To be released
Florian did not let me off the hook with this one. His many flight hours manifested in the way he clarified subtle nuance and how he gave very palpable examples of real application.
Topics:
- What makes a Signature Methodology actually work in practice?
- How do you know when you have found a repeatable approach worth packaging?
- What are the most common failure modes when developing methodologies?
Florian Heinrichs is a Performance Advisor to Consulting firms and a friend. I've followed his work for a couple of years and we've been chatting for a little over one year. There's a clear connection between how his work highlights the power of a Signature Methodology and my own belief that Workshops are a phenomenal tool for Consulting firms.
Florian Heinrichs
welcome everyone to Exotic Matter, which is the podcast season and series where I'll interview some internet friends and specialists around the changing landscape of knowledge work, expertise-based work, mostly around consulting and agency stuff. And for today, I have Florian Heinrichs. I've been trying to practice their pronunciation. And... We've spoken before at his podcast, Unbillable Hours. And I think it's impossible that you haven't seen Florian's stuff because he's quite active on LinkedIn and shares a lot of stuff around marketing professional services. And you'll see him mention very often the impacts of a signature methodology and how this affects positioning. Florian is now a partner at Visible Authority, which you might also seen around LinkedIn. So thank you, Florian, for being here.
Yeah, thank you for having me and congrats on the name pronunciation there. think that was pretty good. It doesn't lend itself well to the English language, but that's all right.
As someone with a weird sounding name...We do what we can. But did I hit the introduction right? Can you...
Yeah. Yeah, no, that's perfect. I don't know if you exaggerate a bit on people having to have seen me, but yeah, I try to keep up with my posting schedule, sharing the things that come to my mind as we do, as we work with consulting firms on their propositions and then go to market and then service delivery, all that stuff. So yeah, I would say fair description.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I see you all the time and people that I know also see you all the time. So in our world, I think you're famous. So it is working. It is working.
So it is working, is what you're saying. No, actually, actually it is. mean, it is for people that don't know. the Visible Authority at the moment is Luk Smeyrs, who people might also know from LinkedIn and myself. And I'm happy to report that business is going well and it's a hundred percent inbound. LinkedIn does a lot of the heavy lifting for us or our sort of persistent and continuous posting on the channel.
Yeah. I love to complain about LinkedIn, but...
which, yeah. To the people who wonder if it works or people who have complaints about how it's not the right channel and so forth, definitely does work. It also takes a bit of work though to make it so.
Yeah, think actually for myself is a good parenthesis. I think I had the wrong expectations around it because I was not aware of like the inner numbers of people that the behind the scene numbers and I thought, I'm sure LinkedIn is showing my stuff to less than average. But then you talk to other people and say, ⁓ yeah, it's broadly what he's doing for others. That is the bit of my anger at LinkedIn.
will also say I remember when we spoke on our podcast, you had just started or you had started shortly before then and you certainly started later than I did. And I think it is not getting easier. Like the LinkedIn game, like all these channels, right? That stuff just saturates. So...
Mm-hmm.
I had a bit of a harder time than Luk had, was two years before me. don't know how much earlier I was. And if you were to start today, it still works, but you still have to put in lots of effort. Consistency is very important, obviously. And then you just got to show up time and again and do the work. And you have to have interesting things to say, which that's obviously the case. But the need for quality or the need for qualifies as good enough stuff so it'll work out for you. also, the bar keeps rising. It's insane. But that's a different conversation probably.
Yeah, yeah, the bar keeps rising for sure. But I think actually this is a good segue into one of the things I've seen you mention quite often, which is like, if you want to talk about, we are in the business of, a business of trust in a sense. And if you want to build that trust on your audience and the people that are starting to get to know you, you need to talk about what you do and the way you do it and so on.
Yeah.
And you often mention the signature Methodology as a foundation for being able to do this. Can you tell us a little bit more on how you've realized that was not necessarily the name, but how important that was for sustaining your marketing efforts as a services firm?
