Have you ever told someone something so valuable, so life-changing, so mind-boggling awesome, powerful, and outright the best piece of advice they’ve ever gotten—only for them to end up dismissing it and never making any use of it?
I know I have.
And I know many others have as well. Because I see it happening all the time.
Truth be told, it happened to me a lot. Especially early on in my consulting career. Or when I’m trying to help friends of mine get started on their own business.
But somehow they don’t end up valuing the advice.
Sometimes they give a quick smile and enjoy hearing the small bit of advice, thinking it’s a nice idea, but not realizing the sheer potential it has or how important of a message they just received.
Other times they outright dismiss it thinking “It doesn’t work that way” or coming up with some other excuse as to why my friendly advice/information wasn’t really valuable altogether.
But I now know why this happened.
I figured it out. After a long time of failing to aid friends and early consultation clients as well as possible and make them see the grandness of the information I’m giving away, hoping they’ll take action on it and dramatically improve the quality of their life or business.
The immense pain I felt every time I thought “wow this was a really valuable session” only to check back up with my client a month later and realize nothing changed.
This has at least taken me half a year to figure out. To pinpoint EXACTLY why this happens.
But more importantly. How to keep it from happening again and again.
And I got it down to just 2 factors. Both of these are related, but slightly different, so it’s useful enough to still make the distinction.
First reason: the person who gets the advice isn’t invested enough. They didn’t have to pay anything to get the information—either in time, money, or some other resource.
I saw this happen with my first 10 consultation clients who I offered to help for free. They didn’t value my advice fully, they didn’t take it to heart. Simply because it didn’t feel valuable. It was nothing more than “free advice” after all.
This problem completely disappeared when I started working with clients who paid me $200 or more per hour to talk with me.
They all valued the advice.
Every word I said they dissected and noted down. They pondered about the implications of everything I mentioned. And most importantly, they immediately started implementing the advice I gave them.
Not because my advice was more valuable than the advice I gave to the first 10 people. But because they valued the advice as more valuable because they paid for it.
But now, I already hear you asking me, “Does this mean I can’t help people see the value of my advice unless I make them pay me?”. But that’s not the case either. You can help people see the value.
This brings me to the second point—which is a more general look than the first one, an overarching view if you will.
People don’t value advice because you didn’t frame it as valuable.
In the previous case our “framing” was simply by making people pay for it with their hard-earned cold-hard cash. That’s more than enough framing to make it work.
But that’s not the only way.
You can—and I often do—give free advice that people value. As long as you “pre-frame” how valuable the information actually is.
Pre-framing often takes the form of you telling them the story about how you learned or earned the information you’re about to share with them. Did it take you 10 years to figure this out? Tell them. Did you have to pay $5,997 to get someone else to share this with you? Tell them.
Share the pain and struggle you had to go through to get a hold of this information.
This will make them realize just how valuable your information is—helping them actually pay attention and take action.
Which brings me to the following:
I talked about how I started working with 10 clients for free to get my business running. That was back in March (I joined Twitter in late January).
Since then I’ve been hard at work trying to figure out how to best play this game of life and business. How to create a business model that allows me to 1) help others 2) read, write, and talk for a living 3) only work 3 hours a day and 4) have complete freedom over my time and location.
I still haven’t reached the top level of the game. In fact I’m far from it—it’s a long game.
But through 9 months of experimentation, lots of failed attempts, months where I literally had a negative bank balance and had to scrape together all that I could to pay my bills—even having to borrow money from friends at one point. But at last I figured out a framework to make it all come together and make it work as good as I originally hoped it would.
More specifically I've mastered the first 3 points and figured out how to get paid reliably by getting leads, qualifying my prospects, and landing clients consistently and effortlessly.
If you want to learn how to do the same and work your way to financial, time, and location freedom. Then click the following link today: https://alexvandromme.gumroad.com/l/clients