S07.EP09 - From Execution to Expertise with David C. Baker

0:00If your client decided that they are not going to use you anymore, how long would it take for them to find what they would deem a suitable replacement? So they get to decide what's suitable, but how long would it take them to find what they think is a suitable replacement for you? That's how much leverage you have in the relationship.

0:25Hello and welcome to Just Branding. The only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

0:44Before we jump in, if you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the waitlist. That's joinbba.com. Today's guest is David C. Baker, one of the most respected voices in the world of expertise, positioning and advisory businesses.

1:26David has spent decades helping firms, consultants and creative businesses become more focused, more valuable and far less replaceable. He's the author of books including The Business of Expertise and through his writing, speaking and podcasting, He's helped shape many of us think about specialization, pricing, lead gen, or what it really means to build a business around insight rather than just execution. And we're big believers of that on the show here. I'm sure you've heard us talk about it quite a bit. So we're getting OG in here to talk about it. And this conversation is super relevant right now.

2:02As AI accelerates production, it makes execution faster, cheaper. Many creative pros are asking a bigger question. if everyone can make more faster than what actually becomes more valuable and that's what David's work has been incredibly useful so in this episode we're going to explore the differences between execution and expertise why so many creative firms actually struggle to position themselves clearly what clients are really paying for and how to build a business around judgment trust and perspective rather than just output. So if you've ever felt stuck between being good at the work and being known for the thinking behind it, this episode is for you.

2:45So David, we're stoked to have you on the show. Thank you for being here. Welcome, sir. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, after that introduction, I'm not sure what else there is to say. You've just said it all. Oh, we're going to unpack that. We're going to unpack it. Okay. Let's start from the top. So execution to expertise. That's the topic of your book. So let's jump straight into it. What do you believe creative firms still get most wrong about expertise? That one I think is easy. And I think it's sloppy positioning. Somebody asked me on LinkedIn today, what percentage of firms or contractors, freelancers, get their positioning correct?

3:29and I said well I think it's a higher percentage than it ever has been so every year that goes by it gets better but we're still at around 30 percent that's just a guess I don't really know for sure and so they're essentially they're generalists and not being viewed with the sort of expertise that every other branch of professional services craves we're we're the only side of professional services that just sort of pooh-poohs the idea of positioning, tight positioning. So that would be the answer in my mind.

4:07Matt Davies:Which is ironic, right, David? Because particularly in the realm of marketing and branding communications, often we would talk to our clients about carving out a position in the market to defend and outmaneuvering the competition some way. So it's a strange phenomena, wouldn't you say? our industry is full of contradictions you know we're there's that and then what how often are we telling our clients like hey your website really isn't very good it really needs to be redone and then you look at your own website and it's like oh we don't have time for that and go on and on and on and that's that's just one of the reasons why i think clients don't tend to take us as seriously as they could.

4:50Yeah, we actually just spoke with a guest recently, Emily Penny, and they did a study of all the different agencies and put together a report looking at positioning and how they talk about themselves. And they did come to the realization very quickly that a lot of agencies say the exact same thing. Yeah, award-winning, full service, we focus on but are not limited to and then they fill in the blank yeah i i get a little angry at it and so i have to just stay away from some of those things because i sound too much like an old man yelling at clouds sometimes and i am an old man and i do yell at clouds so it fits but you're

5:32Matt Davies:in the right place we're me and jacob are both uh you know we're both in a similar category i think great yeah so that's that's that's kind of um what what would you say that this idea though about expertise is though in that sphere because obviously you know every if everybody's sort of sounding the same in terms of the execution where do you see the opportunities in expertise so you mean like what what changes if they determine expertise expertise yeah what what happens and where are the opportunities there? Yeah. Well, the one thing that happens is that you're upstream in the process because by the time you get asked to do something, to do some implementation or some execution, a lot of decisions have already been made.

6:22And so you get upstream, which means you probably have access to a little bit more money. You definitely have access to more time to do it, but you also have access to influencing the decisions that are made. Because the way it is now, a firm or an individual or freelancer is asked to do something, and it's not like they aren't capable of doing it, but they look at the request and say, seriously, this is what you want done? I can do it, but that's really not in your best interest. And so the execution moves them upstream and gives, you know, they have a seat at the table rather than like they're outside the conference room.

