The Expertise Incubator

In this audio update, I dive into what the The Expertise Incubator is and who it is for.

Name change!

What platform should you use for daily publication? I discuss the ins and outs of that question and make a bold recommendation.

Daily emails are almost like their own genre of an art form, so it's useful to study the form as others are doing it. That's why, before we kick this thing off, I want to point you to some lists you can subscribe to, to be a daily spectator to some daily or near-daily emails. CB Insights: https://www.cbinsights.com/ is a pretty good example, and they do email very well. You can join their newsletter on https://www.cbinsights.com/research/ I think they publish at least 3 times/week, which is my minimum threshold for "high-frequency publication". I believe they have a team behind their emails, but still, I find their emails engaging in a way that corporate emails usually aren't. They're a nice mix of informality and value. Fred Wilson. Sign up for a week or three and see what you think: https://avc.com/subscribe/ Daily publication, with a nice blend of on and off-topic stuff. Bob Lefsetz: Not really a "company", and it takes a while to get into his style, but give Bob Lefsetz a few weeks and see what you think: https://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1  No idea how this guy makes money Remember his job is writing, so that shows up in terms of volume, frequency, etc. Very beat poet-esqe writing. Love it or hate it most likely. Civic Science:  Weekly, not daily. Still, there's something about this email I just like. Something about the combination of relaxed tone and interesting content. http://www2.civicscience.com/l/165381/2018-06-06/wn32k Matt Levine:  A mostly-daily opinion column by Matt Levine, for Bloomberg I can't tell you how much a fan I am http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-signup&hash=54223001ca3ffcf40f2629c25acea67a Ben Settle:  A very mixed bag:  Real personality or persona? Actual sexist or just plays one on his email list? Excessive use of curiosity. Pay special attention last week of the month every month. http://bensettle.com/ Jonathan Stark:  Great example of a daily email list. https://jonathanstark.com/#signup Jill Salzman:  I haven't studied her emails closely, so I don't know quite what to tell you about here, but given that she's likely got a mostly-female demo, might be interesting to some for that reason alone. https://foundingmoms.com/Subscribe/ Me: I assume you're on my list, but if not: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/list/ And a few I regrettably forgot to mention in the audio: Eric Davis:  Really good example of using daily emails to sell a SaaS Shopify Apps to drive more SEO traffic and repeat customer purchases Chris Ferdinandi:  Really good example of a developer education-focused list (helps Chris sell infoproducts) Go Make Things Seth Godin:  The "grandaddy" of all daily blogs :) https://seths.blog

This update is less about the program and more about a mindset that may be important as you move into publishing daily.The notes I worked from as I recorded this: Everything is an opportunity Reminded of this week via my automation fail Everything is an opportunity to... Add value Value takes many forms  The aforementioned insight Showing how something can be done Learning by example Entertainment Supporting change Inspiring change Creating connection Supporting community Again, when you're publishing daily, everything is an opportunity to create value

If you're going to take on the daily publication challenge, I have an assignment for you.

What should you publish about?I want you to hit the wall during the 3-month daily publication challenge so you can discover what’s beyond it, so that should guide the decision about what to publish. Teach what you know how to do Explain why things work or don't work Mitigate risk Contextualize risk with the benefit, alternative approaches, or cost of doing nothing Uncover second-order consequences Localize "foreign" examples Reduce fear Inspire Connect Explain/demonstrate others' successes Deliver tough love Simplify the complex  Make the monolithic (and therefore overwhelming) more granular (and therefore more approachable) Remind where the starting point is Identify the 80/20 leverage points Distinguish between the necessary and the optional Deliver a laugh Tools mentioned: Drafts. Where Text Starts. | Drafts Just Press Record https://bear.app/

Pick something, anything, from your list of email ideas and write a shitty email about it and send it (you do keep a list of email ideas, don't you? If not, get Drafts on your phone and set up an action to append a note to some master list of email ideas you keep somewhere in the cloud, or set up some similar thing in Evernote, or use voice notes, or something. As you go about your daily life get disciplined about taking down fragments of ideas for future emails. Your future self will thank you.) Comment on relevant news or current events in your clients industry. Revisit an old topic/email with something new or different. Tell a story and find a way to link it to your theme. Solicit input from your audience. Learn more about them. Run a crazy idea past your audience and then solicit their reaction. Ask a question people will enjoy answering. Point to somebody else's content. Promote somebody else's thing if a subset of your audience will find it valuable. Point to some podcast you've been on, other content asset you've created, etc even if it's kind of old. Link to some sort of "thank god it's friday" or "it's monday, you already need a break" kind of online humor. Answer a common question you've gotten from clients. Create some kind of useful checklist. Give your take on a controversial topic within your area of focus.

