I once sacked myself from a client assignment because I didn’t think I was earning my fee. I’ll never forget the look on his face. It took me months to understand what I’d done.
Some years ago, I had a client whom I caught up with monthly. We’d talk. He’d tell me what was going on. I’d ask questions.
The conversations were good. But after several months I started to feel uncomfortable, because I didn’t think I was giving him value anymore. I wasn’t advising – we were, as far as I could tell, just having a good conversation.
So, I did what I thought was ethical. I told him I wasn’t providing enough value to justify my fee and stopped the meetings.
His face fell; he was devastated. And I remember thinking – I’ve just done the honourable thing. Why does this feel wrong?
What I didn’t understand at the time was that he wasn’t getting nothing. He was getting the one hour a month where somebody paid complete attention to him and his business, and asked questions nobody else was asking. They caused him to reflect and think more deeply about his business. There was nowhere else he could be challenged in this way.
That was the value. It was enormous. And I cancelled it, because I couldn’t see it.
I was measuring my worth by what I put in. He was measuring it by what he got out.
I’ve thought about it a great deal since and come to believe it wasn’t a personal failing. I was running the professional model I’d been trained in, exactly as designed.
Like most professions, our value proposition rests on a single premise: I know things you don’t, and you pay me to tell you. Expertise in, advice out. It quietly equates value with advice – and once those two are fused in your mind, a conversation where you don’t advise doesn’t feel like value. It feels like theft.
Some problems have knowable answers held by an expert, and the client can act on it (or not). The accounting profession has done that work for a century, we’re very good at it, and it’s precisely what AI does best.
Others don’t work that way. The person with the problem is the one who must do the work because the answer involves them thinking or behaving differently. You can’t hand that over. Advise and you’ll get polite agreement and no change.
My client’s real challenges were the second kind. I kept reaching for the first move, found nothing, and concluded I was not adding value.
None of which is an argument for turning up unprepared. Advice draws on what you already know – knowledge looking for the appropriate problem. A good question requires you to have thought hard about the person and their situation beforehand, and to bring genuine curiosity rather than the need to know. Questions take more preparation (and a different mindset) than answers.
I was so certain I was doing the right thing. I had the training, the ethics and the logic lined up behind me. And I was wrong in a way it took months to see.
How much of what your clients really value do you currently see?
