Episode description

When you get paid to do implementation work, you're ultimately being paid to solve a problem.

Maybe it's anything website or content-related. Or maybe it's more broad, like anything marketing-related. Anything within that purview becomes your problem. 

In other words, you own the entire problem of X for your clients.

The challenge when switching to advisory work is that you end up facilitating the solution instead of actually doing it for your client. That means someone still has to actually do the implementation.

But as an advisor, whatever your scope is, it's still your problem to solve. Regardless of the roadblock that comes up, you will move mountains if you have to.  

That might mean finding new freelancers or agencies to implement, doing wireframes or proof-of-concepts yourself, training people do to things in-house, teaching people how things work, or anything else that needs to happen to get the problem solved.

After all, what you're selling is a solution to their problem. Nobody pays for half a solution.

Personally, I charge a fixed price for what I do. I don't want problems to get more expensive for my clients than anticipated. That just adds a problem to a problem.

If it means I need to put in overtime to get the problem solved, that's the risk I take. I own it and find solutions. 

From the client's perspective, they get the assurance that for a fixed price, the problem of X is solved (marketing, design, strategy, leads, whatever).

The feeling of buying all-in services is very reassuring.

But if you throw your hands in the air and make any part of the problem your client's problem, you're providing an incomplete service.

"That's not my job" won't cut it if it's part of the problem you promised to own. 

People pay a lot of money to make their problems someone else's. The more you do that, and the bigger the "problem", the more you’ll get paid.

Listen in for some more specifics. 

Link to this topic in the community: https://society.mindshare.fm/c/mentorship/76-own-the-entire-problem

—kw