The Future Of Entrepreneurial Consulting

People fear the future because they think they can’t control it. However, if you know how to anticipate, then perhaps you can take on the reins and continue to thrive. If you are a consultant struggling to see what is up ahead, you’re in for a great episode! Join Michael Zipursky as he talks to futurist Jared Nichols about the future of entrepreneurial consulting. Jared is the owner of NU FUTURIST, a program that teaches innovators how they have the power to shape the future. Discover why you need to define success for yourself. Learn why it’s important to have a big body of work and content to enforce your core ideas. And know how to be different from everybody else. All of this to help you stay ahead of the curve as the future of consulting continues to take shape.

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In this episode, I’m very excited to have Jared Nichols joining us. Jared, welcome.

Thank you. It’s great to be here, Michael. I appreciate it.

You are a Futurist, Advisor, Faculty Member of the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business, and graduate of Executive Education. You are also the Founder and Creator of NU FUTURIST and The Foresight Academy. We will get into all that. You work with organizations like Coca-Cola, the US Special Forces, Goodwill, and many others. It’s important that we start this off for some or many, what exactly is a futurist?

There are several different definitions, depending on who you ask. From a professional side of things, most futurists you will come across tend to be keynote speakers who do well. They get up and tell you, “Here’s what the next 50 years are going to look like.” That is not the realm I operate in only because those predictions are almost always wrong. It’s great for entertainment but it does very little to help you make better decisions now. I will give you my definition of a futurist. It’s somebody who operates in this capacity, which is focused on how to anticipate where the world may be going by understanding the possible implications of things we see nowadays.

Those are large drivers of change, things like artificial intelligence, big data, climate change, genetic modification, and knowing how to ask the right questions as to what the potential implications might be on multiple facets of society, all with the end goal of creating a three-dimensional picture of what the future could look like. It’s not to try to predict it. If you are going long-term, that’s going to throw a dart on a dartboard, and that’s about as good as it’s going to get. Long-term thinking about the future is about envisioning multiple possibilities so that you can make better decisions now.

I want to certainly get into what the potential implications for the future might be for consultants because that’s the community that we serve here. Before we go down that path, in terms of how you got to where you are. A lot of people would imagine that if you are a futurist and are trying to understand all these different layers of information and perspectives or potential possibilities, it would require you to consume a vast amount of information to be able to contemplate where could you go and what are the possibilities. Take us back to the early days of Jared Nichols. How did you get started? What were you studying in school? What were you doing before you started consulting and being a futurist?

This probably won’t be the cleanest straight-line origin story. I had been in the insurance business for a couple of years. I was an independent insurance broker. I enjoyed doing that. About eight years into that, I realized that this wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore. Going into the insurance business wasn’t a planned thing either. My undergraduate degree was in History, English, and Creative Writing. I’ve dealt with this most of my life. I’m an Army brat, so I grew up moving around my entire life and always trying to figure out exactly, “What is that I wanted to do? Where do I want to go? Who do I want to be?” It’s an evolving question.

When you moved around, were you moving around within the US?

I moved overseas.

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Where were you? Which country have you spent time in?

Here’s the rundown. I always get it this way here. Our first place was Washington State. We were at Fort Lewis, now joint base Lewis-McChord. When my dad joined the Army, I was two. That’s where it all started. From there, we went to Hawaii Schofield Barracks. From Hawaii, we went in typical Army fashion. They send you from paradise to hell. We went to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. We were there for six months. We were then sent to El Paso, Texas, Fort Bliss. From Fort Bliss, we were sent to Northern Germany, a small installation called Garlstedt. It’s beautiful up there in Northern Germany.

That was around the time of the drawdown. Under the Clinton administration, they started drawing down a lot of these bases. We were there for a year and then moved down to Southern Germany in a place called Giesen. From there to Georgia, Fort Benning, and then from Fort Benning to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. That’s where I graduated from high school. I went to school in Georgia. My mom and dad were stationed in 3 different places, 2 of them overseas, and then they finished up in Upstate New York.

What was that like for you to move around that much as a kid?

