Nicolas Cole landed a seven-figure consulting deal by giving a CEO a complete strategic plan for free at lunch. The CEO questioned why he'd give it away, but Cole knew the free insight would raise implementation questions. Two days later, the contract arrived.
The largest consulting deal I've ever landed in my life, like multiple 7 figures, stock options, cash, the whole thing, a massive deal came on the back of— I went to lunch with the CEO, who's the CEO of a publicly traded company. I went to lunch with him and I told him the entire strategy of what I thought he should do for free. He didn't even pay me yet. I sat down, I had lunch and I said, here is exactly what I think you should do. And at the end of the lunch, he looked at me and he said, why did you just tell me all of that for free? Like, you should be charging for this. And I sat there and I said, because I know that even if Even if I tell you to do all of these things, you are going to have follow-up questions and you are going to want my help implementing them. And we left the lunch and 2 days later he sent over the contract and he was like, I will pay you a stupid amount of money to help me. I already told him the answer. This is one of the biggest faulty beliefs in all of business is like, you have to remember they might do it themselves. That's fine. But 20% of them will go, you know what? I didn't know. I'm now educated. I didn't know that doing this involved so much work. I'd rather just skip to the end. I'd rather just pay you to do it for me.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
