audience), what outcomes you deliver, and your ‘DOT’, driver of transformation: the way you bring your clients from point A (problem state) to point B (problem solved). See also my LinkedIn post. Your POV (point of view): explaining the current and future trends in your market or expertise domain that will impact your clients (and you should know everything!) Your social proof: hard evidence that you can make the client transformation come true, e.g. by publishing and sharing case studies on an ongoing basis, research data or problem resolution recommendations from your clients Can you imagine doing all that work for multiple expertise domains and still finding the time to deliver your client work (and remain credible)? Impossible! If you keep saying ‘Yes’ to everything because you’re either scared of losing opportunities or you just want to be nice to your existing clients, you’ll never have time to structurally grow your business. As a consultant, you need to fully grasp the details, the background, the context, the relationships, the trend(s), the characteristics, the frequency, the volume, the typical stakeholders involved, etc. of the critical pains of your target clients (in your narrow market). If you cover multiple expertise areas, that’s totally impossible to accomplish. The world's biggest authorities relentlessly say ‘No’ to protect their time and maintain their narrow positioning. Focus! 2. Staying upstream In their striving for visible authority, I teach consultants to remain productive (and save lots of time) 'by staying upstream' as much as possible: packaging their expertise into 'a strategic system' and to price it as a premium diagnostic service (upstream being strategic versus downstream being operational/implementation support). As authority you'd stay (far) away from implementation work, that’s how I ‘survived’ the past decade. Strategy, roadmapping, diagnosing. That’s your new mindset to save time as a consultant (and authority). 3. Standardising your consulting service(s) to the max Many consultants are still providing highly customized services rather than standardized packages (and are afraid to move to highly standardized approaches). Even if they focus on a single expertise domain, they may still have a hard time packaging that expertise into an easy-to-sell system. As a result of not having a packaged system, they risk moving 'downstream' quickly (highly customized, difficult to scale operational/implementation work) in their consulting activity rather than “staying upstream” (standardized, strategic, diagnostic higher paid work – process and value-driven, much easier to scale).   Offering highly customized services is the biggest draw on your time I could think of and it is also immensely difficult to reverse that downward spiral. It will burn you out one day, watch out! Here are a few more time-saving benefits of packaging a service that I learned over the years: It reduced the time it took me to develop a plan of action; It reduced the time I spent explaining the service and the pricing; It reduced the time clients spent on decision making; It reduced the time lost due to implementation scope erosion, typical for customized approaches (spending far more hours than planned and extremely difficult to give client pushback); It solved problems in a time-saving repeatable way (which also led to better pattern recognition, thus deepening the expertise); It reduced the time to train and align team members, freelancers, or colleagues who were supporting me in my work; It reduced the overall amount of time I spent working on client accounts, freeing up time for business development. CONCLUSION: Not having (making) enough time is a mindset!  I’ve always set myself the target of creating actions that will lead to at least a 20-30% in available time to devote to my content marketing and business development. I am damned serious when I say that 50% of my past success as a consultant was my state of mind to be able to free-up 20-30% of my time to grow my consulting business.   If you really want to develop your consulting business, you will have to get rid of the vicious mindset that tells you ‘I don’t have time to win more clients’ or ‘I don’t have time to nurture my existing clients’.   Related content: Why You Should Learn To Say 'No' To Grow Your Consultancy Business 6 Ways To Find More Time To Grow Your Consulting Business An interesting question for the next edition: I received this question from a reader (thanks!):   'I work in a large consultancy firm and would like to get more support from marketing to improve my external visibility. How can I best collaborate with marketing?'   Would you like to send a question for one of the following newsletter editions? Please send it to me here.  The Disturbing Truth Unsettling revelations from experts I admire. And from myself. Every Monday morning, I am sharing a consulting-related advice on Linkedin to start the new week.    These advices reflect years of my passionate thinking about the consulting profession and span one year of writing. I've mixed my own quotes with carefully selected quotes from experts I admire and you may never have heard of.   Here are the quotes from the past 2 weeks. Let the inspiration be with you (if you let it).    Topic 14-09-2020: The game has changed   The consulting world is hard and is getting harder. No one is coming to save you. There are very few big wins these days but a lot of little wins. To win new clients, you have to do a lot of work and there’s no guarantee at all. You don’t get rewarded for ‘trying’, ‘failing’ or ‘working hard’. And if you hate marketing and sales as a consultant, you are in deep trouble. (Luk Smeyers)   Topic 21-09-2020: Adapt or die   For a consultant to be successful in this quickly evolving world, he/she needs the ability to adapt frequently, a zeal for lifelong learning, and a willingness to embrace an even greater degree of specialization than ever before. (Richard Branson)   The Irresistible Content I write a lot. Here's the update from the past weeks. My new blog: Want To Be a Furiously Successful Consultant? Put All Your Eggs in One Basket. Top 10 articles of September 2020: Eager to grow your consulting business?  Linkedin post: Do you know the biggest blunder that consultants can make? LinkedIn post: Do you fear saying NO as a consultant? LinkedIn post: Do you present evidence of how you add value as a consultant? Content Summary: My Quarter 3 content summarized in 1 blog! The Authority, previous edition: Edition #7  The Inspiring Reading I read a lot. Here's what I am reading right now. I am reading between 30-50 books per year. I just finished reading: ‘Give and Take’ by Adam Grant No wonder this book has received so much praise. The likes of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and others raved about it. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and Wharton’s top-rated professor, examines the notion of success in the context of how we interact with one another. There are givers and takers. Takers tend to focus exclusively on their own self-interest and exploit others to achieve their personal goals. Givers, on the other hand, are those who feel accomplished when supporting others, sharing their own knowledge and expertise freely and generously. The 3 main things I learned from this book: 1. Helping instead of selling. Early on in my consulting career, I got inspired by Guy Kawasaki’s theory of ‘Bakers and Eaters’. His point of view is similar to Adam Grant’s findings. Guy Kawasaki inspired me to become a baker instead of an eater: 'Eaters want a bigger slice of an existing pie, bakers want to make a bigger pie and share it with others' (and they have an infinite supply of pie). Ever since then, this concept has been my guiding principle in consulting. Reframing your head from ‘selling’ to ‘helping’ gives you a better mental guiding principle as a consultant and authority and it makes it easier to embrace the marketing/selling aspect in consulting. 2. Takers lose respect and damage their reputation While takers may enjoy periods of success, I’ve experienced many times such consultants got ‘punished’ by what Adam calls the ‘taker tax’ (spreading the word of a taker’s bad behaviour), greatly hindering their chances of continued success.   The new consultant archetype is transparent, helpful, caring, empathic, supportive, generous, educative, authentic, vulnerable, real, genuine. If you are a taker-personality, you will struggle to get in sync with this new archetype and you will struggle to become an authority!   As I always say: ordinary consultants sell (the takers), authorities share (the givers).   3. Givers can get at risk to burnout (or being abused by the takers)   Many givers I know, flourish thanks to their enormous generosity. Unfortunately, quite a few of those consultants end up exhausting themselves trying to please everyone.   If you are always saying ‘Yes’ to your clients, you’ll end up engaging in far too many activities, and you won’t have the time you need to dedicate to your top priorities, deepen your expertise, and build authority. The biggest authorities in the world relentlessly say ‘No’ in order to protect and maintain their narrow positioning, without becoming takers though.   Are you a giver or a taker?    The book invites you to take a look at your own interactions with people and assess your style. Are you a giver or a taker? To that end, check out Adam Grant’s TED talk, where he discusses this very subject.   Here is a podcast, where Grant discusses his book. The Inconvenient Number Visible Authorities have a better pipeline. The evidence. What buying activities do decision-makers engage in prior to making their decision? According to Gartner research,    The largest chunk of their (decision makers') time – 27% – is spent doing independent online research. Only 22% of their time is spent actually meeting their potential vendors/service providers.   Failing to establish a strong online presence will automatically put your competition ahead of you - 27% ahead, to be exact.   That’s why consultants should carefully and strategically build up their online presence – with content that’s thoughtful, authentic, and original.   Source: Gartner's New B2B Buying Journey & its Implication for Sales   The Secret Backstage A sneak peek behind the curtains of my business. Luk's lab. In ‘The Inconvenient Number’ (see above) you could read how important it is to build your online presence as a consultant with valuable content.   Putting in the effort toward creating valuable content gave me the privilege of becoming a ‘visible authority’ globally the past decade. It didn’t happen overnight though. It took a lot of hard work, a structured approach, and a laser-sharp focus. Openly sharing all my learnings has enabled me to create consulting opportunities that I would not have had otherwise. Honestly, it has built my business from scratch to success. And I have started doing it again now, with TheVisibleAuthority.com. Step-by-step (with a lot of patience) I am building my content again to build trust and to get visible. And of course, building organic traffic (next to social media traffic) still is massively valuable. Obviously, building search engine authority is not a sprint but a marathon. I started to write new content about 10 months ago and my organic traffic has started to slowly grow now, see the chart below. The Inevitable Learning The programs I am teaching. To become a better consultant. My brand new 30-Day Program: In the 30-Days Group Program, you will learn the behind-the-scenes strategies and powerful tactics that I've used to launch and grow my own consulting business. And they can work for you too. It'll be a virtual GROUP PROGRAM, starting monthly, 4x online 2-hour training sessions, life-long access to the recordings, and exclusive Q&A access to myself for 4 weeks. First group starts in November. Here's the link to the info page.  My Accelerator Program: I have A LIMITED NUMBER OF SLOTS in 2020 for senior consultants eager to attract their ideal customers and grow their consulting business consistently. The Accelerator Program starts with a full audit of your market positioning and covers the necessary long-term improvements and quick wins. The number of participants for this 1-2-1 virtual training is limited. Access on a first-come-first-served basis. Here's the link to the info page with the program content. You can book a call on this info page to discuss your participation.  My Mastermind Retreat: Due to Corona, all 2020 Mastermind Retreats are on hold right now. I got several questions from candidates to join. Please get on the list and I will keep you informed as soon as I can go ahead again. Here's the link to the program content with the button to the waiting list. Thanks for your patience! Not yet subscribed to 'The Authority'? Subscribe here. Previous 'The Authority' edition: Edition #7 TheVisibleAuthority.com, Bondgenotenlaan 169, Leuven, \| 3000, Belgium Unsubscribe Manage preferences |
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