Yeah. Well, I think it's to be clear, goes way beyond the marketing efforts. think it is the differentiated today or one of those differentiated today you often describe this two ways of running a consulting firm or could be an agency. The first one is where you go to market with a capability cell capacity. So you say, Hey, I'm an expert in X, I don't know, graphic design or supply chain management. Who here needs that expertise, I have a bench of 10 people who could help you tomorrow. So that's what I mean by go to market with the capability. I can do X and then I sell capacity. We have 10 people who can do this. Lots of firms are built this way. Nothing wrong with it. Maybe even all firms. This is typically how you start. And in the past, firms have been quite successful with that. I mean, if you look at the big four or the largest consultancies in the world today, they have probably been built.
Mm-hmm.
Around this model to a certain extent. But it's my conviction that those times are gone. So nowadays you need to do some differently. And that means you need to shift to the other model, which is more in line with modern client expectations. And there the go-to market is by proposition. So you propose a specific solution to a specific problem. And what you're selling is actually the outcome or some type of outcome. So you don't say I'm a supply chain management consultant. You we figured out a way to improve inventory forecasting for retail enterprises. And we save clients on average 10 % or whatever. I'm simplifying a little bit. That's the new model. And as you can probably guess, a couple of things that you need to be able to...
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
play this new game is you need a crisp proposition. So you need to be really clear on what's the issue we specialize in and who do we solve this for. And immediately on the backside, on the flip side of that coin, so what's the problem we specialize in and who do we solve it for is the question of how do we deliver? How do we provide the solution? And what I describe as a signature Methodology is a simplified high level answer to this very question. So typically comes as a description of I don't know, a maturity model or the five high level steps to take clients through or the seven milestones in a two year journey. So I sometimes make this joke that if you can't answer the question, how you deliver the outcome you promised on a diagram that would fit a smartphone screen, because that's where I'm engaging with it for the first time, probably, you now have a problem because if you can't help me understand how I get from issue to outcome Okay. Then you're just claiming stuff and that's not good enough anymore. I don't know if that makes sense.
Makes a lot of sense. think it makes lot of sense. Even on a personal note, I used to try to explain what I do a lot around capabilities. And I'm shifting more into the outcomes. And there's a little parenthesis I can make in there. And it was very obvious that before, I got the sense that people were like, yeah, nice. But nobody was like, ⁓ I got to know about this. Tell me more about this.
Yeah.
So when I started to get a little bit bolder, more courageous maybe, with like, this is what I do and I helped solve this specific problem, there was not a lot of resonance. And what I was getting was signals from other people that had the same capabilities, right? So I would get other workshop facilitators, workshop designers interacting with me, but not my market, not my ICP.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I have a very, if you're up for it, I have a bit of a provocative, pissing people off way of talking about this is. I had this way of framing it where I used to say, if you're in consulting or if you're in expertise type of business, you have the luxury to start an enterprise or start a business without actually being an entrepreneur.
Spicy takes? Yes.
And I think that's still true. Like there are consultants who are very successful, much more successful than I am. They have firms of 20, 30, 40 people, 50 people, but they're not really entrepreneurs in the sense as my grandfather would have defined it because my granddad had a definition. used to say entrepreneurs and artists are people who are willing to risk public failure. Right. They build something and they present it to the world and they say, here, I made this. Do you like it?" And inherent in that is the risk of people saying "Nah...
Tell me more. Hmm.
...get lost, I don't like it" There's the risk of rejection. And if you're an expert, you have the luxury of avoiding that by never building anything and still have a business because all you say is, I'm an expert in X. Do you need this expertise? And then you sell and bill by the hour. And you never have to commit to something specific and invest in that. And you talked about building trust. There's a great book by Rory Sutherland called
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep
I think, "Alchemy", where he talks about the various aspects of advertising and how it works. And there's a bit of a section in there, which has not much to do with the overall point of the book, but he talks about how lawyers, another expertise profession, run this type of business where because it's very obscure expertise, they could promise you the world, take your money and leave town tomorrow to rip you off, in theory. So in...
Mm-hmm.
...order to win your business they have to be very very trustworthy and they have to signal their trustworthiness all the time and that's so that's Rory's logic he says that's why they have the most expensive offices in the most expensive parts of downtown and they furnish it very expensively with chosen very select woods and steel and whatnot to signal look how much invest we have invested in this place we're not going to leave town tomorrow that's that's the signal and
Mm-hmm.
