A Mindshare community member had a great question about how narrow to go with your niche when just starting out as a new consultant.
Here’s the gist of his question:
I’m currently in-house at what would probably be classed as a B2B manufacturer.
The plan is to step into strategy/advisory within the next 6 months.
So with my current experience, I see it as an easy step to niche further into B2B – helping B2B manufacturers grow by transforming their marketing.
However, the company I work for is actually a manufacturer/service provider in the fire safety space. As a result a lot of my experience is how to target, position, market etc to a pretty specific ICP.
So my options would/could be:
1) General B2B
2) Manufacturers
3) Fire Safety & Security companies (B2B focussed but not all will be manufacturers)Some of my thoughts on 3 come of the back of going to a big fire safety expo recently—there are a lot of companies with bad websites/branding spending a lot of money on their marketing!
I’m just concerned I could narrow myself too much.
As always, any thoughts are greatly received.
This is a great question that I answered in the community but wanted to give greater nuance to with a long-form audio recording.
The question really is: how niche do you go when leaving a job and starting a consulting practice?
In this episode, I talk about factors like:
- The amount of runway you have
- The size of the market
- Access to the target market in your network
- What things you’re credible at
- The benefits of staying broader at first
- Alignment of your niche with your genuine interests
- And general strategies for transitioning out of a job and into consulting with less risk
If you’re thinking of making the leap from employment to consulting and aren’t sure how niche to go, this episode is for you.