I've been hearing the same question in a lot of my Membership welcome calls: "What should my offer be?" But that's not where I want us to start.
As the Membership grows, I'm seeing more members join straight from previous professional careers, alongside those already running established businesses. They have decades of experience, but are having trouble turning that experience into an engagement that they can proactively sell to a potential client (versus waiting for referrals).
For strategic consulting especially, I don't see this addressed in many of the "start your business" programs.
So to get started, experts lead with their new title, category, or a list of things they know how to do.
"I'm a leadership consultant."
"I provide fractional operations services."
"I help organizations with strategy and operations."
Then they try to design a set of services around those capabilities (usually just 'hire me to consult') and go looking for someone who wants to buy their knowledge.
Offer design is a little easier when you sell a defined deliverable. If you're a copywriter, you can sell website copy. If you're a graphic designer, you can sell brand identity packages. There's a recognizable thing someone needs, and you can build an engagement around producing it.
But if you've spent 20 years leading teams, navigating organizational change, managing complex initiatives, and solving problems across functions, what exactly are you selling?
You have a lot of expertise... but you'll need to help your clients and your networks know what they should hire you to do.
A very particular set of skills.
Remember Liam Neeson in Taken?
He has a very particular set of skills. Skills acquired over a very long career.
But imagine if he were starting a consulting business.
What would he put on his website?
"I specialize in surveillance, intelligence gathering, negotiation, and high-stakes problem solving."
Great. But when exactly should someone call him?
In Taken, the answer is pretty obvious: Your daughter has been kidnapped in Paris, and you need someone to get her back.
That's the situation that makes his particular set of skills valuable.
He could probably use those same skills in dozens of other situations. But the situation tells us why someone needs him, which capabilities matter, and what he's actually being hired to accomplish.
Your expertise works the same way.
Consider "I do management training." That describes what you do, but it doesn't tell anyone when to call you.
Now compare it to: "You have an executive team that doesn't know how to work together as an executive team, so you're spending half your week resolving conflicts between department heads."
A CEO can recognize that situation immediately and know whether it applies to them. Management training might end up being part of how you fix it, but it's no longer what you're leading with.
Make sure you identify situations specific enough that someone can react to it. If they can’t say “don’t need that” or “yes, that's us and we do need that,” it’s still too vague. “Organizations that struggle with alignment” could be anybody. “Organizations about to roll out a major AI change with an already-overworked internal comms team that’s never handled anything this big” is pretty specific.
The situation comes before the engagement.
You are probably capable of solving dozens of different problems. Some of them nobody will pay you for. Others you won't want to solve, or won't be the right fit for, even if someone would pay.
But to sell an engagement, you first have to understand what's happening in the client's world that would make them need your help.
What are they trying to accomplish, and where has progress stalled?
Why can't they move it forward themselves? Usually it's capacity, a missing skill, or the need for an outside vantage point.
And, crucially, is this situation important enough that they're willing to spend money to do something about it?
Because there's a difference between a situation where your expertise would be helpful and one where someone recognizes a compelling reason to spend money on hiring you.
Only after you've identified that situation does it make sense to decide what kind of engagement to offer.
Do they need strategic advisory? A fractional leader? Depends on the situation.
Implementation? Coaching through a transition? Same answer.
The offer is just the form your solution takes. Advisory, training, coaching, done-for-you delivery, or a fractional role are all ways of addressing the situation.
You'll start with a hypothesis about what format you'd suggest for a given situation, then adapt it to the client in front of you.
Over time, you'll recognize patterns in the situations clients bring you and the types of engagements that work best. That’s when you formalize your core offers.
So if you're struggling to figure out what to sell, I'd encourage you to stop asking, "What should my offer be?"
Instead, ask:
"What situation would make someone say, ‘I need to call you’?"
Then go test it. Take two or three of these situations to your warm network and ask, “Is your organization or those you work with dealing with any of these right now?” Where people lean in tells you where you might find pull.
P.S. That's what we're working on in next week's Expertise to Engagements training inside the Membership: finding the buying situations that fit your expertise, then turning them into engagements. (Specific offer design is the session after.)
If you'd like the replay, join the membership waitlist! We open up enrollment to the waitlist each month based on our membership cap.