That’s all I ever knew. I’m starting to see it a little differently now because we have children. We are living in Charlotte and staying here. For me, it was a weird idea to stay in one place your whole life since that’s what I only ever knew. I don’t regret it. I jokingly say that all military brats are emotionally wrecked in one form or fashion. Some of us are extreme extroverts. Some of us are extreme introverts but I look at it as a bonus. The ability to adapt to new things very quickly is something that I’ve had to do my whole life. Most Army kids and families will tell you the same.

What was the age range in terms of when you started that journey? When did you stop?

It’s from the age of two all the way through high school. Once it’s in your blood, it doesn’t get out. Even when I was in my undergraduate program, in a 2-year span, I moved around 5 times. You get into this habit of, “It’s time to pick up and go.” Even if that was just moving across town, it gets in you. You get a little anxious. It’s like, “It’s three years. We are good. What’s next?”

We’ve got that out of the way. That’s the early journey. You then studied History and so forth, went into insurance, and woke up one day, going, “This is not what I want to do for the rest of my life.” What happened from that point?

Originally, when I went into the insurance business, a big part of that was I enjoyed working for myself. I’ve never worked for anybody in my entire professional career. My wife tells me because I’m oppositional defiant. I don’t necessarily agree with that but I enjoy solving problems. I enjoy the autonomy, the freedom to work at my pace. Insurance seemed like an easy pathway to do that. Eight years in, I stopped and thought, “Am I still doing this?” It was going great. It was very successful.

 

I was able to work twenty hours a week and was making more than I’d ever made. I was able to race and train on my bike. I was bored out of my mind, to be honest. That’s when I discovered this program through another friend of mine in Strategic Foresight and Future Studies, which I thought was a joke at first. I then went to the World Future Society in 2008 and sat in on a session with a guy named Jay Gary, who was the professor at the time, and realized, “This is what I want to do. This is where my brain works.”

You got deep into studying the future. When did this idea turn into a business and your next career?

I knew I didn’t want to be in the insurance business anymore but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work for anybody either. In grad school and during that two-year period, that was when I started to re-imagine what my work could look like with this type of backing. To give you some context, I was 1 of 10 graduate students that were in this program. Two of us were the only ones who came from the private sector and went back to the private sector. The other 8s came from 3 letter agencies, defense contractors or think tanks. They returned there as well. You have companies that operate in this realm that would recruit from our program.

That wasn’t what I wanted to do. I thought, especially after coming out of the program, this way of thinking and understanding how the world manifold has tremendous value that should be accessible to everyone outside of wonky foreign policy, economic policy, and another think tank with defense needed to be accessible to more people. That was the drive for me. It was to transition my business from the insurance side of things into helping more people think this way, giving them the tools to leverage this type of information.

Now you decide, “I want to go and build a business around this.” How do you do that? How did you go and get your first clients that are going to be willing to invest money and resources into this idea of better understanding the future or possibilities?

That’s a good question because it’s not like everybody is out there saying, “Where can I find a futurist?” You are an event planner who’s looking for a futurist speaker. That’s not something that people are demanding right away. Part of the journey for me is taking a more obscure idea and sometimes unnecessarily complex and making it stupidly simple and accessible so that you don’t have to feel like you need an entire degree to understand and utilize it. Early on in the journey, what I realized was that I needed to, first and foremost, learn what it meant to be a consultant.

In the insurance business, we thought it was cool to call ourselves consultants. Let’s be honest. We are brokers. We get paid on commission from the carrier, not from the client. We can call ourselves consultants all day long but it’s a completely different game. The carriers would supply us with materials and everything that we needed. In this world, you are responsible for everything. I had started working with some folks that have been in the business for a long time, not foresight but the consulting world. They were excellent. I learned a lot really fast.

One of the big things that I learned early on was this. You never want to put yourself in a position where you are a commodity. The way to do that is to build a substantial body of work and create intellectual property. The early part of my career was to create a lot of content, and intellectual property, to build a body of work so that when folks go and check you out, they get a good idea of who you are, what you are about, and whether or not you are the person they want to work with. That was a big part of the early stages of building a business for me.

Do you remember what body of work or intellectual property was the initial source of your first client? How did you get your first client? Let’s start there, and then I want to build on top of that.

