Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Strategy Advisor and Mentor

The Agency Model is Broken: Conflict of Incentives

We need to address an issue that is prevalent within the traditional marketing agency and consulting model. It exists in other industries, too.

The issue: There is an inherent conflict of interest in giving advice (i.e. strategy) while offering implementation (i.e. tactical work) at the same time.

Even the most ethical agencies consultants are faced with this dilemma—whether knowingly or not.

At first glance, this may come across as insulting to other digital marketing service providers, but it should not be taken that way.

This isn’t an ethical issue. It’s a conflict of alignment of interests. It’s an economic issue.

The problem is based on three premises:

Premise 1: As a business, you will eventually require marketing advice and someone to implement it for you.

Premise 2: An agency or consultant who offers advice and implementation are financially incentivized to sell more of the implementation (and therefore increasing revenue for themselves).

Premise 3: A person who offers certain services is financially incentivized to offer those services at the possible exclusion of other services they do not offer.

To be perfectly clear, I’m not calling consultants or agencies unethical. They’re not.

The vast majority are honest and ethical individuals, capable of achieving exceptional results.

But there’s always the background conflict. They want to give you unbiased advice, but there are financial implications around whether you pursue certain marketing initiatives or not. After all, they get paid mostly to implement.

There’s no way around that when you offer both advice and implementation.

How I’m different

I’ve transitioned my business into primarily digital strategy and implementation management services.

That means I offer strategic oversight of my clients’ digital marketing for a fixed fee, while also managing the implementation and measuring the results.

However, the key difference is that since my fees are fixed, I don’t get paid any more or less for implementation work.

As a result, I am not motivated to sell you something that will lead to me earning more money. Instead, I make my money by delivering ROI-positive results consistently over time.

Part of my service involves bringing the right team into place where necessary, and putting them into direct relationship with your business. If I get hit by the bus or you no longer require my services, you retain the implementation team.

Contrast that to an agency, where if you stop working with them, their entire team goes with them, and you need to start from scratch.

Another part of my job is helping your internal team members to perform their digital marketing-related roles in a more unified and cohesive way through data, guidance, and training.

Why I do it this way

I choose to consult exclusively on strategy for a few reasons.

#1 – I prefer to work with companies as a partner and advocate instead of a supplier who sells something.

#2 – Strategy and implementation management is what I do best, so I want to focus more on doing that.

#3 – Companies need it. Badly.

Business owners and executives are currently managing their digital initiatives and often multiple vendors, trying to determine what is good advice and work product, and what is not. The wrong people are being held accountable.

My job is to vet and oversee everything and to work with the business owner/executive on achieving business results, not tactical wins.

To put it into perspective, let’s look at a couple real-world examples.

Real-World Example #1: The Fiduciary

In the financial world, there is a type of financial advisor known as a fiduciary.

Fiduciaries do not gain financially when you choose the products and investments they recommend. Their advice comes at a fixed fee.

In fact, a fiduciary is legally responsible to act in your best interest.

Contrast that to the wealth advisors (who are valuable and also not unethical) who make a commission or take a management fee to watch your investments. There’s an inherent conflict there, even in the well-intentioned.

Real-World Example #2: The Nutritionist

Another analogy is that of a nutritionist. They tell you what to eat, but they don’t make any extra money when you go out to buy the groceries.

They make money through helping you achieve healthy outcomes and by earning your repeat business over time.

Contrast that to a butcher (this is not a knock against butchers either).

If you ask them what to eat, they’re likely going to offer you meat. There’s a conflict there if you’re depending on them for holistic nutritional advice (which you probably aren’t doing anyway).

Fiduciaries and nutritionists succeed by giving you advice that is as sound and unbiased as possible. They actively measure the performance of their advice against expectations and provide ongoing iterative guidance on navigating the next steps in the best ways possible.

Back to traditional agencies

Most services provided by marketing consultants and agencies are heavily intertwined with the implementation work.

That means they are incentivized to sell you solutions that will at the same time benefit them financially. You’re forced to judge the merits of each decision and determine if their advice is sound and in your best interest.

As the buyer, you are hoping you’re making the best decisions possible given what you’re being told. But unless you’re particularly savvy with this digital marketing stuff, you’re really only guessing.