7:05They know all these important discussions are happening in the conference room. And then after an hour and a half, somebody emerges and says, OK, we decided what needs to happen. Here's what we'd like you to do. That's execution. And it's not a very it's not a very fun process, essentially. So just to clarify here for our listeners, what's the difference between like a highly skilled designer or creative versus like the obvious expert, which is what you talk about? It'd be hard to define that specifically, but we could kind of eat around the edges of it. Core to that is this notion of like if somebody is looking for execution, they've already decided what the problem is and they've already decided what should be done to fix it.

7:47and you are just simply taking orders you're like a waiter and they're saying i'd like this i'd like this and somebody else has done the menu somebody else has made all the recommendations and so on with expertise you're essentially employing pattern matching and you're helping them decide not only what to do but you're moving even upstream of that and you're asking all the right questions to help them identify what the real problem is. That's one way to think about it. Another way to think about it is just the difference between using your head and using your hands. So if you could, this is a kind of a crude example, but can you imagine somebody who is, who's colorblind?

8:35They became colorblind through some accident. They've lost the use of their hands. It's very difficult for them to be a designer in any traditional sense because of that. But if their work consists largely of strategy, they can still have a great livelihood because they still have the ability to think. Another way to think about it is strategy can be done in Microsoft Word. If whatever you're doing for a client requires more than Microsoft Word, then it's probably infused with execution. that's not a great example but anyway kind of just it makes the point a little bit i think i think it

9:17Matt Davies:makes a lot of sense i think if you spent all your life in microsoft word you'd be one miserable individual there just because of microsoft but moving on but i think you're right you're right absolutely right and and that's the thing isn't it it's about being a brain not a pair of hands that's another expression i've heard yeah around this it's really hard isn't it well i think a lot of people find it hard at least let's phrase it like that to move if you're so used to seeing yourself as an executioner as a designer for the sake of argument as a producer of stuff to shift and a lot of people think how i get this i get i've got to be more uh you know valuable i've got to move upstream how do folks do it though you know uh what what are your thoughts on on that like what what would you say that that the key things might be to to think about how to to shift your positioning if you find you yourself as a pair of hands and just a follow-up question with Can you do both?

10:10Is it like either or? Oh, yeah.

10:12Matt Davies:Oh, Jacob. I think it's very difficult to change an existing client's mind, to move upstream in their mind. If they already have you in an implementation box, it's going to be difficult to climb out of it. The only hope you have of doing that is to gently question, and you're not going to get paid for this either because it's not in the scope, but gently question what they're asking you to do and say, hey, there might be a better way to do this. Have you thought about such and such? And you're just stepping outside of that box they have you in. But I think it's almost a fool's errand. You're much more likely to impact the situation by starting out that way with a new client.

10:59Now, how do you do that? There's a bunch of ways you can do it. One way is to develop clear points of view and write about them. Another is to ask much better questions at the beginning instead of like, how many orders of fries do you want with that? You know, asking more thoughtful questions about to get them to think in ways they haven't thought yet. But back to that second question about can you do both? So I have what I call a two-room model. So if you imagine a smaller room on the left and a larger room on the right, there's two rooms in this building, and there's an outside door to both rooms, and there's a connecting door between the rooms, okay?

11:45If you imagine a client who comes in from the outside into that execution or implementation room, and that's where most people start. They just take orders from clients. They do execution. They do implementation work. The first thing you would do is to close the outside door into that room. So the only way for them to get access to your execution work is to come in the strategy door. and then if they want execution from you, they can go through that connecting door into the execution room. That's the best way to think about that. Now, I don't think we should require clients to use us for execution or implementation.

12:31In fact, I think that's one of the ways we tend to devalue ourselves because it just looks like we're doing strategy, quote unquote, in order to get all the execution work. And that's like what offset printers did for years. They noticed that, wow, designers are speccing all these printing jobs and we're losing out. So I guess we need to have a design department so that then we get the printing, you know, so that doesn't work. You make it completely optional for them where they come in. Now, I want to talk a little bit deeper. I'm going to go on and on here for a minute, but And like, how do you even, it's one thing to say, I want to be more strategic, but how do you become more strategic?

