Playbook
How to choose a consulting niche by stating what you are not
Publishing a point of view before you have a company, and finding out within two weeks whether anyone competent disagrees.
The methodPosition by negation: seven steps and three tests
This playbook is a method for choosing a consulting niche by writing down what your firm is not, publishing that sentence under your own name, and testing it on the handful of people whose disagreement would matter. It is for founders and consultants who have real expertise, no product yet and no marketing budget, and who are being told to wait until there is a productised (productized) service to sell before they say anything in public. The method is called position by negation: seven steps and three tests. It is designed to return an answer within two weeks of publishing, one way or the other.
The problem arrives in a sales conversation. Your category word, whether it is DevOps, cloud, data, design or transformation, has been used by so many firms for so many things that it no longer tells a buyer anything. Every competitor says they are the one who does it properly. The usual response is to add adjectives, and the adjectives are the same ones everybody else added. What a buyer can actually hear is a refusal: the work you will not take, the customer you will not serve, the way of working you have ruled out. A refusal is specific, and it can be argued with, which is the point.
The seven steps run in order. Find the laziest common reading of your category, the one a competent stranger would assume. Write the sentence that says you are not that, in words the stranger can disagree with rather than nod along to. Name what you are instead, in one clause, not a paragraph. Check it against the work you have actually done and would do again. Publish it somewhere with your name on it. Send it, personally, to the small number of people whose disagreement is worth having: a former customer, a peer who runs a firm you respect, a buyer who once said no. Then read what comes back for two weeks and record all of it, including the silence.
The three tests are applied to the sentence before it goes out. Can a competent stranger disagree with it? If nobody could, it is a slogan. Would you turn down paid work because of it? If not, it is decoration. Does it cost you something to say? A position that costs nothing tells a buyer nothing. The worksheet has a line for each test and the criteria for passing it, and the playbook is honest that most first drafts fail the second one.
What is deliberately not in it: a list of profitable niches, a ranking of sectors, or a formula for sizing the market behind a positioning statement. Those questions belong to a different kind of book, and the answers date quickly. There is nothing on logos, websites or brand. The playbook assumes you already have the expertise and the judgement; what it supplies is the sequence for turning that into one sentence, and a way of finding out quickly whether anyone competent believes it.
I learned this before there was a company. My co-founder Steve and I started writing in public about how software should be built and run while we were still working out whether there was a business in it, and the first thing that got a reaction was not a claim about what we could do. It was a piece saying what the category had become and that we were not that. People we had never met wrote back to disagree, in detail, and some of them were right. Those disagreements told us more about who would buy from us than any amount of planning had, and the arguments we won became the first lines of the proposition when the company did exist. The refusal came first. The service caught up with it.
The playbook is in development. Joining the waitlist means you hear when it is ready, and before then it gives me a way to ask which part of the positioning problem you most want it to solve. Nothing is for sale yet.
What you will get
Who it is for
Questions
- What type of consulting is most in demand?
- I do not publish a ranking, and I would not trust one that dated from this year. Demand for a category word is not demand for your firm. The playbook's answer is to define the niche by what you refuse, then test the sentence on competent people who might disagree; the ones who argue back show you where the demand for you actually is.
- How do you choose a consulting niche when you have no clients yet?
- Start from the work you have done and would do again, write the sentence that says what your firm is not, publish it under your own name and send it to a handful of people whose disagreement would matter. Two weeks of replies, including the silences, is enough to choose with.
- Is positioning by negation the same as niching down?
- They overlap. Niching down usually narrows by sector or service. Position by negation narrows by refusal: the customer, the work or the way of working you rule out. The refusal is what a buyer can hear and argue with, and it can sit across several sectors at once.
- Do I need a website or a brand before publishing a position?
- No. The sentence goes out under your name, in whatever public place you already have. The method depends on the sentence and on who you send it to, not on where it is published.