The three things sought-after consultants do differently

Leah Neaderthal 0:00

It's a Monday morning in 1980 and a young woman fresh out of college is sitting at her kitchen table in her small New York City studio on West Fourth Street in the village. She's doing what she does every Monday morning. She's flipping through fashion magazines, but she's not interested in fashion. She's interested in the photographers because she wants to be a makeup artist, and it's the photographers who choose the makeup artist for their shoots. So she'll flip through the pages to find the photographers, the booking agents and the editors, and she'll call them, I mean, remember, it's 1980 if she gets them on the phone, she introduces herself and says, I'm a freelance makeup artist, and I'd like to show you my book. And she will make an appointment with anyone who will see her. After the photographers and editors, she'll start calling them modeling agencies to get appointments with the model bookers, because the agents always need makeup artists for their newest models to do makeup tests for shoots to build their books. She does this every Monday because the new magazines hit the stand on Mondays. After a while, she starts to get jobs here and there, and slowly, these small jobs turn into a client list. A few years in, through her perseverance, she's able to start taking better gigs, and by her mid 20s, she finally is a working makeup artist, and the clients start coming to her. Many years later, she'll go on to become one of the biggest names in beauty, building a multi million dollar brand with Estee Lauder. But before she was a beauty mogul, she was a sought after makeup artist, the one that photographers and editors knew to call and even before that, on that Monday morning in 1980 she was just a young woman named Bobbi Brown, flipping through magazines and cold calling anyone who would see her, and that journey from hustling for clients to becoming the person that people seek out, that's what we're talking about today. So let's get into it. Welcome to Smart gets paid with me. Leah Neaderthal, I help women run more profitable consulting businesses, getting more of the clients you want and getting paid way more for your work without sacrificing your time. But I've never been a salesperson. My background is in corporate marketing, and when I started my own consulting business, I learned pretty quickly that it's about 1000 times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell someone else's so I taught myself how to do it. I turned it into a methodology, and now I teach that proven methodology to my clients. So whether your consulting contracts are $10,000 $100,000 or more, if you want more clients you love, more work you love and they get paid more than you ever thought possible, then you're in the right place. Let's do it together. Thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to rate, review and share you. Hey there, Leah, here. And thanks for tuning in. I hope wherever you are right now, wherever you're listening to this, I hope you're having a great week, making some good progress in your business and taking some time for you. So I want to talk about something today that I think is going to resonate with a lot of you, because I hear some version of this all the time from the women I talk to, you know, we talk on this podcast and in my work about, you know, how to get clients and how to get paid more, and the two systems that every consultant needs and how to market your business. But when we really get down to it, I think if we're really honest with ourselves, what we all really want is for clients to just come to us. You know, we're good at what we do, we're smart, and yeah, we know we have to put ourselves out there. But really, wouldn't it just be better if clients just showed up already knowing they want to work with us? And you might have experienced this early in your business, when you got your first clients from the people who knew you, and they came in super warm and knowing you're great, but when you get to what we call the messy middle of your business, that tends to slow down. And it's like, you know what happened? Like, how can I get back there again? Somebody said to me recently, she said, I want to be the Olivia Pope of my industry. And if you've never watched the show scandal, the main character is Olivia Pope, played by Carrie Washington, and she is a fixer, and when things go wrong in politics, there's only one person to call, because everybody knows Olivia Pope just makes problems go away, like people go to her. And I think we all want some version of that right, where people just know who we are, and they know to come to us. So today we're going to talk about how to actually make that happen, and you're going to meet some women who have become sought after in their industry. You're going to learn what it truly means to be sought after and also what it doesn't mean. And you're going to learn the three things to do if you want clients to come to you too. So here's where I want to start, because before we can even talk about how to become sought after, we have to get honest about something. And there's a belief that a lot of us are carrying around, and we don't even realize we have it. And the belief is this, that if we're just really good at what we do,

