The Big Question
Questions I get from consultants. And my answers.
Question #15: I received this question from a reader (thanks!):
'Luk, I want to start the year off on a positive note. I find a lot of value in your advice and everything you write about becoming a visible authority makes sense. But it’s a lot. Where do you suggest I start?'
First of all, I love this question. I love seeing the consultants feel inspired and ready to take on this year. After the year we’ve all had, it is amazing to feel hope in the air.
And yes, I know exactly where many of the consultants are coming from. You want to become more visible on the market, you want your target audience to see you as the ultimate authority in the field, and you want to create a reliable pipeline of work that will allow you to grow your consulting business.
Here is where I suggest you start: Narrow down your focus!
Nothing else matters until you do this. It’s almost impossible these days to be successful if you keep focusing on multiple domains as a consultant. There’s too much saturation in the very crowded consulting market, too many competitors doing the same thing. Without focus, you will join the losing battle in both visibility and trust-building with prospects. Don’t forget: your focused (and specialized) competitor is only one click away! (see also my 2021 Consulting Trends to learn more)
I offer a lot of advice on how to consistently develop high-quality educational content as a consultant. I teach how openly sharing consulting experiences, learnings, successes, challenges, struggles, and failures will massively build trust and grow visibility, etc.
However, none of this know-how will yield desirable results until you narrow down your focus. Your content will not resonate without the right audience, you will constantly find yourself struggling to differentiate between the value of incoming opportunities to your business, you will fail at freeing up time to grow your visibility.
So I propose the following exercise (I am doing this with my clients who are in the process of narrowing down their focus):
- Step 1: Take out a piece of paper and a pen. Make a list of all the client work you’ve done over the last 3 years.
- Step 2: Identify patterns – find a subject area that clients were willing to pay the most for, where you provided the most value.
- Step 3: Zoom in on that subject and identify what made it more lucrative than the others. What are the pains you were solving for your clients? How did you get them successfully from point A to point B? What could you teach others in the same shoes?
- Step 4: Write down all the pain points in this niche area and identify what relevant offering you can present to prospects in this field. Start with a bullet point list of your offering and critically evaluate each. Then, shorten it to one single sentence of what you do and how you do it.
Once you’ve done this exercise, start testing and validating your offering. I am pushing all my clients like hell to go out quickly and validate their value proposition. We live in an agile age, we don’t invent concepts and find out, one year later, nobody is interested.
You should know this within a few weeks. No waste of time and money, no unnecessary risk-taking, no creeping uncertainty, and no hallucinatory sleepless nights.
Also, do this:
- Competition check: see who else is working in this narrow niche and how they promote similar expertise
- Audience identification: identify the prospects and the companies that you believe are struggling with the pain points that you address
- Validate: Talk to existing and past clients about these pains and your offering. Finetune, iterate, adjust, iterate again. And again!
- Iterate: Once you’ve validated your (new) narrow focus, you are good to go for a somewhat bigger iteration. You can start creating a transformational offering/product, brainstorm a content plan, develop a content calendar, set up your content machine, start growing your TLC (from Traffic to Leads to Clients), start nurturing your existing and ex-clients with your latest findings/trends, etc.
My final advice: move to a narrow focus step by step.
You don’t have to throw away everything you did at once. But you can already start creating special focus (e.g. offering, content & visibility) on your strongest expertise domain. You can leave ‘the old domains’ behind in a (careful) fade-out approach.
The Next Big Question: Luk, you promote sharing all our knowledge. From a client value and trust-building standpoint, I understand. But what about the competition? Aren’t we feeding them with all our expertise? What are your thoughts about ‘dealing with competitors’ when sharing our expertise?
Would you like to send a question for one of the following newsletter editions? Please send it to me here.