As a result, you create a semi-arbitrary budget and ask your suppliers to stay within it. Or you assign tasks to them and hope it adds up to the business results you’re seeking.

The model is broken, and that’s part of why I offer digital strategy as a standalone service.

“Hacking” the 5AM Club

I’m currently on “workation” – doing some slow travel in Europe while working full-time remotely.

Being in Europe means I am six hours ahead of my clients, so I am able to get a head start on my day compared to my usual working hours.

To make managing the time zone differences easier, I have set all my clocks to Eastern Standard Time.  When I wake up at 11am, it’s actually 5am Toronto time. Thus, I’ve “hacked” waking up early, and with none of the groggy and dark early mornings to content with.

I’ve always wondered what life would be like if I were the uber-productive type that goes to bed at 9pm and wakes up at 5am every day. Even though I’m not technically waking up at 5am local time, it still feels like I am.

So what are the results? Am I more productive? Is this the sacred ground we dream about, reserved exclusively for the authentic, overachieving type-A’s? I’m not so sure.

On the one hand, it’s great having all of this time in the morning to ease into my day. I spend longer at the gym (I’m on a routine now), and when I don’t go to the gym, I can go to the market for fresh groceries, or walk around the new streets where I’m staying (currently, I’m in Valencia, Spain).

Here’s a tweet after one of my morning walkabouts in Spain:

On the other hand, I now tend to work almost right up until I fall asleep. It seems like I have simply shifted when I have my free time.

The mornings are usually my most productive times of the day. When I lived in Toronto, I would either wake up and go to the gym for 20-30 minutes, then begin work, or I would make a coffee, work for a few hours, then hit the gym, then resume my day.

Overall, the main benefit to waking up at “5am” is that I have much more time to spend on my workouts and I am much more rested when I wake up. I don’t need an alarm clock – I sleep until I am fully rested.

I also don’t feel rushed in the mornings, but I do have the background sense in my mind that 9am will come around soon and people will start sending me emails. It’s a low-level stress that can’t be avoided.

The downside to this new routine is that by the end of the working day, I am fairly tired (mentally) but have little time to unwind. I used to like spending a few hours at the end of my day simply relaxing and watching Netflix or reading something on my Kindle.

Now it feels like it’s all work until bed time. I’ll do a little bit of reading before nodding off to sleep. Sometimes I’ll watch something for a while first, depending on my workload.

The verdict is out on this one – I don’t know whether I am more or less productive. I can’t help but feel like there’s some degree of hype associated with waking up at 5am, especially for the “average person”.

I get why Tim Cook might do it. As Apple’s CEO, I imagine the early hours are the only time he gets to himself.  Preparing himself mentally for what I can only guess are long, arduous days is probably essential.

I also understand why people who work in an office all day might want to wake up at 5am, since they don’t have the flexibility in the day to exercise or do other personal activities.

But for me? I like having freedom over my day, waking up at a reasonable time, and having some time to unwind in the evening.

I’ll keep the schedule  while I am here, but I’d be curious to know what works for you.

Drop me a line in the comments or tweet to me.

Slow Travelling and Working Abroad

It’s been more than two years since I logged out of my corporate 9-5 desk job. I remember the day clearly: it held a mix of anxiousness, excitement, apprehension, and optimism. You name it, I felt it.

The day I walked out for the last time, I felt something else as well – something you might not expect to be a typical response.

I felt guilt.

I felt like I was playing hooky; like I was expected to be at work.

It’s that same feeling as when you skip a period in high school, but you can’t enjoy it because you feel your absence is noted and tangible.

My new life as an entrepreneur felt foreign to me, even though this was my second entrepreneurial venture.

It was exciting but shrouded in all kinds of emotions.

Day One

When I woke up that first Monday morning in my new life, I had no structure. My wife, Kaitlind, reminded me that just because I was self-employed, it did not mean that I could sleep in past 9 am.

I went to my computer. Or worked out. I don’t remember exactly. But I followed the pattern I was accustomed to at my corporate job – sitting at my desk all day doing whatever needed my attention.

With some thought and experiment, I soon developed an intentional routine for my new life. I set aside my mornings for writing, research, reading, discovery, and sometimes putting out potential fires before the day begins.

