You never forget your first consulting client. While The New York Times was my second consulting client, Fundera was my first. Fundera is a platform for small business financing. I got connected to their founder and we met for breakfast. I was just about to quit my job at Google, where every project started with a âbig companyâ approach of positioning, branding, strategy and so on.
I wanted to be doing important, big, strategy work and so over breakfast I told Jared the founder of Fundera about how weâd do this kind of big picture strategic work.
The SOW we arrived at looked a bit more tactical - Jared was looking for some SEO help.
Itâs true: strategy work is better paid, itâs more satisfying and itâs more impactful. The quest for strategy work is in essence the quest to be an independent consultant - doing interesting work for more money with more impact.
Thereâs only one problem: what the hell is strategy work?!
In western culture we repeatedly conflate strategy and execution, thinking and doing, knowing and feeling. And every time reality refutes our clean separation - thinking and doing are two sides of the same coin.
Client work can be frustrating - it sometimes feels like clients are actively working against your ideas, despite the fact that they hired you!
Have you ever been frustrated that:
A project got cancelled without notice
You have to go through endless revisions and rounds of feedback
A project stalled before it even started
A piece of work you delivered never got implemented by a client
But frustration is a two player game - when youâre frustrated that work doesnât make sense - the client is likely frustrated that your work doesnât meet their objectives well enough.
Context is the key.
As soon as I start talking with a potential client Iâm probing for context. Iâm asking questions about business model, team structure, company priorities, market shifts and more. These donât always feel relevant to the specific project but help me better map out both the work I need to do and the stakeholders that need to see it.
The more you understand an organization the better you can understand context, and every client is a nested set of overlapping contexts.
So when I talk about strategic work - itâs about trying to understand the concentric circles of context at any time. For example - if youâre designing an app for a company the app might sit within a variety of business contexts. This model seems⌠obvious? Except Iâm always surprised at how often consultants and agencies fail to properly explore the wider contexts of the business either before starting work or during their engagement.
However, in addition to the above context - that app design project might also exist within a variety of people contexts:
Every project exists in multiple overlapping contexts - hereâs some of the types of context to look for:
[insert project kickoff question themes here?]
Your work likely overlaps at least partly with all of these ideas - but also depending on your specific work you might have different contexts and add more nuance.
Once you understand the concentric circles within which your work happens youâll be able do work thatâs more effective and useful for your clients.
Two examples from my own work:
Example #1
I was working as a marketing advisor for a client and early in the engagement (partly because we were discussing me becoming the full-time CMO) I was invited to sit in on their quarterly board meeting. This experience was formative in better understanding the drivers and motivations of the business - by understanding who literally owned the business better. This context was crucial for proposing work and for ensuring that pitching that work to the board was smooth. The CEO gave me some of the necessary context but by attending that board meeting I got a vantage point that I didnât realize existed previously.
Example #2
Last year I was working with a client to integrate an acquisition into the main business - in particular to ensure that one business function was working correctly. My north star and most of the language in the team was about revenue projections for the function. Makes sense. But, I discovered that actually the SVPâs OKR for the quarter was ensuring that the business unit was functioning smoothly. While revenue was obviously a thing that they cared about, the more important context was around process and communication around that process. Once I had this context everything became easier since I could be more closely aligned with the objectives of the business.
Through being aware of the overlapping contexts that your work sits inside of, youâll be better able to navigate uncertainty. You can position your work so itâs more likely to be palatable to the key stakeholders and youâll have more chance that your ideas will actually get implemented.
In addition to being better work (for clients and for you) - strategic work is also better paid.
As an independent - youâll hear a lot of advice boil down to âcharge moreâ. Iâve even said it myself! And itâs true - itâs the best advice you can get. Except⌠itâs kind of empty advice. I donât think it provides much direction for how exactly you go about doing it.
Translating executional work into strategic work is a framework that I think gives concrete ways of continually ratcheting up the price & value of your work.
The key idea is that at every layer of context there are new kinds of work - and by reaching for associated layers of context you can get involved in new kinds of work that are associated with and grounded in the thing you know but also a slight stretch.