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The first way I got a client was the good old-fashioned way of word of mouth. Even in this age of social media and all the marketing tools in the world that are out there, I have yet to find anything in the digital space that competes with word of mouth, with somebody who says, “You need to work with Jared.” That right there removes all the obstacles if that person is somebody that they trust.

That was how I got my first client. Where the body of work comes into that is that they trust that they want to hire me but if they want to do their homework, they have a place to go to see it. It’s not like they are going to spend hours and hours scrutinizing your work. Most of the time, it’s like, “Let’s see what this guy has done. Who is he? Do we like him?”

Is there anything you’ve done over the years? If you are talking about referrals and word of mouth, which is widely accepted as the best way to generate business, very often, people are just in a position where opportunities come their way. They are more reactive, not as proactive. Is there anything you’ve done over the years that you find helps you to generate more referrals or word-of-mouth business?

This would go back to the content side of things. The larger your body of work, the more content that you are putting out. That’s good. That reinforces a core message you have in your practice that helps to increase the number of clients that come to you. I like to always look at things based on what type of clients I want to be working with. I’m very picky about that. Early on, when the business started, it’s like, “Do you want to pay me? I will take it.” That’s what we do.

Now, it’s gotten to the point where I only want to work with a certain individual or a group of people within an organization. What I found to be successful is having a clear message about who you are, your core ideas, and how it fundamentally transforms the individual you are looking to work with. When I say individual, organizations don’t hire you. The individuals in the organizations hire you. It’s their transformation or their change that is most important. That’s the number one most important thing.

I saw on your website that you have this page that says, “What I do and who it’s not for.” That probably plays into what you are talking about. Where did that idea come from? I would love to know why you have that page. For many consultants, especially at the earlier stages but even sometimes those that are somewhat established, the idea of putting up a roadblock or saying like, “Don’t come here. I’m not for you,” is a scary one. Where did that idea originate from?

That idea came from Frank Kern. Frank is a master of communication. He gets to the point. I love that he had something similar to that, so I thought, “This is a great idea of who this is not for.” That fit in with what I was trying to do overall with the site, strategy, and messaging. What I want to do in all of my content and my whole digital presence is make it very easy for anybody visiting to say, “This is my guy. This is not my guy.” That’s it.

When I saw that on Frank’s set, I thought, “That’s one extra thing that is a good idea.” I know he has more psychological reasons behind that. He does a much better job of it. For me, I thought this is good because it helps to clarify. Early on, when you asked what a futurist is, I also wanted to make sure that folks that were looking for somebody who’s going to get up and say, “We want you to do a 90-minute keynote on what the next 50 years are going to look like,” they would know real fast that’s not what I do.

What have you learned about your approach and messaging in relation to marketing and having people want to have a conversation with you? As you’ve talked about this idea of a futurist, people don’t typically wake up going like, “I need a futurist now.” It’s, “I have a marketing problem. I want more leads. We are losing market share.”

 

There is a connection to the future. If you can envision the future and plan for it, that could create a competitive advantage for you. Part of me thinks that a lot of people wouldn’t recognize that or it wouldn’t be their first thought. What have you learned about how to make something that, in some ways, can almost come across as being intangible and relevant for people so that people want to reach out to you and have conversations?

That’s pushed through in a lot of the content. For me, everything starts with the person if I’m working with somebody. A lot of my work is one-to-one coaching work, which I enjoy. I don’t push a lot of advertising on that. That tends to be what happens. Conversations get started, and an opportunity opens up in that arena that is working with small teams. Our focus is on ideas and different ways of thinking about how the world unfolds.

If you start a conversation with, “With artificial intelligence, this is where it might be going,” that’s interesting but that doesn’t necessarily lead to business. Unless you are a keynote speaker, then maybe it does. That’s not the end goal that I have. For me, it’s pushing on the front end more of the mindset that’s necessary to identify possibilities and think differently about where opportunities for your organization, for yourself, where those things may be. A lot of that is removing bad thinking.

I want this to be tangible for everybody and practical. Give me an example. If you are saying, the idea is not to say, “Here’s where artificial intelligence is going to go in the next 25 years,” give me an example in one of your pieces of content or if we were meeting face-to-face at some event. What would be your message or approach to creating that potential desire to try and hook me as a prospective client?