I like this, his way of framing it and the story, because that's just a proxy. Those lawyers also have not invested in the equivalent of a product. Like every size startup, every bakery does this. They take their own money, they pour it into something, an oven, a recipe, 150 pretzels they sell the next morning. And they say, we made this, do you like it? Consultants often don't do this.
Okay. Yeah.
They could get away with not doing it. That's what I said earlier, I think it's changing. So the signature methodology, coming back again to your point, very much is a very, very strong cross signal because it says to the world, I stick my neck out, I say, I think you have this problem. I know how it can be solved. I built this process to get you there. In other words, I have
Mm-hmm.
I have skin in the game, right? I put my own money into this, I've built it out, I took the risk of people hating it, I take the risk of people calling me out on LinkedIn, right? Saying this guy's posting BS, whatever. But that is what also then strengthens and reinforces the proposition. It's the consultant's equivalent of being entrepreneurial in investing in a product. That's as close as you can come, I think, to that.
Yeah.Eating your own dog food, You know, this... There's the... I've started to write the book, right? And I've written a lot of stuff online and so on, in different places. But now I'm, you know, bringing it into a single thing. And it's an incredible forcing function for really like stress testing. Do I like the way I see this? Do I agree with this? Does every...Way of looking at this still makes sense. And I mean, this has been known for a long while, a long time, which is you don't know what you're thinking until you write it down. And to me, the fact that you try to design and commit to and bet, in a sense, on a Signature Methodology is also a way of really making you reflect and surface how you work, right?
Yeah,perfect. And yes, and it does another thing, which is beautiful. And that's why it's more than marketing. It shows or it delineates certain contexts and correlations and things as trade-offs. Right. So all methodology is good for this. It will not help you with that. And suddenly everybody in the firm has clarity around what
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Not to do, what not to say yes to, which things not to help with. So it's a forcing function, not just in the way of how do we think about this, but then also downstream, like what type of work do we pick? Where do we say no to? How do we streamline delivery? It can even go to what types of people do we hire around here, because now that we have the methodology, we have some clarity or better clarity around.
Yeah.
What types of skill sets do we actually need around this place? Everybody can write, yeah, you need a business degree and analytics experience, but what does it really mean? So as soon as you have your high level methodology or approach clarified, a lot of the opportunism that exists in the capability capacity model is pushed out and a lot of the complexity inside the firm is reduced, which also then reduces the complexity cost of running the business. And it's a huge game changer for many firms.
for sure. Okay, and I have a feeling, and I've had interactions like this, so maybe, I think you've been doing this for longer, so you surely have your own stories around this, that sometimes experts, they get the sense that, yes, yes, I get it, but my business is different, and it's impossible to create a methodology because everything is so unique and customizable and so on. Is this a pattern you've seen?
That happens all the time and it is a choice you can make. I will not say it's a mistake. It is a choice. You can run your business that way. You can say, no, we don't want to narrow this down. I thrive on the challenge of having a different problem every day, whatever. But again, trade-offs, if you make that choice, you better be clear that the ever increasing complexity costs, right? If you add people to the firm and you continue with the opportunistic route,
Okay. Mm-hmm.
Like your new partners also bring on business day like and so forth. So the, the complexity will continuously rise with the growth of the firm and that will completely constrain your ability to stabilize things, let alone scale them. And with things, mean, everything revenue profits, all that stuff. You can still build up a relatively decent firm. Maybe even a thriving one.
Mm-hmm.
But the costs you'll likely incur are, like I said, there will be a cap to how profitable you can be. There's impacts on everybody's life, for lack of a better word. The firm that doesn't have a methodology in where you take whatever business seems to fit your expertise, that's a firm that leaves clients in charge of the engagement. They set the terms, they sent the RFP, you say yes to everything.
Thanks.
Those are the firms where everybody works 60 hour weeks and has to update the presentation Friday afternoon because the client wanted it to brackets. The clients obviously has left the office and won't respond to you before Tuesday. That's so these are the things that these are the things that you, you incur as downstream costs. If you avoid the actually very manageable risk of investing in something that doesn't work because that's the fear, right? The fear is of building something out. People don't like and reject and then
Yeah.You're busy Yeah.
