Are You A Hypocritical Advisor?

Growing up in Guatemala, we used to get in the 4WD vehicle every three months and head to the big city, leaving the little Mayan village of San Miguel Acatán behind. It took five hours to go the first 60 miles to Huehuetenango, and then another five hours to go the remaining 130 miles to the capital city (because that last part was paved).

I looked forward to catching up with friends, speaking in my native language, and catching up on the Top 40. For that last treat, I had to go to the only McDonalds in town where they played it, after the cassette tape was flown down after the fact.

But there was one element of that quarterly visit that I dreaded the most and that was the occasional visit to the family doctor. He had a terrible bedside manner, for one thing, but I never really trusted him.

That’s because my family doctor was a chain smoker…during the appointment in the examination room, no less.

I was never a smoker, but I imagine he had a hard time urging his smoking patients to quit, right?

The thing that surprises me, too, is that you’re doing the same thing, because you aren’t taking your own advice. If you did, I think you’d be more persuasive in the sales process and I think your clients would listen to you more carefully.

Granted, you’re a small, independent creative or digital or marketing or whatever firm, and they are a $100 million enterprise. But still, here’s what you’re telling your clients every day:

• Be consistent in everything you do, internally and externally. Branding isn’t who you say you are, but what you do at every stage of the CDJ. If you have a branding problem, you probably have an employee problem.
• You need to make courageous choices and then be who you are to the marketplace. You can’t be everything to everybody. You need to have a core group of loyal customers and the rest can go pound sand.
• If you don’t spend time and money on marketing, you aren’t building for the future. There are only a few brands who can succeed as a speakeasy–the rest are gonna need honest signs out front.
• You need to consistently generate insightful content that will set you apart from the crowd because it’s the most efficient way to let clients find you.
• Quit talking about yourself–tell your customers about the benefits your product or service offers.

Now I want to flip this around. I’m going to repeat the exact same list, only this time I’m going to put a question in bold to get you to think about something.

• Be consistent in everything you do, internally and externally. Branding isn’t who you say you are, but what you do at every stage of the CDJ. If you have a branding problem, you probably have an employee problem. [Do your employees believe what you say about your firm publicly, or is there a credibility gap between what you say is important to your firm and what you actually do?]
• You need to make courageous choices and then be who you are to the marketplace. You can’t be everything to everybody. You need to have a core group of loyal customers and the rest can go pound sand. [Is there a more courageous choice you should be making? Maybe about that one employee? Those two clients? That old client who insists that you still be involved?]
• If you don’t spend time and money on marketing, you aren’t building for the future. There are only a few brands who can succeed as a speakeasy–the rest are gonna need honest signs out front. [Is your own marketing headed by one specific person? Is that person one of your best people? Do you devote your time to this function? Is there a regular plan, written last year, that you are carrying out this year?]
• You need to consistently generate insightful content that will set you apart from the crowd because it’s the most efficient way to let clients find you. [How many really good elements have you personally developed yet this year that had nothing to do with a client? It might be a podcast, a webinar, an article, a speaking engagement, whatever.]
• Quit talking about yourself–tell your customers about the benefits your product or service offers. [What are you talking about all the time? Is it insight that a prospect loves reading or self-promotional slaps on the back about the work you’re doing?]

What would happen to your client base if you signed a pledge that looked something like this:

• We will never ask you to do something unless we are doing that equivalent thing for ourselves.
• We will never ask you to make a more courageous decision than the ones that we have made for our own firm.
• We so strongly believe in constant improvement that we will publish, quarterly, the total time and money we have spent on pattern matching and insight development, just to keep us honest.
• We pledge to treat our professional contractors like we want you to treat us.
• We put such value on building our team that we encourage you to ask them about their experience working here. And feel free to offer them any job you like. It’ll keep us on our toes.

If you’re smoking in the exam room, you need to stop that. There’s something really satisfying about taking your own advice.

You might also check on the advisors that you have. Are they doing for themselves what they are always going on and on about to you?