Notes Here is the survey I mentioned in this episode (I forgot to mention in the audio that at the end of this survey I give respondents at 30% off coupon code for my books.) Never seen The Terminator but, it'll work for an analogy Segmentation and personalization are big in the marketing world. This can be a wonderful optimization, but if done prematurely it can be a real distraction. That said, I think there is an "easy mode" that I've recently run across that I want to share with you now. Terminators:  On the hunt for your help. Their internal heads-up-display is scanning, seeking, and pattern-matching. They are on an urgent mission. It's worth letting these folks self-identify. List opt-in  It's an interesting, almost pregnant moment. Someone has said yes to hearing from you, and I've found they're surprisingly willing to say yes to a bit more, in the form of telling me more about themselves through a post opt-in survey. Most email marketing platforms let you send folks anywhere you want after they successfully opt in, and so I send folks to a simple, dumb Google survey. Using the survey to gather information from both less urgent and more urgent folks and turn that into a lead notification Using in-email CTAs to connect with those who have recently become Terminators. After all, you're getting 3, 5, 7, or more opportunities each week to connect with these Terminators! You don't need to set up fancy automation to identify them when your contact with them is this frequent!

Meeting Format & Expectations I know some things that you don't about daily publication, and I've spent three years walking the hot coals you're about to, so I hope to serve as a resource. But... I don't want this to be "the cult of Philip". There are some freaking amazing business owners in this pilot group. Just wait; you'll see what I mean. So I really hope there's a strong element of peer-to-peer connection and interaction both during and between our weekly meetings. I know it takes time for a group to gel--and some never do--but I really hope this one does. So please know that you have my full encouragement to interact, offer support, and seek support from each other. If you need infrastructure for that like a Slack channel, forum, whatever, please let me know and I will add that to the mix. Let's start with the weekly calls and then add in more infrastructure as and if needed. When you give feedback to others, I have a few suggestions:  Before you do, take a beat and ask yourself: "Am I clear on what this person is trying to accomplish? Do I understand their goal here?". If not, make clarifying their goal, need, or intention your starting point, then frame your feedback in terms of that. There's a time and a place for declarations, and there's a time and a place for open-ended questions. Consider starting your feedback with an open-ended question rather than a declaration. It might get both of you further into the good stuff :) These kind of questions almost always begin with what, why, how, when, who, or where. Our general meeting format will be:  A moment of small talk while the group comes online Brief check-ins on progress and blockers with each person, facilitated by me Open discussion, driven by your questions or needs, moderated by me As we go, I'll be desperate for your input on the meeting format, program, and any other ideas you have for how I could help you get the most out of this experience.

