¶ Intro / Opening
Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with the Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected, so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you want to hear more about that, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership.
Okay, today we are talking about what it means to have a consultant mindset and how that mindset can create opportunities as well as risks for project managers and other specialists working in an agency or other client services context. Joining me today is Max Traylor, a former agency service designer and ex-pro-paintballer who now helps agencies productize consulting services that improve client retention. Max, thanks for joining me today!
Yeah, good to be here.
Good to have you, man.
Hope I didn't make you laugh in your intro there.
That was actually perfect because so what I tell all my guests, as is that I'm going to record my intro every time. And I don't think my listeners believe that it's a freshly recorded intro every time. So this will be that anomaly. We'll run a contest later.
Oh, yeah, I wanted to knock you off your horse so that, so that you second guess your live performance.
Mission accomplished. I'm gonna make that part of the show from now on. Be like, try and trip me up during my intro. Love it. I'm excited to dive in today. I'm really interested in your work. The story of how I know Max is that I was listening to you guest on another podcast, and there was so much you were saying about agency life that really landed with me.
And then I really love this notion of, how folks working in an agency can be a little bit more strategic in their work so that they can create downstream work and can create more value for their clients, create more value for their agencies, and not just be kind of this flash in the pan. I thought maybe I'd just start by asking one juicy question.
¶ The Value of a Consultant Mindset
And the question is this — why would a project manager working at an agency want to put in the extra effort and energy to be seen as a consultant rather than just focusing on delivering the projects that get handed to them?
Oh, I don't know. Job security, your contribution to the world, the level of respect. People like to be respected, not marginalized. So there are three levels at any organization, and this isn't my fault. This is just corporate culture. There's leaders that make decisions. There's doers that do things, and in the middle, there are managers that make doers do things that leaders want them to do. The top gets paid, the top gets respected, the bottom gets pushed down. That's how the top goes up.
That's corporate culture in a nutshell. And if you're managing projects, you are the executioner for the decisions that were made at the leadership table. The great thing is you, if you are in a decision maker position and you don't have the experience of managing these projects, you're gonna make some dumb decisions.
You're gonna make some unreasonable decisions and you're probably gonna push a lot of those people responsible for projects out of the organization because your expectations are unreasonable. But make no mistake, your career path goes in one direction, and that is from project manager to decision maker. It's nothing wrong with doing project manager.
It's an essential skill, but the more that you can develop relationships with that leadership team in your current role, the more you'll find yourself slowly and slowly gravitating towards that decision maker identity.
I really like that framing because I think for probably a lot of agency folks, but definitely project managers, like that path isn't clear of like, what is the role? What is that decision maker role that I would ascend towards? But I do like that notion of, yeah, it's just, you just want to find your way. If that's your goal, you want to find your way up to that, the level of leadership decision maker, whatever that may be.
Will you go from managing projects to deciding what projects should be managed?
I mean, in an agency context, is there like such thing as too many leaders? We're looking at the stack of kind of doers, managers, and leaders. If everyone's trying to be a leader, what happens to the other two layers of the stack?
Well, if everyone tries to be a leader, there's going to be some churn. You're going to go to another. We're not still under the assumption that you're going to be at your current employer forever. I mean, I'd give you, anybody listening, I'd give you probably another year. Let's be honest. If we're looking in the mirror. So you want to go to that next gig instead of putting, Hey, I'm just a project manager.
Hey, I've got some ideas about how to prioritize different projects, how to forecast project performance or efficiency, how to train other project managers. This is recognizing that your intellectual property, not just what your fingers can do. Your intellectual property, the stuff in your head can be codified, can be taught, can be monetized. And that's cooler than getting paid by the hour. I tell you what.
Fair enough. I love that. Not just what your fingers do, but what's inside your brain.
Yeah. And you got to use it a little like that.
Yeah. Whenever we discuss the concept, for folks listening, we're just creepily wiggling our fingers.
Little creepy piggies.