In all of this here, the big differentiator is that I’m never going to tell you what to think. Everything that I do in the work that I do with clients is about how to think. That always starts with understanding the core skills or the tools you need to have to see things before everybody else. It’s not just that but also how you identify those things and take action on them early. We can even role play something here if you have a situation or client that you don’t have to mention their name but if there’s a certain problem that they’re dealing with, we can usually apply these types of skillsets to that problem.

The reason I say that is because pretty much all problems are future-oriented problems. Some are easy to fix, no problem at all. For a lot of organizations, it’s how we ensure we are not constantly reacting to all the volatility that’s going on now, whether that’s in the market, in their space, whatever it might be. They are in that place of stagnation where they know that they have been successful.

It’s almost always the ones who have been successful. It’s not folks that are dying and saying, “Our business is about to go under. Those people don’t want to talk to me at all.” I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t either. They are in that survival state. It’s the folks that have done well. They’ve hit the top, and then they are looking around, waiting to fall. It’s saying how we leverage where we are to make sure that we stay ten steps ahead.

Is there a go-to question or two that you find yourself always asking people? It might be angled a little bit differently depending on what industry they are in or their situation. Is there something you always go to because you find it resonates with people like it just clicks for them? In your conversation with people like, “My name is Michael,” and I’m saying in terms of people that you talk to on an ongoing basis. Is there something that you might ask them about like people in a business scenario, “This year, what’s one of the big initiatives that you’re excited to be working on?” It’s something along those lines that tends to bring people or get them to connect with this idea of the potential future or anything relating to your work.

With anybody, I like to sit down and get to know them a little bit more. When it comes to asking a specific question in this area, I always want to know, “What are your biggest concerns about the future overall over the next 5 to 10 years?” I want it to be open-ended because most of us don’t have a real clear cut, “It’s this one thing.” Some people do, and that’s great.

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If they have a real clear idea of what that is, chances are, they are already working on it or trying to figure out a way to work on it. For a lot of us, these are the things that I’m concerned about. That starts the conversation because there’s not a crystal ball that one person can look into and tell you, “Here’s how this is going to turn out.”

Most people have a pretty good idea of what is most concerning for them on an individual level and an organizational level. For some, it might be artificial intelligence and the impact that it’s going to have on their industry. For others, that may be climate change because they are in the agricultural industry or live in Miami. They start to look at what’s this big overarching problem they are hearing a lot about. Most of it is doom and gloom. They have no idea how to think about it, let alone how to take action on it. That’s where a lot of the conversation starts.

For most people, the future is this idea or concept that is being thrust upon them that they have no control over. The reality is that you do. Certain things are outside of your control but we first have to start by changing this idea that the future is something that we are going to one day arrive at or that it’s this thing set in stone.

This may seem elementary but the reality is that we talk about the future as a singular thing when that’s not the case. It’s a multitude of possibilities that could happen based on the actions you take now. When people finally realize that or if they have some agency in the direction of their life their organization goes in, that tills the ground for some of the deeper work.

We have been with our team at our annual meetings or quarterly meetings, where we will talk about what could the future look like and if there are potential threats or opportunities. Going through that process or that exercise of talking about the future puts you in a position of power because you now can plan for things or address things. It’s probably not enough people do but should do. I found it to be not only grounding but also empowering and helps you to plan and take action in the right direction.

It’s one of those things that people think they can’t do because the idea is that the future is unknown, so we can’t plan for it. Most of the energy is focused on, “Here’s our historical success. Here’s our present-day understanding of what that means. Let’s take some mashup of this and throw it out ahead five years,” if they are even thinking 5 years or 1 year, then let’s hope for the best. The difference here is something I like to call perceptual location. Perceptual location is what point on the timeline you are making your decisions from and your perspective on how you are making decisions.

The way most of us make decisions is that we stand in the present, look to the past, take our successes, and project them forward. This is all for how we think about the future. In foresight, the difference there is that we stand in the future. We look back to the present and determine how we ultimately got to the place that we wanted to be. The mind is not bound by time and space. This is a human construct that we put around ourselves. If you can remove those obstacles, all of a sudden, you start to answer the bigger question, which is not, “Where do we need to be? What do we need to be doing?”

