Unlocking Success by Choosing the Right Consulting Niche

Dec 01, 2023

👋 Hi, this is Ben with this week’s newsletter. I write about starting your own data consulting company. Thank you for your readership, we hit 1,800 readers this week 🎉🎉

This week, I’m writing about finding your niche as a data consultant. If you find the post helpful, please share it with your friends and coworkers.

Enjoy!

Everyone will tell you that it’s important to pick a niche when you plan to offer a service.

I recently saw that Luke Komiskey who was our guest speaker for the Technical Freelancer Academy a few weeks back said you should niche until it hurts.

But most people who have niched successfully often forget how stressful it can feel to pick a niche.

It feels like you are risking saying no to possible projects that also could be profitable. So I wanted to discuss the concept of picking the right niche as a consultant as well as provide a general flow for finding your niche that you can apply to your own consulting journey so you can feel confident picking a niche that will be successful.

So let’s dive in.

Assess Your Skills and Expertise

As a consultant, you need some sort of clear and concise set of skills that you can apply to solve business problems. That’s why step one of starting a data consulting company is to assess your skills and expertise to determine what services you can offer.

Make a List of Skills You Can Demonstrate to Potential Clients

So before setting up a website or writing a press release, stop.

Make an actual list of your skills and expertise. Write it down on a paper or Word document.

Keep in mind that you need to demonstrate your expertise to potential clients. It isn't enough to know that you've used a tool like Apache Airflow. You need evidence that you can use it to help organizations optimize their workflows.

That might include previous work experience, projects in your portfolio, or professional certifications.

You’ll use this list to help pinpoint the skills you can offer. After all, in the next few steps, you’ll want to list out problems that your target audience needs solved and highlight which skills you think can solve them.

Identify Your Target Audience

You have some good ideas for what you can offer within your consulting niche. Now it's time to define your ideal client so you know how to target them properly.

You can find plenty of guides online for making an ideal customer profile. Feel free to find one that matches your niche well. Generally speaking, you can reach your goal by:

Creating a list of organizations you'd love to work with
Identifying characteristics shared by these organizations
Writing a fictional profile that includes common characteristics like size, industry, location, and priority
You can even go so far as to target a specific persona like a marketing director or VP of engineering.

Once you have an ideal client profile, you can personalize your outreach methods to motivate the organizations you want to work with most.

Analyze Market and Industry Trends

Now as you recall you wrote out your skills in a prior step. You will likely find that some of your skills align with current market trends.

Maybe you have experience working with data warehouses and generative AI. Right now, knowing how to apply your skills to those topics will make you an appealing choice for companies that need help from consultants.

You should also research industries to find areas that need more data consultants. For example, you might find that healthcare organizations in your region need a professional's expertise to follow data privacy regulations.

The more an industry needs assistance, the easier it is for you to find an in-demand consulting niche you can fill.

But don’t limit this to Google searches. Talk to people!

Reach Out to Your Target Personas and Ask: Engaging directly with potential clients can provide invaluable insights. Consider these strategies:

Conduct Surveys: Use tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to gather feedback about specific industry pain points.
Interviews: Have one-on-one conversations with industry professionals to get a deeper understanding of their challenges.
Networking Events: Attend industry conferences and networking events to interact with potential clients and understand their needs.

Overall you need to start creating a map of your skills, the problems you want to solve, and the problems your possible clients have. Which you should have.

Now you can start taking that map and testing out ideas in terms of services you could offer.

Test Out Your Ideas - Do People Resonate With Your Services

Once you have a set of problems you believe your ideal client has, you can start testing out how big of a problem it is. An easy way to do this is to try posting articles, LinkedIn posts, and other forms of content and see the response you get. This can provide anecdotal support for your niche.

Use Posts on Social Media Like LinkedIn to Gauge Interest: Social media is a powerful tool for market research. You can both post your own ideas as well as track other people and trends. Here’s how you can leverage it:

Observe Discussions: Follow industry-related groups and hashtags to see what topics are trending and what challenges are frequently discussed. You can follow specific individuals or just general hashtags and see if people respond more to certain topics.
Engage with Content: Respond to posts and ask questions to get a sense of what your audience cares about. It’s also a great way to build your expertise.
Analyze Engagement: Look at what types of content get the most engagement to understand what interests your target audience.
Post Your Own Thoughts: What’s great about some social media platforms is you don’t need to spend hours writing an article. You could write a 5-minute post that could create a great discussion. Like my post a while back about data architects. It didn’t take much to write but it got a decent amount of discussion.

Going a step further. Once you start seeing success with smaller content you can start putting effort into larger pieces of content.

That’s why I put these videos and articles together below. These were topics that came up over and over again either in client calls or in terms of what seemed to resonate.

Looking to start your own data analytics consulting company? Not sure how to attract clients, partner with the best vendors, or choose projects you're passionate about?

I've been there. In my Technical Freelancer Academy, I share how I built a successful data analytics consulting business from the ground up. A business that made it possible for me to quit my data engineering job at Facebook.

See you there!

Join The Freelancer Academy Today

Break Some Of The Rules - Temporary Niches

You should always have a general niche that you focus on. But every once and a while a new opportunity might come up that you can capitalize on and bring on as a temporary niche. It doesn’t have to be your focus, but you can always test out other niches even if it's just temporary.

An example of this is data infrastructure cost savings. Recently I noticed that many companies are spending upwards of $100k on their data ingestion, often due to Fivetran. This is also often driven by a single data source like a Postgres or MySQL instance.

In these cases, I have found that solutions like Estuary have been able to drastically reduce my client's spend. Meaning I know can talk about this topic or directly reach out to possible clients who I believe are having this issue.

And guess what, it’s resonating.

Scale and Evolve Your Niche Consulting Services

Starting a data consulting company is just the beginning of your journey. Eventually, you will want to scale and evolve to generate more revenue and remain relevant within the industry.

Options for growth and scaling include:

Recruiting other data professionals to help you finish projects quickly and accurately
Working with a marketing agency to hone your brand and convert more leads into clients
Maintaining a list of happy clients you can use as references
Building a portfolio that showcases your best projects
Learn more about sales and how to find prospects

Expect to keep learning new things so you can keep up with changes within your niche. Data science and engineering evolve rapidly, so plan to become a lifelong learner with a growth mindset.

Get Started in Your Data Consulting Niche

Starting a data consulting company takes hard work and careful planning. You'll need to do a lot of research before you find the right niche for your skills and passions. Once you find a successful approach, though, you can grow your client list quickly!

Keep learning about emerging trends in data and exploring new opportunities as they arise. In this rapidly changing field, there's always an exciting new challenge to tackle.

Thanks for reading, if you want to read some of the prior articles, then read these articles.

Technical Freelancer Academy