Following that, I do my task work. The things that I personally need to get done. Finally, I start having phone calls and meetings as the afternoon draws on.

Two years later, that routine is pretty well developed, mixing in working out and meditation where and when I can.

But now, I’m starting a new routine. Only this time, I am not throwing everything out the window and starting from scratch. I’m merely transporting my routine to another country.

Slow Travelling and Working Abroad

My wife and I are fairly newly married; it’s been about 6 months. We live in a furnished condominium in the Distillery District in Toronto.

The unit came furnished because the landlords originally expected to make it into an executive rental suite, but found out it was not as easy as it sounded. We accepted, since the furniture we had was neither complete nor of high quality (reminiscent of our university days).

Our possessions can realistically fit inside of a cargo van. I prefer to live as minimalistically as possible, likely due to the fact that I have moved over two dozen times in my life. Every time you move, you get rid of stuff instead of lugging it to the next place.

We realized that this may be the last time in our life when we will own just our essential possessions. No mortgage, no kids, no car, no jumbo jet. My wife, also a recent corporate ex-pat, was ready for a change, so we took this as an opportunity to put “settling down” on hold for a few more months while we pursued our goals of travelling and working remotely.

For the next while, I will be working full-time on my business, as usual. My clients rarely see me in person, so there should be very little difference to their experience in working with me.

The trains will continue running. I will continue working and being available during North American business hours.

I will not be backpacking nor trying to see it all – I will be working 10 hours a day, as I do now, except from an AirBNB or local coworking space in one of the cities we are planning to visit.

Kaitlind will help out in my business in more ways than she probably knows.  She’s smarter than she even realizes.

The Fear

Any time you tread off the beaten path, you get the Fear. You feel it in your gut.

The upside potential is high, but the downside potential is present too. There’s always a potential downside, even in your safe 9-5. What if you get fired or laid off? That’s worse than losing a client. That’s losing all the eggs and the basket.

Naturally, we are excited, but also a bit nervous. That same feeling of guilt I felt when I left my corporate job to pursue my goals is starting to rear it’s head again in both Kaitlind and I.

Should we be doing this? Are we being selfish? Will people think we are crazy? What will my clients think? There’s never a perfectly solid answer.

The Rationality

At the end of the day, we rationalize through the cumulation of the following factors:

  • We don’t have any furniture, mortgage, car payments, nor kids.
  • We want to move homes anyway, so why not travel in between places we live?
  • Kaitlind wanted to make a career transition, so why not travel and work before hunkering down at her next gig?
  • We want to see more of the world before we die. When will there be a better time?
  • My business works remotely already. I have clients with whom I have never met or only met once. So, why not work from another country while doing so?
  • Since I’m able to work along the way, we won’t use our savings. There is only the “opportunity cost” from losing Kaitlind’s income for a few months, which we hope to offset in a few ways.
  • We have saved enough money to have safety nets under safety nets.

The way people work is changing. More businesses are hiring consultants or contractors to keep their labour costs down. They are are finding it more efficient to hire people like me instead of an under-utilized employee or one who tries to do too many things.

I believe I am an example of this change. You could call it “just-in-time” labour and expertise.

Closing Thoughts

One day we are going to die.

It’ll happen when we least expect it (ideally in about 90 years from now).

Will we look back and say, “we should have played it safer. Put our heads down, waited until later to pursue our life experiences.”?

Or will we say, “those were some of the best days of our lives”?

The story is yet to be written, but we placed a bet on the latter.

Now it’s time to sit down and do the work to make it all possible.

Curious about where we will be travelling? I’ll write about it again soon.

Subscribe here to follow along

Slow Business: Partners vs. Suppliers

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I run a slow business.

It’s not because I’m lazy, disorganized, or disinterested.

Instead, I like to take my time with things and get them done right the first time. I don’t like to do work twice.

I give credit to my dad who instilled this idea into me as a kid when doing the weekly chores. He would inspect my vacuuming work and tell me when I missed a spot (or many). I would have to haul out the vacuum cleaner again and essentially redo the job I did poorly the first time. It stuck with me.

It stuck with me.