Let's zoom out a bit. You help agencies productize their services so that they are
¶ Productizing Services for Efficiency
positioned sensibly, so that they are efficient to deliver, so that they are crafted to increase client retention. And all that sounds great for agency owners and operators, but can you walk me through how that benefits specialists at other levels of the org chart? When you're talking about the manager level, when you're talking about the doers, how does that sort of productized service help them?
Well, I mean, project managers should love this. Like, okay, you gotta manage a project. Has anybody written down what the steps are? Are there links to, like, the tools I should be using? Do we know how much I should time I should spend on each step? Can we somehow inform the client of their role at each of these steps and how long it's gonna take them? Do we know how much it's gonna cost us at each step?
So a tick of mine is when I see a service being delivered and these questions aren't answered, it puts a heck of a burden on a project manager when these things haven't been set internally, let alone expectations be set with the client. And so I use a big word productize for something that really amounts to steps and things, you need to go through the same steps and deliver the same things every time. And don't give me this "every client is different".
It's like, of course, but your process for delivering value should not be and you have to make money and you have to put food on the table and you have to babysit crazy, wild, unpredictable clients. So to the degree that you can document things, you're gonna do better. What is the benefit? Sanity, profitability, people liking you, frustration levels, stress levels, basically everything bad about a service business can be mitigated by treating a service like a product. And that's all I mean.
I don't actually mean creating a product where in a lot of cases, if you're able to adhere to the same formula time and time again, there will be opportunities to literally create a product. For a project manager, I would look at the commonalities of the last 10 projects you managed. I'd put that into an instance of Monday that you can white label and resell to all your clients.
A buddy of mine, I did that for a buddy, he's making 100 grand a year off of just a project template that he installs for every client. He added a line item, we're going to license you our project management software. Yeah, there's opportunities to literally make it a product. But the idea that you're going to productize a service is just like eliminating as much of the uncertainty as possible.
I like that clarification because I think when people hear the word productize, they're like, we can't do that. Like, everything's different. Like you said, this sort of unique snowflake conundrum. But you don't mean that, hey, here's what you get in the box and like, only these five things and it's the same every time.
You're talking about process and repeatability and fundamentally like predictability and like you touched on it there in terms of like, there's a lot of stress I find in a client services context, right? In an agency or consultancy, everything seems new and different every time you're working with different teams or stakeholders are different. I see a lot of teams are just like shrugging. They're like, I don't know what we're going to do. We'll just figure it out.
Like, and it's all of this like ambiguity. Whereas actually, yes, if you look back at your, other 10 projects that you just did, there's some repeatable elements there of things that did work that you can bring in and just make life easier for yourself.
There's a big changeover from the founder doing this work and somebody that's employed doing this work. And the difference is the ability and confidence to improvise. What comes next is the most important question in any project, right? So, if you're putting people in place and the expectation is, well, they're gonna figure it out, they have to improvise. One, they have to have the skill to do that, which takes a lot more experience to develop that skill set.
But then every decision, there's the paranoia of how is this decision going to look for the person that cuts my check?
Right. I like that sort of improvisation. In some conversations, that's like, like you said, it can be a skill. Yeah, for people like working at your agency who are great at improvising, that's an asset, in and of itself, but I don't think it's always an expectation.
Yeah, and the best consultants will improvise, the best salespeople will improvise, the best business owners will improvise, the best conversationalists, conversationizers. I'm improvising right now.
You improvised a word.
The new words, yeah, words with friends. But you shouldn't rely on that when it comes to scaling your business.
Yeah, there you go.
And look around, most people are bad at it.
Yeah, I mean, there's so much discomfort in having to improvise. You don't always have the full context of how it's impacting even the project, the client, your peers, let alone the person who's cutting your check.
Yeah, look, improvise all you want, but don't improvise the process. Don't say like, today, I think instead of step three, we'll just skip that. We'll just skip it and go to step four. We'll make something up. Put some thought into the client journey. What is the most important first step, second step, third step, fourth step? A menu, a services menu. If your organization has a services menu, you need to have a serious talk with the person responsible for the services.
A menu is a recipe for disaster. You ever worked at a restaurant?
I have.
