I talked with a charming, outgoing couple on Saturday afternoon. They told me they’d had a boat they called “Honey Dear.” They had her for 20 years and sold her last year.
“What was the best part of having a boat in the family,” I asked.
The woman, Kathleen, said they loved two things:
Honey Dear was an anchor and a compass.
When Honey Dear was at the dock, she was steady as a rock. They could live on her for extended periods, have visitors, and enjoy being anchored in the community.
When they had the urge to wander, Honey Dear was more than ready to take off. She could travel long distances, and her navigation system always kept them on track.
Since I’m such a business nerd, I quickly looked for the relevance of both an anchor and compass to business.
In a word, strategy is both anchor and compass.
For years I tried to sort out what strategy means.
And more importantly, how to apply it to my business.
Is strategy your vision?
Your goals?
Your mission?
Finally I found the strategy defintion that scratched my itch:
“Strategy is built on your driving forces which are those critical factors that will affect the future of your business over the next three to five years.”
What are critical factors?
They are ingredients or essential elements within the company.
For knowledge services firms the critical ingredients are the:
- Knowledge and expertise of the staff
- Method of delivering impacts from that knowledge and expertise
- Way the company is compensated for delivering those impacts.
Strategy at its essence comprises three elements: your driving force, your most important market, and your profit requirement.
You can write your firm’s strategy in one sentence.
It looks like this:
(Company name) delivers (IMPACT) to (market segment) for X% profit.
Here’s ours: Trivers Consulting Group enables knowledge services firms to charge fees proportional to the life changing IMPACTs they deliver to their clients, for X% profit.
This is our anchor.
When we’re asked how we might help a firm owner or executive, we go back to this. Everything related to pricing for knowledge services firms is possible.
We might take a client through the 60 Minute Pricing Makeover Mini Course.
We’ll have the Issue Chart conversation and ask about IMPACT.
We’ll offer three ways to deliver IMPACT, using our IMPACT Based Pricing Choice Framework.
If the need is outside of the pricing arena, we know they are not a great fit client.
This is also our compass.
For example, once a client adopts IMPACT Based Pricing, they’re often inspired to deliver more high impact differences to clients. Our compass allows us to partner with these firms to help them increase their range and deepen their impact for their own clients.
We’ll help them explore their own firm’s bell curve to see if the IMPACTs they deliver are distributed from high to medium to low. A healthy firm is one that delivers options.
We do not wander off into unconnected areas such as IT, digital presence, or legal issues; nor do we give advice that is the purview of accountants or CFOs.
We are anchored in IMPACT Based Pricing, and we use our compass to travel out from there.
Need a quick fix?
Sometimes you don’t need a full consulting engagement with me to fix an IMPACT Based Pricing problem.
That’s why I offer 90-minute Think Tanks when you need laser focused advice.
Most clients use a Think Tank when they want to improve:
- Defining the scope of their client engagements so they protect their fee.
- How they use the IMPACT Based Pricing Choice Framework for offers.
- Finding great fit clients without interrogation.
You can schedule your Think Tank ($425, payble upon booking) by emailing, or texting THINKTANk to 703-801-0345. You can expect to schedule your Think Tank within the week.
Look, you can change your clients’ lives,
But if you charge by the hour,
You will never be appropriately compensated for those changes.
