We sit in a lot of rooms. Masterminds, boards, coaching calls, training days. Agency after agency, week after week. It turns us into something like a receiver, picking up what’s working, what’s quietly failing, which marketing channels are paying for themselves and which are just noise and effort.
But the strongest signal isn’t what agencies tell us.
It’s what they ask us for.
Four doors
The advisor job has always covered a lot of ground. Second opinion. Thought partner. The person who holds a mirror up to the thing that needs attention. Accountability partner, benchmark provider, contributor to the strategy, occasional pair of hands when something needs solving.
Much of the time requires facilitation. We help you work out what your positioning should be. What benchmarks you were chasing. Which roles the business needed next.
Recently however, the ask has got a lot more specific.
Should we go after marketing for tradespeople in our region? Or higher-value digital growth services for professional services firms? Or premium brand and creative for founder-led businesses in health and wellbeing? Or ecommerce marketing, for ecommerce clients?
Four doors. Then: “Come on Janusz, put your money where your mouth is. Which one? We’ve looked at all of them and we don’t know which way to turn.”
They want an answer.
The uncomfortable bit
Facilitation is safer. The coach asks the questions, the client owns the conclusion, and if it goes wrong in eighteen months, well, they chose it.
Giving the answer costs you something.
We don’t know your sector better than you do. What we know is the shape of things. Which client types lend themselves to retainers. How long the buying cycle runs for a given ICP. Which services have an addressable market big enough to build a marketing plan around, and which ones only ever benefit the few. Which propositions carry a premium rate. Which ones travel into international markets and which ones die at the border.
That’s the ground we can stand on. So when the question comes, we answer it.
This is a market signal, not a client quirk
What’s changed isn’t the agencies.
These decisions used to evolve. Debated round a board table, prodded at over months, tested in two directions, revisited at the next quarterly. That was normal. Healthy, even.
Now the same decision needs resolving in a fortnight. Not because founders have got impatient. Because the market has got harder and the runway to get it wrong has shortened. Agencies that traded comfortably for a decade are finding the conditions unfamiliar, and speed of decision has quietly become part of the strategy.
When clients start demanding specifics that fast, that’s a market under duress telling on itself.
What to demand from whoever you’re paying
If conditions are biting, a whiteboard and a stack of post-its is not enough.
Someone who only asks you good questions will leave you roughly where you started, with better-organised uncertainty and a photograph of a wall.
What you want is someone who has seen this shape of problem enough times to hold a view, and who will put that view on the table with their name attached to it. Then you argue with it. The arguing is the useful part.
Ask your advisor which door they’d walk through. See whether they’ll tell you.
