Want To Increase Your Consultancy Revenue? Do What You Teach.

The power and accessibility of the internet means that really, anyone can be anything.

• You don’t need a degree to call yourself a social media consultant.
• You don’t need a qualification to call yourself a digital marketing expert.
• You don’t need to have won a writing award to call yourself a content marketer.

So, why is it then that there are so many incompetent people out there with self-proclaimed titles?

Now, this isn’t a dig at those who are learning their way into their role.

Everyone starts somewhere and with the wealth of knowledge available on the web, it’s not hard to study and teach yourself the the things you don’t know.

But that doesn’t account for people talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

It takes time to be the best

They say it takes 10,000 hours of working at something to become an expert.

That’s a lot of time to put into being the best at something. Can you honestly say you have the persistence to spend 10,000 hours to become the best at something?

How it looks from the client’s perspective

This Twitter users says they’re a social media consultant.

They probably promise to grow your account by X amount in Y time.

But look at their own following…

Would you trust this person to grow your own social media account when they haven’t taken the time to grow their own?

Would you trust a dentist who looked as though they hadn’t brushed their teeth in years?

It’s not good enough to say you do something

As we mentioned earlier, anyone can call themselves anything they want on the internet.

So sifting through those with talent and those without is a hard task. You have to validate each person against what they tell you they can do. It often leads to spending money on people who don’t bring any results or value.

Benefits of niching down and living what you do.

The saying goes:

You can’t be everything to everyone.

It’s true. Especially in business. For every product, task or job role, you’re faced with competitors. And if you have no competitors, it’s most likely there’s no need for what you’re offering.

I run a content marketing agency and previously we also did social media management and paid advertising.

We did this to have a constant stream of work and felt if we didn’t accept any job we could find that fit our budget, our prospect pipeline would run dry.

This isn’t the case.

In fact, when we niched down we increased the number of clients who came to us.

This is because they knew what we did and there was no confusion as to whether they were the right fit for our services.

Now, we only work with B2B and SaaS companies.

It’s helped our pipleline, it’s given us focus and it allows us to become the experts in our field.

What’s more. We write. Not just for our clients, but for ourselves. We live what we teach and we do it well.

So I put the question to you, are you doing enough to establish yourself as the expert you claim to be?

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 308,692+ people.

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