It's a disaster. How much better would the experience be if you just hired a really good chef and the chef said, like, this is the four course meal. We're going to go one, two, three, four. We're going to make that as good as possible. Your job is just to make people feel comfortable. Make sure they have the drinks that they want. You don't have to worry about the food. The answer is yes or no. You want this food? Yes or no. Would have completely changed my life as a server.
Yeah, fair enough.
So.
That's an interesting one. Menus are bad because they allow your customer to kind of pick and choose things that may or may not make sense. Am I picking up what you're putting down there?
Well, you don't know what's next. You don't know what's next, so you can't set the proper expectations for what's next. The most important thing is that every client starts the same. Everything's about the start, right? So if you've got a menu of services, and you can identify your ideal client, which is I'm assuming people are doing that nowadays, your ideal client, then there is a single answer to the question. What is the most valuable thing that we can do first?
That there's one answer to that. And so every time you allow a client to say, I think it's actually installing new toilets. That's what I want to do first. Then you're like, yes, client, the client's always right. No, the client's not always right. That's why they're hiring you. And so sometimes you got to step up and say, perfect. You want that? Here's the process that we're going to use to do that. A singular services process. You take those five things on your menu.
And the first step is just to go, we're going to go one, two, three, four, five. Number one might take five minutes, but we're not going to skip it. We're not going to skip it. You're going to try that salad, even if you only have one bite.
You must pick an appetizer from this fixed price menu.
Yeah. It's part of the experience. You can't skip it. So singular services process, good. Menu, bad.
I like that because like now I'm looking at it. I'm thinking about your background as a service designer, right? And you can't create a sort of client experience where the client is just calling all the shots and you're kind of just asking, you just taking their order. How can you deliver value there?
Yeah, and then you start to say things like well, the client experience is that we're very attentive.
Yeah, exactly. We're responsive.
And we have a strong culture and we're always smiling.
Here to do your bidding, the agency.
Yeah, no one cares. No one, no one cares.
Let's dive into that, because, we're talking about this consultant mindset. We were talking about consultants being also
¶ Consultant Mindset in Service Delivery
great improvisers. And you were talking about the client journey and the client experience, which I think is really important here. I'm thinking of this sort of consultant mindset and productization, and I'm wondering just like, how does the consultant mindset play into service delivery? Like, what do you mean when you say that agency folks should be thinking of themselves as consultants?
Well, a consultant is someone that helps someone else make decisions, right? And the later you get involved in the decision making process, the less impact you can make. I've already decided that this is the most valuable project that we should work on. You go manage it. So now you're limited because what if there's a different project that you see because you're wise, and you have a different perspective and you're like, well, this project's, all well and good.
But this other project over here would actually be more valuable and you haven't even thought about it. So a consultant is just somebody that helps these businesses make better decisions. As my dad would say, his definition of a consultant is that you just make up the price. Which I thought, it was always funny. The problem is that marketers identify as marketers. Project managers identify as project managers, when you really should identify as somebody that's adding value.
I am here to add value. That is the only reason anyone is employed, is to add value. And so, the mindset is how can we add the most value? That's it. You walk around saying, how can I add the most value in a conversation about a project? You actually walk in, you go, how can I add the most value instead of saying, here's an update on steps three, four and five. I'm gonna go back and put my nose into this piece of paper here.
And so with that mindset, you start to challenge things in ways that might make your job actually a little more difficult or a little more scary. Or you'll have to improvise, right?
There you go.
So, yeah, it's a mindset of like, look, I have project management to sell, or I have marketing to sell, or I have these other services to sell. But instead of that being my identity, and like, that's all I talk about, I'm actually here just to add value. So we could actually have a business conversation. It has nothing to do with marketing, nothing to do with project management. I'm actually here to figure out what is most important for you.
What's going on in your life, and maybe just a conversation about that is actually adding value. Maybe I know somebody that I can introduce you to, and in that moment, you're a consultant, you're an indispensable partner, you're a trusted advisor. And if people start seeing you as a trusted advisor before they see you as a project manager, that just strengthens your relationship with the people that pay the bills, and that's gonna help you in every way, if you haven't figured that out.
