Deliverables in Professional Service Businesses - Part 2: Intangible Deliverables

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

Last month we discussed some tangible deliverables, so now let us focus on the intangible deliverables. This is actually the value for which you get paid.

This is actually the real reason why you have been engaged in the first place.

The important point here is that at any one time clients do their absolute best to improve their conditions, and the situation they are in is the result of performing at their absolute best. However, working harder out of their existing frame of reference will not help them to improve the situation.

Regardless of how many pounds of reports some consultants generate, their clients are still stuck in their existing paradigms, which is the cause of their problems. And you run create hundreds of reports and other typical deliverables, no improvement will take place.

Your greatest value for smart clients is the intangible deliverables you provide because that will provide lasting positive change in your clients’ futures.

Now let’s see some of these intangible deliverables.

Leadership - Your clients receive direction from you for their projects. In a world filled with complexity, your clients need clarity about where to go and what to do next. It is very easy today to lose sight of where your focus should be and become paralysed by fear or indecision.

Note that highly successful people admit this natural flaw easily. The problem is with egotistical chronic underperformers, but they must be ignored anyway. Even highly successful people experience this immobilising complexity, which often results from having more opportunities than they can handle. We create value when we help clients to gain a sense of simplicity in their complex thinking about their futures.

Relationship - Your clients receive confidence through your relationships. Your clients can operate at a higher level when they feel supported in what they are doing. However, this support can only come from other people. Creating value through relationship happens when you increase your clients' confidence by repeatedly demonstrating them that you are someone they can trust and rely on, someone who is focusing on their strengths and playing on their team. While confidence is something that we feel as individuals, it really comes from others with whom we have relationships. Good relationships provide confidence. The people we can rely on and who support and protect us give us confidence. Confidence is vital to success in any endeavour.

Creativity - Your clients receive capability from you to move forward. Creativity goes beyond the conventional realm of services to include any kind of capability that you provide. Clients are not interested in your services per se. What they are really interested in are the new capabilities embodied in those services. Value creation through creativity can mean providing new tools, techniques, structures, systems or ways of thinking to solve problems and - even more importantly - innovate.

Frame of Reference - Your clients receive a fresh perspective and a different frame of reference in the ways of looking at their situation.

Trust - Your clients receive a peer-level relationship with you, which are based on mutual trust and respect. This is the only type of relationship in which all parties involved can openly speak their minds candidly address any issue good or bad.

Imagination - Clients receive big futures through your imagination. We all have limited thinking about our own situations, but can easily help others to think big. You cannot even imagine a better relationship than a client and an advisor with huge bold visions.

Clarity - Your clients become clear on their issues as you pull them back, so they can take their noses off the grindstone. They are too closely connected to their businesses, so the picture they see is often blurry and confusing.

Truth - Since you are free from internal politics and various other internal issues, you must tell the truth even if it means losing the gig. If clients fire you for being - brutally if necessary - honest, it shows they cannot learn. They would be like a dog which was refused a bone once, and now is willing to tear anyone into little pieces as revenge, without thinking why. Beware of chickenshit conformists who are unwilling to change.

Validation - Your clients receive validation by your encouraging them to take action and acknowledging them for the actions they have taken.

Message - Your clients can tap into and benefit from the knowledge, opinions, or wisdom you have built up over the years.

Energy - Your clients receive your energy, enthusiasm and support for the change they are seeking.

Strategy - You and your clients jointly develop strategies for their lives to fully align personal their personal goals with their business objectives for individual peak performance and firm-wide excellence.

Action Plan - You and your clients jointly co-create a plan of action, a detailed road map as to what actions must be taken to achieve clients’ objectives. The interesting thing is that most managers know what to do, but fail to do it.

Feedback - Your clients receive your honest and unbiased feedback. Unlike clients and their internal people, you are free of internal politics and emotional attachments to clients and their businesses.

Structure - You and your clients jointly create a supportive environment, which reduce ambiguities and encourages them to support the change in progress.

Resource - Your clients receive recommendations on various resources, such as books, audio and video skill building programmes to further enhance knowledge transfer to their people.

Solution - Your clients receive possible solutions to their problems, and then you can jointly finalise the solution together, using the principles of the mastermind.

Caring - You and your clients jointly create a caring and nurturing environment in which everyone involved in the project feel safe to face the sometimes scary aspects of change.

Skill Building - During projects everything gets documented, so your client’s people can learn it, so problems you solve remain solved after your disengagement.

Option - Your clients receive several options to achieve their objectives, and then together we can pinpoint the best one and implement it.

Advice - You receive my unbiased and pragmatic advice, which I believe is the best for you to achieve your objectives.

Challenge - Your job is to be a pedigree arsekicker. You must challenge your clients and make certain they grow and learn from everything they do. You must take them by the hand (because you care) but with your other hand you must hold a torch under their feet to make certain they are moving forward towards their goals as they have never moved before in their entire lives.

There is one thing to be careful about. As a result of applying these deliverables, you will be attributed with some great things in your client’s company. Take it very easy with taking credit for stuff.

Your clients and their people’s feelings of gratitude towards you can backfire. Relying too much on your help can easily lead to your clients’ people to despising themselves (after all, they failed to do it without your help), and that can create incredible level of resentment towards you. Now they owe you too much.

So, make sure you spread out the credits among all the people. Now you may ask, “Hey, Tom, what happens if they say to you, ‘If we did it all, why should we pay you’”. Valid question.

Then you can say, “If you could have done it without me, why haven’t you done it without me?”

Or as a mentor of mine has told me, “Tom, if you know what to, how to do it, and that it would have a positive impact in your life, but you still don’t do it, there are two options. You are either a liar or an idiot.” In my case I was a liar. I knew what to do but did not exactly know how.

Also, your buyer will understand your role and value, but some self-important busy-body mid-managers may give you the screaming heebie-jeebies.

Summary

Look at you both tangible and intangible deliverables. Where do you think your clients perceive the value of your contribution?

If your value is on the tangible side, that is, how much manual labour you perform to create deliverables, then you are perceived as a contractor, that is, a temporary employee. It may be a good idea to change that perception.

Consultants vs. Contractors

Consultants are experts in some area to help their clients with their project. Clients treat and pay them accordingly. Consultants have significant input and influence in their area of expertise, and apply all that expertise to improve the client’s condition. In most cases, consultants’ contribution is intangible.

Contractors are hired hands (outsourced labourers) to perform tasks clients have neither time, skill nor inclination to perform. They are like everyone else on the client’s staff, minus the benefits.

Note: although I use the term “Consultant”, I mean all other service professionals who earn their living using their brains, like coaches, speakers, lawyers, accountants, medical and fitness professionals, etc.

Copyright Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan. All rights reserved. You are free to use this article in whole or in part. One favour though: Can I ask you to you include complete attribution, including a live website link. Also, can you please let me know where you plan to publish the article.

The attribution: This article was written by Organisational Provocateur, Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan of Dynamic Innovations Squad, a firm specialising in helping consulting firms to sell their expertise at the highest margins. Get Tom's free Practice Management Black Paper when you sign up for his monthly newsletter, Commando Consulting: Lessons And Practices From The Ultimate Professional Service Firm, The Military. Visit Tom's website at http://www.di-squad.com.

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