Urgent vs. Innovative  Open  Car horn sound  What's the information value of a car horn?  It's a signal, but how informative is it? What can you learn from a car horn?  It could mean like 10 different things, right?  Email list unsubscribes are like a car horn.  Talking about unsubscribes led to a fascinating conversation with Bob L from TEI, which led to this TEI audio update for you.  There's a thing that happens when you get further into this daily publishing practice  I've seen it in myself  But now that I've seen it in TEI participants, I can talk about it  Many thanks to Bob L for helping me frame it better.  The path  As a reminder, you'll probably start out with the Expertise Enema  You'll also just be feeling the burn  Then about 3 months in, things will stabilize somewhat  You'll hit the wall at some point too, perhaps a bit before the 3mo mark, though that depends a lot  Then, you'll reach 100 posts. That's about the earliest you'll start sensing this change  The change  PoV starts to emerge  And also, maybe, you start to innovate  And then, you really start to wonder what you should be writing about  A tension emerges. Let's meet the components of this tension.  The innovation content  Some examples from my world  Change vs. optimization consulting  Brand vs. DR  Nobody asked me to explore these areas, and the value of me exploring them is still quite speculative, but I can see the exploration paying off over time  Or maybe instead, they're just part of the cognitive infrastructure I need to be more effective. Either way...  We take infrastructure for granted. No one says "thank god there's electricity in this city of 1 million people!". We just expect it.  Likewise, experts have parts of their cognitive infrastructure others take for granted.  So maybe that's all I'm doing here: building cognitive infrastructure that will soon be taken for granted.  Plenty of prospects have said to me: "I have a positioning problem". No prospect has ever said to me: "I have a need-to-transition-from-DR-to-brand-marketing problem". Yet as I explore this issue, I see more and more who do!  DR feels cheap and manipulative and needy to them and they don't know why  And I'm starting to see that they also focus on change consulting more than optimization consulting  I see a mechanism at play in their business (which I see as a system) that they themselves can't see. That's POWERFUL, at least once I master the articulation of this insight/PoV.  I have a niche-famous friend who has hired a marketing firm. I see exactly how and why they're tarnishing his brand and how he'll either have to cause them to change a fundamental aspect of their approach, or fire them. They're clumsily using DR in a brand marketing context.  An attempted definition of "innovation content" It's meant to help your clients innovate  Could be focused on the earliest-adopting 10%  Could be focused on the most serious/ambitious 10%  Could be focused on opportunities/threats that are 3 to 5 years out  Could be incorporating context in a new way, or considering new heretofore unconsidered context  Could be modeling the kind of thinking they need to do to innovate  Is mostly oriented towards change rather than optimization  Compared to the "urgent" content  We might also frame this as "commodity" content unless it also includes a strong PoV or unless it fills an information gap (which is a temporary condition that exists around new "rising star" platforms)  Plenty of prospects have come to me saying they have a positioning problem.  Plenty have certainly come to DCB saying they have a profitability or business operations problem.  These are the problems or needs of now. They're "home improvement" rather than "the hero's journey". They're an aspirin rather than an aspiration.  This is the kind of content that we believe is able to shake loose prospects from your email list.  I think of this like an electron doing a quantum jump.  The electron jumps in response to conventional DR methods  Agitating pain  Connecting benefits to a strong CTA  The tension  The tension, said succintly What's the right ratio of these two forms of content?  Two anxieties feed this tension  The innovation content will alienate leads who are on the list for the urgent content, leading to them unsubscribing, costing us business opportunity  The innovation content will position us as out of touch with the urgent issues, costing us business opportunity  In other words, we'll build a reputation as somehow out of touch as an expert practitioner that can help now  Fear: we'll develop a reputation as a useless "futurist"  A reasonable desire feeds this tension The desire: get some kind of ROI on all this effort!!  Is there a resolution?  The ideal resolution, I think, is whatever leads to a reputation as a "visionary practitioner". You do both, but with a certain tone, filtered obviously through your personal style.  The tone (subtext of what you're writing): OF COURSE we can help with the urgent. We've mastered that so much that we spend a substantial part of our time exploring the innovative, but not at the expense of our mastery of the urgent.  The tone of the urgent content will be highly prescriptive (do this), matter of fact, comforting (you got this), and -- above all -- have a resonance of competence.  The tone of the innovative content will be different. It will necessarily be more exploratory, perhaps more tentative.  It's critical to not let the more tentative, exploratory, uncertain tone of the innovative bleed back  into the urgency content. I mean the actual tone of the writing can still be confident, but it's a confident exploration of the uncertain or the unknown.  Some models  John Wimberley practicing setting up his tripod  Advante garde jazz musicians who still spend two hours a day running scales  Medical researchers who still do a certain amount of routine clinical work  This certainly leads us to think about the nature of change itself Some change is discontiguous in nature, but a lot is gradual and continuous change  So there's almost always going to be a way to contextualize the innovative within the urgent. Or the urgent within the innovative.  With this in mind, I don't worry too much that some focus on the innovative -- even significant focus there -- is going to make you look out of touch or totally irrelevant to the day-to-day urgent.  Ex: marketing online in the context of an Internet where aggregators have 100% won and regulation or other forces have failed to reign them in  the urgent advice is given in the context of this innovative thinking. What do you do *today* to prepare for this eventual future? How do you do things *today* so you are not screwed over by this coming reality?  The innovation content is still relevant, except to those in some kind of survival mode who believe they can't afford to think very far forward, or simply aren't inclined to.  The breakthrough: I don't want them as clients anyway!! Do you?  The resolution of the anxiety  If you have an impulse to explore the innovative, GIVE IN TO IT. Indulge it!  It may have a short-term cost in terms of unsubscribes or perceived relevance to your market's urgent day-to-day needs  In a larger sense, joining a daily email list is kind of like dropping in on a conversation between regulars at a bar. If you can tolerate lurking a while, picking up on contextual clues, and then gently inserting yourself into the conversation at a carefully-chosen moment, you'll be fine. Some people don't have what it takes to do even that, and they're going to find the daily email list version of the bar conversation intolerable.  In other words, there are so so many reasons for people to unsubscribe from a daily email list. A low unsubscribe rate is not why you publish daily. There are deeper, more important reasons why.  But remember: you're iterating quickly here. You're publishing daily, which means you'll learn quickly. Even 3 months of not quite getting it right won't hurt you long term.  You'll pretty quickly (in terms of months, not days) get to a point where the urgent and innovative are good "dance partners" for each other. They'll inform each other in a virtuous way, and they'll each act as a filter for the kind of clients you want to work with.  If you have this impulse and don't surrender to it, you won't do that on-the-job learning that leads to this more powerful position as visionary practitioner. So give in to it! 

