Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors: Covert Techniques for a Remarkable Practice

No middle ground: free to prospects … or high fees to clients.

A client orientation kit—or whatever you want to call it—does just that: helps them sample the relationship before

Clients want to listen to advisors who have a provisional POV and not advisors who are too hesitant with a declared perspective. This requires a certain degree of mental health.

It’s a destructive false choice to assume that you have to be a deep expert or a broad generalist. You need to be both—and you’ll pull that off by diving really deep in your work life, but then backing far away and developing a crazy pursuit of all kinds of unrelated, interesting things in your personal life.

they buy. The format doesn’t matter too much, though I am drawn to the physical format and not just a digital one because it feels more substantial.

Second, clients will not pay a premium for ongoing presence, long term. They will only pay a premium for episodic presence. The residents of a country welcome a liberating force more than the occupying force.

In the real world, a new client chooses to work with you based on your reputation and their best prediction of what it will be like to work with you. All the positioning stuff is just table stakes: It won’t close the gap, but it gets you in the game.

If you are at the outset, just building your practice, maybe have another (even part-time) job to make enough money to fight off starvation and retain your expert posture. Or save up enough money before kicking it off publicly so that you don’t panic.

Point of view: While you can’t promise to always be right, you can obligate yourself to express a helpful point of view. If you don’t have one based on your previous work, you’ll embark on some fresh research to shed light on the client’s challenge.