In particular, I like to develop new business relationships slowly. After all, you can’t rush trust, which is the foundation for my work.

I also like to be slow and methodical with my project work and retainers. That’s how I develop the best strategies and outcomes.

Of course, there’s a time and a place to act swiftly. We all have deadlines to meet. But that’s not what I mean.

I have learned that the more slow and intentional I am, the better things are for everybody. As a digital strategy consultant, my job is to get business results for my clients’ through their digital (and offline) marketing.

In order to do that, we must first build a level of mutual trust and respect for one another. We also need to educate each other about our businesses; how we work, our challenges, our goals, and in many cases, intimate financial details.

Great work requires time and space. The analysis, research, and strategizing work is an often-overlooked part of my profession. But it’s absolutely crucial.

Partners vs. Suppliers

There are two categories of service providers: partners and suppliers.

Suppliers are order takers. They do what you ask them to do, and you better know what you need, because you’re not really paying them to think about the business outcomes. You’re paying them to do the job you ask them to do.

Partners, on the other hand, are focused on creating alignment with your business goals. It’s less about what you do, and more focused on achieving the desired business outcomes.

The difference is subtle but important.

I prefer to be a partner with my clients. My clients tend to be smart individuals who understand how marketing and digital strategy works. And they hire me to bridge the gap between the marketing they do and the business results they are looking for.

Often there’s not a straight line between the two. Business is complex by nature.

A supplier will sell their clients whatever they ask for. A partner stops and thinks about the feasibility of their clients’ requests, and looks at it through the lens of whether it will achieve the outcome they really desire.

A partner advises on direction. Strategy plus tactics. The focus squarely on desired outcomes.

Mutual Understanding and Care

Creating a true partnership requires a mutual understanding of both parties’ goals and interests. It takes time and trust to do this.

A partner cares about your ambitions and aspirations. A partner works with you to achieve them.

In contrast, a supplier relationship is primarily transactional, which can work in many situations. After all, I don’t need to partner with my local grocery store to be happy. But I also expect less from them.

If you ever decide to do business with me, you’ll know that I care about your true objectives.

I can’t afford to be less than perfectly honest with my clients, nor them with me, and I take my time in the beginning to build the foundation for a successful partnership.

That’s why I go slowly at first, and why I take my time with projects.

In exchange, I expect you to care about my interests as well. I expect you to care about creating a mutually beneficial relationship, founded on openness and trust, where together we look out for our best interests and help one another achieve our personal and professional goals.

This thought probably goes back to my ideas around creating a business utopia, but it’s grounded in a place that makes sense to me.

It will make sense to my best clients as well, but it will be foreign to those not suited to work with me.

It’s the reason I like working with business owners the most: they tend to be idealists, like me.

Paying Yourself

Last week, I was invited to be a panelist along with two other entrepreneurs at a local meetup for startups.

Beside me in the hot seats were owners of two very different but successful companies.

One panelist, Avery Swartz, owns a tech/digital marketing training company called Camp Tech. The other guest, Jackie Schwarz, owns a dance program for youths, whereby the students make their own music videos and develop self-confidence along the way.

Avery has, to this day, never paid herself from her training business. Instead, she consults on the side to pay her bills. Her business is growing steadily as she continues to reinvest her earnings back into the company. Smart move.

Jackie is now starting to take some income from her company, but she has already sold multiple franchises of her business and is on pace to sell many more.

I have no doubt that both of these companies will be million-dollar businesses soon if they aren’t already. But what strikes me as interesting is that they put their business’ health before their own personal profits.

Never did they eat the fruits of their labour until (in Jackie’s case) the fruits were plentiful enough to eat AND grow the next crop at the same time.

Let’s continue with the fruit analogy.

When you’re a farmer, you start with a few seeds and perhaps a small plot of land. It’s your job to grow those seeds and nurture them until you have a ready harvest.

The problem I see with many startups is that when they plant the seeds in the beginning, they are already hungry. They have no stockpile or alternative means of survival.

So when the first harvest arrives, they need to eat some; half, most, or any.

And now they have the same amount of seeds that they had in the beginning, or even less. So, they put them back into the ground for another season and hope for a larger harvest next time.

