Positioning a consulting business: how to become the one they call

Available to everyone means memorable to no one

Positioning yourself as broadly useful makes you hard to remember, and being hard to remember is the whole problem. If nobody knows who you're for, nobody knows to think of you.

The resistance to narrowing is completely rational, so let me put it fairly. You have fifteen or twenty years of range. You can help a hospital and a software company. Turning away good work when the pipeline is thin feels reckless.

But look at what breadth does to the sentence someone repeats about you. "She's a really good consultant" isn't a referral. It is a compliment.

Here is the part that changes people's minds. Narrowing doesn't reduce the work available to you. It changes whether you get considered at all:

• A person with a specific problem looks for someone who solves that problem.
• Being the obvious answer for one thing means being called first, which is worth more than being on a long list for six things.
• Expertise in one area reads as expertise generally. Being known as the expert for one group makes other groups want you too, while being known as the expert for nobody does not.

And it's worth being honest about scale. You need a handful of clients a year. Even a narrow slice of a B2B market contains vastly more organizations than you could serve. The fear of running out assumes a market far smaller than the one you're standing in.

Choosing who you serve is an economics decision first

Before anything about affinity or interest, your ideal client has to be able to pay your fee. That is the criterion most consultants leave out, and leaving it out is how you end up with a lovingly-defined ideal client who can't afford you.

The order that works runs from the money outward:

1. Can they pay? Organizations of a size and type where your number is a normal expense rather than an exception.
2. Do they've the problem often enough that this is a repeatable business rather than a one-off?
3. Do they know they've it? Selling to someone who hasn't yet noticed the problem is a much longer road.
4. Can you reach them? They gather somewhere, professionally, where you could be consistently present.
5. Do you want them? Last, and it does matter, because you'll spend years with these people.

Most consultants run that list in reverse, starting with the clients they enjoy and discovering the economics later.

There is a specific version of this worth naming. If your number requires clients who can pay it and your current clients cannot, you don't have a pricing problem. You have a client-selection problem, and no amount of negotiating skill fixes it.

The good news is that this is a decision. You aren't looking for a truth about yourself. You are choosing a group and deciding to become known to them.

And you already have the evidence to choose well. Look at your last twenty engagements and mark the ones that went smoothly, paid properly and produced a result you'd put your name on. The pattern in that short list is usually the position, sitting there in your own history.

Look for what the good ones had in common on the client's side: the size of the organization, the moment they were in, who brought you in and what had just happened to them. That is the address you're already good at reaching, and it has the advantage of being demonstrably true rather than aspirational. You have the case studies for it already.

Say it the way your clients would say it

Describe the problem in the words your client uses when she is complaining about it, not the words your profession uses when it's being precise.

This is the most mechanical fix in this guide and it produces the largest change, because it decides whether someone recognizes herself in the first two lines.

Your industry vocabulary is precise, and it's also invisible to the person with the problem. She isn't searching for organizational effectiveness. She is thinking that nothing gets decided and every meeting repeats the last one.

A few reliable translations:

• She doesn't want a change management framework. She wants people to stop ignoring the new system.
• She isn't seeking go-to-market strategy. She wants to know which of these four things to do first.
• She doesn't need executive alignment. She needs her two vice presidents to stop contradicting each other in front of the board.

Getting this right takes listening. The phrases are already in your inbox: what clients wrote when they first contacted you, the way they described the problem before you renamed it. That is the source material, and it is better than anything you'd invent.

One caution. Using their words doesn't mean dumbing anything down. Lead with the symptom they recognize, and let the sophistication show up in how you talk about the fix.

Run a position as a ninety-day experiment before committing to it

Treat a new position as an experiment with an end date, because the fear stopping most consultants is that choosing wrong is permanent.

It isn't permanent. A position is a set of sentences and a choice about where you spend attention, and both are reversible in an afternoon. Framing it as a ninety-day test removes almost all of the risk that's holding you still.

What to change for the test:

• The one line, on your profile and in how you introduce yourself.
• What you write about, aimed at that group and their problem.
• Who you talk to, twenty conversations with people inside the position.

What to leave alone: your existing clients, your fees, your website, and any work already in flight. Changing everything at once means learning nothing, because you'll not know which change did what.

What counts as evidence at ninety days

That last row is the one that panics people. A narrower position produces fewer enquiries and better ones, so counting volume will tell you the experiment failed when it succeeded.

Ninety days isn't long enough to judge revenue, and it's long enough to judge whether the sentence travels. If it does, keep going for a year. If people keep misdescribing you after three months of consistency, the line is wrong, and rewriting it is a smaller job than starting over.

What to do with the work that does not fit

You will keep getting enquiries from outside your position, and having a policy for them beforehand stops each one becoming a fresh negotiation with yourself.

Three reasonable policies, and any of them beats deciding in the moment:

• Take it at a premium. Off-position work costs you more, so price it accordingly and let the number do the deciding.
• Refer it out. Sending good work to someone better placed builds a relationship that returns.
• Take it and say why. A deliberate exception, named as one, so it doesn't become the business by default.

What corrodes a position is the fourth option, which is taking it, telling yourself it's temporary, and never counting how often that has happened.