Love The Problem, Not The Solution
Jason M. Blumer, CPA
CPA leading a firm for creative consultancies, firms, agencies, service providers, and an expert at team scaling, team structuring, and restructuring.
One of my favorite startup bloggers is Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean. Though he writes about tech startups, a lot of his principles apply to the consultative world of service firms that I live and breath in.
And one of my favorite blogs is "Love the Problem, Not Your Solution." As he states in his post, we fall in love with our solutions before we even know what our clients want us to solve. We have to become lovers of the problem first. Our 'big ideas' are normally the solutions that pop into our minds. But this is not the path to market dominance. The only thing that matters are solutions that solve problems.
Maurya built a Lean Canvas to help entrepreneurs get to a problem faster. What is the problem? Answering this question is what you must love if you are to build a company and business model that are valuable and demand higher prices.
To get to the problem in a service-based company, we can ask, "what technical skill or ability is our client lacking that they can't even see they don't know?" Typically, when clients are hiring a service based firm, they are seeking some technical skill they can't (or shouldn't) be providing for themselves. But clients often come to us with a predetermined problem and want to purchase our supposed solution.
We can build more valuable service firms if we ignore the client's self diagnosis and instead fall in love with their problem. It takes longer to vet out the real issue, but it's a more profitable way to crafting problems with valuable solutions.
Auditor @ Aiyegbusi Fadare Ogunwale & Co. Chartered Accountants
7 年The best way to have a problem solved is to have much focus on that particular problem and/or spending much time with the problem as to ensure it is being solved.....
manager
7 年Love the problem i want to understand this buzzle tankyou
Supervising Administrative Officer at Philippine Science High School - SOCCSKSARGEN Region Campus
7 年i agree to this... if you dont love the problem then you dont get to offer the best solution... loving the problem means understanding it better than the others!
Specialized in social media, content marketing & event management
7 年Tnx. Now I realise.
Controller at Steel of West Virginia
7 年This is rich Jason Blumer, CPA. I like the blog you referenced and I think something else the author is correct about is that often solutions fail because they're not solving a big enough problem. You're also right about clients lacking technical ability they don't even know they lack. However that's always a fun dance of helping them explore an issue enough to expose the issue of them not knowing what they don't know.