For many indie consultants who have rejected the 9-5 of full-time employment, trying to specialize and box yourself in is a path to Burnout and failure
The problem is that good specialization is exceptionally hard. And mediocre specialization has two core problems: 1. It attracts less senior, more tightly defined work that traps you in a mode of repeatable execution work 2. It puts you in a well defined box that grinds against your identity
The advice is correct - IF you can create a narrow positioning, if you can become a visible, trusted expert in a particular niche then you will attract clients. It will solve your problems. But it’s a big IF…
This third agenda is why specializing can lead to burnout. We’re not just looking for product/market fit for our consulting work - but our consulting work is deeply tied to our identity and we need a way to make it sustainable.
By creating a narrow positioning or specialization you make yourself more legible and understandable - you’re essentially optimizing for well-defined work. And well-defined work is less senior, less well paid and less interesting.
strong opinions create the kind of trust and visibility required for senior, ambiguous work.
Signal a creative energy that clients are looking for to catalyze change in their organization
strong opinions are what distribution is made of. Every independent consultant should be working in public in some form - it’s how you generate awareness, clients and visibility.
There’s no easy way to replace the consultant or verify the advice being given. Simply put, oftentimes the client (and sometimes consultant!) are operating outside of normal boundaries.
This kind of taste is hard to signal with a positioning statement. To develop this trust in someone without actively working with them before requires a strong understanding of the person’s point of view and vibe, which is why sharing your point of view in depth matters.
They are looking for a very specific kind of energy - enough energy to change and destabilize the org, to provoke the organization to change, to create momentum for new projects. But not the wrong kind of energy to tear the client’s organization apart
indie consultants bootstrap with beefs.
Rejecting one or more flawed premises driving the disillusionment 5. Adding imaginative alternative premises
None of those articles took me more than a couple of days to write. The work is hard because it takes a certain amount of courage and a good deal of taste. If you don’t feel a bit of an adrenaline rush, a sense of a fight-or-flight, a sense of burning bridges, while working on them, you’re not doing it right.