13:13And here I just have to take us back to the very first thing we talked about. If you're a generalist, there's no way you can be smart enough about all these things to be an effective advisor from a strategic standpoint. The world is too complicated. You know, it's not as simple as it used to be. There's so many things that you can never know. And all you do is just go to YouTube and figure out how to do it. And you have an expectation that it's going to be free and quick. And you'll learn what you need because some fool has decided to tell you how to do it on YouTube, right? The world is so complex right now.

13:51There's no way you could be an expert in everything. And that's one of the reasons why you have to narrow your focus, narrow your positioning so that you can, like my podcast partner, Blair Enns, he talks about it like this. Like we all have a certain amount of water. That's sort of the brain power. You can pour it into a cake pan where it spreads all the way across and it's very, very shallow. Or you can pour it into a narrow goblet where it's very, very deep. That's what positioning is. And once you allow yourself to notice the patterns because you have repeated application across similar scenarios, that's when you start to be strategic and you see patterns.

14:31and you develop the questions so that when you're talking with a new client, they say, oh my goodness, it's like you have a camera in my office. Like the questions you've asked really demonstrate to me that you understand my situation. Brilliant. I love the visual metaphors here, especially for creative folks listening. It really helps the rooms and the goblets and all of that. Where do we go from here? Like if we've established this idea of the obvious expert and position is super important, like why do you think there's so much resistance to doing that well there's different reasons from different people but i think there's a few common themes one of them is that the people who are drawn to this field are very curious people and they love learning all kinds of new things so when they see a client come to them that they've never worked on before like it never it's like that they don't think, oh gosh, I'm incompetent.

15:32There's no way I should do this. What they think is, oh, this'll be so much fun. I'll learn about this, right? So that's the first is curiosity. And the notion of limiting the scope of what I do in order to be more of an expert feels like death to them. And just to illustrate, I said something earlier about how we're one of the only professional services that does this, like climb up that ladder for a minute and think about, say, an attorney or a medical professional, a surgeon. You know, they get all their general training and then they specify something very, very specific. And now they're like do brain surgery.

16:11But you don't see some physician that does brain surgery have a office meeting in the morning that says, hey, team, you've noticed that people keep coming to our office because it the number of the office is similar to the person down the street that does vein work, you know, quit turning them around and sending them to that guy. Like, I think we want to start doing some of that work too. So don't turn them away anymore. Let's do that. I have always wanted to learn how to do that. It's like, you know, real experts never say that kind of stuff. But in our field, we do because we're so curious and we love the stimulation that comes from learning different things.

16:50I think that's one reason anyway. And is it the fact that you can essentially have the whole pie, like you can do everything like soup to nuts strategy to the executional work? So they're like, well, we can do both. And not only can we do both, but there's no governmental body saying we can't, you know, there's no, there's no certification, you know, a couple of countries, Canada has a little bit, have certifications, but we only create certifications in society. If we feel like if somebody misuses this, they can hurt people. And the general sense is like at government and the governmental bodies will they'll implement any law, even the stupidest thing.

17:32Right. But they just think, well, what these people do doesn't matter. They don't need certification. Just, you know, you can it takes 2000 hours to be a massage therapist in Tennessee where I live. And it takes zero hours to be a designer or a consultant. So that tells you how important they think it is. If you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it.

18:07If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list. That's joinbba.com.

18:19Matt Davies:I think some people are scared though as well, aren't they? I don't know what your thoughts are, but I see a lot of scarcity mindset. People are desperate for sales, they're desperate for stuff, for pipeline, for deal flow. So if it moves, they'll try and go for it, and then they get spread too thin. A lot of creatives, as you said, they take up too many things, and then before you know it, 10 years down the line, they've not kind of carved out a position and then they're scared to leave the generalist position that they're in because that's all they know like that's my observation anyway i don't know if that's a fair one i think it is fair yeah people don't usually they're not drawn to repositioning their firm unless they're forced to and they aren't forced to until they don't have enough work.

19:11And then they say, I need a marketing plan. And they look at creating a marketing plan, a lead generation plan, and they realize, oh my goodness, it's so inefficient to do that for a generalist firm. I don't know how to do that. And that sort of forces them to think about a tighter positioning. And here's where that pressure comes, because the moment where they reluctantly look at a lead generation plan is the moment when they are most panicky about work. And so when they look at positioning, it seems to them like, wait, I need to spread my arms wide to get a bunch of work. And you're asking me to narrow that.