Leah Neaderthal 4:51

people will find us like even if we know in our heads that this probably won't happen, we sort of like hope in our hearts that it will happen. Been like, if we do great work, somebody will notice and the phone will start ringing. And, you know, honestly, who could blame you for thinking that we were conditioned to believe it? You know, in school, you do a good job, you get an A right? In our careers, we're told that you do great work, you get a promotion, right? And I think it's sort of in the culture this like idea of being noticed or discovered. Like, how many of us have heard stories of people being, you know, discovered, quote, unquote, discovered, like I remember hearing about, so this is like, back in the, you know, 80s and 90s, but like, models being discovered at the mall, right? Like, I remember they used to hold model searches at the mall. And I think we all just sort of took from that, or maybe just me, but I think a lot of us did. We took from that that, like being discovered is a thing that can happen to you, right? You know, actors discovered waiting tables or whatever like, just by being there, somebody could pluck you out of obscurity. But here's what I've come to understand, that's a fairy tale. It's a hopeful story that we tell ourselves, because the people who look like they were discovered, you know, the ones who seem to have come out of nowhere, they didn't come out of nowhere. They were working for years before we ever saw them. For example, just take the actor, writer and producer, Issa Rae. She had a huge hit with her show insecure on HBO, and this year, she signed a deal with Paramount worth over $40 million like she is sought after. Now most people think she burst onto the scene with her web series called Awkward Black Girl in 2011 and that's the one that got her noticed, and that's the one that led to insecure but here's the thing she didn't get handed, you know, a huge budget and a team to make that web series. She hustled, you know, she wrote it, self, produced it, put it out into the world. And even that wasn't her first attempt before Awkward Black Girl, she had made two other web series that went absolutely nowhere. So by the time we saw her, she had already been grinding for years. So, you know, being discovered, quote, unquote, being discovered or becoming sought after just by being good at what you do. That's one of those fairy tales that, as business owners, if there's any part of you that still holds onto it, we have to let it go. It's just not true. So just being good at what you do isn't the thing that makes you sought after. But here's the thing, being good isn't the problem either. The problem is something else entirely, because you're already good at what you do. You know, if you've been running a business, if clients are paying you, if you're getting good results for them, you're already good. Like, really good. I see this all the time with the women I work with. They come in thinking they need to, like, get better at their craft, and the truth is they don't. They're already really good at it. That's not the problem. The problem is that you're trying to be really good for too many people at once, like too many different types of clients at once. And when you do that, it actually dilutes you. It makes the fact that you're really good harder for anyone to see. Let me show you what I mean. So when I have a knee problem, I want to go to an orthopedist who specializes in knees, not someone who does a little knees, you know, some elbow here and there, a little neck like I want the knee person now is the knee orthopedist a better doctor than the, you know, general orthopedist, not necessarily. I mean, maybe they went to the same med school, maybe they had some similar training. But when I have a knee problem, the knee orthopedist is the one I'm calling because she's positioned herself as the one for that problem. And so many women consultants are doing the other way, like a little bit of this, a little bit of that, trying to serve too many types of clients. And it's not because they're bad at their work. It's because they're afraid to narrow in like I saw a consultant recently whose messaging said she was a coach to executives, founders and creatives, all right, executives, founders and creatives. And I want to break that down for a second, because the CEO of Citigroup is an executive, and so is a newly minted vice president. You know, the founder of a $10 million business is a founder, and so is a solopreneur. Consultant is also a founder, a group Creative Director at an agency. Is a creative and so is a content creator. These people do not have the same problems. They just don't. And here's the thing, this consultant is probably really good at what she does. She might be excellent at it, but her positioning is hiding it. Because when you try to be good for all those people, what the client hears is, I'm pretty good for a lot of different situations, and pretty good isn't sought after, not in your industry, not anywhere. And I know it's easy to

