Two ways.
Think about.
Niching.
So there are a lot of ways to think about niching in your business
and your consulting business.
And in many ways, the tighter you go, the easier it can be to
sell what it is that you offer.
After all people are ultimately swimming in options when it
comes to buying what they want.
You know, there's a million different things and the internet has only
made it easier for people to find.
What they're looking for.
So the competition tends to be quite fierce.
And what people are looking for when given a choice is specificity.
And that's what we're gonna talk about today is how do you add specificity
to your positioning as a consultant, in order to stand out, to be
differentiated, ultimately to create a price premium and to have people sign
up and pay, pay for what you want to.
Well, where you were, what you're offering for your expertise.
So really there are kind of two ways to think about, to think about this there's
many ways, but there's two angles that I want to kind of talk to you about today.
Number one is you can get specific about who you serve.
And this is the more typical kind of advice that you hear pick a
niche is the kind of common sort of guidance that people will give you.
And yes, I agree.
Picking a niche is a great way to grow your consulting business.
It's really hard to say we help anyone do everything.
So at some point you have to kind of say, we're going to leave a little bit of money
on the table here by getting specific, whether that's in this particular way or
the other way, which we'll talk about.
And.
In order to not leave money on the table.
With other opportunities that can come along your way.
So the more you kind of think I'm going to exclude X number of
people, the more you're actually picking up different money, you're
always leaving money on the table.
I like to say whether you pick a niche, whether you get specific or not, you're
always leaving money on the table.
The question is which money do you want to leave on the table?
So you want to be a little bit intentional about how you niche
yourself in the first place.
And these are the two ways that I'm, that I'm kind of thinking about it and that
I want you to kind of explore in your mind a little bit if especially if you're
struggling a bit with, with your niche.
So number one is you can get specific about who you serve.
And of course the more specific about who you serve you are the more likely
water resonate with people to find them.
It's kind of easier to speak their language.
It's easier to be sort of ubiquitous to them.
So that's the benefit of, of getting specific about who you serve.
Which also then allows you.
To be a little broader in terms of how you serve them.
So for example, if I help multi location, coworking spaces do better marketing.
That's a pretty specific target market in a fairly broad way that I can help them.
And you could reason if you're listening to this and thinking to yourself,
well, you know, it makes sense that you can have a broad knowledge about
marketing, but then have potentially rare knowledge about how to apply it.
Uniquely to the multi location co-working industry, for example.
And so that would allow you to kind of say, you know, yes, this is a broad.
Claim abroad, problem being solved.
However, it's applied to a very specific situation.
So that allows you to kind of have a leg to stand on in terms of credibility
versus saying, if I can help anyone do marketing at scale while then
you're kind of it begs the question.
Well, where are your weaknesses?
And.
Can you really help anyone?
Can you help that?
Advanced sciences life sciences company.
You know, take their market to their product, to market.
Probably not.
So you want to have either, or, and this is what the second point is.
You either want to be very specific about who you serve or.
Very specific about the problem you solve.
And so that's, that's the angle.
Number two that I want to talk to you a little bit about today.
So the typical conventional wisdom is pick a niche and I think that's
still a good one to some extent.
I think you have to have a focus otherwise.
Everything you say is going to be watered down.
Everything's going to be generic.
Nothing is going to be specific and therefore you're going to be invisible.
So I think you have to pick some level of niche to begin with.
The question is how niche do you go?
And I think part of the answer to that is how specific is the
problem that you're solving.
So the more specific, the problem that you're solving.
The the less specific you.
You need to be.
Potentially for your target market.
And that's because you can kind of credibly say, well, you know,
I help, for example, if I were to say, I help people sell their
expertise through membership programs.
That's a pretty specific promise, even though the target market of
quote-unquote people is fairly broad.
Obviously the implication there is that they would be entrepreneurs of some kind.
And maybe you can kind of clarify what that means a bit, but
generally the target market in that particular case is quite broad.
Whereas the value proposition, the problem that I helped solve is quite specific.
So it stands to reason that I could probably credibly solve that problem for
a wide range, if not most people that come along looking to solve that problem.
However, if I were to say, you know, I I'll faith-based dog
groomers to pick an example that my client knows, used to joke about.
Uh, sell membership programs.
Well, the problem with that is yes, that if you found a faith-based
dog room who wanted to sell a membership program, you'd be the
obvious choice, which would be great.
The problem with that is though that the market is often too small and it's,
or it's hard to reach these folks.
And that's the difficult part in the whole equation.
So, what do you do?
Do you, do you focus on the target market to get really, really specific there?
Or do you get very, very specific on the problem that you're solving?
And this is ultimately what strategy is all about?
There's no perfect way to position a consulting business, but
specificity really does help.
So the question is where are you going to be specific?
What hard choices are you going to make about who you serve, who you don't
serve, or what level of granularity, what level of depth are you going
to go on one specific problem now?
Of course.
And this is a topic for another discussion.
You can be, say, broader and have different products.
And those products can focus on specific target markets or those
products can focus on very specific problems or even a combination of both.
So there's a way that you, that you can use products as a form of
leverage as a form of sorry, niching.
But that's a topic for another discussion I may have covered in the
past, but for now, just thinking about yourself more broadly as a consultant.
I'm a freelancer adviser agency.
Are you going to go deep on the problem that you're solving?
Or are you going to go deep on a target market?
And that's the hard choice that you need to make, that are
involved with, with strategy.
Strategy is about making trade-offs.
It's about choosing what money to leave on the table, so you can pick
up more of a different kind of money.
So I think, you know, as they say hard choices, easy life, easy life.
Easy choices, hard life.
This is the, this is the challenge that we all have, and there's no perfect answer.
And you're, it's, it's a discovery.
And I, you know, I do think that you can niche down too quickly or
too specifically, and I'm not, I'm not a maximalist when it comes to.
Finding the tightest problem with the tightest niche necessarily.
It's about finding the right size.
That's going to sustain your business ultimately at the end of the day,
because a lot of things you can do are transferable to different industries,
the transferable to different problems.
And this is the challenge we have as consultants is we're very capable
of doing a wide range of things.
So that's inherent to strategy.
You have to help your clients make these hard.
Trade-offs make these hard decisions every day so that their business
can be more effective strategies.
About what advantages are you going to capitalize on to give you that?
To give you that advantage to, to sustain that opportunity for you to
grow your business in a way that, that allows you to lean on your
strengths and not your weaknesses.
So that's the question I have for you today is what trade offs are you making?
How are you being specific about either what you do or who you do it for?
And that might be the difference between running a successful
consulting business or not.
And if you're not finding traction, either in attracting or speaking to
your target market, or you're not finding traction in the problem that
you solve, it might be one of these two things are either too broad or
too specific, or both of them are too specific, or both of them are too broad.
So you play with those levers and dials and yeah.
Go and look at your individual services.
Maybe you have a, you know, a specific target market and then maybe have
a bunch of different offerings.
And there were even a broader target market, but very specific sub offerings.
Or vice versa.
You know, I help.
I'm an accountant, but I also specialize in X, Y and Zed industries.
For example, that would be an example of a broader.
Positioning and a more specific target market.
So I hope this helps.
There's no perfect answer.
I wish there was, hopefully this is getting you thinking.
Uh, are you too broadly positioned about who you're serving
or how you're serving them?
That's the question or are you too specific?
Bye for now.