Absolutely, I love that. I love it because, especially for project managers, but arguably for, anyone sort of doing a job at an agency. It's easy to just be like, okay, I'm an order taker. Especially a project manager, they're like, I'm this in between where client asks for something. I take that and I ask the team to do it. That's my job. I'll stay in my lane.
The more technically complex your practice is, I think the harder it is to step back and recognize that something so simple, that no one's really like talking about, is actually more powerful than the last five years of expertise that you've gained. Take like technology people that know how to fix computers, bless them, right? They have so much knowledge that no one cares about.
Like, I don't care, but they need that when, they need to be there to answer those questions and to fix those problems. Right? So you go into a room with leadership and now your identity is attached to this technical stuff that no one cares about. What they care about is the value. And it's hard for somebody with all that technical knowledge to go in and just say, How can I add the most value? What's actually going on at the leadership level?
What are some of, what are some of your important initiatives? Oh hey, marketing, what's up? Where are you up to? Right? That's not their profession, but it's how you generate relationships, trust, credibility. It's how people learn to like you. People like people that listen, not that can recite how to take apart a computer. I would not want to hang out with that person. Like, good for you. You have the knowledge, like save it for someone else.
I like that sort of, stepping back from it. I mean, maybe we can get a little bit tactical here and like dig into that.
You ever notice how if you talk to any employee and you ask them about their superiors, they're like they don't know anything. It's because it looks so simple from like an expert's standpoint that is doing all the work. I'm actually doing the work. I am pressing the buttons. There go the weird piggies again, the hands. I'm doing all the work. You're just sitting there, but they're not invited to that decision maker table.
They don't know what happens in that room where you're just having higher level conversations and you're talking about adding value. So to an outsider, it just looks like they're like, what do you actually do? I'm a people person.
It's really interesting you said that because I find often people will even be dismissive of the leaders above them to be like, well, they made the decision and I have to live with it. And it's just rather than being curious about it, I guess I should say. Because you said earlier, you're like, yeah, listen, ask questions, have conversations with people who don't do what you do, because then you'll have a better understanding of why these decisions are made.
And then you can start influencing them.
So one of my mentors, Steve Lashansky, that I end up quoting on every single podcast that I'm on. I get no kickbacks, but incredible leadership coach has this whole principle of being an indispensable partner. But he talks about two things that will have somebody perceive you as an indispensable partner. And that is, first, you have to be perceived as somebody that understands what is most important. I have to perceive that you understand what is most important to me.
And number two, I have to perceive that you can actually facilitate what is most important. Which happens if you can help somebody identify what's most important, if you can help me identify what's most important for me, you get both. I will automatically assume that you can facilitate what's most important, regardless of if you have the skill set or not. But another thing that he talked about, I almost forgot when I was saying this, but being right is not sufficient for being effective.
Technical people can be right all day long, but unless you can bring the other decision makers or the people writing the checks through a process of co-creation, of collaboration, lots of c words, that make them think it was their idea, it's not effective. You can be right all day long. It ain't gonna happen. Or you're gonna have one person out of five that's a blocker. You know, and then it's all done. So these soft skills are really important.
I like the filter of sort of understanding what is most valuable to that person. Because also I've seen folks working at consultancies who, they take this a different way, right? They're like, I'm going to be a consultant. I'm going to sell any project. I'm just going to go and talk to my stakeholders and be like, you should do this and you should do that. And I'm going to spin up all these projects.
And sometimes the effect is that whole portfolio of things they pitched while they were walking the halls doesn't make any sense at all. Nobody sees any value in it. They aren't the person who is going to be able to bring all the folks to the table to deliver those things. And really, they're just walking the halls to be schmoozy and salesy, thinking that equals dollars into their bonus. Which it could, but that's probably the wrong mindset.
The better mindset is how can I understand the problem set better so that I can think of ways to add value that makes sense and then position myself as someone who understands what is valuable and kind of be that trusted partner.
Look, it's easy to understand what is valuable, but the most critical skill is to arrive at what is most valuable. The most difficult question on the test is not the ones that say, pick the right answer. It's the ones that say, pick the one that best applies, and they're all the correct answer. It just drives you fricking nuts.