Leah Neaderthal 9:43

hear this and think, Well, you know, my business is different. My messaging is way more specific than that. But honestly, I see this all the time, even from women who are confident that they've honed in on their niche. So here's your permission to just say who you are really good for like, who are. You the best for. I'm thinking like the clients you've done your best work with, the ones whose results were off the charts, like the ones that you would do more of that work for in a heartbeat. These are the people that you're excellent for. And when you claim that, like when you actually say it, everything else gets easier. Your messaging gets easier. The right people start paying attention, and you stop wasting your actual you know, excellence on trying to be good for everyone. So that's the foundation excellence for a specific audience. So being really good at what you do, that's like table stakes for becoming sought after, but that alone won't make you sought after, right? Like you might get some referrals that way, but in this very noisy world, that's just not enough. I mean, remember, there's no universe in which you get discovered just because you're good, and that's why this matters right now, because it is noisy out there, and if you're like most people, your industry is flooded with new people doing some version of what you do, and being the best kept secret isn't a flex. It just means that nobody knows about you. And these days, you know, with the economy as it is, the news cycle, and you know, this is me, sort of just like waving my hands at everything, clients aren't going to swim into your net. And so if you're thinking, well, listen, that's easy for Bobby Brown or Issa Rae, like they're them, and I'm me. Remember every sought after woman you admire started exactly where you are right now. They weren't discovered. They worked for it, and here's how. So now let's talk about the three things that you can do to become sought after. So step one is position your work for value. And you might have heard me talk about this before, because it comes up a lot. This is what we call the painkiller statement. And here's why this is the first step. You know, we have this phrase we sort of like lovingly use in the academy, kind of tongue in cheek, which is, no one wants to hire you. And what we mean by this is, nobody wants to hire you. Like the act of paying you. They don't want the thing you do. Like the tactics, right? If you're a digital marketing consultant, nobody wakes up and thinks, I really have to pay a digital marketing consultant. What they actually want are the outcomes of your work. They want what that work will do for their business. But the problem is, a lot of women are positioning themselves around the tactics. If the value is a painkiller, the tactics are what we call the vitamins. You know, I'm a digital marketing consultant. I run leadership workshops. I'm a fractional CMO. I mean, even that phrase fractional, as hot as that term is, right now, that's a tactic. It's what you do. And it's really hard for clients to fall in love with a tactic. What you have to do instead is help clients fall in love with how their business will be different. They have to be able to see, even before they get on a call with you, they have to be able to see the value that you will create for their business, not what you do, but how they will be different. That's the painkiller. It's not a vitamin, not a nice to have, but the thing that solves their most pressing problem. So for example, one of my clients does PR, and the painkiller statement she developed is, I turn real estate brands into media darlings with the power of PR. Another one of my clients says, I help companies develop an internal pipeline of highly capable leaders at every level, growing careers and delivering business results. Those are not lists of services, right? Those are outcomes that clients can hear and think like, oh, I want that. And the way to get there is to ask yourself, How do your clients want to be when you're done working with them? Like, what do they want to be able to achieve? What's there after and then anchoring your painkiller statement around that, and this is a foundational step for any consulting business. But here's why it matters for becoming sought after, because when you can clearly communicate the value you provide, it helps clients see and understand your value, even before they reach out to you. It helps people talk about you and your work in ways that are compelling even when you're not in the room. And that's actually a huge part of becoming sought after, when people start saying start saying your name in rooms when you're not there. And by the way, this is the first step towards moving away from being hired as an executor, you know, just like a pair of hands, and being hired for a more strategic role with your clients. Because when clients see the value, they treat you differently. Now, you know, back to what I was saying before. It's really hard to make a great painkiller statement if you're trying to serve too many people, the painkiller really works when you know who you're best for. And if you want to go deeper on the painkiller,

Leah Neaderthal 14:30

check out episode 63 it's called the one thing that makes it easier to get clients. So that's the first step position your worker on the painkiller you provide. Learn the next steps to become a sought after consultant. Right after this, step two is get visible. And I know this sounds really obvious, but I'm saying it because a lot of women consultants either just aren't doing it, or what's happening more often is they're not doing it to the degree it actually takes. Thanks, because if you want to become sought after, people have to be able to see you. If they can't see you, they can't hire you. They can't tell their friends about you. They can't refer you. I mean, that's just how it works. So you have to show up and get visible. And I know a lot of women consultants feel all sorts of ways about that. You know about posting on LinkedIn or having a newsletter or putting themselves out there, some women feel like, if they do this, it's going to look like they're desperate for work, like it's going to appear that their business isn't going well. But think about it this way, every brand you can name markets their business, and you don't look at their ads or billboards or whatever, and think, wow, they must really be struggling. You think, you know that's just what businesses do, because marketing your business is part of running a business. I mean, think about something that's really sought after. I was scrolling LinkedIn the other day and I saw an ad for Bentley All right. Bentley cars, this is an ultra premium luxury brand that people aspire to be able to afford like this is sought after, and they're running ads because marketing your business is part of running a business. It's not an extra thing. It's not something you do on top of your business. It's just part of running a business. And the second thing I hear is some version of, you know, do I really have to do this, you know, I've talked to women who have come out of very senior roles, total professionals, and they've said to me some version of, you know, do I really have to do business development? It feels beneath me, and it's not isolated, like I hear this from a lot of people, either, you know, do I really have to do this? Or, if I'm so good, why should I have to market my business? But remember, what we talked about, being good is not good enough. You also have to be seen. And there's a third thing I hear, and this one, I mean, I see it too, because if you've scrolled LinkedIn recently, I mean, you know that it's kind of exhausting. I see people like jockeying for position or trying to be provocative, or just a lot of like, AI slop. And when you look at that, it's really hard to want to jump in and add your voice. I get that. And I'm not going to go into like, why it's even more important to add your real, authentic voice here, but I will say that, you know, that's actually why in the academy, we teach a marketing system that's intelligent and designed to let you feel like you not a voice that sort of isn't yours or trying to rise above the noise. It's the combination of LinkedIn, shoulder tap, emails, a bunch of other tools we teach. And the point of it all is that it should feel like an extension of how you already think and talk, because if it doesn't feel like you, you won't do it, and if you don't do it, then you know none of this works. And actually, the specific tactics you use to market your business are less important than the fact that you're doing it and doing it in a way that feels true to you, and finding a method that works for you and actually staying consistent. And you know, I'll just say it it takes work. It takes more work than most women are doing, and it definitely takes more work than random acts of marketing. And if you just want to run a little business and take some clients here and there and pay your bills, that's fine. You can do random acts of marketing, but if you want to get to a point where you're sought after and you want clients coming to you, the level of effort has to match the level of ambition. And I know how this lands for a lot of you listening, because I know you're already busy, you know maybe you're even overstretched. You're probably delivering client work, you're running your business, you're doing 100 other things in your life, and now I'm telling you to, like, add marketing on top of that. I can see why you might think, like, okay, sure, but like, this is never going to happen. But here's what I want you to hear. I'm talking to a lot of women right now whose businesses are doing fine. They've got revenue, they've got clients, but there's this feeling underneath it all that the other shoe could drop at any moment. You know, this feeling that what they've have or what they've built is more fragile than it looks. And honestly, I mean, they're right to feel that because a