Do you see the problem with this? By eating the fruits of their labour too soon, they never grow their output. They eat the fruit and the seeds, so the next harvest is simply a repeat of the last season, or worse.

When you’re starting a business, the biggest piece of advice I can give you is to:

  1. Have a stockpile so you don’t need to eat your own fruit too early.
  2. Reinvest as much of it as you can for as long as you can.

Does this work in the real world?

Many will know Amazon for the success that they are today. And if you follow the stock markets, you’ll know that for a LONG time people waited for Amazon to turn a significant profit, which they started doing somewhere around early 2015 (but I could be wrong so don’t hold me to that).

Nonetheless, we’re talking about more than a decade with almost no profit and major reinvestment.

They simply kept reinvesting their profits into new business models, new ventures, lowering overhead, etc., until one day they finally decided to turn a real profit.

Former Amazon Employee described their business strategy back in 2013 like this:

To me, a profitless business model is one in which it costs you $2 to make a glass of lemonade but you have to sell it for $1 a glass at your lemonade stand. But if you sell a glass of lemonade for $2 and it only costs you $1 to make it, and you decide business is so great you’re going to build a lemonade stand on every street corner in the world so you can eventually afford to move humanity into outer space or buy a newspaper in your spare time, and that requires you to invest all your profits in buying up some lemon fields and timber to set up lemonade franchises on every street corner, that sounds like many things to me, but it doesn’t sound like a charitable organization.

I was lucky enough back in 2014 to realize this truth.

While I was new to the stock investment game at the time, I knew they couldn’t hold off on taking profits forever without major shareholder upheaval.

I also knew they were investing in an entirely new business model, consisting of cloud services (AWS). I knew that their cloud services were slowly and quietly becoming massive.

You’d pay fractions of a dollar to upload or download gigabytes of data, and big organizations and small alike were using their hosting service to host their entire platforms. This was the future for Amazon, and the retail business was the tip of the iceberg.

So I invested in Amazon at about $330 per stock, and today it’s worth over $850. Not a bad ROI in roughly 2 years.

The moral of the story

The moral of the story is that if you truly want to build a business with a moat around it (lots of capital and a competitive advantage), you need to invest as much as humanly possible back into the business.

Buy the tools you need to grow, invest in the next employee or team member, take that course, go to that conference, spend that money on things that will enable you to sell more of what you sell in the future.

Don’t squeeze the oxygen from your business too early – it doesn’t matter what vanity metrics your take-home salary is at the end of the year. What matters is the long game.

But you need to find a way to survive while the long game plays out, and that’s where your resourcefulness as an entrepreneur comes into play. It shouldn’t be beneath you to have a job or side hustle while you build your early-stage business.

That’s what I did and I wouldn’t do it any other way.

Restrictions in Business

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You hear so much about growth, scale, rapid execution, and innovation. All of those things can be assets to a company – and are in many cases. They are the reasons we have advanced as humans.

But what about creating restrictions instead? Could they make your business healthier in some cases, or would it simply stunt its development?

A thought experiment…

Imagine:

  • You can only work 4 hours per day
  • You can only have 10 clients at a time
  • You can only have 1 business for the rest of your life
  • You can only offer 1 service for the rest of your life

If it was possible:

  • What does that business look like?
  • What does your life look like?
  • What does you be doing differently?
  • Does it allow you to be more creative?
  • Does your business be more lucrative?
  • Does you be happier?

In a perfect world, I would own the simplest business: Lucrative, not time-intensive, zero complexity, original, creative.

That’s my business utopia – but is it realistic? Probably not.

But can restrictions actually enhance your focus, creativity, and improve your business?

Probably, yes.

Plan of execution…

In 2017, my plan is to trim my service offering at KVNW to the core essentials. Trim the fat, make it more efficient, systemized, and lean. How will I do this?

My first plan is to create products. Specifically, productized services and information products. Less custom work and more fixed-scope work for people who will benefit the most. I’ll still offer custom solutions, but at a higher premium.

It will mean cutting out certain service offerings, consolidating and simplifying what I offer, saying no to certain opportunities, referring out clients who are no longer a good fit, systemizing my process, making work outputs repeatable and consistent, and focusing on my best clients.

