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Happy new year, y’all. Feels good to be back. Got a fun one this week.

In his recent excellent book The Four Conversations, consulting consultant Blair Enns describes a term called the flip, where a prospective client begins to view you as a consultant, not a contractor.

This is essentially a matter of positioning: you view yourself as an expert, talk about things that promote yourself as an expert, and hopefully the client views you as an expert, too.

One does this a few ways:

• Teaching everything they know on their mailing list (hi)

• Podcasting

• Guesting on others’ podcasts or blogs

• Writing books (also hi)

And then hopefully your prospective client comes in the door already knowing your whole deal. For the rest of them, there’s this lesson. Here, we’ll talk about the role of consultative positioning, and why it’s vital for the future of design to work in a consultative capacity.

Again the positioning

As a reminder, positioning is the practice of defining & promoting:

• What urgent, expensive problem you solve

• Who you solve that urgent, expensive problem for

• What uniquely differentiates you from others

The problem must be urgent (it needs solving yesterday) and expensive (providing an economic impact to others’ businesses).

You must be specific about both the problem and whom you solve that problem for. That can involve niching to a business type, industry, or even market size.

In doing so, you must position yourself as an expert. The days of the production-only designer are mostly dead. Henceforth, designers will use design to solve urgent, expensive problems.

“The Flip”

It’s possible to detect whether prospective clients already view you as an expert. Sometimes it’s joyously explicit: they heard you on a podcast and want the best of the best. Or sometimes it’s subtler, in their body language, where they do more listening & asking than bloviating.

In situations where the client comes in and clearly doesn’t view you as a consultant, it’s your job to position yourself as one as quickly as possible. This exists independent of fees; at Draft, we’ve had people pay us $X0,000 for work that they expected to micromanage. And while it might feel nice to get paid, it’s much nicer to both get paid and have a client who
treats you with the appropriate level of respect.

Enns calls the psychic shift in the prospective client from contractor to consultant as the flip. Some example ways we’ve personally done “the flip” involve:

• Asking questions about why things are done the way they’ve always been done

• Noting our level of expertise offhandedly: “we’ve worked for over 50 stores in the past decade”, etc

• Bringing clarity to a pointy decision they’re dealing with: “You’re asking a good question about this. We’ve seen these tradeoffs with these clients in these contexts. We would bring the same discovery process to you if that might be useful.”

• Noting our educational prowess: “in my fourth book, I said…”

We do not provide explicit tactics until compensation has been transferred, because we don’t work for free under any circumstance. If people ask us, we offer to incorporate a solution as part of our kickoff.

The ramifications

There are several reasons why you’ll be working in a consultative capacity as a designer going forward:

• Your job will get easier. Critique will be smoother. Fewer changes will be requested. You’ll exist in a culture of trust.

• Your work will ship. Ultimately, the team will move with higher executional velocity when your work is consultative.

• Fewer people will make “shadow design” decisions. More will be run by you; less will be done without you in the room.

We know that there’s a major economic cost to others practicing design. It’s time to take that power back.

Wrapping up

We invite a deeper conversation on this topic, as we think it’s urgent for the future of our industry. Hit reply and let us know what’s showing up for you, and especially if you have any questions

Next week, we’ll get into a fun topic about the actual practice of design – one which we’ve had to do a lot of spaceholding about over the past few months.

Office hours: Tuesday, January 21, 1p CST

Join us here:

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