The real question that people want to have answered for themselves, whether they realize it or not, is, “Who do I want to be ten years from now? Who do we as a team want to be?” That’s what foresight helps people to get clear on because there are outside things you cannot control. That’s a fact. The one thing you can control is who it is you ultimately become over a certain period, which is more important to an organization than, “Where’s our position in the market? How big is our organization? What is our revenue like?” That stuff is important but it should follow the bigger question, which is, “Who is it we are aspiring to be?”

This may be a bit of a leading question. Do you find that individuals tend to think that a very high percentage of the future is saying that they cannot influence or control at all? If you start to think about the future, go through these exercises, and then take actions where you want it to be in terms of reverse engineering, where you are in the future, and how you got to where you are, and start taking steps towards that.

 

Do you find that it’s true that people are able to reach that future desired state a lot more often than they thought that they could? I don’t know if you can figure out what I’m saying. People often think, “I can’t control the future.” You are right. A lot of things out there around you can’t control but if you focus on what you can control, you can actually influence your own future a lot more than you might expect.

That’s the power of foresight. It’s not just about anticipating, changing disruption or opportunities, and all these sexy terms we like to use. It’s about having the ability to influence future outcomes. This is how think tanks and various agencies have utilized this skillset to shape foreign or economic policy. All of it ends up the way it has been utilized and has been about influencing certain narratives over many years. It’s an art and science. This is why more people having the ability to do this is very important.

I’ve spent little time thinking about this at a policy or economic level. It’s more something that I think about in terms of our business and community that we serve, my life, my family, and all these things. Let’s bring the conversation back. In your own business now, it sounds like the real thrust of your marketing is content creation. You put a lot of ideas and content out there.

You are very specific and intentional about who you want that content to speak to and target. You do great work that creates word of mouth. Those are the main two engines. Is there anything else you’ve tried from a marketing perspective that has fallen flat on its face or worked much better than you expected?

Failures are all embedded into the process of all of that.

Is there one thing that stands out? Is there one thing you tried that you got excited about and didn’t?

One thing that comes to mind here, and I don’t know if this necessarily fits exactly but it’s a story of colossal failure on my part. When I get up and get to talk, I’m not saying I don’t do keynotes. I do, but I always let them know, “I’m going to talk for 20 minutes, maybe 25. If 90 minutes is the time we’ve got, the rest of that time after I’m done talking is the Q&A. That’s what we are going to do.” I’m not going to get up there and talk. I hate PowerPoint with a passion. I don’t want to use it. That’s not going to happen. I have yet to have somebody say, “We want PowerPoint. We need you to do a PowerPoint.” That has never happened.

Early on in my career in this, I was invited to speak at the annual conference of a large professional association. I was thrilled. I thought, “This is going to be great.” One thing they did want was a 90-minute presentation. For me, I thought, “I don’t like to do PowerPoint. I don’t like to do all this stuff but I’m going to do it anyway.” The lesson learned was don’t try to adapt to the standard of what everybody else wants to do if it’s not who you are. I spent so much time on this stupid presentation, which just got in the way.

I finally got up there and started to give this presentation. The technology failed. The video pieces that were in there all fell apart. None of it worked right. I had 90 minutes to kill. It was terrible. The immediate feedback from the audience was not great. The lesson I learned here was that trying to do things the way that everybody else has done them will never serve you. It never will. That was a colossal failure, one that I have not repeated since. On a grand stage where other people see you failing in real time, that’s always a good lesson.

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Other stuff is launching a new product or something in the digital space that maybe doesn’t take off the way you think it’s going to take off. Nowadays, bringing that full circle, if I create something, the first question that I ask myself is, “Is this one-off? Is this something that can scale? Maybe not just scale from a revenue standpoint but if it’s simple content creation, how can I take 1 piece of content and turn it into 10 without having to do more work?” That’s the way that I look at things to try to mitigate that potential failure and keep expectations where they need to be.

You provided talks and workshops. You do custom engagements. You have coaching. You also have digital products. What percentage of your business would you attribute to each one of those?