19:55It's like, that seems the opposite of what I need to do, right? Yeah, totally. All right. Well, can we get into something practical now if these creators wanted to start moving upstream working on their position like where do they start we're not going to ever invent an expertise it's an expertise that's going to emerge from something you've already been doing and the only thing that changes after this boundary is that your rate of learning will be much faster than it was before because you're being delivered similar circumstances. So we're going to, we're not going to invent something. We're going to choose from the options that are already true for your firm.

20:38So the first thing you would do is say, you look back over the work that you've done and you'd ask yourself two, maybe three, but preferably just two questions. What work did I do that where I made a lot of money and where I really moved the needle for the client? So those are the two really important questions. You made money and you made a difference. The third question, which some people throw in there, I'm not a fan of it, but it's like, where did I enjoy the work? At first, you may land on a positioning that wouldn't have been your first choice, but once you start making a big difference in people's lives and you start making money, you'll start to enjoy it, trust me.

21:18So that's the first thing. And you may end up with just one or four or five, and then you just evaluate those options and say, what are the pros and cons of each one of these? And then you come up with, again, I'm going to refer to what my podcast partner, Blair Inn, says. He says, you're not looking for a perfect positioning at this point. You're looking for a perfectible positioning. So, there's two things that keep you from making the right decision, the right positioning decision. One is information and the other is courage. So if you have the courage, then you're looking to round that out by getting the information.

22:00And when you choose a provisional or a perfectible positioning, you're just saying, this is the one I think is right, but I'm going to keep my eyes and ears open as I have conversations with clients and prospects. And it might change or it might, Usually it gets tighter. You pick something that's a little bit broader and you don't lack courage about making it narrower or you just don't have the information yet. So that's how I would think about the process.

22:27Matt Davies:Awesome. I love how you sort of frame that around making money and making a difference. And the money side of things, I think some people, at least here in the UK, we sort of shudder when we hear money, right? But the truth is that I think this is an important point because in our society, in our culture, particularly in the Western culture anyway, the way that we reward value usually is through money, right? So if I value what Jacob's offering at a higher rate than somebody else, I'm happier to pay more money for it, usually is how my understanding of the philosophy of it works. So it's interesting that you've paired those two things, because if I'm also making a difference, that means I'm adding a lot of value.

23:10Matt Davies:And so the two things should go hand in hand, And logically speaking, making money and making a difference, meaning I'm getting paid for creating that value for that client in that specific way. So I love the way that you frame that. I think that makes a lot of sense. What do you think about the idea of value exchange and value perception? Is that something that you would go along with? It is my fifth book. So three books ago, the subtitle, well, the title is The Business of Expertise. The subtitle is How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to, and then there's two words, Impact and Wealth.

23:48Nice. So I really believe in both of those things. And in fact, I don't think you can have one without the other. So people aren't going to listen to you unless you charge them a lot of money. They just aren't. You could provide the exact same advice and the person who's paying more for it is going to take it more seriously. So even if you don't like the money, even if you fancy yourself as Gandhi or something, you want to give it all away, fine. But charge money or people won't listen to you. And then if all you're doing is making money and you're not moving the needle, well, that's very empty.

24:25You're going to get found out and your business will eventually collapse. So I think both of those things could be improved in our world. I think we could move upstream and make more of a difference. And in the process, we can charge more so that people listen to us more.

24:43Matt Davies:It's true. I found that as well in my own career. Like if you come in as an expensive consultant, say, and you're talking to the right person, like the CEO, then it's a reflection on them, right? And they wear it like a badge of honor. When this first happened to me, I was really shocked. So I was like, well, you're happy to, you know, I'm introduced as like a, you know, Matt, this is Matt, you know, he costs a fortune, let's listen to him. And you think that's really bizarre. Like, you know, it's really strange, because when you're earlier in your career, you think, oh, you know, no one's going to pay a lot of money.

25:13Matt Davies:And, you know, it's a really bad thing to charge lots of money. No, the opposite is the case. If you get the right client who really values what you have to say, and the strategies that you're going to help them with to overcome the bigger problems, that they're happy to pay the money, you know, that is, as you say, exactly what you say, you know, how it should work. Yeah. And there's times probably when both of you have the client or the prospective client misheard you and they repeat the number back to you and it's a lot higher than you said. And you're thinking, oh, wow, they didn't even blink.