When Affordability Can Drain You Of Money
When Affordability Can Drain You Of Money
How a dog dermatologist taught me a crucial business lesson on hiring generalists.
This is my dog Vesuvius, he has been having serious feet issues that have baffled multiple veterinarians in the past 6 months.
I’d show you a picture of his feet, but they look like some kind of alien, zombie life form so I’ll spare you the gory imagery.
After 3 different vets and over $1,000 dropped in medical fees to figure out what was going on with his feet, none of these vets were able to diagnose what the culprit was.
Beyond the money, Vesuvius’ feet have been cut open and he’s been through several rounds of antibiotics and steroids — for no reason other than to test several theories of the vets we visited.
We also switched his food, have bought multiple dog shoes, hoods, and other supplies to experiment with finding the root cause of the issue.
Thankfully, the last vet we went to had the humility to say that they didn’t know what he had and that we should go see a specialist, a dog dermatologist instead. (Did you know there were animal dermatologists? I definitely didn’t.)
Well, when we visited the dog dermatologist, he examined Vesuvius’ feet for 30 seconds and gave a diagnosis that no other previous vet had ever mentioned before.
He even drew a pretty detailed diagram to explain what was going on and how this problem probably developed. Everything he explained to us resonated with the experience we had gone through in the past 6 months.
We were in and out of his office in 15 minutes and spent $170 on that visit — pretty expensive for a 15-minute visit, but check out this math:
Vets (Generalists): 6 months of engagement, $1,000 in medical fees, and another $300 in supplies. Problem not solved, not to mention the stress and drawn-out pain for my dog.
Dermatologist (Specialist): 15 minutes, $170 in medical fees, problem permanently solved.
Generalists vs. Specialists
I tell this story because this is the perfect analogy of the dangers of engaging a generalist vs. a specialist when it comes to your business.
Generalists are affordable, but they won’t permanently solve a serious pain point — some of them don’t even have the humility to let you know when something’s outside of their expertise.
Generalists are great if you want someone to give you an overall review of the general health of your business. They’ll give you a surface-level assessment, but they won’t be able to perform surgery to fix it. If they do, they’ll botch it.
You can identify generalists by their quality of advice — they’ll tell you things that you’ve heard before or can Google. They may also have a jack-of-all-trades vibe to them and “specialize” on multiple topics.
They won’t surprise you with the level of analysis and depth they can provide after just speaking to you for a few minutes — this is the work of a specialist.
A specialist will speak to you as if they’re in your head and they’ll share observations that you’ve experienced before but that you’ve never mentioned to them.
They may even freak you out a little bit because they seem a little psychic (when you live within one niche 40 hours a week, you get to this level of specificity).
How You Spend More Money On A Generalist Who Charges Less
Generalists are good for providing navigation, but the execution should be left to the specialists.
If your pain point is important enough for you to resolve, then only a specialist will follow through on solving your issue permanently.
A specialist is able to work quickly because they’ve acquired 10,000+ hours under their belt on the niche problem you’re currently dealing with. With this knowledge, they’re able to identify and diagnose your problem faster and solve the issue with more precision.
They’ve seen multiple variations of your problem set, whereas a generalist is going to rack their brain and test out a couple of ideas on you.
Employing 3 generalists for my dog left me spending $1,130 more and fighting the problem 6 months longer than employing a specialist. Who knows how much longer I’d be at it if someone didn’t point me in the direction of a dermatologist.
I not only lost a lot of money here, but I also lost a lot of time.
Even though the upfront investment of hiring a specialist is usually more than hiring a generalist (the visit fee for my dog’s dermatologist was 3x more than the visit fees for my vets) you’ll spend less money on a specialist in the long run.
A generalist will draw out your problem, a specialist immediately fixes it.
A generalist uses you as a problem-solving experiment, a specialist already knows the answers.
Generalists usually charge less because they’re not promising any permanent solutions, they’re just promising you that they’ll spend their time working with you on the problem.
Whereas you’ll spend money helping a generalist burn through your cash to figure out your problem, your specialist has already crossed that bridge and is just focused on closing out your problem permanently.
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