I’m sure there will be reports on my progress on this blog, and if it doesn’t work, then I can always return to the complexity of custom solutions with varying methods of delivery.

What will you do to simplify your business, and what restrictions will you put in place to help your business grow? Leave a comment below.

Client Work vs. Creating Content

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Don’t feel like reading? Listen to this article instead.

When you sell your knowledge and expertise as a service, the temptation every morning is to wake up and start tackling the tasks at hand.

The problem with that is, it keeps you on the hamster wheel. You are forever in the process of doing the client work, and not working on building your business through creating an audience.

And there is leverage in creating an audience. You can create products or services and sell them at scale, and quickly, but only after you have done the hard work of building your audience first.

That part has no real shortcuts. Just daily, weekly, monthly consistency; producing interesting content and building trust one word at a time.

Today I have plenty to do. But lately I’ve been victim (if you can call it that) of pursuing client work first thing in the morning. Despite having a month where I wrote nearly 1,000 words per day, I’ve now let the habit slip. Like a person with a new years resolution, it’s always easier to stay in bed instead of hitting the gym.

But today, I hit the gym (both literally and metaphorically). I wrote this content and now I can move onto other things.

With any luck, you’ll identify with parts of this in your own struggle. And with any luck, it will reaffirm the importance of putting your own future first by investing in the content you create, in order to build an audience for tomorrow that will allow you to sell your offerings at scale.

Today I did not consume, I created. I did not react to client work, I created first. And I call that a success.

Listen instead

The Tie-In Strategy

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If you’re doing content marketing, you should be focused on communicating to your prospective, current, and former clients as much as possible.

Not always at the same time, of course, but definitely creating for each group consistently.

On the one hand, you need to write content that addresses the needs of your prospective clients. For example, writing about their challenges and how to overcome those with your services.

This builds trust and drives leads.

On the other hand, you also need to continue to develop your relationships with your existing clients in order to keep generating repeat business and referrals. But they don’t always want to hear about how your company offers solutions. They already know.

So how does one create content on a regular basis that serves all parties?

The answer is to focus on the common challenges and aspirations that your prospects and clients face, then tie in how your company aids in helping them overcome that challenge or achieve their goals.

With this strategy, it’s not all about you, your business, or your solutions. It’s mostly about the client or prospect — their challenges and aspirations, and your insight into those topics from various perspectives.

I call it the Tie-In Strategy.

It’s not a strategy that you will use in every piece of content you create, but the more content you do create, the more this strategy will help to keep your content interesting: both to you and your readers.

To learn more about the Tie-In Strategy, read the following article from my agency’s blog.

Link: How to Attract and Keep Clients Using The “Tie-In” Content Marketing Strategy

Create Bad Content

Create bad content and put it out into the world. Okay, try your best of course, but don’t let the idea of perfection hold you back.

When you’re just starting out, done is better than perfect. And if you’re the type of person to analyze what you do so much that it limits your ability to deliver, then you need to get over that… quickly.

The world isn’t perfect, and your creations won’t be either. Especially in the beginning. But you will have time to make things better. With time and consistency, you’ll start seeing the results you intend. Plus, nobody will even notice you in the beginning anyway.

Publishing is the only way to get past the fear of creating. Like all things, creating takes practice. It’s a skill. And even though we can all communicate with words, some are better at it than others.

When you first start out, your writing will be poor. But what isn’t poor on your first attempt? Imagine you gave up trying to speak because you couldn’t do it well. Or you stopped trying to walk after falling a few times. What would you be capable of today?

We all need to swallow our pride when it comes to publishing work that we create. It doesn’t matter what it is, we are going to be bad at it at first. But despite that, we need to publish our work.

Try it and be willing to risk looking foolish in front of others. Be vulnerable. Ship your work. Let it sit for a while. Reflect. Then get better at it, with practice.

#DigitalStrategist

I’ve been inspired lately by the idea of creating a community. I think about it a lot.

I recently read (well, listened, actually) to a book called The Membership Economy by Robbie Kellman Baxter. And while the book wasn’t necessarily life changing, it got me thinking again about how exciting and fun it would be to build a community to both learn from and serve.

“But who do I serve?”, was my first question.

