I’m now into year four of consulting and advising mid-stage and start-up companies.
I really love this work.
I’m irresistibly drawn to the oxygen-starved activities of moving a company, piece by unchartered piece, often from $0 along the up/down slope to $100M. I’ve built bigger companies, but the scrappy, customer-obsessed culture in this general company size just sucks me in.
I’m attracted to individuals and teams obsessed with taking an idea and making it into a product, a core customer value and turning it into a market, and evolving a name into a brand that connects. Really hard and wonderful work.
Here’s the rub of course as an advisor.
Market and brand building is all about doing. At its core, the best strategy is just smart execution. Even though the discipline of a plan and the inspiration that comes from a strategic direction are useful, they are never enough. They are, at best, a preamble.
Business strategies are easy to map out on paper, cute to capture in a phrase and tweet, but invariably fall back on themselves in executional shambles. The most prophetic words on building a business come not from us practitioners, but from Mike Tyson:
“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.’
If you’ve ever woken up to have Microsoft, Apple, Google or Facebook enter your space, or worse, find years of work evaporate with a market shift, you know this is true. Closer to home are the many painful decisions and programs that hold lots of possibilities and just don’t deliver. They all sting and set you scrambling after you gain composure.
In my advisory work, I’ve worked to bridge the advisory action gap.
To find a way to guide and advise, but not merely pontificate and walk away from action plans. And be responsible to the company’s goals. I’ve focused on longer-term, skin-in-the-game relationships where I can take my 25 years of operational experience across a variety of models and categories, and become part of your extended team. The more I know about your business and the more you trust me, the more valuable the partnership becomes.
This approach takes lots of time and focus, and limits the size of my client base. It stifles my innate drive to dabble and flirt with new and different models and ideas. To know more entrepreneurs in a working environment which is where you really get to vet and appreciate each other.
I needed something lighter…and the result is “Office Hours”.
This is a subscription-based service to me as an advisor, to my experiences and thinking through an ongoing but lighter touch-point relationship.
It works really well with teams or individuals that don’t need to be managed, just directed.
If you have the vision and the where-with-all to put tangible structure behind an advisory role, then this model may be suited for you.
It’s simple and it seems to be working well.
Scheduled meetings at your offices or a coffee shop. Or Skype. Always face-to-face, always on a schedule, and always tied to objectives we’ve set. A couple of times a month, a hand-shake, mid-term contract commitment. Open access as needed and satisfaction guaranteed.
I’ve rolled this out through my networks for a while now. Showing great signs of traction.
I realized while writing this that in all my blogging on marketing and business, on the web and communities, this is the first I’ve written about my advisory work.
It feels good to lay out how I work with the community of marketers and entrepreneurs. I love what I do and get inspired by my clients and make their challenges very much my own.
Check out my many blog posts on building a market and how to balance core marketing tactics and thinking with the possibilities of the social web. The details of how I work in the Consulting section of this site and the Voomly Office Hours page. Then hit me with questions on how this might work for you now or sometime down the road.
