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

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.

Clients come to experts with challenges that they can’t solve. They’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit and it’ll take a ladder to get the rest. Or they’ve eaten everything on the plate except the vegetables and it’s going to be a slog to get through the rest of the meal.

You are selling objectivity, which comes from externality. One of the only reasons you can actually help them is that you are not in their world. They are inside their own jar and can’t read the label. You enter that world and you see the label clearly. It’s not that they aren’t capable of reading other people’s labels—just not their own. They are

The idea is to divide your week into three kinds of days. The first kind (Preparation), which will comprise three or four days of each week, are the days when you get things off your plate or clear the deck. I call these Preparation days because they are designed to enable you to do something else. These are full of all the little things that won’t

First, make sure your positioning is not interchangeable with more than 200 other advisors, but make sure you can find at least 10 other advisors who do the same thing as you. Not who do it the same way as you, but who do the same thing as you. As a secondary check on your positioning, make sure that there are at least 2,000 addressable prospective

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

Start by listing all your clients in a spreadsheet, from largest to smallest in descending order, along with actual or projected revenue for each one. After you have that basic data in front of you, there are three simple things to look for.

All this works if you standardize your data gathering, because only then can you make the comparisons easier to apply. You might play with that initial survey for a year until you get it right, but after that, you’ll want to land on one specific instrument that’s used with all of your similar clients. Which should be quite possible if your position