Corrections:At 7:52, I say "difference between what you do and your clients to." I meant to say "difference between what you do and your competitors do."NotesWhy a research project?  Let's play a game: count up how many decisions you have seen your clients make in the complete absence of data that might support making a better decision or improve the outcomes of that decision. Now total up the number decisions where they have some form of objective or semiobjective data available to make that decision. Now compare the two. Mindset: This is an act of service. It is also an act of discovery or validation of a hunch, but more than anything you should think of it as an act of service aimed at your best clients or the kind of level-up-clients you want to attract. Those that understand motivated reasoning are having all sorts of read flags at this point. If the research is motivated by something other than a pure, unalloyed desire to learn, won't it be ruined? No, but it's a very valid concern to keep in mind! How research produces value  Value to you  All profit comes from risk-taking. This is something Peter Drucker said. (All profit is derived from risk | WARC) I'm not sure this is true in some absolute sense, but it is one hell of a useful lens through which to view the thing I'd like to talk about today, which is: using research to create profitable intellectual property (IP). The profit, in this case, doesn't come from your abilities or expertise as a researcher. It comes from the risk-taking of even doing the research in the first place. Research-driven IP is such a simple and definitely underutilized way--to differentiate yourself to clients. It moves you into a leadership position because you flip from reactive-1:1 problem solving to proactive-scalable problem solving. Instead of individual bespoke solutions, you are moving to group semi-standard solutions, which you could think of as the generation of research-driven best practices.  In fact, one way to think about this research is to think about the unknowns that would present themselves at the outset of a new project, and to accept the task of figuring out those unknowns before the client ever hires you, and reduce that uncertainty for a group of clients all at once rather than for a single client. So clearly you would go for ideal clients as you think about what group you'd like to reduce uncertainty for. It also can be used to reduce risk or move the lever for clients more powerfully; all things that clients will pay a premium for. Value to your clients  Reducing uncertainty (hat tip Douglas Hubbard) Reducing risk Assisting with decision-making Closing  The primary risk here is simple: speculative work done with an uncertain ROI. The much lesser risks: social status, short term revenue/profitability hit. But that's the genius of this. So many people nope out of that kind of risk, even though the work is surprisingly easy, often simple, and requires not much fancy expertise. It just requires buckling down and doing it! A way to get support with this: http://theexpertiseincubator.com