Do I serve an audience of people who resemble my agency clients? Those people are mostly entrepreneurs of service-based businesses. But is that enough of a thread to bring them together? My gut instinct is that it is not. Although I know it could be, in theory. There are far stranger niches, after all.

My clients are typically busy business owners who care just enough about the work I do to make sure it gets business (read: financial) results for them. However, they are not seemlingly the type to join a community of people who could theoretically range from dog walkers to corporate lawyers.

I even went so far as to claim a stake in the sand with the idea by registering a domain called Servicepreneur.com. I register a lot of domains. I’m one of those people who registers a domain with every idea I have. But I’ll probably never use it.

One of the great things about the Internet is that no matter how small your niche is, there’s probably a community for it. The best part is that the smaller your niche, the more traction you’re likely to get with that audience — at least, in theory.

For example, Servicepreneurs are anybody who owns a service-based business. And that accounts for a LOT of people. But their business challenges range so dramatically that it’s hard to put them in the same group.

Even within the realm of service entrepreneurs, I personally only solve one problem for them, which is attracting and retaining the right clients. What do I know about human resources that they don’t?

Aside from that – it’s a big world with a lot of industries and it doesn’t make sense to add a mining consultant with a hair stylist and get them to speak the same language about the problems they are facing.

Finding a niche

So what are some good niches to create a community around?

Some examples are:

  • Industries
  • Interests
  • Professions
  • Working and Lifestyle
  • and Relatable Professional & Personal Challenges

Theoretically, the list could go on and on, but this broadly covers the ideas I have right now.

A good friend of mine, Dmitry Kornyukhov, started a community for translators. Rather than creating a forum or chatroom, he went a step further and hacked together a WordPress blogging platform that all members can publish content on themselves. He gave a voice and community to the translation industry.

It’s pretty amazing what he accomplished actually. Especially because he a) had the idea, b) built it himself and c) is completely self-taught.

The community now has roughly 2,000 members and is thriving under his leadership after about one year. He took the membership concept and successfully brought it to his industry.

So what will I start?

I have tons of ideas, and it’s not easy to pick one. Another idea I liked was Remotepreneur, which would be for business owners who do business remotely (online) and/or have a team of remote workers. A distributed workforce as they call it.

I’m a remotepreneur and my team is entirely remote. Although I do see about half of my clients and some of my contractors at least once or twice a year.

Who knows, maybe I will launch that idea one day. But for now it’s another idea on the shelf (with the domain to go with it *wink*).

Enter: #DigitalStrategist

The last idea I have is one that speaks to me directly. I’m a digital strategist. It’s a hard job because it relies on knowing a lot about a broad spectrum of Internet technology and marketing.

To be an effective digital strategist, you need to know about fundamental business principles, like cash flow and creating a break-even analysis, and of course the principles of marketing as a whole.

But you also need to know about how the Internet works; how people use it to make purchase decisions, human psychology, design fundamentals, web development, search engines, digital advertising, copywriting, content creation, email communications, public relations, social media and the list goes on literally forever.

And despite how challenging it is to reign in the complexity of near-unlimited options for achieving business goals through digital channels, there’s no real centralized place for us strategists to chat about ideas and get feedback from one another.

The term “Digital Strategist” has been around for over a decade and has since seen an upward trend consistently over time. This indicates that the role is not only sticking around, but getting more popular.

Also known as digital marketing strategist, digital media strategist, content strategist, social media strategist, “strategist”, UI/UX strategist, web strategist and various other renditions, this role is becoming ever more important as the need for a wide breadth of knowledge increases with every new technology and tactic.

For that reason, I’m investing into creating a Slack community exclusively for self-identified digital strategists (in all of the various forms). It will be called none other than #DigitalStrategist.

Digital strategists are people in an organization who create the roadmap of digital marketing tactics to be used to achieve measurable business results. This person oversees the implementation of the technical and tactical work, but usually does not complete most or all of the tactical work themselves. But of course some do that too.

I don’t know how big the group will become, but significant growth is not the primary focus. The point will be to make it a tight-nit community of people who care about the work they do; people who want to be a member of a community of like-minded professionals with whom to share ideas and reign in the complexity of our jobs together.

Is this you? Shoot me a message on Twitter and we can get you on board.