Parliament: I Paid $35k For Permission
The firm we hired to run our strategy and planning sent over the list.
Every business has one constraint, they said. Nothing else gets attention until that constraint is gone. Here are your three critical tasks.
Hire a closer. Get the managing director out of sales and onto running the company. Put Kristen on content and personal brand.
I read the first two and thought, yes, correct, I wouldn't have gotten there myself.
I read the third one and felt relief.
We paid $35,000 for that engagement. It moved us about 25 degrees off the direction I'd been heading and it will shape the next year more than anything else we do. I'm not going to be coy about the number. If I'm going to ask founders to spend real money on the work we do, I should say what I spend on the work other people do for me.
The first task was new to me. And without that unlock, I had been struggling to make the second one happen. The third one I'd been circling long before that firm showed up.
I run a branding agency. I tell founders for a living that their visibility is a business asset, that people buy from people, that a company can't be more articulate than the person running it.
I've also written this newsletter nearly every week for two years, which let me believe I was already doing the thing. Parliament has the company's name on it. I could file it under marketing and get back to work.
What I'd been avoiding was everything past it: video, stages, my name out front instead of Hoot's.
It wasn't doubt about whether that works. It was that it didn't feel like contributing. The work is client work. Anything that was only me felt like something I was doing instead of my job.
Then a firm I paid a lot of money put it on a list of three things and it became my job.
Every other constraint in a company is about the company. You can look at a sales process or a hiring gap or a margin problem and assess it without your ego turning up. The moment the constraint is you, the assessment is contaminated. From the inside, deciding that your own visibility is a business priority is hard to tell apart from deciding you'd like more attention. So you don't decide it. You circle it, feel vaguely guilty, and go do something billable.
Someone outside the company has to say it first. Not because they know more than you do, but because they can say it without it meaning anything about them.
Which means part of what I bought was not information. It was permission.
I've gone back and forth on whether that's embarrassing to admit. I've landed on it being an accurate description of what most of us are buying when we hire someone.
Consultants and coaches and peer boards earn their fee, and not always for the reason printed on the invoice. Sometimes it's new thinking, or a correction to something you nearly had on your own. Sometimes it's a person whose judgment you trust looking at a call you already made and not flinching. That second one costs almost nothing to produce and it's frequently the thing you needed.
The alternative is standing still, and nobody quotes you a price for that. Mine was two years of a newsletter and not one minute of video.
There's a cheaper supplier of the same thing, and it's the work we do.
The Brand Being Method™ takes what a founder already half-believes and puts it outside her head. Into words. Words her team can repeat, words she can hold a decision up against at eleven at night without booking anyone's calendar. We aren't handing her convictions she didn't have, only making the ones she had external enough to use.
I wrote here recently that you can't be consistent about a belief that doesn't have words yet. The same goes for authorization. You can't check a decision against a standard that still lives in your gut, so you go find someone whose gut you trust more than your own.
That's why the founder's transformation is the real deliverable and the one thing we can't put on an invoice. What changes is the number of decisions she can make without calling anyone first.
She'll still hire consultants, and she should. She'll just bring them harder questions.
