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 There's always a deeper cut. Ask John Oliver
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Still stuck on niching down? Think that selecting a specific industry, vertical, or psychographic segment will 1) limit your opportunities, or 2) perhaps worse, leave you bored? ​ Regarding limiting your opportunities, remember your magic number. If you can only serve, say 10 clients a year… And assuming you capture 1% of the market, as long as there are 1,000 entities that match your ICP, you’ll have more than enough opportunity to live out your consulting days. ​ Regarding potential boredom, I always think back to a quote from John Oliver. If you’re unfamiliar with his HBO show Last Week Tonight, he and his team deliver a dense, humorous, and biting 30 -minute deep-dive on one thorny topic each episode. US Infrastructure. Drug cartels. They even featured one on consulting firms. He describes how one early episode on prison proved to just scratch the surface of a thorny topic. “I think we learned some big lessons early on. It might have been in the first season, we did one story called “Prison,” and it was about 16 minutes, and that seemed like a long time at the time. And I think what we gradually learned was, it is crazy to try and talk about all the problems with prisons in 16 minutes, especially if two of those minutes are going to be a song with “Sesame Street” characters at the end. So, since then, we’ve basically come back and redone that story in 20 different ways. We’ve talked about prison labor, prison phone calls, prison recidivism, prison re-entry. There are so many different aspects to criminal justice. You can’t just slap “prisons” on it and say, “Oh, we’ve done it now.” I look back at that and do slightly wince.” ​ ​ (via The New York Times) So, what John and his team thought was one episode, turned out to be layered enough to fill an entire season’s worth of shows. This might give you some comfort that as you triangulate your niche, there will always be a deeper cut to scratch your intellectual itch. 💡 -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.