Great Consultants Are Forged In The Dip

Learning the key lessons from going from a few hundred to a few thousand.

Getting started is easy.

It’s easy to get your first client or first few hundred subscribers/followers.

But it’s going from 1 to 10 clients, and 100 subscribers to 10,000 that really matters.

This is a race against time. If you don’t figure out how to build a sustainable means of attracting clients within your time runway, you fail.

The Dip

Seth Godin wrote a fantastic book about this years ago.

I’ve adapted the primary chart below.

When you launch your consultancy practice and you also need to select your client acquisition medium.

At first, you have an initial burst of success - typically up to an audience of a few hundred people. This isn’t difficult. These are usually the people who already know and like you.

But then everything slows down. The people who were most likely to follow you already do. Your rate of growth might slow to a crawl at this stage.

This is the dip.

What you did to attract your initial audience won’t get you through it. Luckily, there is a better approach.

The Dip Is Where Consultants Are Forged

The real work of building a sustainable consultancy practice begins in that dip.

Attracting the first 100 to 300 people is easy. But getting to 1k to 3k to earn a living is HARD (and getting to 10k to 30k to earn a great living is even harder).

Every consultant who’s going to make it for the long term has to figure out how to cross the dip in their own way.

It’s a right of passage.

The dip is where consultants are forged. It’s where you can test and explore different ideas to find out what the market does and doesn’t care about (and what you are good and not good at).

The dip is where you need to find that overlap between what you can be the best in the world at and what people really need.

The dip is where the initial excitement of launching a consultancy practice wanes and the congratulations of your peers fade into irrelevance. It’s where the hard work begins. It’s where you have to build a sustainable means of growing an audience and attracting clients.

The dip is where you have to shed the parts of your service, messaging, and ideas which aren’t working and double down on the ones that are.

Wanting to become a consultant without figuring out how to attract an audience is a little like wanting to start a tech company without technical skills. You simply need to figure it out.

And, as painful as it might be, you need the dip.

Confront The Painful Truths In The Dip

Startups famously pivot from their initial idea based on market feedback.

Many of the most successful firms today began as something else entirely. Yet they noticed what the audience did or didn’t respond to and quickly adapted their approach.

One of the most important things a new consultant can do is to take a similar approach.

The idea you currently have in your head about what audience to target, what services to offer, and how to attract clients hasn’t been tested yet. And it probably won’t survive contact with reality.

If you are rigid in your mindset, you’re going to struggle. However, if you’re flexible and responsive, you can quickly adapt your offerings and promotion to what the audience is telling you it needs.

Ultimately, the dip is where you should confront painful truths head-on.

I know someone who posts long-form YouTube video breakdowns to promote themselves. They’ve been doing it for six months. They get around 10 to 30 views on each breakdown. It’s clearly not working.

Either the audience doesn’t care about breakdowns or they can’t figure out how to get the videos to a large enough audience.

This approach is screaming out for a change. Test different video styles, try different promotional tactics, or give up on videos and take another approach entirely.

Better yet, see what’s working well in other industries and adopt those styles to your industry. There are so many opportunities here to listen to what the market is telling you and adapt accordingly.

I know a few people who publish blog posts every couple of weeks. None of the posts seem to attract much of an audience. Few people seem to view them or share them. That’s the market giving a very clear signal to you. Change it up. Try a different style or try a different medium entirely.

The dip is emotionally painful but indescribably useful.

It’s telling you which parts of your vision you need to shed to emerge with a sleeker, more targeted, more refined consultancy offering.

Double Down On What Resonates

A few years ago, back an acquaintance of mine posted an article explaining how the algorithms of each social media tool worked. It had a great diagram and explained what did or didn’t boost the signal.

This article was staggeringly popular. It was widely shared. It attracted more attention than any other article he had written.

While I knew he was on to something big, he sadly didn’t. He used his newfound attention to talk about a range of digital marketing topics instead of doubling down on what the market was telling him

What a shame!

He had received about as clear a signal from the market as you can get and didn’t do anything with it.

He should have rebranded himself as the social algorithm expert. He should have launched a range of services helping organisations optimise for each algorithm. He should have taught courses on it. He should have published a whole series of content targeting each platform etc…

Instead, he kept trying to do what he was previously doing, didn’t find the success he wanted, and eventually went back to his old employer.

When you get a signal that something resonates - even slightly more than usual, pay attention to it. Try doubling down on it. See if you can expand it. See if you can offer services and support related to it. This is the market telling you what they want.

The great thing about being in the Dip is you can prototype a dozen ideas each month, see what resonates, and move forward with whatever clicks.

The Dip Is A Blessing

While the dip should tell you what doesn’t work, it should also help guide you to what does work.

The dip is a blessing. It’s where you can work in relative obscurity and try a dozen things which don’t work. But, luckily, people will only remember the one thing that did work. The dip is where you find your own product/market fit.

This newsletter is hopefully in the dip right now. I had an initial audience surge and now it’s slowed down. Now’s the time to figure out what this should become.

Is a newsletter on consulting too broad? Do I need to find new ways to promote it? Should I make it more targeted at a particular niche or challenge (say, getting clients)? It’s nice to have a place to test these ideas.

Treat the dip as your ideas factory. Use it to test ideas and see what seems to resonate. Shed the things that aren’t working. Gradually, you will find what works and then you can charge forward.