Question from live Q&A last week:

“I’m currently providing ad-hoc advising to an early startup. How can I expand that into something bigger or more structured?”

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Advising can be an exciting way into solo consulting, or a lucrative extension of your service portfolio.

A company may feel like they don’t quite need you or afford you full-time, or even fractionally but they admire your expertise and want your strategic guidance to help them see around corners, avoid pitfalls, etc.

Sounds great - and in many ways, advising is the purest form of monetizing your expertise:

A company wants on-demand access to your brain, and you provide it, for a fee.

If you want to expand beyond an ad-hoc advising arrangement, let’s start there…

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Stop advising for free.

Many of these arrangements originate informally — friend of a friend is a founder, your name gets brought up as someone they should talk to, etc. — and early stage companies in particular will be cash-strapped or at least very frugal.

In that context, it is tempting to sign up as an unpaid advisor for a lot of other reasons (visibility, brand-building, exciting problem or product).

This is a trap.

One or two complimentary calls is fine, but any more than that starts to cheapen your expertise.

You’re essentially a time-traveller helping them avoid future issues, and as a business-owner, you need and deserve to claim a fair share of that value.

The longer you go unpaid, the less chance you’ll have of ever generating revenue.

And remember, your client is never going to ask “when can I start paying you?”

It’s up to you to turn off the advice valve and propose a formalized agreement, ideally a monthly retainer.

Next, ask yourself how you want to help

You might have jumped into an advising relationship, but perhaps you find yourself missing rolling up your sleeves to actually do the work, or at least shaping a strategy.

Think through the helper personas - if you could choose, which one represents your “zone of genius” with respect to your client’s problem?

If it’s a more hands-on role like a fixer or a strategist, do you have the capacity/bandwidth to even offer that?

Last, have a frank conversation about partnership

Based on how you’d like to help them, ask for a 30-minute zoom-out discussion about how you can best partner with them.

Tell them what you’ve seen so far while advising them, what you think is coming down the road in their journey, and where you think you’re best able to add value.

Then stop, and listen to where they are.

Even if they’re not interested or ready to commit to a larger engagement with you, you’ll get a lot of information about their priorities and how they see you fitting in.

And if nothing else, the conversation allows you to revisit the structure of your advising relationship. Use this as your opportunity to move away from a free or hourly advising model.

(I’ll cover structuring monthly advisory retainers in a future post. Drop me a line if you have an imminent conversation about that coming up.)

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Tomorrow’s question:

🗣️ “How do I pitch strategy work when the return on my work is long-term or hard to quantify?”

💡

-Wes

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P.S. The Lighbulb pulse check is still open a couple more days - please let me know how I can improve! 1-minute. Anonymous. Much appreciated. 🙏