Not only can you charge more because the work is more useful, impactful and better but you can also charge for the associated parts of uncovering context - workshops, user research, competitive analysis, stakeholder interviews etc.
Letâs look at two examples:
Letâs imagine youâre a writer - commissioned to write for a clientâs branded content site. Letâs say you get paid $200 per article. The work: writing. How might we think of writing-in-context? Hereâs a list of context that you should ask for and where itâs not available or itâs done poorly offer to step in:
Letâs imagine youâre a UX researcher - creating user research from real users for clients. The work: creating user research projects, finding relevant users and running them. This is likely reasonably well-paid work as-is but letâs look at ways we might take this UX-research and place it in-context:
Some more examples of how work and associated context work might fit together:
Iâve got a very loose working theory that every time you expand your context-circles you get paid an order of magnitude more money.
Itâs not unreasonable to imagine:
These are necessarily imperfect analogies and will vary wildly from industry to industry, but hereâs a specific callout as you start to bundle âthe workâ and âthe contextâ:
Donât give the context work away for free. In fact, do the opposite - charge more for it than your regular work.
I see this often with more junior or less confident independents - youâre trying to close âthe workâ and so you throw in âthe contextâ for free or as a sweetener.
Donât do this! Work-in-context is typically more expensive than regular work so donât be afraid to price it separately and confidently. Donât worry if the client doesnât bite at first - strategic work is only valuable at certain inflection points (see below graphs) but theyâll remember that you offered it and itâll come back around.
Thereâs a certain kind of experience that I want to describe where everything goes to shit. Certain events in business collapse the environment. For example - letâs take that context model for app design from earlier in the post. But letâs assume that the growth objectives are âin crisisâ - this could be missing targets, people change, overspend, change in marketing strategy etc
These catastrophic events collapse the environment and cascade downwards. Every circle inside gets ignored, paused, cancelled, changed, redefined. These events are felt like system-shock for anyone operating in these lower circles
But for those above the fire-line there are two things that are crucial:
Weâve likely all been personally inside a context as it collapses - either as a full time employee or a consultant / agency partner. Itâs not fun.
Riding these crashes is a skill that I think in theory you can get good at - learning how to sprint at a moments notice in a new direction and operate supernaturally fast in a crashing environment.
But I think itâs way easier to instead always be searching upwards for more context awareness - i.e. working strategically. This helps you ride out those catastrophic events with more planning, awareness and foresight.
So weâve established that you can get paid more money for strategic work - and now I want to show you that the new higher rates youâre charging can also last longer. A compounding effect on your pricing power.
I learned about the model of Strategy & Stewardship from the Helsinki Design Lab:
It is common these days for one group to be involved in analysis of a problem and designing the solution (consultants) while a different group executes these ideas (contractors). But this disconnects an essential feedback loop1
Their solution? Strategy and stewardship:
We invoke stewardship in place of words like âimplementâ and âexecuteâ out of recognition that the latter imply a cleanliness or linear progression which is rarely found when working on a shared proposition in a complex environment. Inside a factory plans can be executed, orders implemented, and outcomes delivered, but innovations that engage with the messy reality of the social sphere do not happen so neatly. What we describe also goes well beyond âfacilitation,â which suggests that others do the important work. Stewardship shapes the course of innovation; it is not a neutral role. Think of stewardship as a form of leadership. One that acknowledges things will change along the way for better or for worse, therefore demanding agility over adherence to a predetermined plan. Many individuals who work in alliances or collaborative endeavors act as stewards almost naturally. If you are used to continually calibrating the goals of a project with the constraints of your context, you are practicing stewardship. If you maintain a constant state of opportunism and a willingness to pivot when progress on the current path is diminishing, youâre a natural steward2
This idea of a feedback loop between strategy and implementation is one Iâve taken to heart. It maps directly to my mental model of a typical long-term retained client relationship.
Imagine a 12-month client retainer with the strategic work in green and the implementation in blue:
You can see that (roughly) the total amount of work is constant but there is a phase shift from strategy at the beginning to mostly execution & implementation (stewardship) and then a hard shift back into strategic work. You can think about this as repeated contexts over time.
If you look at strategy on its own:
There are two key things to draw from this chart:
The long-term work begins with strategic work, so if you want to get involved in a project early (a common request) you have to be thinking and working strategically.
