Specialization guru Philip Morgan joins me to talk about when to niche down and what to do about the fear of doing so.

LINKS

• philipmorganconsulting.com
• positioningcrashcourse.com

TRANSCRIPT

Jonathan (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to ditching hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today. I am joined by special guest, very special guest and old friend, Phillip Morgan, Phillip, welcome to the show.

Philip (00:09):
Great to be here, Jonathan. Thanks

Jonathan (00:11):
For having me. So for folks who maybe haven't heard your name before, could you give us a quick 32nd name, rank and serial number?

Philip (00:19):
All right. Start the timer. My name's Philip Morgan. I help independent consultants thrive. I've arrived at this weird made up job for myself, starting with an interest in how specialization is the beachhead that provides this really outsized advantage. And I've ended up becoming generally interested in how sort of indie experts, you know, folks like yourself, Jonathan me, to an extent like how do we cultivate expertise and turn that into economic output. Hmm.

Jonathan (00:51):
Awesome. Love it. Yeah, totally aligned. Of course. So the, the sort of impetus for this particular interview was an email you sent out to your list with a subject line perpetually fascinating specialization. And you know, I guess someone sent this question into you.

Philip (01:10):
Yeah. When folks opt into my email list, I just redirect them immediately to a survey that says, Hey, you know, what's on your mind. What sort of questions do you have? It's totally optional whether they fill it out, but this question came in through that channel.

Jonathan (01:23):
Gotcha. Cool. And the question was, how do I discover the area of specialization that is both perpetually fascinating to me and valuable to the market? An age old question. Yeah. That's what we all want. Yeah. We, I get this all the time where people, you know, I, I talk about it in the context of positioning and, and, you know, becoming the go-to person for a particular something, you know, and, and it's, you're kind of like with, with me as a solo person or people that work with me who are solo, you're kind of dead in the water. If you don't have some kind of differentiator, because if you're just presenting yourself to the market as a, just another one of these things, you know, coder, developer designer, then you're not meaningfully different from anyone. Then you're going to have really powerful, downward pressure on your prices.

Jonathan (02:16):
No leverage in the negotiation. It's, this is a terrible place to be. It's much better to be the one and only of something instead of just one of many. And it just has a dramatic effect on the prices that you can charge. And also the impact that you can have, all of your marketing suddenly starts to work. Imagine that so, you know, we're super aligned on this, but the thing, the pushback that this reminds me of is that people have the fear as you coined it many years ago about specializing and, and there's a bunch of different ones, but a bunch of different fears of sort of three or four different fears it'll crop up. And, but this one comes up all the time where say to me I, I totally buy in on the idea of positioning and I understand why that would be good for me, but which position or which specialization, or they're not the same thing, but which focus do I pick? Like how do I pick the thing?

Philip (03:15):
Yeah. And it's, I mean, it really kind of gets to the heart of, I think, what is intimidating and scary and mysterious about this decision? It's a decision is maybe the first thing we should point out. Like we could, I could make 10 specialization decisions in the next minute. If I wanted to, the decision