180. How narrowly should you niche when starting out as a consultant?

Mindshare community member, Jack, 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.

—k