Research ideation and selection  Ideation in general  Remember that the overall goal is to serve your clients by reducing uncertainty. There might be situations where you want to prove or disprove a specific hypothesis, but mostly your mindset should be to serve clients by reducing uncertainty. Uncertainty in a low stakes situation might be annoying or frustrating, but it’s rarely costly. That’s because.... well, the stakes are low. It’s playing poker with Monopoly money, not real money. So as you’re responding to the ideation prompts I’m about to walk through in a moment, keep in mind the context. Ideas for reducing uncertainty in a low stakes situation, or in the context of an easily reversed or changed decision are likely to be less valuable to your clients than an ability to reduce uncertainty in a high stakes situation, or around a decision that is not easy to reverse or change. In fact, you might generate your list of ideas, pop them into a spreadsheet, and then add additional columns where you rank each idea based on how high the stakes around the client situation it relates to are. It’s OK if you generate a ton of ideas and it’s OK if you generate only a few. Either way, you need to prioritize the resulting list and arrive at the one idea for reducing uncertainty that you’d like to focus on. About the ideation prompts  I’m going to walk you through a bunch of questions, and some I’ll add some additional context to. There will be a lot of redundancy in the list of questions. This is because they’re based on just a few simple themes. Those themes are...  How can you reduce uncertainty around important decisions for your clients? How can you reduce consequential risk for your clients? How can you create other efficiencies for your clients using data that you collect and interpret for them? So like I said, just a very few themes, but I expand those into a bunch of questions because the variety in this basket of questions is more likely to elucidate ideas than just those three themes I identified. What causes or increases uncertainty for your clients? What’s the biggest risk to your clients (that you could do something about at your current level or 1 or 2 levels of involvement higher)?  What causes or increases risk for your clients? What specifically are the risky parts of your work with clients? If you don’t have a guess or know what this is, then there’s a potential research project! If I were you, and you currently do mostly implementation work, I’d assume that this research will eventually get you access a few levels higher in the client organization. No guarantees, of course, but if you bake this assumption into your choice of topic selection, then the research you do is more likely to be of the sort that would help you gain that new access to higher levels in the client org. What increases ROI for what you do?  Why do projects fail to work at all? Why do they underperform their potential? What functions as insurance against project failure or underperformance? What acts as a force multiplier or accelerant on project performance/results/outcomes? What decisions do your clients make under high stakes + low data conditions? Where do you see your clients or prospects making decisions without good data or evidence or best practices to support those decisions? Likewise, where do you see them making decisions based on bad data, evidence, or outdated/wrong best practices? Is there a perennial question your market tries to answer without evidence or data or useful models? Is there a problem you're in love with but can't solve without data?  Is this an “unrequited love” or does your market also love this problem (or rather, do they crave a solution to this problem)? The “in love” language is not accidental. Where specifically do your clients do work that's sloppy, misguided, badly planned, or held back by errors or bugs?  On a pessimistic day you might just chalk this up to your clients being lazy or dumb, but I hope not. :) In a more optimistic frame of mind, I hope you chalk this up to well-intentioned people acting without the proper data or guidance. Your research can provide that missing data or guidance. Clients are still free to reject at, at which point you are still free to regard them as lazy or dumb, but at least at that point it’s fair to do so. What areas of tech or best practice do your clients feel like they are falling behind in? Be careful about guessing here. You’re possibly an expert, and your expertise can create bias, so make sure with this question you’re responding to evidence and not assumption. In other words, if a video camera could possibly document this, then you’re probably on solid ground, but if it’s just a gut feel or intuition, don’t totally discount that but also be wary of your own bias at play. What specific area(s) of performance are upper management within your clients always complaining about? ex: our IT department keeps embarrassing us with their failure to $THING. ex: our competition is kicking our ass in $AREA. Or to frame this differently: think about your buyer at their year-end performance review. Where are they going to be told they need to improve? What do you wish you could prove to clients or prospects? (ex: In sales calls, I'm always saying $THING, but clients don't get how critical this is. I wish I could help them understand the importance of $THING.) This is dangerous, because it works from you -> market rather than market -> you, but the question can lead you to good research ideas nevertheless. What do your clients push back about, or what do you argue about and wish you could objectively define for them? What specifically are the risky parts of your work with clients? This is very similar to a prompt I posed earlier, but the difference is that here I’m giving you permission to be selfish and ask what poses a risk to your work specifically, not necessarily to the results your work produces for clients. Ex: $AREA-OF-UNCERTAINTY causes your projects to go over scope a lot. You’d like to have this happen less, in order to increase your own profitability. Since you work fixed price, the scope overages have minimal effect on your clients or the ultimate success of the project, but again I’m giving you permission here to be selfish, so you run with it and think about how your ability to execute for clients--even if they never see it--could be improved with data or research. What new capability would represent an 80/20 win for your clients? What could they learn from your research that would produce outsized results for their business or a unit within the business? What repeatable 80/20 opportunities exist for your clients? Said differently, what are the top 20% of your client's cohort doing that the rest aren't? What are top performers in other fields doing that your clients could learn from? That’s it!  I hope at least a few of these questions really get you thinking. If not, just let things percolate in the back of your mind for a few days, return to this list, and see if anything new has surfaced. I’d bet money it will. I imagine some of you will have a massive list. Here are some ideas for ranking the list.  What would have greatest impact for your clients? What research project seems the easiest to execute on? You can combine the above two into a synthetic metric that favors ideas that have a lot of impact and also represent an easy execution path for you. Which ideas are simply the most interesting to you? Which ideas couple with a point of view that you have? Remember that a point of view is an opinion that you can support, and what better way to support an opinion than with research! I know that in an ideal world, the research would leads us to the POV, not the other way around. But we need not live in an ideal world to create outsized value for our clients. :)

Notes This is the tweet I mentioned from Alan Klement: https://mobile.twitter.com/alanklement/status/1141697528557182976 Grounded theory wiki article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory Bohemian club: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Club IBM C-suite study: https://www.ibm.com/services/insights/c-suite-study