Good at ten things, hired for none

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #25

A man on a call last week told me he was good at a lot of things.

He said it with a little pride. The way you would with thirty years behind you.

“Honestly,” he said, “I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades.”

So I asked him a simple question.

What do you want to be known for?

Then came one of those long, uncomfortable pauses. I could almost hear his brain stretching for the answer and not finding one.

That stretch is what I want to talk to you about today.

So I’ll ask you the same thing I asked him.

What do you want to be known for? Not everything you can do. The one thing.

If you struggle for the answer... if you feel the pull to list a few things instead of an obvious one thing... stay with me. Here’s what I’ve come to know in my decades of helping consultants, and why it may be costing you more than you think:

• Why being good at a lot of things has turned into a liability (and what to do about it).
• Why your best prospects don’t know what you do, and what it’s costing you.
• What your decades of experience are really worth, and how to finally get paid for them.

For years, you stepped up when you were needed, took on new challenges, and collected impressive skills. Whatever the company or the client needed, you could handle it. Marketing? Sure. Operations? Done it. Strategy, hiring, maybe even department or whole company turnarounds. All of it. You learned a lot. Now, as you build a consulting business, you cast a wide net because you can. You’ve earned those skills and certifications, and you want prospects to see them. And you don’t want to miss out on opportunities. But that creates a whole new problem.

The marketplace ignores you.

Not because you aren’t good. You’re probably better than most. You’re invisible because no one can repeat what you do in a single sentence.

Think about how people actually hire you. A friend says, “You should talk to so-and-so.” Then comes the next line. “He’s the one who ___.” If your friend can’t finish that sentence, the referral dies right there. Nobody passes along a list.

That’s also why the work runs hot and cold. Feast, then famine. The White Knuckle Income Roller Coaster Ride. When you’re good at everything, you’re the first person someone thinks of for nothing in particular.

There’s more...

A few years ago, knowing a lot put you ahead. You’d spent decades collecting information, training, and certifications to stand out and compete. That was the edge.

That edge just got filed down so far it couldn’t cut hot butter.

The whole library of human knowledge now runs about twenty dollars a month. Commoditized like toilet paper and gasoline. Anyone with a smartphone can sound informed about anything.

So if your pitch is “I know a lot,” look hard at who you’re up against now. A twenty-dollar subscription. And it never sleeps.

But here’s the good news...

Information got cheap. Knowing did not.

Knowing isn’t having the information. Anyone can buy that for twenty bucks. Knowing is running that information against thirty years of getting knocked down, punched, kicked, and pummeled in the real world. Then getting back up, applying your own tourniquet, and getting the results anyway.

So your decades didn’t lose value. Just the opposite. They’re worth more now, because raw information alone doesn’t win the brutal game of business.

I’ll say another thing here that might surprise you, coming from the guy telling you to get specific.

There’s a book called Range, by David Epstein. The whole argument is that generalists win. People who sample widely, who carry ideas from one field into another, who don’t lock in too early. And as you think, he’s right. I found it convincing. Your range is a real advantage. It’s probably why you see things the specialists walk right past.

But there’s a difference between how you think and how you get hired.

Range is how you do the work. It is not how you win the work.

You can hold all of it inside you and still need to point at one thing on the outside.

Think about it this way. Picture a conductor.

He stands in front of an orchestra full of world-class musicians. He cannot outplay any of them. He’s no better on the violin than the violinist. If he tried to prove he could play every instrument himself, he’d be mediocre at all of them and create a cacophony.

But he’s the most important person on that stage. He’s the only one who knows what the music is supposed to sound like. He hears the whole thing before a single note is played. He brings forty players in, on time, in tune, so the audience hears one thing instead of forty.

That conductor has more range than anyone in the building. He understands every instrument. And he is known for exactly one thing. His sound.

That’s you. Or it could be.

Your range isn’t the problem. Leading with your range is. You’ve been standing in front of the orchestra trying to prove you can play the violin, when the job was to conduct the whole thing for this one client and his customers.

Here’s a way to check where you stand.

Could your best client describe what you do in one sentence, without making a list? Not “he does a bunch of stuff for us.” One sentence. The one problem you solve. The one result you create.

If he’d reach for a list, the market is hearing nothing but confusing static, and a confused mind always says no.

If he can say the one thing you change for him, you have the start of a real, competitive position.

The man on the call called himself “a glorified sales rep.” Thirty years, and that’s the phrase he reached for.

He wasn’t a glorified anything. He had more pattern recognition in his back pocket than a room full of twenty-five-year-olds with the best software money can buy. He just never picked his one sound. So the market kept hearing noise, and pricing him like noise.

P.S. The man who called himself a glorified sales rep emailed me two days later. One sentence, about the one problem he solves for a company. It was the first time I’d heard him sound certain. He didn’t get smarter in two days. He just stopped trying to be good at everything... and started being known for one.

“Chase two rabbits, catch none.”

— an old proverb

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #24
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #23

You might also find these interesting:

🔎 The "Diagnose" Phase Call Prep Checklist
🔎 Sales Series Part 5 of 7: Prescribe

P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...