Specialise or stay a generalist? How to pick a consulting niche after corporate

Ask somebody leaving corporate who their audience is, and the answer comes back as a sector. I help financial services firms. I help scale-ups.

A sector tells me where somebody works. It tells me nothing about what has happened to them.

How money actually moves inside a large organisation

I spent sixteen years in banking. I was Head of Technology HR at Credit Suisse, then technology reward at UBS, and the most useful thing I learned in those rooms was about how money actually moves inside a large organisation.

A headcount request with nothing behind it sits. It goes in the pile, it gets discussed at the next review, and it is still sitting there a quarter later.

The same request, for the same role, at the same cost, with a trigger behind it moves in days. A team that has just lost its lead. An audit finding with somebody's name on it.

Nothing about the role changed. What changed is that somebody now has a problem with a date on it.

Buying advice works exactly the same way. Nobody wakes up and hires a consultant because they are in financial services. They hire one because something has happened.

So the question is not who your audience is. It is what week it is for them.

What a niche sounds like out loud

One sentence you can say out loud that names a person at a moment, rather than a category. "I work with heads of function in the six months after a merger is announced" is something. "I work with financial services" is a demographic.

Say both of those out loud and you will hear the difference before you have finished the second one.

Where AI comes in, and why people get it backwards

The first thing to build is not a writer. It is the thing that knows your situation.

Open a chat window, ask it to write your LinkedIn bio, and what comes back could belong to anybody. You have told it nothing. So you decide the tool is oversold.

The first file I would have you build contains no content at all. It is a plain page describing who they help, what has happened to those people, and what those people are worried about at two in the morning. Nothing clever in it. Everything specific.

Every draft after that gets written by something that already knows the answer, which is the difference between a tool that saves you an hour and one that saves you the week.

Build the thing that knows you before you build the thing that writes for you.

If you are not sure yet which problem is yours, start with what can a corporate leader sell as a solo advisor?