Here are several unsolicited offers I received in email and various messaging today:
- An unsolicited email explaining my site was slow and not high-ranking in SEO.
- Another unsolicited offer to totally redo my social media.
- And yet a third unsolicited offer to make my consulting business much more successful by allowing AI to write content for me. (Me!!)
It's not even noon.
All these unsolicited offers have one thing in common: They want to help me because I'm running my business “wrong.” They—and only they—can help me run it right.
Nope. These offers are wrong.
All of these are the equivalent of cold calls. I don't know these people or what they can do. No testimonials, no cues for me to see their value.
They clearly don't know me or my business.
Worse, I'm pretty sure there's only one thing that the people behind these offers have in common: they succeed at separating would-be consultants or business people from their hard-earned money. The people behind the offers—if they are people, and not bots or AI—have a business model that steals from strangers.
You Don't Need Unsolicited Help from Strangers
If you're a consultant, especially if you're new to consulting, don't fall for these schemes. That's all they are—unsolicited offers of help from strangers. They don't know you or your business.
But they do prey on people who might not have the self-esteem to persevere.
Before paying anyone for anything, here's a little test to see if you should believe any of their claims:
- Make sure every offer of unsolicited advice points back to a website.
- Read that site to see what they really offer and any testimonials of the offer. And to see the price for that offer.
- In a separate window, do a search on all their testimonials and see if those people are real, and still have their consulting (or any!) business. Does the value of their promise meet any form of reality?
It's possible you will find a real offer in amongst all this chaff of unsolicited help. But I suspect not.
Work on your business engine (see Successful Independent Consulting: Relationships That Focus on Mutual Benefit.) Create content that matters for your ideal customers. Build on small successes.
But ignore all that unsolicited advice from people who are not successful and don't know about your business. You can do without their unsolicited “help.”
This is one of an intermittent series of consulting tips.
(Interested in the consulting workshop later this year? See the Successful Independent Consulting Workshop page for the details and to subscribe to a notification list.)
This kind of thing has been going on for years – postal mail offers of services, phone calls about services, and random emails that offer services. I suspect you are right in that they prey on doubt and uncertainty of the recipients. Almost always these are destined right for the dustbin.
I got a phone call the other day (and answered because it might have been an actual service provider I wanted to talk to) with a random person offering to “help my business” with something. I didn’t bother talking to them long enough to find out how big of a scam it was.
It’s astonishing, the number of emails/calls/LinkedIn solicitations I get. I just started to count: at least six every single day. Nutso.