Successful Creative Agencies and Boutique Consulting firms actually manage to get paid for their strategic thinking.
How do they do it?
The first trick is that they wrap it in something else:
They have engagement formats and touchpoints that let them display their intellectual might while generating tangible outcomes for their clients.
I design these formats and touchpoints, but more on that later.
Can you hear it?
Pure knowledge work is facing it’s meteor moment.
Knowing things and getting paid just for that is going the way of dinosaurs.
Three massive gravitational wells sucked this impeding rock of doom towards you and I:
- Clients are developing more work in-house. Understandable.
- Borderless Knowledge-Work kicking into gear after 2020.
- Generative Artificial Intelligence blanketing the internet with “good enough”
Telling people things? Cheap and getting cheaper.
Invoices for that sweet pure advisory work? At risk.
Avoidable Irrelevance
Now, like you, I don’t like this.
I don’t buy it when LinkedIn bros tell me all of this AI magic will make it easier to create content that I can use to sell my services.
Like you, I understand supply and demand.
And of course I’m not a luddite. I use this AI stuff every day 1
What can we do to stave off the collapse of the craft we love honing?
Fun fact #1: most experts see themselves more as artisans than as entrepreneurs.
“Game recognize game”
Kobe Bryant said that. And I don’t even care for NBA.
But the phrase cuts through it all.
It’s devotion that brought you to this level of proficiency. More than devotion, it’s destiny. You’d do this even if unpaid (you probably actually do it unpaid, from time to time).
Loving the work. Putting in the two, the five, the ten thousand hours. And slapping ten thousand more on it. You’re an Expert and that capital isn’t going anywhere. But still…
Will the world have a place for me and my work?
When cars came around, what did the most passionate horse breeders do?
When quartz watches rocked Swiss horology, what did they do in Genève?
When fashion logos got too popular, what did the actual luxury brands do?
What will your firm do?
Getting on the right side of Survivor Bias
If you’re reading this page and not a report from a Big Four consulting firm I have a very strong suspicion that you will do one of two:
Dig, burrow and hope the best- Sprint, chase and pursue the trends
- Shed, change and evolve into what’s next
It’s fair to say I’d prefer you’d pick the last. Not just because I want to sell you services (I do) but also because that’s the only one that is not a losing game.
For 95% of us, being an AI consultant is not safety. A raft is not a shore.
After every extinction there’s a calm.
And after that calm, there’s an exuberance of Life that is the biggest miracle in the universe. Fueled by radically different conditions and a clean slate, ecosystems burst into life that is unique, original, optimistic.
You might have heard of the Cambrian Explosion.
We will see this flourishing happen right before our eyes.
Not in century nor even a decade.
But do we actually have to wait for the meteor?
Can’t we get started with the getting our work noticed, valued and made incomparable?
Enough with the nerdy-talk,
this is what I do:
I help specialized Expertise businesses (creative or technical) turn their fuzzy intellectual property into something clients can see, touch and use. And buy.
This means:
- flagship formats for how you work with clients (e.g. Workshop Sessions)
- visual tools and canvas that, like a magic carpet, take your ideas everywhere.
Complexity commoditizes
Think of the archetype of a studious genius. Does she wear glasses? Or a telescope? Perhaps a microscope then?
Not a mirror, right?
Experts are cursed at seeing the world from extreme viewpoints. Their sight irradiates outward. As fish that don’t know they’re wet, Experts lose track of how far ahead they are.
Their Expertise becomes both the prison and the prisoner.
Not great for sales!
Fun fact #2: there’s a threshold at which a service can be so complex that the general public stops grasping it’s value. In those cases, the whole discussion slides back into just price.
Show, don’t tell
Excellence is easy to detect but hard to describe. Prospects already read you as an Expert. They just don’t understand how that helps them. So they will not buy.
We try and explain what it is that we do, the value, the RoI, the analogies and the examples. Prospects see a little more. The bravest might buy. Most will not.
Talk is cheap and explaining only gets you so far.
It’s proof clients want. They want to see how the sausage gets made.
Experts need practical ways of presenting their Expertise.
Shoulder-to-Shoulder beats Face-to-Face
When knowing things was enough, we could get away with framing our client interactions in simple “Expert” talking to “Non-Expert”. That is not coming back.
Clients are more prepared than ever. The half-life of an insight shrunk to immediacy. You see their eyes darting to the chatGPT tab as they fact-check your points in real time.
Knowing things is dropping to nada.
Helping them put that into practice? Gold.
Working together on something is a peer thing. It’s not you spouting insight nor them listing demands. It’s you both, working side by side, on the same thing. Looking at a problem from the only side of the table that matters now, the one where stuff gets done.
The way you frame this new sort of work is different from the previous way.
In this new way, you need to shape the interactions and sessions with your clients.
Flexible enough to adjust. Structured enough to hold.
If you’re a creative agency or technical consulting firm…
- …have less than 50 employees;
- want to get paid for “the strategy bit”;
- have experimented with codifying IP and got sidetracked…
- … but still suspect there must be a way of capturing what’s unique about your work…
contact@joaolandeiro.com
- but not right now ↩︎