As soon as people hear what you do, there’s a chance that they will ask you for free advice. It might be a question you can answer in five minutes and it might be a long conversation. They might want to know something general or they might want really specific information with step-by-step instructions.
Should you give out free advice? There are two schools of thought about this and you’ll have to decide what works for you.
Reasons not to give free advice
- This is your profession and you’ve worked hard to learn everything you need to know. If someone wants advice they should pay for a professional like you to provide it. You’re in the business of providing paid advice and giving it away for free means fewer paying customers.
- Questions rarely take a short time to answer. As soon as you give one piece of free advice, there will be a follow-up question. You will soon find yourself in an hour-long conversation, when your time would be better spent doing actual work.
- People often pick your brain because they want to compete with you and this is a shortcut to learning what they want to know about your profession or business. Your free advice might be just the ticket they need to start vying for your job or filching your clients. In a small market like Israel, this can have a big impact on your success.
Reasons to give free advice
- You’ve acquired a lot of knowledge about your profession or business. When you share it with others, they understand how much you know. When someone asks them to recommend a professional, they will tout you as the expert in the field. And if they’re trying so hard to get free advice, they aren’t your ideal customer anyway.
- Giving free advice can be a time drain, but you can control how much time you spend talking to someone. You can always end the conversation by politely saying that you have another meeting and go back to your regularly scheduled work.
- Competition is only an issue when someone is doing exactly the same thing you are. But chances are that they will choose a slightly different niche, and if you are good at what you do, more people in the profession or business is not a bad thing. Karma, on the other hand, is a great thing. When you put helpful energy into the world, you’re likely to get that positive energy back, whether directly or indirectly. In a small ecosystem like Israel, you want to be known as helpful and nice.
Setting boundaries
You don’t necessarily have to make a hard and fast rule about whether you give free advice. Experiment with one policy and see how it works for you or just decide on a case-by-case basis. When someone asks you for free advice you can use these questions to weigh whether to provide it:
- Is this person polite and respectful of your time?
- Are you able to cut them off when you feel the conversation has gone on long enough?
- Are you on a tight deadline or need to work more hours, or can you devote some unpaid time to answering questions?
- Is this person someone who can refer work to you or recommend your expertise?
- Do you enjoy giving this person advice?
- Is your advice being taken or are they milking you for your opinion and then doing the opposite?
At the end of the day, your instinct can generally tell you whether to give free advice or not. You can feel when you are being taken advantage of and you will automatically feel resentful. When that happens, it’s time to set firm boundaries and refer them to your client relations department or to a list of your rates.