That's what's going on in real life every day, because if you want to make more money, you can make more money by selling five things one at a time than you can by selling five things. Bundling brings the cost down. But if you can sell five things, one at a time, well, then you're going to get full buy-in from everybody involved to do one thing better and better. You're going to increase your renewals. You're going to piss less people off. You're going to reduce stress levels.
You're going to be able to manage and set expectations and meet expectations more consistently. Like every project manager's dream is to manage one project at a time, and the only thing that's missing is the reason a client will want five things at a time is because you haven't brought them through a process to give them confidence in what is most impactful first, and why it's beneficial to do that most impactful thing first, before you do the second thing, before you do the third thing.
That's really interesting. And there's so much discipline to that, I'd imagine. I've worked at agencies where, of course, we want to sell all five projects at the same time. It's going to add a couple zeros to the deal. Like, let's do it all at once. Clients like, yeah, let's boil the ocean, let's do this. And then, you're 4 weeks in and it all stalling because like, nobody actually has capacity to do that. Nothing's happening in the right order.
I'm coming back to your like, fixed menu idea rather than having, Hey, choose what you want to do. Maybe it's everything. Maybe you want dessert first, like let's go. Versus like knowing and having enough confidence in your service and experience that you've designed to be like, we need to start here. We need to find the most valuable thing. And then we need to do that one thing. And then we can do the next thing.
Yeah. The best restaurants have tiny menus.
Yeah. Right.
Hey, look, we only caught one fish today out there in the ocean and we only serve fresh, so this is what you're going to get.
And it's the best, it's the best fresh fish you're going to get.
And if you don't like fish, like you shouldn't be here. That's the other thing that people don't do is just take a stand on like who they're for and what they do. They just, they take anything and so it's impossible to have confidence in that singular services process because you're going to take somebody on that actually shouldn't go through that singular services process and they're actually going to only need the fourth out of five things that you've got. So there's this, it requires both.
It requires you to make a decision on your ideal client. And you can't say something like a B2B software company. Like, No, dude, there's like a million different categories in what you just said. You might as well just say I help companies. It requires a more focused, ideal client, and it requires you to turn down some opportunities that aren't the right fit. And boy, is that scary because most of us are driven by fear and hunger. It's like that marshmallow thing. The test for the kids.
Yeah, the famous marshmallow. Hey, kid, if you wait five minutes and you don't eat this marshmallow, you'll get two marshmallows. Kid eats the marshmallow every time. We're all just kids eating marshmallows.
I was thinking that as what a difficult thing to persuade an agency owner to do when the whole game has been about trying to gather as much money on the table, like don't leave any money on the table. Yes, we will do copywriting suddenly. Even though that wasn't part of the deal and it's not a service we offer, but we'll find a way because there's money on the table and it's just dilutes their differentiation.
Yeah, and I know what they're thinking right now. They're like, oh, it's easy for you to say, well, the reason is because most of them have not taken responsibility over their pipeline. So they actually need to eat because they don't know when their next meal is coming. Most agencies participate in buying process. They do not sell anything. They've never sold in their life.
They've never gone out, developed a relationship, listen to somebody's critical initiatives or their priorities or over a period of time, and then offer a solution when what you offer is going to be most impactful for what they've decided is an important initiative for them. Most agencies just respond to a buying request. Hi, we've decided we want a website. Ooh, I'll be the cheapest or we'll be the best. Here's our features. That's participation in a buying process.
There is no sales skills required for that. And so they don't intentionally build these relationships consistently. There's no rhyme or reason to the size of a client coming in, when those clients are going to come in, the relationship between an amount of hours being put in by a business development or sales rep, or even founder-led sales. There's no mathematical equation that says, if I let this crappy fish go, I will get the fish that I came for two weeks from now.
It's like, I'll eat the crappy fish because we out here in the ocean and I might die.
Yeah, we're hungry. We need to eat.
Yeah, we're hungry. We need to eat now.
That's really interesting. And actually, that spins back to the sort of consultant mindset where when you have a good client, if you have a good fish, you don't want to go out and get a whole bunch of new bad fish.
