I love chatting with people just entering into a career of full-time consulting who reach out to share my experiences. (If I can help you, get in touch!) One of the first recommendations I always share is that I found it very important to be extremely focused on a single niche as a consultant, at least at the beginning.
Once you nail that niche you can broaden to other focus areas, but first nail that niche.
There are many consultants that profess to be masters of an entire domain, but then it becomes hard for a potential client to differentiate between all of these generalists. Without specific signals about why a generalist is better than another generalist, a client will more than likely use price as a primary deciding factor - exactly what you never want to happen.
Plumber vs handyman
The best analogy here is to think of who you might want to call in the middle of the night when you have a leaking faucet. More than likely any handyman with plumbing experience can help fix this issue, but given the high cost of damages if it isn’t fixed you spring for extra and hire a plumber who you know has experience. Instantly the plumber trumped the choice of a handyman. Price is less of a factor than specialty or skill. However, if you went with a handyman the price between two options suddenly becomes more of a concern.
Consulting options
For consultants, this is a tough choice to make because it means that you will inevitably turn away consulting business that falls outside of your niche. Ultimately, I think this is the right approach as by doing this you will eventually get more leads/referrals within your niche and you will also be able to charge more.
In my own consulting career, I focus very specifically on Product-Led SEO. This is the title of my book as well as the title of the newsletter you are reading. Potential clients that don’t fit within this narrow band might be referred to a better resource; however, for the right clients I will be the most ideal solution because this is my specialty.
In truth, there are never really true masters of an entire domain or vertical. From my experience, nearly every CMO I have ever met, despite needing to be a master of all of marketing with in an organization, are truly just experts at one particular area. This area is usually the one they spent the most time in before they started moving up in the ranks of leadership. This bent towards that one area becomes most apparent when they are given a choice between two distinct areas of investment and most will lean into the channel they like the most because of their own experiences.
Just my opinion but not niching down into a specific focus area isn’t just a less ideal sales tactic, but also is not ideal for career growth as it is truly to difficult to maintain mastery on many different areas across a domain.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic!