The consultant’s dilemma

If you’ve ever been consulting, you’re probably all too familiar with the following dilemma:

A client asks you to help out with something, such as writing copy for a web page. You could just do the job quickly, get paid, and then wait for the client to contact you again in a few months when new texts need to be written. Easy money, right?

But, what about trying to teach the client how they can write better texts themselves? For example, you could share some useful sources of inspiration, such as the excellent book Made To Stick. While this would certainly make your client happy, it might also result in less recurring work for you. Essentially, the Consultant’s Dilemma boils down to this:

Do you give someone a fish so they can eat for a day, or do you teach them how to fish so they can eat for a lifetime?

At our small design studio, we always try to teach clients to help themselves, whenever time allows. Sure, it might mean that we get less work over time from that one client, but we’ve found that from a bigger perspective it eventually brings us more work and, importantly, more interesting work.

🤝 Build trust

A client who trusts you to teach them new things are likely to reach out to you with new challenges, such as helping them to recruit their own copywriter. To us, this means that we constantly need to learn new things in order to stay on our toes, but that’s something we enjoy anyway.

✨ Get endorsed

Face it, clients talk to each other. If clients like you, they will put in a good word for you. We spend almost no time on sales and I think our approach to teaching might be a reason for this.

♻️ Boost your ecosystem

Finally, as consultants you are part of a larger ecosystem of businesses and people around you. In the long run, you want as many people as possible to build sustainable, growing companies that generate new work and opportunities for you and others in the future.

This is what works for us. What will you do the next time you face the Consultant’s Dilemma?