Also, there's this, this fear of, and you alluded to this of saying, ⁓ the, the, the, the thing people often leave out as they give the response, our business is different. ⁓ there is so much complexity. What they don't say is we haven't found the thing yet that we could do repeatedly. Right. So it's, it's very often as a business generation problem, they say yes to a thousand things because they cannot generate demand for just one thing. And so they.
Mm-hmm.
They're afraid of saying, oh, this is it, right? Going back to my supply chain management example, they say, yeah, we've done forecasting projects at retail in the past, but it's never enough to feed the company, right? So we can't do this. And that of course is sort of a bit of a vicious circle. Yeah, you can't because you haven't presented a compelling methodology, which would be a great contributor to winning you more business in the fields, but you haven't done that because you're very busy sort of bring in revenue from elsewhere because you can't commit to the thing. So it's, I fully understand the fear and the resistance, but there's only one way to fix it.
We've touched on a few things and I had a question here that I think we kind of broached, which was where people trip up when trying to come up or codify their signature methodology. And on one aspect, I think the first trip up from what I gather is just a resistance to it because the fear is a very understandable fear. But let's say that someone is convinced.
Yep.
How to figure out what's our signature methodology. Are there patterns on things that they, well, trip up on? As they've made the decision to do it, they want to do it, but they make a mistake or something.
Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, it's a long list. I'll try to present the most important ones with some order. So I'd say the first stumbling block usually is if you are convinced and you have three partners who aren't, there's an alignment issue. And that is often significant, specifically in larger firms, because if you have multiple partners, they will have different books of business. And even if all of them are convinced, the next question downstream, which what methodology should we offer, you get four different answers. Because everybody has their own book of business, their own priorities and so forth. So the political aspects is a huge stumbling block and you got to work around this. So you have to set a direction everybody buys into. The next thing then is you need the value proposition first, right? You need to clarify those strategic questions. Like what's the business issue to focus on? Who do we solve it for? What are these people's struggles? What can they...
Mm-hmm.
Expect from us in terms of how we help. What's our point of view? Like all these are components of the value proposition. What's our point of view on their issue on the business of the way it should be solved? And that's if you don't do that, if you jump straight to some methodology, then you'll end up later with a problem where you might have a methodology, but maybe you still have top level messaging or a strategy that's not quite a fit. So
Mm-hmm.
So the idea is to have a red line or a very tight cohesion between all those elements. So the value proposition says, this is the business issue we specialize in solving. We do it primarily for those type of clients. We know they have these and those struggles and they can expect from us to overcome them. And the point of view through which we do all this is we are convinced X and because of all that, Because of that conviction primarily, the previous observations in our insight and then the conviction, we have developed this process and the process better fit everything you said before. Otherwise, there's a little bit of a refraction. And if people listening now say, duh, that's obvious, you'd be surprised what I see in practice. I give an example, I don't want to call these guys out, but let's just say I recently worked with a sizable US company.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
That does, paraphrases, they do change management in large organizations by implementing certain ways of running things. Let's put it like that. They prided themselves and we knew from client interviews that the clients love this, that despite their reliance on existing and proven frameworks, those were not their frameworks, their best practices across a variety of business functions. They were never a sort of framework first. So they don't come in and say, you guys have to be, I don't know, agile, or you guys have to do this or that, whatever it is. But they would carefully diagnose the client's problems and constraints and so forth, and then would customize the framework and its implementation to the client situation. So far, so good. Now they had a process description of their engagements and it went like discovery, scoping, Trainings and then roll off. I said, sorry guys, don't you pride yourselves in the customization of the methodology? Where's that step? Obviously it was in there somewhere in the mix, right? It was there implicitly, but I'm stupid and I have TikTok attention span, so I'm not too dissimilar from your bias. I expect you to have it, like I said before.
Yeah. Yeah.