But importantly, if you only do strategy work the client isnât going to keep you around for months 3-12. No matter how lucrative that strategy work is, if youâre not shifting your outputs to implementation/stewardship then there isnât enough work for either you or the client to justify sticking around and so you end up with a short sprint of a project.
Now, if you look at execution on itâs own:
There are two key drawbacks to only doing implementation/execution work:
Firstly - notice how the blue line shoots up a few months into the project? When youâre only working on the execution/implementation you get called into the project too late - the strategy is already set.
Secondly - notice how at some point in the future, the client either pauses, reviews or changes their strategy and the project unexpectedly ends? This can seem like it âcomes out of nowhereâ if youâre only doing the execution work and not aware of the wider context.
So what is stewardship exactly? Sometimes itâs literally just rolling up your sleeves to do the work outlined in the strategy. Never underestimate how powerful a single reference piece of work can be - e.g. you want the editorial team to produce 1000s of pieces of content over the next 12 months - but if you create the gold standard piece of content it can get referenced again and again and become the inspiration for a whole team.
So is the execution just plugging away in the trenches? Yes sometimes, but I think the most powerful stewardship work is around momentum - helping the organization or project accelerate their output. Some examples from my own work for things that look like stewardship:
If you take this strategy & stewardship approach - when the client comes to review the strategy at month 6 youâre still there working with them and able to offer tangible and concrete insights into the work. How is the strategy evolving? Where should we adjust? What have we achieved?
In the 9 years Iâve been consulting I have one client Iâve been working with for 7 years and multiple 2+ year engagements. I attribute this to being willing to work on strategy and stewardship.
I recall an important breakthrough for my own thinking - a client had hired another consultant to work on a project and afterwards I asked my client how the experience was and he said:
âIt was fine - but he just gave advice. I like working with you because youâre not afraid to roll up your sleeves and do the work when it needs doingâ
This was a real lightbulb moment for me - up until that time Iâd always worried about doing âmenialâ or âlow-paidâ work as a consultant but charging a strategy-based day-rate.
But the thing I realized was that if you can provide momentum to an organization it doesnât matter if youâre writing title tags in an SEO environment or putting together a board pitch: you should do the most valuable thing the business needs at that moment.
The freedom of a consultant is that you can ignore job title / role / responsibility and be laser focused on moving the business towards key objectives and mixing your outputs from small to big as needed.
So, donât undervalue either part of your work - either the strategy or the stewardship. Remember that graph up above with the blue/green strategy/execution mix? I bill it all at the same day rate. Stewardship is just as valuable as strategy and thereâs no reason to somehow charge less for the execution work.
So weâve established that the combination of strategy & stewardship is important - but thereâs a crucial note to make:
Clients that come to you only for implementation are going to be your worst clients.
Wait what? Havenât I been telling you to get your hands dirty? Yes, butâŚ
In his book the business of expertise in chapter 10 titled âDistinguishing expertise from implementationâ David Baker uses the great analogy of a building with two connected rooms and two entrances, one for strategy and one for execution.
The whole chapter is a delight and the punchline is: âonly let clients in the strategy doorâ:
The argument really boils down to:
You should really buy the book - itâs a fast read but has lots of pieces of wisdom.
Importantly - if you accept that you can do a lot of implementation work for clients but they should all start with strategy then your external positioning should be entirely focused around the strategy work to attract the right kinds of clients.
Hereâs a funny thing - when you read the accepted literature about pricing as an independent youâll hear again and again that pricing based on time is a bad thing[^timemoney]. And, maybe theyâre right - but Iâve had plenty of success charging on a loosely-coupled time-based approach (almost all of my work is scoped at a day rate, at least to begin with).
I have a theory that this time-based approach to pricing is especially powerful as you move through a context-transition.
Why? Well - as you go through this cycle of exposure to new contexts and working in new contexts you are by definition operating in new types of work and new types of environments and itâs hard to control the inputs and outputs.
Put simply - as you ladder up into wider contexts for your work you donât yet have enough experience to properly scope and price the work - not to mention you may be continually expanding your context not upwards but sideways into new types of workstreams.
