“Let me get you Victor Welling’s number.”

If you want to become the ‘go-to’ person for what you do as a consultant, there’s hardly a better role model than Victor Welling.

He’s the snooty pageant consultant that was brought in urgently to help the hopelessly disheveled FBI agent Gracie Hart get gussied up and ready to be planted in the Miss United States pageant to subvert a terrorist threat.

Yes, I’m talking about the 2000 film, Miss Congeniality.

The film doesn’t give us too much backstory on Michael Caine’s character, Victor, except to say that 10 out of the last 11 years, his client won the pageant.

As Victor says, “The year we lost, the winner was a deaf-mute. You can’t beat that.” Note: Parts of this film have not aged well.

We also aren’t privy to Victor’s pricing conversation with the FBI, but I’d suspect he has a set rate to prepare a client for a pageant. (And perhaps a bonus if they win?)

This puts Victor in the ‘Special Ops’ quadrant of our matrix.

He serves a very specific client with a very specific service. Over time, he’s established a track record impressive enough to be the first name people think of in that specific situation.

Now, while the benefits of the specialist angle may be apparent, specialists can use productization of their services to their benefit in two different ways:

To triage and control the inbound chaos

• Remember, you don’t want to take custom egg orders from everyone​
• Having one or two standard services speeds up the sales cycle and gets you out of proposals, rate negotiations, and other unscalable activities during client delivery

As a stepping stone to other engagements

• An established, standardized service can be a low-risk way to test consultant<>client fit, and for you to prove your value in the client’s context
• Once you’re in, you can proceed to sell more work if you want to…
  (Teaser: that’s the final quadrant…)

Word is still out on if Victor continued to work with Gracie after the pageant…

💡

-Wes