It's been a decent run banging out my SEO for Non-Scumbags series, even if there might well have been an audience mismatch. I had fun with those, but they were fairly trade and theory heavy. And I've found that kind of discouraged me from my writing habit as a whole.
So, if only for today, I'm going to dust that habit off and resume ranting to whoever happens by, like some kind of internet busker.
Today's topic is on my mind, both because I did a livestream Q&A about it (it'll be up on the Hit Subscribe Youtube channel in the coming weeks), but also because I see it everywhere whenever I'm poking around freelancer or small, boutique service provider websites.
What I'm Talking About: We Do Labor and Consulting
If you can't picture what I mean, I'll default to a hypothetical custom app dev shop for example. If you hover over their "services" menu on their website, you'll see a list like this:
- Custom Wordpress Website Builds
- Monthly Site Maintenance
- Custom Plugin Development
- Wordpress API Integrations
- Wordpress Consulting
Emphasis mine. (Well, I mean, of course it is, this is a hypothetical I made up, not a quote.)
The service provider enumerates a series of different kinds of labor they will sell you, and then, almost invariably at the bottom, they'll throw in that they also offer consulting.
This is what I'm saying you shouldn't do.
Do as I Say, Not as I Do
Lest someone beat me to the punch, in the immortal words of Doc Holliday (at least, in Tombstone), "apparently my hypocrisy knows no bounds." If you look at Hit Subscribe's offering page, you'll see this:
Now, I'm not sure if I wrote (or even read) that copy before it went to prime time. And I'll also point out that whoever wrote it wisely structured the bullets as all being consultative in nature, at least partially, and they also created a moat around the fulfillment piece as separate from strategy.
But, nevertheless, there it is, a potential example of what I'm saying not to do.
My main reason for bringing this up is simple expediency. I don't want to put some random service business on blast, and there just happens to be an example on a site that I presided over, so it's the most practical way I can show you a screenshot without being needlessly rude to someone.
If you're wondered whether I'm worried about this and feel any pressing need to change it... neh. I've got bigger fish to fry.
Consulting vs Labor Services
I have beaten this topic to death. I've talked about it here, and here, and probably 10 other places over the years. So I'll just do the Cliff's notes here.
- Labor services involve acting as a pair of hands. Someone pays you to do the thing.
- Consulting services involve acting as the brain. Someone pays you to do nothing, except offer advice (in whatever form that takes as a deliverable).
If you're executing something, you're selling labor, and not consulting.
Mapping Consulting and Labor to the Org Chart
Let's do another easy one. Let's take a look at each service type and imagine that the client liked the provider so much that they just decided to throw money at them until they could slurp them into a role within the organization.
What would that look like for each type of service? Very simple:
- Labor services: individual contributor.
- Consulting services: organizational leadership.
Absurdly Mapping the Org Chart Back to the Services Page
Having drawn that parallel, let's revisit what the services page looks like from our hypothetical above.
Here are our services, dear prospect:
- Specific Tactical Individual Contributor Labor
- Specific Tactical Individual Contributor Labor
- Specific Tactical Individual Contributor Labor
- Specific Tactical Individual Contributor Labor
- We Can Also be Your CTO!
Can you imagine running across something like this in the wild? It'd be like running across a resume with the usual tech stack alphabet soup for a senior software engineer, but with an objective at the top (is that still a thing people put on resumes?) that read "Seeking a position as a software engineer III, senior software engineer IV, or maybe CTO, whatever."
Best case is the person reviewing the resume chuckles and ignores that CTO bit.
Now, things aren't quite as ludicrous or dramatic on your services page. They almost certainly won't think to chuckle before ignoring your consulting services completely.
Consulting Services as "Hey, I'm Strategic"
Over the years, I've observed that one of the most predictable anti-patterns that indie technicians (laborers viewing their work as a craft) deploy to bolster their cred is to refer to themselves as "strategic" in some way. So throwing something about "consulting" or "strategy" on your site acts not as a serious offering. Instead, it's a strawman ironically intended to differentiate the tactician from other tacticians by making unfounded claims of strategic (consulting) acumen.
But the problem here isn't so much what happens if clients ignore the strategy offering and detect, at least on a subconscious level, that you're engaging in a sad form of resume padding. In fact, that's the good outcome.
The bad outcome (for them) would be someone taking you up on this strategy.
Technician/Tactician Strategy Is Just Tips about Labor
Why do I say this?
Whenever you ask a technician for advice, something predictable happens. They bury you in tactical suggestions about how to do the thing better.