Off the top of my head here, one-to-one work, coaching work, and workshops are probably the largest part of my business now because a lot of folks want to get a taste of what strategic foresight is. The workshops are great, and the one-to-one work usually follows along after that if it’s with a team, a board of directors or an individual.

The digital side has also gone well with my partnership with the University of Tennessee with The Foresight Academy. That is an interesting area. How I came to discover Frank Kern and a lot of these other folks is learning how to create, develop, and deploy a digital product. It always promises you the world but it never works out that way.

It’s often a lot more challenging for people to believe. It’s this idea of passive income, where you put something online and can make money. It takes a lot more work than that.

You also realize quickly that, in that world, unless you are in the digital marketing space, for example, most digital marketing products, tools, tricks, and all of that are designed by digital marketers to teach other digital marketers how to be great digital marketers. If you are in the consulting space outside of that realm, a lot of that stuff does not apply. You must find ways to adapt to what’s good and go from there.

This is very relevant. Many people look at marketing tactics or strategies that are created for and by people that are selling to consumers or at a much different scale, not to a business owner, certainly not a mid-size or large organization. Is there anything you’ve learned that you’ve seen work well in terms of taking your intellectual property, packaging it, offering it digitally, and making it profitable to sell to organizations?

From building digital assets, whether it’s a course, I will tell you what has been well. To have the ability to be in front of a camera is important. This is also my studio. I shoot all my own videos and build all that stuff because I enjoy doing it. This is not something I would recommend to most people if you don’t want to shoot and edit, which I enjoy the creative process of doing. Getting good at delivering your content in front of a video is important in my mind in this day and age because it gives you the ability to leverage time in ways that other people can’t.

For instance, if we have a half-day workshop, and we are trying to cover a lot of things in that workshop, one thing that I’ve done, and this has been great with organizations, is I have two videos that I will shoot at once, and then it’s up there, and then folks have access to it. They will go in there and start to first and foremost understand what’s my philosophy about what we are doing. Let me explain what it is that we were doing.

 

The things that would take up time in the beginning to the time it would take for me to convince you as a group, that I’m not completely insane, and that I’m not making this stuff up, that there is some real backing to what we are going to be doing but more importantly, what’s the philosophy of success that we need to have to go into this? I start it off by saying, “If you are watching this, that means that we are going to be together in person for a number of days, weeks, maybe even months.” The other video is, “Here’s your homework assignment. It’s one of the most important skills in my field.” It gives them an opportunity to start flexing that muscle before we ever get together in person.

The goal is that we have a limited amount of time, and we want to hit the ground running because, for me, I never want to leave a group of people I’m working with, with a feeling that they had a lecture or that they just learned something that they could have read in a book. I want them to get their hands dirty real fast. I want them to put things to use because that’s what foresight is. It’s a tool. If you can learn how to use that tool, you can take it back to your organization and your life, whatever it might be.

Let’s dive into that for a moment in terms of the future and how people can benefit from it. The two questions I have for you regarding this is number one, out of all the work you’ve done and all the thought you’ve given to the future and where we stand here now, what do you feel the impact or the opportunities are for consultants? You are a consultant. You’ve worked with consultants. You talk to different individuals and organizations. Where do you see now from a future perspective? Is there anything that consultants should be thinking about, preparing for, and taking advantage of? That’s question number one.

The second question that comes to you right afterward, just to plant that seed is, how do you yourself spend time thinking about the future? Is there anything that you would recommend for people that are reading now and saying that they themselves could do to develop this skillset themselves so that they can go down that process and benefit from it themselves?

The first question was about what consultants or folks in this space should be thinking about. The thread, if we are going to start there, is nothing new. It’s the commodification of what it is that you do. I meet a lot of consultants that are commodities. They tend to be shopped around like, “Are you DiSC-certified?” I’m not certified in anybody else’s stuff. This probably goes to prove the point that my wife said that I’m oppositional defiant. I have no interest in being certified in anybody else’s programs, not at all. That’s just me. It’s not because there’s something wrong with them. That’s not how I operate.

