Thinking about giving something away?  This book might have the right ideas for you...

“Free” by Chris Anderson, 2009

If you have ever worked with Vue Consulting on client engagement, relationship management or prospecting you would hear us say again and again how important it is to have some free offerings in your business.  Well, here’s a book right on that subject, with the sharp title of “Free”.

Briefly, this book is primarily concerned with online free – websites and online business ideas.  Indeed the original idea came from this article on Wired (which the author is the editor of).  So the book does spend considerable time on Google, online gaming sites, Second Life and more.   As one of the quotes goes “The internet has become the biggest store in history, and everything is 100% off”.

For professional service advisers, you may wonder what the relevance is, since it would seem unlikely you are ever going to price your advice for free...  But I think there are many valuable lessons in this book for the adviser with an eye on the (very close, very real) future.

First, the book makes the salient point that the internet is making all content free.  Just about anything you can think of can be found on the internet.  True, while some of the information is not quality controlled, this will only improve in time and, for that matter, not all professional advice is quality assured either.  If content becomes increasingly free, it will be very hard to have genuine proprietary advice or information for your clients.  The average client can probably answer most questions with Google and get it for free.  If so, what exactly will the average client pay you for?  Service, comfort, speed?  This book analyses various ways to structure a free offering and then charge for something else in your experience.  While again it is primarily focused on internet businesses, there are enough ideas for professional services practices.

Second, the book has interesting lessons for business development and prospecting.  In particular, how to draw clients in with free offerings and then revalue other parts of your business to make revenue.  There’s plenty of food for thought for any professional services firm trying to attract new clients.  The book also has an interesting discussion of the impact of “free” on bricks and mortar companies – scary reading for any business without an online strategy in mind.  Think about what Craiglist and Wikipedia have done to Newspapers and Encyclopaedia companies respectively.

This book is a little left field reading for a professional services adviser, but it’s definitely thought-provoking and it’s an easy read at less than 300 pages.  Recommended, especially for a good Summer read when you are dreaming of what lies ahead next year...