So I say - if youâre reading the commonly accepted wisdom about pricing and feeling like youâre doing it wrong by pricing based on time let me tell you that youâre totally fine and that strategic work by definition can be fuzzy and so scoping on project work can be dangerous.
Looking back at my career - this idea of doing work-in-context has determined the path Iâve taken from SEO manager to digital strategy to consulting work.
The problem with SEO is that itâs inherently non-strategic. As an activity itâs increasingly commoditized and marginalized. Not that SEO-traffic is not important or that SEO is going away, but that the strategic activities you undertake to achieve business-level goals are usually not owned by SEO practitioners or agencies.
This wasnât always true - there was a golden age of ~2008-2012 where an SEO agency could get directly in front of the CMO to work on digital strategy. Back in 2011 when I ran an SEO agency it wasnât uncommon to be working directly on digital strategy for fortune-500 brands, in a context model that looked something like this:
But I could see the writing on the wall and could feel the shift as everyone else in digital âcaught upâ to the competencies and experience that the SEO industry had built up over the previous decade to the point where a more traditional SEO engagement now looks like this:
As I felt this shift towards SEO being less strategic I needed to find ways to expand my context and work in different types of work more directly and explicitly.
When I first started consulting in 2014, yes I worked mostly on SEO projects - like the New York Times Cooking project. But I was keenly aware of the wider context and pushed myself to ask questions and be curious - whether about the business model or the teams executing the work.
Over time - by asking questions and pushing for more context I was able to start to get involved in several different wider context-circles and evolve the work I do.
Taking my personal SEO example above itâs hard to overstate the importance and value of being curious. Being curious about the industry youâre in and how it works, being curious about the clients youâre working for and being curious about the context of your own work is where this whole strategic independent path starts.
Then, from there the path to strategic work looks something like this:
Hereâs a worked example from my own experience on âhow to be more strategicâ as I learned about brand positioning work for clients:
This explicit evolution and experience in my own work probably took 3-4 years with the help of some friends but is exactly that ladder of context-awareness that enables you to get involved in strategic work.
As you can see, this path to strategic work relies on gaining context from client work - but thereâs another way to gain context - from your network.
So far weâve only looked at the context of the clientâs organization. But your personal context can sometimes be critical to a project.
One of the core benefits of being the outsider inside a clientâs organization is the ability to bring in contexts from other industries, other clients and other experiences. This context often allows you to figure out ways to get projects delivered, smooth tensions between teams and find ways to operationalize the strategy youâve created.
This is a core benefit, since clients are only exposed to the context of their own business. Agencies can sometimes see this adjacent context too but itâs at a relatively shallow perspective.
The unique vantage point of the independent consultant, working in strategy and stewardship for multiple clients is that you get this unique perspective of all the overlapping contexts for the work.
This is also why building a strong network of other independent consultants is valuable.
Frank Chimero wrote a wonderful essay I think about often titled the inferno of independence which is hard to boil down but looks at the nature of independent work - and articulates this shift from independence to co-dependence:
Listen: we only deserve what we can maintain and keep safe. A community is only as good as how well it takes care of all its members. There is no independence. There is only subservience or co-dependence. And I choose you. I choose community.
Co-dependence and network building has plenty of other benefits but one key benefit of a diverse network is the adjacent-context. Some of the most helpful context you bring to your clients as an independent is the context they would otherwise not have access to or overlook.
Adjacent context is thinking laterally about an industry, organization or problem - looking sideways for unusual or unexpected analogies or insights into expanding contexts that might not be obvious to you or your clients. You can only get this from hanging around a blend of interesting people who are also context-aware.
So then, the strategic independent is someone who not only helps bridge context inside an organization but outside as well. This distance from a clientâs organization is extremely valuable - and yet another reason not to undersell the value of context before and during an engagement. Someone able to connect the dots and do work-in-context but also expand the context into new directions.
Letâs recap:
Unfortunately, the quest for strategy work is not easy or short. Itâs a long journey. In the next chapter weâll explore the journey in more detail.
Page 40 of Recipes for Systemic Change by Helsinki Design Lab ↩
Page 15 of Legible Practices by Helsinki Design Lab ↩