• Are you regularly sought after and paid for your thinking?
• How do you apply your expertise?

Many service providers are not rewarded because they don’t have a method for the application of their expertise.

They haven’t developed their own proprietary method for working.

DAVID C. BAKER

Imagine for a minute, that someone shows interest in your work. David C. Baker suggests that what you need to be talking about is whether you are a mutual fit and how you will go about solving their problem and NOT solving the problem BEFORE you are engaged. This only happens when you DO NOT have a proprietary means of applying your expertise.

Attempting to solve the problem before the client agrees to engaging and paying you for your solutions changes your positioning from expert to generalist. Your positioning becomes interchangeable with all the other advisors trying to “get” the job.

To come up with a working method take a look at your process. Do you follow a particular framework and what are the steps? Why is each step important in the order you are suggesting, and finally what are the specific results the client can expect, once a step is completed?

Once you are clear on your method, begin to test it and stick with it long enough to learn whether it is effective, whether you need to tweak a step or whether you need to return to the drawing board.

This is going to take a bit of time but remember this: there aren’t that many people in Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean who know as much about your area of expertise as you do! Don’t ‘not do this work’ and end up in a pricing battle because you are not clear about how you apply your expertise!