If you’ve been reading along for any length of time, you’ve heard me talk about the value of specialization.

• When you specialize, it gives you more opportunity to learn and get better results for clients.
• Prospects love to hire specialists – so it makes it easier to get deals to close.
• When you know who you are speaking to, it’s easier to know where to go and what to say.

When you pick a niche, it’s like switching your game to “easy mode.”

This advice to specialize isn’t just something I’ve been saying – it’s pretty standard advice that creative firms’ advisors give.

What we aren’t always good at is advising about how to go about finding a niche and gaining expertise that helps you sell to that niche.

That’s where Philip Morgan comes in.

Philip has recently released a new edition of his book The Position Manual for Indie Consultants that takes his readers step-by-step through the process of reducing your risk, creating new opportunities, language, and expertise to enable you to specialize.

While Philip’s framework is beneficial, he’s careful not to give you a formula or recipe – there’s a lot of work you need to do and decisions that only you can make. But even there, Philip does a great job of giving you some observations about the consequences of those choices and making the decisions less risky.

The riskiest choice is inaction.

If your business isn’t getting good traction right now, it might be COVID or the economy…but it might be that you haven’t made good strategic choices about who you’ll serve and what they need.

If you’re wondering if the latter is the case, I encourage you to pick up Philip’s book and see if his method might work to move you further into a specialty.