Think about our hypothetical offering above around Wordpress services. What do you imagine this Wordpress "consulting" from this firm actually looks like?
I suspect that it would involve giving you advice about customizing Wordpress themes and maintaining Wordpress sites.
- "You should keep your plugins up to date."
- "Here are some best practices for customizing your theme."
- "What error are you getting? Okay, lemme take a look... ah, yep, that's your problem right there."
If someone is paying you to say things like this, I suppose it is technically consulting. They give you money, and you give them the advice to keep plugins up to date or to fix an error.
But there's a more specific, accurate term for what you're doing when giving this advice: training.
And training is just one tiny step away from labor, in the sense that the absolute most natural thing for any client or party to do when you say "ah, yep, there's your problem right there" is to immediately say, "look, can you just fix it for me?" So what's happened here -- the bad outcome for them -- is they started off looking for strategic advice, and wound up in the weeds with you, deciding tactically which one of you should do which labor. You're pair programing and just trading off driver and navigator.
And then, by the way, bam, you're right back in labor-land and not strategy-land.
The "Consulting Services" Throw-In Is Not a Path Toward Strategy
A clarifying way to look at this is to think of labor, for a technician, as having an intense gravitational pull. You have labored all of your life for money, and you view the quality of your labor as your differentiator.
When asked to be "strategic," you thus immediately start spewing granular and tactical tips that amount to best practices, often without context. Make your code DRY. Do Scrum instead of waterfall. Whatever.
In short, the advice you will give, naturally, all has to do with the question of how, exactly and rarely, if ever, the questions of what or why. And those latter questions are where actual strategy and actual consulting live.
In my experience, flipping into true strategy and consulting requires a clean break. You need to stop answering the question "how" and adopt the attitude of "who cares about the how, that's below my paygrade," which is a really heavy lift for a technician. But you have to do it.
If you're an individual freelancer, this means that you either remove all labor offerings and the like from your site, or you remove all mention of "consulting." For a firm, it's a little easier, in that you can segment by personnel. For instance, in the Hit Subscribe example, I personally don't ever create content for clients myself, but I do act as a fractional CMO for them.
In the end, I'd suggest you indies go with this simple heuristic. Until you're ready to offer nothing but consulting services, leave "consulting services" off of your website.
(Also, when you do take the consulting plunge, don't just say "consulting services," but that, dear reader, is a topic for another time.)
Top comments (17)
This is a good article. But now I’ve a lot of questions.
My first thought, borders a common argentinian joke where you take your car to the mechanic and he just screws a bolt and overcharges you “for knowing which bolt to screw”. Therefore, it’s not overcharging. It’s just his knowledge applied.
Why wouldn’t I (the freelancer or company) offer you my knowledge service to you (the client) if I do have experience with it? Haven’t experience gave me that power? The years battling with close minded people that stayed with the pascal program that “works like a charm”. So why are you having problems?
Let me “consult” you for a better approach. Even if I don’t do the labor because either you didn’t like me or you can afford me.
And I think that’s the whole point, you offer consulting as a hook to do the bigger job.
In fact, following your example, I’ll offer my consulting for free to everyone using wordpress (please stop). And now, I’ve got the labor job, your new modern website.
Perhaps it’s just some local issue, but not small. We’re talking about huge companies that don’t have the right CTO or a “stuck in time” one. Those people need consulting. They need you you to guide them to the right (assuming not scammers) path. And their team will take over from there.
Perhaps it’s all marketing. I don’t know.
Thanks for the article!
If I got the post idea right (and I've read other posts from Erik), wouldn't the consulting (being the brain) part be the actual bigger job?... not the minutiae of throwing lines of code into an editor
I think it depends on the definition of "bigger." For an individual, consulting (brains) is likely to be much higher paying as a function of your time. I'm not really sure what kind of rates programming caps out at these days, but the last time I paid attention, you'd be hard pressed to get over $200/hour for writing code, unless it was something highly specialized. But $200/hour is much more of a starter price for any kind of bona fide consulting.
But when it comes to the brains:hands ratio, labor is typically needed in much higher volume. If you go look at a miscellaneous custom app dev shop, for instance, they'll probably do some kind of "discovery," perhaps even paid, and that will be the entry point to sell millions of dollars of app dev labor to a company.
For an individual, this might look like bringing in a programmer to look at some sad legacy application, asking if the application is salvageable, and, if not, can the programmer rewrite it? Even if the programmer-consultant in this scenario charges, say, $10K to make the "keep using or rewrite" decision, there's almost certainly going to be more than $10K worth of hands work rewriting the thing. But you spend a few days earning the first $10K, then 2 weeks earning the next $10K as a laborer.