Leah Neaderthal 19:01

business that depends on referrals or the current economy or the current clients staying forever, that is fragile. So yes, this is work you have to prioritize on top of everything else. Think of it as an insurance policy. You're not doing it because you need clients today. You're doing it so that you're never in a position where you need clients, so that when the market shifts or a client leaves, or the economy gets weird or weirder, it means you've already got people watching you. You've already got demand that you've been building. That's what this is for. And the practical thing is you don't need 20 hours a week for this. You need, like, a few hours consistently every week spent on the right things like, that's doable. It's definitely more doable than doing random acts of marketing where you do like, a bunch of random, disconnected stuff and then you stop when you're getting busy with client work. That's what feels overwhelming, because you're always starting from zero. But when you have a system and you know exactly what you're doing each week and why it becomes manageable. Possible becomes just part of how you run your business, not something extra. You're trying to fit in, and I want to be honest about something else. Yes, it takes work, and it also takes time. I went to a talk last night by Esther Perel, and she told a story that really stuck with me. When she was first starting out, she used to travel over an hour by train to deliver her workshops in a part of Brooklyn where nobody talked about feelings. And she'd get there and like, one person would show up, one and she kept doing it, you know, week after week, hour long train ride, one person in the room, and the people around her kept saying, you know, just keep doing it. They will come years later. I mean, she's become one of the most recognized relationship therapists in the world. Like people pay 1000s of dollars to be in a room with her now, but she started with one person in a nearly empty room hours from home, and this is really what it looks like on the ground. You know, it's not glamorous. It's you on a Monday morning doing something that might not pay off for a long time. And, I mean, just take me, you know, I've been posting on LinkedIn three to four times a week since 2018 I have this podcast. I have a newsletter that comes out every week. And you know, a few years in from doing that, now people regularly come to me because somebody told them about me. Some of my clients start to see that after just a few months. But it's putting in the work before the inbound starts happening. So if you're early in this, that's okay, but you have to start, and you have to give it time. And that brings me to the third thing, because starting isn't the hard part. The hard part is what comes next. Because step three is keep going. Because here's something I think a lot of people don't realize, there's no level you can reach in your business where you get to just stop marketing. There's no finish line where clients just start showing up forever. There's a great quote I love from Erica tebbins that I always come back to. She says, so much personal suffering is caused by assuming there's some level you can reach in business where loads of potential clients are landing at your digital doorstep week after week, if you simply cracked some magical marketing code. And I love that, because that level doesn't exist. I mean, if it existed, like, why would Tony Robbins have to advertise? Right? Why would Oprah have to market her podcast or other initiative? Why would Bentley be running ads. These are some of the most well known sought after brands and people in the world, and they're still showing up every single day. Remember Bobbi Brown at her kitchen table every Monday morning? That was her in 1980 by the mid 80s, the phone was ringing off the hook. You know, she had become this sought after makeup artist, and you know what she did then, she didn't coast. She got an agent, and she went after even bigger work. She kept going. And I mean, think about what happens when an actor or a director gets nominated for an Academy Award. You might think that they got nominated because they're great at what they do, and, you know, sure they are, but behind every nomination there's a massive marketing campaign to make that happen. The studios spend so much money they run ads. If you are in a major metro area, you might have seen campaigns that say you know for your consideration. And there are people whose entire job is to get these actors and other people nominated and then to win, and these are people who were already well known, you know, already excellent at their craft, and it still requires effort to be seen. You know, one of my clients has been posting consistently on LinkedIn for almost a year, and recently she started getting messages from a bunch of people she's never met who have been following along, you know, reading her posts, watching how she thinks, and they're reaching out to her, wanting to work with her, and that didn't happen in month one. It didn't happen in month three. It happened because she kept showing up. And so, you know, I'm talking

