We just so happen to be those odd people who have somehow become a jack of all trades over the course of our career and a master of none. Usually people pick a domain and stick with it. That’s called developing an expertise. We have done no such thing. Jenn has been a chemical engineer, investment banker, founder, marketer and Head of Sales. I’ve been in actuarial science, FP&A, analytics, self-employed contracting, and had a stint running a front-line call team. Me, run a support team — that’s crazy talk. Anyone who knows me would find that odd as is Jenn running a Sales team. That’s how wild our rides have been.
Between the two of us, we’ve either been a part of or ran the function for everything in a start-up except for build the product itself. This made it difficult for us to hone in on what the hell it is we were selling. Because compared to everyone else we were competing against, we didn’t have a defined specialty. At least, not one that any normal person would recognize.
Yet on the other hand, it made us acutely aware of how difficult it is to start a business. The many facets that are required for success. It also made us highly interchangeable for each other and able to do practically anything that is thrown at us. From a day to day perspective, our well roundedness was a strength in our ability to run our business as an extremely lean team. Take our website, for example, which has been spun up without any designer or developer support. Or our back office setup, which runs pretty much on auto-pilot. We can do anything together, but what is it should we be doing?
| We can do anything together, but what is it should we be doing?
Our generalist background made our content strategy highly fragmented. We had a wide range of interests and it showed in the content we were writing. We couldn’t decide on what niche to focus on. We couldn’t pinpoint which business problems we sought to solve. It’s something that we both found immensely frustrating, and difficult to overcome. As we have evolved, however, I’ve come to really appreciate our unique perspectives and capabilities.
Take our top performing content for example. Of all the content we’ve written, the articles that have made its way to find a semblance of an audience are:
On first blush, none of these articles have anything in common. The probably most prominent thing about them are how odd and somewhat uncommon the topics are. Ironically, the more we ventured into “typical” topics like those of our competitors, the worse we did. This isn’t necessarily that our content in those areas were worse. It was more likely that other people’s content was better or the domain authority associated with those pieces were much higher. The latter is definitively true.
I have a hypothesis for why these have done the best, though I doubt I’ll be able to aptly prove it. Yet I think it’s the same reason, we’ve both found success in our careers, despite our meandering paths. These articles show how we choose a random topic of interest, then apply our storytelling, common sense, and analytical abilities to seek to solve a problem. This aligns well with out track record. We are often tasked with jobs we’ve never done before, because of all the people available, we are likely the ones with the highest aptitude to figuring out a good enough solution. Not because we are brilliant, but because we approach every situation with pretty much the same methodical approach.
The more fields I’ve been exposed to and the more business functions I am involved in, the more I realize that most business problems can be solved in a similar approach. This is particularly true when the companies are small in size. Larger companies suffer from more bureaucratic complexities and handcuffs.
Of course, there are nuances and domain expertise required. However, there’s more transferrable knowledge than people realize from one domain to another, and a lot can be learned through trial by fire and extensive research and planning. The underpinning requirement are:
The last bit is meant to be ironic. However, when you’ve repeatedly tried to solve a problem over and over again, receiving a hint from an expert really makes a huge difference to unlocking the solution. The same hint, however, isn’t as impactful until you’ve banged your head against the wall on a problem a few dozen times (figuratively).
Almost every consultant we have read about says to pick a niche and an expertise and to go with that. But this usually means picking a skill — like growth marketing for SaaS startups.
Teams of 1 can’t sell more than one skillset, but we are a team of two. We also hope to grow our team of 2 into a team of five, or maybe ten or even twenty. A team of twenty doesn’t in any way feel daunting or impossible. That’s why we won’t be specializing in just one niche.
What we will do instead is to focus on positioning for one of our offerings that is a best service as an entry point. It is also a niche that we are good at and can see our potential customers gain the most value from.
From there, as the relationship builds, we’ll add on new services and offerings as it best fits client needs. This is why I love not having a niche. Without a niche, what I sell and what the client needs can be better aligned. I can sell only what they need as opposed to selling what I have.
Not having a niche means, I can focus on selling what clients need as opposed to what I have to offer
What all this means is — we need to embrace our ambiguous identity.
That means that our content eventually will cast a very wide net. We will touch upon many different subjects. At first, our knowledge will be relatively shallow in some subject areas, but as we iterate over time both our breadth will expand as will our depth into existing domains. Like Jenn once told me, people with defined niches over time will feel “one-note”. Though it will take us a long time to get to where we need to be, our content will be expansive. We will seek to dive deeper and deeper into subjects every step of the way as we tackle and solve one problem, then two, then three, until we’ve solved all the problems we encounter (which is never).
Any client who works with us will get both the benefit and the drawbacks from our generalist backgrounds. The primary benefit is that we will have far fewer blind spots when we provide advisory and tactical services. We can also quickly jump into different domains and industries because we have done so before. The main drawback is our services will be less defined, and if you need immense depth in one domain, we won’t be as competitive as specialists. We can, however, do a little bit of everything and do so efficiently. And that we believe, for most small businesses and early stage start-ups, is exactly what is needed. We’re startup operators, and we’re in the business of running businesses.
Despite the headwinds we face, we’re going to keep moving forward as the jack of all trades that we are. As we go we will find new problems to solve, new domains to explore, and hone in on our craft as the specialized generalists.
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