They say that a pilot earns their paycheck every tenth landing. The theory: the plane mostly flies itself when everything goes well*. When you need to do something more complex – like, say, fly into ORD mid-derecho, as I’ve had the unfortunate fate of experiencing – then that’s where your expertise kicks in.
I have had the good fortune of earning my paycheck this past month, for all of my clients, for reasons both obvious and not obvious. One client watched a vendor turn usurious with a day to go in the contract; another lost a key staff member; a third shared with me a big, intractable problem around onboarding. In each of these, we flew into the storm, stuck the landing.
The common thread is advisory, brought about through establishing the expert position ahead of time. Expertise can be publicized in the form of whitepapers, process documents, surveys, books, and reports. Most of you know we’re experts in what we do, but many others, including some who hire us(!), need a little budging.
Because what we do is value-based design, but how we create value is through advisory. It doesn’t take long for people to start asking us bigger strategic questions that, on face, have nothing to do with the actual practice. But they have everything to do with the way the business works, and there’s always something deeper to explore.
