A daily email about monetizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.
đź’ˇ The wrong screwdriver
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A longtime reader wrote in yesterday with an epiphany after a coaching arrangement went south. She mentions she had hired a business coach who may have been too generalist for her needs, and in turn she saw first-hand the benefit of specialization not just as a consultant, but as a client as well. She also closed with a brilliant metaphor for niching I’d never heard before… Lightly edited for brevity, shared anonymously with permission.
[Reader first describes that the coach had cancelled her remaining sessions after a year lapsed.] ​ ​I wasn’t really planning on getting online with her again because in the interim I’ve found people who’ve been able to help me catch blindspots, listen carefully to provide insight, and actually change my outlook which thus changes my motivation ​ ​I share this with you because with those aforementioned interim people/peers/mentors I’ve found, they’ve been profoundly more helpful because: 1) They’re actual practitioners of my craft or closely related. ​2) They’re facing similar business issues so they can speak a lot closer to them.​ ​ I realized that if I wanted a coach, I should have looked/hired for someone to fix my specific problems in my specific domain(s). ​ I had a mix of marketing and business structure questions and she seemed like someone who could bring clarity because she said she could help with these things. ​ However, in hindsight, even when I look at her site, her service was actually a generalist offering and I wasn’t a good client fit because I needed/wanted more specific direction, and I suppose people come to her as a mess of issues and I was farther along than I thought. ​ So I think in my case your thing about offering a very specific thing applies, and perhaps as a buyer, to look for a specific thing too! ​ You could use a flathead screwdriver on a Phillips screw but the process will be slow, and so tedious for so little progress! Every day a new metaphor for niching and specialization 🪛 ​ 💡 -Wes |
đź’ˇ The Lightbulb
A daily email about monetizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.