From the business standpoint, it’s also because if I’m going to deliver something, I want it to be my own or my version of what this thing is that can solve your problem. I want it to be something that I’ve developed and created. From the consulting side of running your business, one thing that consultants should do is put time and energy into creating a body of work. That can be in anything. If you are developing content, it doesn’t need to be perfect. The medium that I enjoy is video but it took me years to get good with video.

I have people I work with who are consultants in their own realm on helping them develop a clear map and journey around their message that can then inform their content. We get into this idea about video and the way that they should deploy that. They are always like, “My videos look terrible,” so I always have my early videos, which are still online. I say, “I would like to show you something. This is terrible. The lighting is awful. The position of the camera is terrible. It sounds like I’m saying something smart but I’m saying nothing at all, so don’t feel bad. You just got to let it rip.” You’ve got to start putting things out there.

One thing that is important for consultants is that you have to put more of yourself out there if you are not already doing that and be clear on what your message is because, with all the noise that’s out there, if your stuff looks, smells, and tastes like everybody else’s, nothing makes you stand out. I’m not giving groundbreaking advice here but I’m telling you it works. It’s true. Find something to be oppositional about and put that front and center.

How important do you think that point is? You said find something to be oppositional about. You are talking in some ways about this idea of polarization and having a unique perspective or strong opinion. At times, consultants like to play it safe. They want to have that ground in the middle. They don’t want to offend anyone. They want to do good work. They are good people.

There's so much noise out there that if your content looks, smells, and tastes like everybody else's, then you're not standing out. Click To Tweet

What you tend to see from a marketing perspective, and certainly not only in the business world, this is in media and sports, it’s the people that stand out but tend to get the vast majority of the attention and, therefore, the business as well. Is there anything else that you could share from either your own experience or the work you’ve done that might support that point?

A few years ago, is when I started to shift where my business was. For the first half of it, I was trying to do what I saw others doing successfully. There’s value in that because if you are jumping into an area that you don’t know about, you should imitate the most successful folks you see say. That’s smart. One of the things that I learned early on from the mentors that I had and the community that I was a part of was never built by the hour. That is a stupid idea.

It’s a core concept because what you are doing is you are attaching your value to time. You need to build by the project. You need to build value. Everything needs to be focused on objectives and value. Who wouldn’t want you to complete something in a quarter of the time and pay you twice as much? I’ve never had anybody complain about them.

Things like that were important. I imitated those that I saw as being successful. At a certain point, you start to realize that the things that I value may not be the things that you value, so you shouldn’t imitate me. You have to start to discover your own voice in this. You have to discover what is it that makes you unique. Why do people enjoy working with you?

I don’t think you can do that right out of the gate because it takes several years and clients for you to step back and say, “Who are the folks I enjoyed working with the most? Number one, it’s the folks I saw the biggest results with on their side, who also looked for ways to spend more money with me because things were going so well, and third, who I would always feel good about working with. It was never a struggle. We were a true collaboration.”

When you start to ask those questions, you get a clear picture of who your people are. Once you have a clear picture of who your people are, then you start tailoring your message to those people because everybody else that doesn’t fit doesn’t matter. Why would you want to spend time and energy trying to convince somebody to hire you who you don’t want to work with?

In the beginning, if you are starting out, you think, “I don’t know who I want to work with.” That’s why you have to have time with several clients to figure out, “Who are my people.” Once you have that, you start having a conversation with them. All of your content is a conversation with them. All of your surveys are with people like them. The more you dial that in, the more selective you can be, the higher your fees are, and the more you can turn away business you don’t want.

I want to be conscious of your time here and respect that. Before we wrap, I have a couple more questions. What’s the low-hanging fruit for the person joining us now and going, “I can see the power of thinking more about the future?” What are a couple of steps that are very practical that they could start to implement and get some benefit from?

On a real practical level, I always start with the way that people are thinking. This isn’t going to be some sexy futurist thing but it will give you a much greater advantage if you start to implement that. That is by asking yourself important questions about how you define success. This is something that I have to continuously go through because I’m also susceptible to following other people’s definitions. Even as oppositional as I am, maybe my opposition is a front for trying to prove to other people that I can be successful by the way that they define it. Being self-aware of those things is important.

