A Summary Of My Content - January-March 2022
Luk Smeyers
Consulting Firm Performance Advisor ?? Advisor to Consulting Firm Buyers/Investors ?? Author of 'The Authority' newsletter
All right, we are well into 2022 and I feel more energetic than ever. I've spent quite a few months towards the end of 2021 designing a portfolio of new services and last month, I launched a number of them. I'm so delighted and humbled by the response from my audience – consultants and consultancies.
These new services will provide me with even more content ideas by helping me uncover new patterns, identify new trends, and even better understand the pain points of the consulting world. I am listing these services in my bi-weekly newsletter, if you are interested you can subscribe to the newsletter at the bottom of this article.
In the meantime, here is a review of my content in the first three months of 2022.
1. 'The Authority', my bi-weekly newsletter
Check out the past editions of my?bi-weekly 'Think Piece' newsletter for consultants. 'The Authority' helps consultants grow their pipeline by sharing intriguing educational stories. It’s my ultimate aspiration to create a bubble of calmness with this bi-weekly ‘think piece’, a place of stillness in the face of everyday stress. A chance to reflect on what really matters in your consulting work.
In each newsletter I address the following:
The big question I address: Leading up to this edition of the newsletter, I had been finetuning my positioning. My new positioning is: ‘Authority-Led Business Development In Consulting.’ I immediately received a few questions to explain this finetuning: “Luk, what exactly is Authority-Led bizdev in consulting”??In this newsletter, I explain how and why my positioning has shifted and the trends in the consulting world that I strive to get the consultants to understand.
The big question I address: In my January webinar, I presented my top 10 learnings from 2021. I got several emails from fellow followers/subscribers, so I decided to summarize them in newsletters #42 and #43 – part 1 and part 2. This is part 1.
The big question I address: This is part 2 of my top 10 learnings from 2021.
The big question I address: My previous two newsletters talked at length about the ‘authority-led approach’ to business development in consulting. I received quite a few questions asking for elaboration. That's exactly what I do here – an additional overview of the core components of an authority-led consulting approach.
The big question I address: I gave a workshop the previous week to a mid-sized consulting firm. One of the sessions was about ‘symptoms of a poorly positioned consultancy’. As it is such an important topic, I decided to write about it in this newsletter.
The big question I address: “Luk, you often talk in your newsletter about the importance of creating an authentic ‘signature voice’ as a consultant. Can you elaborate on what that entails for consultants?” This is what I cover in this edition of the newsletter.
2. The Visible Authority blog
“Why should we hire you?” Consultants get this question a lot. Most have ready-to-serve answers:
Here is where I stand on this:
Ordinary consultants get asked: why should we hire you as a consultant.
Authorities get invited to solve a problem. They don’t get that question.
I’ve seen it way too often; most consultants’ mindsets switch into defense mode by getting the why question. They feel the need to justify, convince, and claim to have the expertise. Deep inside, they feel mistreated and misunderstood.
In this article, I explain where the question is coming from and why you should dig deeper instead of rushing into self-defense mode.
On the 12th of January, 2022, I hosted the eighth webinar in my series, titled My 2021 Learnings. In this session, I reviewed the state of the consulting world: the trends, the challenges, and the opportunities.
I believe that the consulting world has been changing for a while and many of these changes – putting emphasis on the digital, for example – got accelerated over the past year.?In this webinar, I dive into how business development in the world of consulting has changed forever. I also explain my 13 main learnings from the year. This post contains the video recording and other resources from the webinar.
With every new year comes my new book recommendation list.?
As you know, I am in constant pursuit of expanding my knowledge. I read books and articles, watch educational videos, and listen to insightful podcasts. My goal is to discover new perspectives and gain a better understanding of what I already know. As such, I don't limit myself to strictly business books. Many of my recommendations are for books that cover psychological aspects of how we think and operate as human beings.
All of these books have one thing in common – they will help you become a better consultant.
We live in a world full of restlessness and indecision. In consulting, that often translates into ‘keeping all the options open’ out of Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). What I’ve seen the past year, more than ever before, in working with consultants is the chasm between:
And this is just one of the many business development challenges I've witnessed many in the consulting world struggle with. In this post, I summarize the top 10 challenges and explain why it's important for consultants to start dealing with them in a consistent manner – most of these challenges are not temporary and are bound to escalate.
In the last two years, I spoke to >200 consultants and consultancies, read close to 1,000 articles on trends and evolutions in the consulting space, and hosted eight webinars, with a total of 200+ attendees.
I also stayed on top of great research on topics such as thought leadership and visibility as an expert consultancy.
This is the 2022 edition of my observations on trends that consultants should really be aware of.
"You need to share your knowledge," I tell consultancies. "You need to showcase your expertise by producing content that addresses your target audience's pain points, that offers insightful solutions, that sounds authentic. And you need to do all that on a consistent basis, measuring results and optimizing the process as you go."
If you know anything about me and what I do, then you know that this is the message I'm trying to get every consultant and consultancy to hear. Often, during such conversations, consultancies tell me they don’t know what to write about.?That's why I decided to put together this piece and reveal some of my content hacks and secrets.
Most consultancies I meet don’t end up where they had hoped. Their reputational footprint or authority is not strong enough, they struggle to build a healthy pipeline, they aren’t working with the type of clients they envisioned, and - the most difficult challenge of all - the leaders/owners have a lot of internal debate about the vision and direction.
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So much of that comes down to a consultancy's positioning. In this post, I provide a list of some of the most common symptoms of poor positioning that I come across on a daily basis as well as my three-pronged approach to addressing the problem.
Most consultancy websites suck. Yes, they suck. Big time. Sorry to say. I am struggling with such poor professionalism. And to be honest, most of you are underestimating the criticalness of a website to succeed in consulting. What do you think buyers of consultancy services do when evaluating candidate consultancies (or their consultants)? Exactly, they check out the consultancy or the consultant/advisor.
Consultancy websites is one of the most discussed topics in my work with consultants and consultancies. I receive 2-3 questions about it every week. So I thought I'd compile a list of some of the patterns I've noticed when reviewing consultancies' websites and share that list with you. Fasten your seatbelts.
Authority-led business development in consulting is about building visibility and growing the trust in your expertise in your market(s). To help me with that, the email list of my target audience has been my secret trust weapon for almost a decade (and still is today).
In this article, I explain why building and smartly utilizing your email list is a must for consultants. And I share my takeaways after a decade of sending emails to my target audience as a consultant.
3. My LinkedIn posts
4. Previous 2021 content summaries
If you'd like to catch up on my content from the beginning of the year:
Interested in receiving all my learnings to become a better consultant? No spam, no BS. Pure teaching!?Subscribe to my newsletter (and the monthly training calendar).