Home

The Strategic Independent

source

Proposed in this article is the act of playing strategy, and steward to your clients. stewardship defined as follows:

Sometimes it’s literally just rolling up your sleeves to do the work outlined in the strategy

• “It was fine - but he just gave advice. I like working with you because you’re not afraid to roll up your sleeves and do the work when it needs doing”
• you should do the most valuable thing the business needs at that moment.
• The freedom of a consultant is that you can ignore job title / role / responsibility and be laser focused on moving the business towards key objectives and mixing your outputs from small to big as needed.
• I bill it all at the same day rate. Stewardship is just as valuable as strategy and there’s no reason to somehow charge less for the execution work.

Tom also emphasises this point: ‘as you start to do more strategic work, only let clients in through the strategy door’. These are deemed as higher quality work, and he says the average length of this type of relationship with client is 20 months.

These are the clients that come in before the execution phase of a relationship, which comes after strategy.

Weak Ties & Strong Intros

source

So you need to educate and explain your work in a way that even weak ties have a good enough understanding of the kind of leads you’d be a good fit for.

![[toms communities.png]]

You’ll have a lot more success by being sustainably visible in a medium where you feel comfortable than trying to force yourself to create content because you think you should in a way that makes you cringe.