If you're trying to reach somebody else's goals and ideas, then you're living by somebody else's idea of the future. Click To Tweet

If you are reading this and finding yourself trying to reach somebody else’s goals or match up to somebody else’s ideas, then you are living by somebody else’s idea of the future. At a talk, you asked this question, and it has been a little while since I’ve given a talk. Now, it’s come back to these. The first question I would open up with is, “Whose idea of the future are you creating?” In other words, “Whose beliefs and ideas are you allowing to influence your decisions on a daily basis?”

If you can ask that question and spend time with it, what you may find is that you are allowing other people’s definitions of success, the world, individuals, and people in your industry to tell you what you should be, who you should look like, and what success is. That is the number one thing that is getting in your way. In the age of information that we are bombarded with, and this is on full blast in the age of COVID of telling you what you should think and what side you should be on.

The best thing to do is step back and if you have a certain reaction and emotional reaction to some piece of information, ask yourself, “Why? Why do I feel this way? Why do I think this way?” The more you can get to know yourself, the faster you can get to who you truly are so that the inside matches the outside or better yet, the outside matches the inside. To me, that’s the biggest thing that you can do in this world.

That’s extremely powerful. I appreciate you sharing that. This next question will sound in direct opposition to what you mentioned. What is one book that you have either read or listened to that had a big impact on you or would suggest that others may want to read? It can be fiction or nonfiction but something that you’ve enjoyed.

I was in a conversation with another colleague. He said, “I’m an avid reader.” I was thinking to myself, “I’m an avid skimmer.” I skim a lot of things, but some things draw me in that I enjoy listening to. I’m probably going to get this wrong. A book that had been recommended to me that I’ve enjoyed that I’ve started is one by Dan Sullivan called Who Not How.

I am a chronic doer of all things in my own business, and that can kill me. I suck it at outsourcing. It’s a skillset that I have to get better at. My wife has graciously taken on a lot of the admin stuff for me. She has worked with me for years, and then COVID happened. She had to take a break from all that, but now she’s back. I’m telling you, that has been an impactful one. Another one that I’ve liked this guy’s angle is called The Hype Handbook.

It’s by Michael Schein. He was on the show as well.

He and I have some mutual friends. I would like to connect with him at some point. His stuff was great. I thought, “This is good.” This is oppositional. He is picking a fight. Those two have been good.

Jared, I appreciate you coming on and spending some time with us. I want to make sure that people can learn more about you and your work. Where’s the best place for them to go?

The best place to go is NuFuturist.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. That’s in social media. That’s the platform I tend to be on. The best way to reach me is by email, [email protected].

Jared, thanks so much again.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• NU FUTURIST
• The Foresight Academy
• World Future Society
• Frank Kern
• Who Not How
• The Hype Handbook
• Michael Schein – Previous Episode
• [email protected]

 

About Jared Nichols

Jared Nichols is the founder of the NU FUTURIST and creator of The Foresight Academy, a groundbreaking program that teaches leaders and teams the same skills that innovators, industry disruptors, and change-makers have used to guide and shape the future they want to see. Jared is also a futurist, advisor, and adjunct professor of Strategic Foresight at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business, in Graduate and Executive Education. He teaches leaders, teams, and individuals how to think like futurists so they can create the best future for themselves and the people they serve.

His insight and expertise are utilized across a wide variety of sectors and industries from Fortune 500 companies to government municipalities entrepreneurial start-ups, as well as his work in Hollywood with accomplished actors, writers, and producers, helping them reinvent themselves and discover new areas for growth both inside and outside the bounds of their industry.

Jared is also the host of the small business podcast presented by the National Small Business Association titled, The Road Ahead: Small Business in the 21st Century, which focuses on practical tips and insights for small business owners on how to grow, thrive, and contribute, in a volatile and uncertain environment. In addition to hosting The Road Ahead, Jared also sits on the Board of Trustees for the National Small Business Association, focusing on equipping SMEs with the ability to anticipate change and influence public policy in favor of small business growth.

Jared is also a musician, composer, competitive cyclist, and trail runner living in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife and two sons. His most recent accomplishment is becoming an official card-carrying member of the Dollar Beard Club and is making plans to build a workshop and tame a wild animal.

 

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