Leah Neaderthal 23:51

to a lot of women right now who have been running their businesses for years and for a long time. You know, clients came to them through referrals, and now that's slowing down, and that's why they're working with me, because it's easy to get lulled into a false sense of security, or think that because you're at a certain level, you can stop, and it turns out that level doesn't exist. And I know this is a lot, but I don't want this to kill your soul, because remember, we're not talking about hundreds of hours of work. We're talking about a few hours a week consistently spent on the right things. And when marketing is something you're in for the long term, it means you don't have to get it perfect the first time. It means you can try things and test because there is no finish line. There's just keep going. So these are the three steps to become a sought after consultant in your industry. Position your work for value, show up and keep going. I mean, there are a lot of other things that go into becoming sought after, right, like how you package and price your work, how you lead a sales process, the questions you ask, but all of those are secondary to these three, because if you're invisible, it doesn't matter how you package your offer. If clients don't understand your. Value. It doesn't matter how good your sales process is, and if you stop showing up, then none of this works. So let's talk about what's actually on the other side of this. You know what it really looks like when you do this work, what becomes possible and what doesn't? So here's what's real. When you're sought after, you can charge a premium. Clients come to you already understanding your value, which means that the conversation isn't about you trying to prove yourself or convince them, it's about whether they're the right fit for you, and that changes everything about how you run your business. You get to be more selective. You can stop saying yes to work that drains you or pays you less than you're worth. You can start turning down projects if they're not the right ones. People start saying your name in rooms that you're not in. I mean, that's really what sought after means. It's not that you have a line out the door. It's that when somebody in your industry has the problem you solve, your name is the one that comes up and then, yeah, you know, inbound starts happening. People reach out who you've never met, who might have been watching you from a distance, who already know they want to work with you by the time they land in your inbox. That's real. That's what's possible. And you know something just worth saying right now because of everything going on in the economy and the news and everything else you know when you do this work, when you become sought after in your industry, it's not about getting clients right now. What you're doing is making sure you're never in a position where you need to get clients or where you're scrambling when you're watching your pipeline dry up and wondering what you're going to do. That's what becoming sought after actually protects you from it protects your business from the long term, because when clients already know you, you know when your name is the one that comes up, or when people are watching you from a distance and already want to work with you. You're not waiting for the market to turn you're not hoping things pick up. You've built something that holds even when everything else feels shaky. And I know this can sound like a fairy tale, especially after I just spent the last however many minutes telling you not to believe in fairy tales. But this one isn't. This is what happens when you do the three things we talked about today consistently for long enough. It's not magic, it's just the work, and that's why this matters now more than it used to. So that's what's possible. But there's also stuff that's not possible. You know, you don't get to stop marketing. You don't get to stop showing up. Like I said, there's no moment where you've made it and you can just coast on your reputation. The women I know who are genuinely sought after in their industries are the ones who are showing up, you know, still writing, still in the work of being seen. They just get to do it from a different altitude. And you also don't get to stop being intentional about your business. You know, sought after doesn't mean that the business runs itself. It means you've built something where the right clients find you, and you get to spend your energy on the work you love. So if you were hoping that being sought after meant that you could, you know, stop putting in the effort. I hate to say it, but that's the fairy tale version, you know, right up there with the idea of passive income. But if what you want is business that comes to you, where you charge what you're worth, you choose who you work with, and you spend your time on the work that matters and something that's sustainable in any economy that is real and it's available to you, it just takes the three things that we talked about today. So before we wrap up, I just want to leave you with a couple questions to sit with. First, what's your version of Bobby Brown in his early years? What's the work you know you should be doing to get visible that you just haven't been doing? And second, what does sought after look like for you? You know, not the generic version, your version, who's reaching out? What do you say yes to, what do you say no to? What does your week feel like? Just sit

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with those for a moment. Let yourself actually picture it, because somewhere out there right now there's a woman in your industry sitting at her kitchen table on a Monday morning doing the very unglamorous work that's going to make her sought after in your industry. She's writing the post, she's sending the emails, she's showing up, and a few years from now, people will probably look at her and think she's made it because she's good at what she does. But that won't be the whole story. The whole story started years earlier, at a kitchen table on a Monday morning, doing the work. And that woman can be you if you want her to be and if you want help building that, that's exactly what we do in the academy, you can apply at Smart gets paid.com/academy All right, thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time you.

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