Hello Indiana, I know I've covered this before. If you've been with the Academy for more than a session or two, you've probably heard some version of what follows. And yet, whenever I talk to you all, I still see the same pattern. So I make no apology for returning to it. Of all the things we discuss in these sessions, this is the one that will have the most transformative effect on your business if you actually act on it.
Many of you were in the last Academy session when I told this story. For those who weren't, here's what happened.
A client came to me not long ago wanting their landing pages redesigned. Standard brief. The kind of thing any of us could quote for in our sleep.
I didn't quote. Instead, I started asking questions. What's your CRO strategy? How much of your ad spend goes to these pages? Are you A/B testing at all? Who builds the pages, and what training have they had?
Turns out they were spending $2 million a year sending traffic to unvalidated landing pages converting at 0.4%. They didn't need a redesign. They needed a completely different way of thinking about their pages. A proper CRO strategy, a testing framework, a process. The redesign was the symptom. The underlying problem was worth a lot more than a few new page templates.
I got the bigger engagement. Most of us would have just quoted for the redesign.
You have two rooms. You're only using one.
Think of your business as two rooms in the same building. One room is strategy: the thinking, the diagnosis, the recommendations. The other is implementation: the doing, the building, the execution.
Most agencies let clients walk straight into the implementation room. A prospect wants a website? In they go. UX work? Same door. The strategy room, if it exists at all, is somewhere down the back where nobody goes unless forced.
The shift I'm asking you to make is this: close that direct entrance to the implementation room. Force every new client through strategy first. Implementation is still there and still available. It's just through a connecting door, not a separate entrance. It's for client convenience, not for how you lead.
This sounds simple. It's actually quite hard. Clients come to you knowing what they want. They want a website. They want landing pages. They want an app. The temptation, especially when the pipeline is thin, is to just give them what they asked for.
Think about the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant. A bookkeeper executes tasks. An accountant advises on value. Both might do some of the same work, but clients pay the accountant more, take them more seriously, and bring them bigger problems. The work itself isn't always that different. The positioning is everything.
The technique: ask why, not how
The most practical thing you can do is also the simplest: ask why. Not once. Keep going.
A client says they need new landing pages. Why? Because their conversion rate is low. Why does that matter right now? Because they've just increased their ad spend. How much are they spending? $2 million a year. And what's converting? About 0.4%.
At that point, you're not talking about landing pages anymore. You're talking about a business problem. You're no longer a web designer who happens to know about UX. You're a business advisor who happens to be able to fix this. Those two people charge very different rates.
The other thing worth doing is changing the language you use.Stop talking about user journeys and information architecture. Start talking about conversion rates, revenue, customer acquisition cost, return on ad spend. Not because you're pretending to be something you're not. That's just the language of the actual problem you're solving. Use business language and you'll get invited into business conversations. Stay in UX language and you'll stay in the implementation room.
How to frame it in proposals
Try framing your options as Essential and Recommended rather than Basic, Standard, and Premium. Essential is the bare minimum that meets their stated request. Recommended is what you'd actually do if you were advising them properly: the strategy work, the research, the process, the stuff that ensures the implementation actually solves the right problem.
That framing changes everything. It's not "would you like to add strategy for an extra fee." It's "here's what we'd need to do to make sure this actually works."
The part nobody likes to talk about
You can read this email, nod along, and then go into your next client call and quote for exactly what they asked for. Because it feels safer. Because you don't want to seem pushy. Because you've trained yourself to be helpful in a very specific, bounded way.
But there's nothing pushy about trying to solve someone's actual problem. When you ask the why questions, you're not trying to manufacture a bigger project. You're trying to make sure you don't spend three months building something that doesn't work. That's a service. That's the whole point.
The shift from implementer to advisor doesn't come from a new script or a clever proposal format. It comes from genuinely believing that your thinking is worth as much as your doing. In my experience, that's the bit most people in this group are still working on. And I get it. It took me a long time too.
A regular part of what we do
I'd originally planned to set aside a dedicated session for this in a few weeks' time. I've changed my mind. This is too important to do once and move on from, so we're going to make it a regular part of almost every session we have together.
Here's how it will work. Each week, bring something along: a brief you've just received, a project you're about to pitch for, or something you've already quoted for and wish you'd handled differently. Share it with the group and I'll walk through how I'd approach it. Not a script, not a framework to memorize. Just how I'd actually handle that conversation if it landed on my desk.
We'll start this next Thursday. Come with something real.
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