Being of service doesn’t mean you have to provide the service.
If you’re an expert, people aren’t only coming to you because they want you to solve their problem.
Sometimes they can feel something’s wrong but may not know what the problem even is to begin with, and they desperately need someone to help figure that out. You can be of service just by knowing the right questions to give them clarity and figure out their goals.
But again, you don’t have to provide the service.
Once you finally pull out that problem, it might not be in your wheelhouse. In my case, maybe it’s a team that realizes they need really high-fidelity, computing-intensive fluid dynamics simulations. That’s not something I do right now.
That doesn’t mean I can’t be of service though. I can give them a suggestion of the kind of support they need, point them to a few companies that do the analysis they’re after, and send them on their merry way.
Maybe it took me a few extra minutes to write a few messages or emails answering their questions. You could say that as a business owner I wasted those minutes, and they would have been more valuable elsewhere.
But I’d argue part of being a consultant is the consult bit. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t start my company just to be able to sit in an ivory tower and only ever talk to people who might as well be doing their aircraft analysis themselves. I wanted to help people, and being available to folks who really just need to ask an expert a handful of questions is part of that.
Also, my industry is surprisingly tiny, and my particular niche even more so. It’s easy to become infamous, and I’d rather be known as someone who is of service, even if I’m not the one getting the final check.
This works even if you’re an employee at a larger company. That’s half of what subject matter experts (SMEs) are for, to be the great font of wisdom that doesn’t necessarily implement the solution for you, but can at least get you going in the right direction.
Guard your energy and time fiercely, as always. But if you’ve been hyper-focused on only ever serving your perfect clients, consider broadening your definition of being helpful.