Have You Got Two Minutes?

It is quarter past five and somebody catches you on the way out. Have you got two minutes.

Twenty-five minutes later you are drawing on the back of a form. You have explained the thing, then explained why the obvious approach does not work, then told them what to say to the person who is going to push back, then given them the two situations where none of it applies and they should come and find you again.

They thank you. You go home. You do not think about it again.

That interaction is the most valuable half hour in your week and you have never once counted it.

What was actually in those twenty-five minutes

Take that single conversation and mark it up, because it has more structure than you noticed at the time.

You diagnosed. They asked one question; you worked out that the real problem was a different one. That is the hardest part of any professional skill and it took you eight seconds.

You sequenced. You told them what to do first, and — more usefully — what to leave until later. Nobody publishes sequence. Training is organized by topic.

You closed two dead ends. You warned them off approaches that look sensible and are not, and you knew that because you have been down both.

You supplied the words. You told them how to phrase it to the person who has to agree. That is not technical knowledge at all and it is frequently the part that decides the outcome.

You defined the exception. You said where your advice stops applying. That is judgment, and it is the thing that separates you from a document.

Five distinct pieces of teaching, delivered without preparation, for nothing. Now notice that those five are more or less the module list of a short course.

The audit

One conversation is a curiosity. The pattern across a month is a business.

So run this properly. Four weeks, and you can reconstruct most of it from your sent messages and your calendar rather than doing it prospectively.

For every time somebody in your profession asked you something, write down four things:

• Who asked — their role, how long they had been doing it, what they were trying to achieve
• What they asked — in their words, not your translation
• What you actually told them — the whole answer, including the parts you consider obvious
• How long it took — three minutes or forty

Keep it in one file. Do not tidy the wording.

What the file tells you

Four things, and each one costs other people a year to work out.

The repeated question is the course. Anything that shows up three or more times from different people is a real problem with real prevalence — the two properties that actually determine whether anyone buys. You did not have to estimate demand. You observed it.

The person asking is your buyer. Not a demographic you invented. A specific role, at a specific stage, with a specific reason for caring. Most people building this business guess at that and get it slightly wrong for two years.

The length of your answer is the shape of the product. If your honest answer runs three minutes, that is an article. If you cannot get through it in under half an hour and you keep having to double back, that is a course.

And the fact they asked you at all settles the credibility question. People do not ask a person they consider unqualified. Every entry in that file is somebody who decided, without being prompted, that you were the one who would know. That is the thing everybody agonises over, already answered, repeatedly, in writing.

Why none of it has produced anything

Because the delivery mechanism is a hallway, and a hallway holds about six people.

Your teaching is real, it is good, and it reaches only those who can physically find you. It is unscheduled, so it lands in the worst part of your day. It is unbounded, so a two-minute question takes twenty-five. And it evaporates — you have explained the same thing to eleven different people and there is no record of any of it, so you will explain it again next month.

That is the actual cost of doing this informally, and the lost income is the smallest part of it. It is that the answer keeps being reassembled from scratch and never reaches anyone beyond arm's length.

On charging for it

You will have a reaction to that word, so let us deal with it.

People will absolutely pay to pick your brain, and you would be surprised how much. Adding a consultation to a course business is not complicated — a page saying what it is, and an invoice.

Two rules if you do. Take the money before the call, because otherwise you will occasionally do the work and never hear from the person again; it has happened to me and it is infuriating. And set boundaries in advance — what hours, what channels, how many. Unbounded access to you is not a premium feature, it is how the thing becomes another job.

But charging is not the point of this article, nor the main opportunity. One-to-one time still runs on your calendar, which is the thing you were trying to get out from under. The point is that the file you just built tells you exactly what to record once so that the answer stops being something you have to be present for.

You have been teaching for years. The only thing missing was that anybody more than ten feet away could hear it.