I actually used to do a lot of consulting gigs like this, but just the assessment piece. Doing the labor piece was (1) way less profitable and (2) would have made me way less credible as a consultant.
And that brings my real issues with consulting as tip-of-the-spear work for labor:
Loved your response.
So, let me tell you, it’s a regional thing. I’m on the gig since 2003 (from freelancing to entrepeneuring) and started consulting following the big fishes model from the beginning. It started for free. Then, i was asked for, then it became more like an outsourcing job. Nowadays, members of my team leads (in-site) clients teams consulting or mentoring.
And, let me tell you the truth, I consulted a lot for free and lots of then became my clients long after the consultation, as they didn’t find in the low cost what I offered.
My best regards, thanks for answering me!!!
It’s not one or the other, I think. Your brain is the one that let’s you crack the code. You organize, you prioritize, you scale, you do everything consulting yourself before actually writing the code. It’s part of the job.
If you offer solutions, why consulting isn’t consider one of them?
I get that there’s plenty sh1tty offer. That’s where the difference is made.
If your consulting service is a good quality service, and the client won’t be able to pay it (or any reason they decide not to continue with you), at least they’re going towards the good path. And that service should be (word MUST applies too) offered.
I'll make an attempt to tackle what you're saying/asking here holistically.
IME, consulting is, or at least should be, accompanied by an answer to the question, "why would I pay you for this advice?" A compelling answer to that question is, I believe, the difference between a consultant and a technician with an (yet another) opinion.
Take the "free consulting" you're offering: "Wordpress sucks."
I can get that same consulting from anyone that doesn't like Wordpress for some reason. Why would I, or anyone, pay for that take? The barriers to entry for that opinion are non-existent.
Contrast this with something I would actually pay for right at the moment: advice on when and how to form a board of directors for a company. In the first place, the barriers to entry for that knowledge are relatively high, but, even if someone read up on it and then offered to give me advice, that still wouldn't be a compelling answer to the question "why should I pay for this advice" (when I could just read the same articles myself)?
What would be a compelling answer to that question would be someone telling me "I've advised 15 different boostrapped services-based startups form boards of directors." Assuming that were verifiably true, I would pay that person just to size up my situation and suggest when and how to proceed.
Your parable -- the one about knowing to turn the screw -- is an old consulting adage as well (though I've heard it told about a factory owner), but one that's intended to sell value-based pricing rather than hourly labor. But it's still labor (albeit brief, highly valuable labor).
A real consultant in that parable would be the person the factory owner asked for advice.
"Should I pay this laborer $50K to fix the problem?"
"Nah, he'll just overcharge you by $49,990 for something you can do yourself in 5 minutes -- just turn that screw over there."
In that position, as a consultant, I wouldn't even bother to charge for the "turn the screw" advice because saving someone $50K with throwaway advice guarantees I have a customer for the rest of that person's career.
Maybe throwing "consulting" is a form of "fake it until you make it" or a low pressure way of evolving into a consulting business...
Loved it!
The Carl's Coding'n'Consulting lemonade-style stand drawing really got me tickled. 😆
Lovin' the self-deprecating humor throughout this one!
Also, I just really enjoyed the breakdown — how you've pointed out that true consulting is a higher-level, strategic position, and that doesn't allow for getting pulled into the minutia.
Appreciate you sharing this post, Erik!
The self-deprecating humor is natural. Most of the lessons I've learned about career and business, I learned by doing something dumb, wincing, and learning my lesson :)
I don't how that writing this kind of rants feels, but it's a fun and liberating read for the reader!
That's my favorite way to really get new concepts
Looking forward to read this next one
I can certainly add that to the queue :)
Lol I don't know ...
What if you're able to give advice or tips to the client (rather than crank out code) - you should then not put "consulting services" on your site, like it's an "evil" thing to do, unless you're a genuine bona fide high brow IBM type "business consultant" wearing an expensive suit and charging a commensurate fee?
This article needs a lot of words (and there's no "TL:DR" summary) to make, well, which kind of point exactly - protecting the turf or the business of "real" consultants, maybe? :-D
But hey, thanks for the effort :)
The beauty of writing a column on an owned or syndicated property is the implied "here's some thoughts, take them or leave them." Sounds like you want to leave them, so god bless. I'm a little busy to take bespoke content requests from everyone who happens to wander by some blog post I've written.
No worries, I have no requests for you - have a nice day!