Dr. Juma’s Lesson on the Danger of Being a Generalist

When I was President of the local chapter of the Institute of Management Consultants a couple years back, I would regularly hear individuals introduce themselves as a “financial consultant”. A few people down the row, there would be another “financial consultant”.

Now at first glance, these people naturally got their hackles up about competitors — but drilling down in conversation with them, it turned out that the first served publicly traded multinationals, while the second specialized in funding plans for startups! There is a reason they’d never crossed paths in daily life — they aren’t competitors but have a better chance of sending work to each other as referrals.

So the lesson is to always focus on serving the special needs of your customer constituents, unlike the following where Dr. Juma can do almost everything (in fact, s/he competes with me – “Customer Attraction”!!)  The narrower your focus, the greater the possibility you’ll be seen by a non-competitor in the industry as complementary and thus a potential referral.

Consider the following billboard and I’ll be back next time with an exercise!