¶ Sales Skills and Career Growth
You can actually get more from this good fish. Maybe I've taken the metaphor too far. But I think the sort of consulting thing, you said participating in a buying process is different than selling. And I think if I'm picking up what you're putting down, the consultant's job is selling in the sense of asking and understanding, not just reacting to a request. And I'm thinking about that in terms of, okay, yeah, so I'm a project manager. I want to be seen as a trusted advisor.
I'm going to talk to people. I'm going to listen. I'm going to help make decisions. I'm going to help people, my clients specifically understand what the most valuable thing they could do right now. It sounds all fine and good, but I think a lot of folks listening are going to be like, okay, but like, that's a lot of time. Like, is that billable time? Am I going to be sacrificing my billability? Is my utilization rate going to go down?
How can project managers and other agency folks like be consultants without sacrificing their billability or even just getting distracted from their job?
First of all, there's so many things I want to say about that. Number one, everyone is in sales. If you haven't figured that out, you're going nowhere. You have to sell your job role every single day to your employer, do you not? And so consultant is selling. You're selling the idea, you're selling your role, you're selling in that thing that is most important. Everyone is in sales. People that have sales roles are simply the way that the money is exchanged.
I'm getting you to make a decision where you're going to purchase something from me, whereas a consultant is I'm making you a decision where you'll continue to work with me. It's barely different. And the idea that am I being paid for this? Is this part of my hourly, billing? Everyone's objective should be to get out of hourly billing. It should be to get out of trading time for dollars. Because you are incentivized to suck at your job.
Am I going to make more money if it takes a simple task, five hours or one hour? I'm going to make more money if it takes me five hours. So you're incentivized to suck. Now, profitability comes from innovation. Innovation makes you do things better, faster, cheaper. So if you start innovating and coming up with ways to do things better, faster, and cheaper, you will make less money, which is why your current hourly gig that you got going on is terrible for you.
It's like walking around with weights on your feet. So the question is not, is this something that I can charge for? The question is simply, how can I add the most value? And the answer is, I don't know. So you got to go talk to the people that have the money that aren't getting paid hourly, people that run the company, and you're gonna ask questions. And it's not, how's your computer going? Or can I do this project any better for you?
It's like, Hey, I never asked you, what's the plan with this business? Are you going for an exit in a few years? Do you see this as like a lifestyle business? Are you trying to hand it off to somebody like, what's the big, how's your family? The important shit in life.
I like that. I mean, there's a lot to chomp on. And you're absolutely right. Right? For like a, when you're getting paid for time spent doing a thing, copywriting, being a project manager, being a designer, you name it. Yeah. You are incentivized to, for it to take time so that you make more money or whatever. And that kind of like curbs the innovative spirit because you're like, why would I innovate? I'm not incentivized to do that.
But I do like this idea of just like going and having that conversation. I like this idea that we're all in sales, right? You're selling your value every day to frankly, everyone you interact with, especially your boss and especially your client. But I guess at the end of the day, and maybe to cap this off, like, folks who are listening to this and going, yeah, that sounds awesome. Max, you're absolutely right. I need to be doing more of this. I need to be having more of these conversations.
But what if they're like five layers away in the org chart from having that conversation? Where it's not so simple, Max, I can't just email my CEO and go, Hey, can we chat about your family?
No, start with the people around you. You can't pogo stick five layers up, but you can start to develop stronger relationships with the people that you already interact with. People that make decisions about how many hours you work, what projects you have to take on. Everyone should understand who their most valuable relationship is. At one organization, there's like one person that's your ticket to the next step. So you start with that person and you practice.
You have to sell the idea to that person that you are more valuable than your current role. That is what career path is. Selling the idea that you are more valuable than your current role. And so the idea that a project manager is sitting there going, Well, I've not paid for that. That's not my job. You misunderstand your job. Your job is to add value. And there's something else that you could be doing or talking about that is more valuable than the project you're managing today.
Go figure it out. Go find it.
Boom. There it is. I love that. Max, thanks so much for spending the time with me today. Loved our conversation. It's been a lot of fun.
I enjoyed it.
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