The Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants
Many people write about positioning, a smaller number really understand it, and then there’s Philip. While you might craft the perfect positioning by applying the principles in this book, you will certainly learn how to develop and test hypotheses in the future. Essentially you’ll learn how to learn, and that’s the best positioning there is.
-David C. Baker, author of “The Business of Expertise
Specialization is challenging.
Everybody says you should specialize, but the decision feels arbitrary, overwhelming, or frightening. You see the benefits for others (their value proposition is so clear!), but can’t see how to get your business there.
- If you don’t understand how specialization works
- If you aren’t sure if specialization can help your indie consulting business
- If you don’t know how to choose a specialization
- If you don’t know what to do once you’ve specialized…
then The Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants is for you. You’ll learn:
- What marketing actually is (for indie consultants, not product companies)
- How specialization and positioning relate to marketing
- The benefits and the risks of specializing in a platform
- What marketing infrastructure that helps you earn new visibility
- The way fundamental marketing labor realates to specialization
- How to choose the right beachhead for your business
- How to navigate the risk of specializing
- The tradeoffs In the 5 ways of specializing
- The valuable opportunity that being bad at marketing presents
Specializing your indie consulting business has obvious benefits (visibility, momentum, impact, and profit) and non-obvious obstacles (fear, ineffective approach to deciding). This book helps you navigate those obstacles.
You don’t specialize so you can be specialized; you specialize so you can more effectively become visible to your market and trusted by them.
This mindset frees you to ask yourself: “What greater impact could I have if I was more visible and trusted by a market?”