In a chevron diagram, I can see on a smartphone is like, want to be able to say, ⁓ step two is where they customize the methodology and it takes them four weeks. If that's not there and you'd be surprised to often it isn't, how am I supposed to believe you that you deliver them one of the main selling points of your overall proposition? So not having the value proposition, not having that type of region is the next big issue. And then one step down from that is I alluded to this when I said client interviews. You need to ground this stuff in data. At least in my world, we never work with consultancy startups. So we always have firms who are a bit bigger and have track record. We always force them to come to us with a definition of what's the ideal engagement. What's the type of work you want to win more off. And then we make them look backwards and pull eight or 10 engagements from the past that loosely fit those criteria. And then we... Then we interrogate those engagements because we want to spot the patterns in those engagements and use those to build up the methodology. So how did you help those clients? What were the steps? Where did they struggle? Like, ⁓ you got to surface those things. It's not good enough. Although it might be if you start out, I can't vouch for that. Probably it's okay to just have hypothesis and test it.
Mm-hmm.
But it's usually not good enough to just whip up a PowerPoint, put some chevrons in and say, these are the five steps. or God forbid, ask Chachapti because that puts you at risk of coming up with something generic. At a high level, all consulting processes look the same. Everybody has the same signature methodology, right? You do some sort of assessment, you derive some sort of recommendations, you build some type of roadmap and then you implement it or whatever it is. But the point, the actual point would be to get to something that's more specific and more
for sure.
I'm always hesitating with the word unique, but more relevant to how you work and the best way of finding that is in past successes. So that would be my mistake number three, if I'm counting correctly. You got to root that stuff in data or in past successes. And then the next one would be... Don't put the thing out in full, just copy a page or take a page from the book from Silicon Valley companies. Build a rudimentary go-to-market program based on your proposition. You might have an initial offering there of idea what the first workshop looked like or whatever, and then try to pull clients in. And you should never start from a blank slate and just wing it. I don't recommend it, but sort of have a hypothesis for the next step. See if you can take a client through, if it works, that's it. If you need to refine, refine it, but sort of... Do sort of progressively validate and improve the thing to get to process where it works. So speaking for the visible authority, we now have a process that seems to do what we needed to do quite well. We are on version seven of that. And that took us two and a half years to build. Not to build in full, but it took like once we had a good one at first and... It took two and half years of constant implementation, improvements, client feedback, all that stuff to get to version set.
I think that is a really valuable nugget for people listening because from the outside we often don't realize how much iteration there is on these things, right? And we compare the polished messaging that we see from competitors and inspiration and references to our own, you know, messy Excel spreadsheets and so on. So when I was younger, I've always liked to draw. When I was younger, I remember looking at comic books. and thinking, my god, the way these guys draw, I'll never get to it, right? And then I got some Learn How to Draw like a comic book artist, and it shows you how they start, right? And I was like, ⁓ okay, there's a whole another process, much more behind.
Yeah. that's how they're... Yeah, that's the same thing here. And if people are interested, there's a great book, I forgot who the author was, but it's called Lords of Strategy. It's like an industry history that looks back at the origins of the big strategy firms. There's a chapter in there where he describes the journey of the guys who came up with BCG's Matrix. You must read the story for yourselves, but it took them five years from the initial observation.
yeah.
That led to the eventually refined metrics everybody knows today, five years. So yeah, to your point, no one goes from zero to perfect framework. That doesn't happen. Can I say one more thing? Because I don't necessarily think it's where people trip up or miss. I think sometimes firms try to force building something completely original.
For sure, for sure. And I think this... Absolutely, yeah.
And in many cases, this is also not necessary because what you need a methodology and you need your specific way of taking clients through. But it could be that the thing that's specific is you using a specific software to do it, or you having a specific type of onboarding or like the client I just mentioned. They used off the shelf frameworks with a bit of customization. The specific thing was how do we customize those? But the frameworks themselves were like, yeah, everybody did their there in the public domain. Everybody can just buy or use them. My other go-to example for this is, I think, IDEO, the innovation consultancy. There used to be an agency before they stumbled across design thinking and made that really famous and really took it around with it. But as far as I know, people can correct me in the comments. IDEO did not invent design thinking. That was the concept that existed beforehand.
It did not. I wrote about it.
