How to find your niche as a consultant

How to niche down and find customers that will pay >$250/hour for your deliverables

I had a call with a friend the other day who was laid off.

Extremely talented director level leader with >10 years of experience building systems of scale for some great companies.

He was looking for his next full time role, but was considering consulting for the next 6 months to buy himself time.

Sounds a little familiar ;-)

His first question to me was ‘where would I fit as a consultant’…

At first, I wasn’t sure.

But it made me realize, finding your ICP as early as possible is critical.

I took nearly 50 calls in my first 45 days. Closed 1 customer.

Despite my terrible win rate, I learned what things needed to be true in order to find my ICP.

✅ Early stage startup, B2B saas

✅ Between $100k - $2M of ARR run rate

✅ Have at least 1 rep in seat (or I just do advisory work which is a bit different)

✅ Venture backed (or has cash to test / iterate with)

✅ High growth expectations

Not all of my customers meet 100% of the criteria, but this is essentially my checklist to validate someone that I can work with.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far about finding your niche.

What’s 1 thing you can do in your sleep?

What do you know like the back of your hand?

What can you form systems & frameworks around?

What have you done in your career and what have you become the expert in?

• Early stage full cycle sales

• High growth saas SEO

• Paid ads for companies selling to IT

• Recruitment for Fintech

The better you can narrow in here, the easier it’ll be to find customers.

The journey of your career will help you define the gap you can solve.

Consider what you are an expert at. Don’t over think this.

As Justin Welsh describes it, ‘what’s something you can do in your sleep?’

Write yours down. Take 5-10 shots at this. See what you can come up with.

Don’t worry, you can broaden your scope later if necessary

What stage of company is this thing needed?

I’ve seen a handful of LinkedIn profiles of consultants that say something like ‘helping companies from Seed → Series H → IPO’…

I’m no expert, nor have I worked for a company >$150M… but I’m not sure how one person could solve anything for all those stages of a company.

As yourself: At what stage of company would they hire the first ‘me’ to do this job full time? What are 4 indicators that would signal when they’d be hiring a ‘me’.

For the role you’d fill, who is the person that these responsibilities currently fall on? If it’s the CEO, you’ll have direct access to budget.

Here’s a few examples:

→ SDR: They’ve raised a seed round, company size is ~10-20 people and you don’t see any AEs at the company. It’s likely they are still founder led sales & would consider a fractional sales rep / sales leader. The CEO is playing this role.

→ Demandgen, marketing, SEO: Could fit in the exact same description above depending on the founders strategy

→ Recruiter: They raised a Series A, have grown headcount >100% in the last 12 months, have job openings and ~30 employees. Most companies at this stage don’t have recruiting support and it falls on the line of business leaders & CEO who typically don’t know how to recruit.

→ HR: They’ve raised a seed round, are taking the company from 10 → 20 over the next 12 months. There’s a lot of HR logistics work to be done here but not quite enough to commit to full time

Try to get really clear on where you’d fit. The goal is to be more focused than not.

Find the gap and build a story around it

Your story here needs to describe why you are an expert in this niche. What have you done that’s given you the credentials to guide them through their challenges.

To be clear, their options are always:

→ Do nothing about this problem right now

→ Solve this problem with someone internally (who’s typically not an expert or is doing something else)

→ Solve this problem by hiring someone full time

You need to help them think through this problem and WHY they should use someone part time to do this thing.

Use this diagram per Donald Miller to outline your story. This framework can be career changing if you use it correctly:

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Here’s my story:

When I left Workstream, I planned on taking 6 months off to spend with my family. I had full intentions of going back full time in January.

I began to meet founders in November, each of them ~Seed → Series A and <$2M ARR.

I met >30 founders in 30 days.

Nearly every single one of them said the same thing: “we hired a VP of Sales 18 months ago, it didn’t work out and we’re back to the drawing board”…

It set these founders back 12-18 months.

That’s a costly mis-hire.

Because most sales leaders have never seen the <$2M stage where you don’t have a playbook, product market fit, or much for resources.

It’s a damn hard stage.

I feel fortunate to have seen this stage a few times in my career and what it takes to build the playbook.

Instead of CEO’s taking a HUGE risk on another full time VP of Sales hire, I help reduce the risk and costs associated with building a sales team but helping the construct the playbook. This gives founders more options on who to hire and when. I will also help them build their team with my network of over 200 reps I’ve hired previously.

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✅ I’m using the 1 thing I’ve learned well in my career → build the playbook in the early days of saas

✅ I found a HUGE gap (that is expensive) → CEO trying to scale sales but doesn’t know how & needs to hire someone to help them build it. But their options are limited due to how few sales leaders have done it at this stage

✅ I have a compelling story as to why someone would rather pay me >$60k for 4-6 months of part time work vs. hiring someone full time and paying them >$120k (plus benefits) for 6 months and having to potentially part ways and start over

Now write your value statement

It’s going to sound like this:

{{Here’s the 1 thing I can do in my sleep}} for {{The stage of company that always needs this thing}}

Here’s some examples of where we’ll get to:

• Building pipeline via outbound sales for high growth startups between $5 - $10M

• Paid ads for venture backed companies between $1m - $5M

• SEO for AI vertical saas startups at $5M

Notice how I frame these. You need to be as specific as you can. You want your audience to be able to see what you do and say, ‘this is exactly for me’.

Test & Iterate

This will take some practice.

Make it known that your available for consulting work and can take on 2 customers for the next few months.

Reach out to your network and ask for intros.

Take as many calls as you can. Even if you think it falls outside your ICP.

Test your hypothesis on your ICP over and over.

This will be the fastest way for you to learn what’s going to work vs. what’s not.

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To Recap:

1. Find 1 thing you can do in your sleep

2. Find a Gap and build a story around it

3. Get clear on your value statement

4. Test & iterate

Hope this was helpful!