But they just took it and it's completely fine to take someone else's framework. As long as you add enough of your own reflection, thinking, improvements. I mean, that's how most of innovation happens, right? You stand on the shoulder of giants, you pick someone else's work and you improve upon it just a little bit. As long as that's a significant enough improvement for your clients, fine. You don't have to start from scratch to your point it's not possible to invent a framework or whatever. Well, take one that exists and have an internal discussion of its shortcomings. There always are some and you can maybe find a way to improve on those I don't know
Yes, and I think there's an angle, not really an angle, but there's a thread here, which is, you've mentioned this, you've touched on this on different points, taking a page from the Silicon Valley book, the fact that you do customer interviews, client interviews, the fact that you need to, at least on your firm, you work with what they've done in the past, it's very concrete, it's very empirical. So there's all of this...
Yep.
...background, let's say, of basing it on reality. And it's a scientific method, right? You just create an hypothesis, you allow it to fail or to... Yeah.
Very much that, yes. Very much that. And thanks for the call, because I think that is how you get from the capability selling to the proposition selling model, is you perceive all of that stuff as experimentation. You could even look at the, if you found a firm or if you're still in that capability selling mode, it's totally fine. Just commit to looking at it as an experiment and say, okay, we'll do this for 24 more months. It's fine, everybody go out, sell opportunistically. But from now on, it's an experiment because what we really do is we try to find the most profitable problem to solve in that sea of different engagements we take. Let's, let's spot that pattern. And then again, you can experiment as to once we have that, what are the most common pitfalls, roadblocks and so forth. And then can we develop ways of taking clients through that that makes life easier for them? And again, those are experiments or tests or iterations. I think that's, that's actually...
Mm-hmm.
...quite a crucial thing in the entire approach.
I see that the very fact that you tell people, you tell your team that this is what we're looking for. Because a lot of consulting is, you know, pattern recognition, right? you kind of, and pattern matching as well, you kind of leave it on the background. But when you say, look, we are looking for things that repeat themselves and they point towards an interesting direction. Just the fact that people are aware of, this is the mission we are on right now.
Yeah.
It changes the kind of attention you pay to things or even like the kind of notes you make of a project, know, on a very tactical level.
Yeah. Well, you Typically, to be in full fairness, you typically need some type of guardrails or some type of swim lane because consultants are very good at spotting patterns, but then you might just recreate the problem for different people spot for completely different sets of problems. But for example, if you're data analytics firm and you say, well, we do think that the types of analytics we should do in the future are connected not so much to cost as to revenue. So we want to deploy analytics in front office processes. So marketing sales.
Yeah.
I think you need that type of guardrails to protect it because otherwise people will find profitable problems wherever and you end up with a list of 15 and you have the alignment issue again. I mean, those are questions of who sets firm strategy and how do we negotiate and navigate that. yeah, as this point still stands, experimenting is I think the way to get to a good process.
Mm-hmm. Of course, of course.
You should get to a point where I sometimes compare it to medicine where. CPR for first responders, for example, is an aspect where the process by and large stays consistent over time. So the methodology is always sort of chest compression breathing. That doesn't change. depending on what people learn in terms of the practicality of it and how helpful it is and so forth, the specific instructions change all the time. Like, isn't that many chest compressions per minute? Do you try to?
Mm-hmm.
Inflate the lungs or not. think I lost track about it since I did that. I was with the medics in the military. It's changed. Even while I was there, it changed like two times. That stuff changes forever. Same could be true for your process. But the highest level pillars, so again, thinking about design thinking, just the buckets of steps in that process, those should by and large stay the same. That's the level of stability I would go for. But I would never insist on, first step in our process, the...
Mm-hmm.
the 16th bullet points in the checklist that has to stay the same. No, no, no. If you find something better, it needs to be updated, right? It's just, it's like software in that sense.
Yeah, yeah. And also feel, I mean, we are driving towards the end of our time here, but to your point, I I also feel that that's a common misconception around the whole productize or methodology and so on, which is sometimes people feel that they need a recipe. It's not really a recipe. It's just a set of, it's more about how to navigate that problem space. Like if you were walking through the woods and you see the moss on one side of the tree and you know, it's more...
Yeah.
heuristics sometimes than necessarily like walk three steps in this direction then turn to that direction and so on. But I think so let's try to find the thread between the things that we've chatted here. So initially we started to discuss how having a more clear understanding of what you do and how you do it and more see your methodology is becoming more relevant in the context that we live now where there's a lot more competition. People can just compare things and capacity is always at a difficult thing to manage. You are very careful in not presenting that as the only way, but just in terms of, look, there are trade-offs with everything. And if you choose not to develop, not to... codify your methodology, you can have a business, but there's usually a complexity cost associated with that.
And to your point, sorry, to inject to your point of the increasing competition. If you look at a market where now thanks to AI, I hate that I have to bring this up, but yeah, um, this stuff doesn't do half of the things it claims to do, right? Um, but it's still, there is something there and that something is that expertise can now reside in a machine to a certain extent and as flawed as it is.
It took us a while. Mm-hmm.
That means if you don't have a clear proposition, but you're just offering up expertise, you might lose out to software that comes at a subscription cost of just $200 a month. That's the reality now. And so you have to have something better and hence the methodology.
for sure. Absolutely. I think that I agree with you. I also don't like to bring up the AI thing all the time, but I mean, it's a generational thing that's changing every single industry. Of course, it changes this industry as well. And you've described some of the patterns of things that trip up people when trying to come up with their signature methodology. And
Yep.
And then we found a connection between all of this, which is the need to experiment, the need to connect to reality and interact with the market, interact with people, be open to the fact that, you know, this will be developed as you work on it. So you don't need to start with something that's setting stone from the beginning, which, parenthesis, I have a feeling that is something that is usually uncomfortable for people that, you know, base their careers on knowing things that were very, you fixed.
on having the perfect answer. Yeah, I think about it sometimes. That may or may not be true. I think I meet all kinds of different personality types. There is a certain tendency, but yeah, I find it either way. I sometimes think that people have the feeling that, but that might be because they hire us as outcast consultants. Sometimes there's the expectations of having to change everything tomorrow, but that's not true. You could leave everything in your firm as is and launch your new signature methodology...
Mm-hmm.
...as an experiment, just build a landing page and pretend it's a new service offering and offer it to 20 people. If two bite and you get to do the work and run it and it's great, eventually make it the thing for your entire firm. It's the same idea, right? And sometimes I think that is the, people are not necessarily always afraid of not having the perfect answer. They are afraid, they feel this pressure to do this and then make it the thing.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
You what mean? Like to go all in right away, but that's not true. You can, you can fade in the new idea slowly. The methodology you can build towards eventually making it the thing for your firm.
Mm-hmm. That's such a more nuanced take, for sure, for sure. And I can also imagine that, you know, outsiders, you arrive with all this repertoire of techniques to experiment and reduce the risk. There's a lot of people talking about de-risking things these days. I've been hearing that expression coming up more. So there are ways of doing that. And as experienced in your field, you have all these tricks and tools of the trade.
Yeah.
So I always finish...
Which by the way, by the way, just to pick on that word, yes, we have them and, then then the proprietary, yes, there is just ways of doing this. You can, you can also go pick a book, pick up a book about product development in the Silicon Valley or whatever. If, if you are taking an entrepreneurial risk by saying, this is the thing I want to build. There are ways of de-risking those decisions and making sure you're not betting the bank and the house and everything on it, but you can incrementally built into it.
I think that's the key for your people having this just a misconception. It doesn't kill the company if you get it wrong within the right way of doing it. There is ways to safeguard you against what if this is wrong? It's no hard. It's literally very little downside and a lot of upside if you do this, if you have a decent process.
For sure. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. This is, I love the fact that you've didn't let me keep my general generalization. So I think it the conversation much more nuanced, which was what I was hoping for. So thank you for that. And where can people find more stuff from you and the Visible Authority?
Well, there is the website, thevisibleauthority.com. We have a newsletter that is bi-weekly and I recently learned that it's not defined in the English language, whether that means twice a week or every other week. It's actually every other week. So we don't try to flood people's inboxes. People seem to like that quite a lot. And we share a lot of the things we touched upon today and a few other things there. And then, yeah, you can always find me on LinkedIn and say hi if you want to.
So the links will be also in the show notes and it will be easy to find you. Thank you so much. Thank you for, it was a pleasure having this conversation, learning from you and advancing the discussion, exploring.
Perfect. Likewise. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was a blast and wishing you all the best of podcast. Thanks for listening.