John: Hey, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
So what’s the favorite topic that everyone likes to ask about?
You guessed it right.
Specialization.
I’ve got another question about specialization here.
Since I’m always talking about specialization, but yeah, there’s a lot of confusion around
this topic.
This question comes from Jim and Jim says, “First off, congrats on all your recent
successes and impressive growth.
That’s very encouraging.”
Well, thanks Jim.
He says, “I’ve been putting a lot of thought around your advise around specializing and
I have 2 questions for you: One, I’m interested in your perspective regarding the necessity
to travel and specialization.
I live in a decent sized city in Columbus, Ohio which is the 15th largest city in the
US.
The specialization possibilities I’ve come up with so far seem to be limiting to maintain
work in one city.
The more I think about it the more it seems like consistent traveling would be required
for deep specialization.
What is your take on this generally speaking?”
I’ll answer this one first.
As far as traveling and specialization, if you’re in a fairly decent sized metro area
you’re probably going to be able to specialize pretty far down in your career.
Your specialization might not match up.
If you’re looking to work for companies to get a job, you can be a specialist in an
area, like a deep specialization and that company may not be “looking” for that
specialization but you might match up somewhere else and then they might want to hire you
because you’re a specialist in this area.
What I’m saying is you might not see a job description that goes all the way down to
your level of niche that they’re not looking exactly for you specifically, but because
you’re in that general area and you are a specialist and you’ve built up a reputation
and a name they’re going to hire you anyway, right?
You’re not going to really have a problem as far as career wise with being too specialized.
You can always—if someone is an expert at a very low level detail of let’s say mobile
development, say Android.
So you pick some very specific specialization like messaging or communication in Android.
If someone’s looking for an Android developer they’re not going to say, “Oh, well this
is a guy specialist in communication or this low level thing or in ListView so I’m not
I’m going to hire him to do general Android development.”
They’re probably going to see that as a benefit and say, “Well, if we use any kind
of thing around messaging or whatever your specialty is, this guy—we’ve got the foremost
expert in this area.”
That’s always going to be a good thing.
Now, if you’re freelancing, if you’re being a consultant it might be a little different.
You’re probably going to find more opportunities traveling around as you find people with specific
pains especially if you do a specialization where you solve a specific pain that people
have, something in their business that you have the exact solution for and maybe you’ve
done some kind of productized consulting there where you come in and let’s say that you
designed a corporate website or you make corporate website messaging clear or testimonials or
you create a mobile version for a corporate website, something specific like that.
You can go and find those people and that’s probably going to require some traveling.
You’re probably not going to find enough people in your space if you’re doing something
like that.
It really depends on what you’re doing.
For the most part though I would say that most people don’t really have to worry about
this.
There’s very few specialties that I can think of where if you’re in some kind of
a major metro area where it’s going to hurt you you might not be able to optimize it,
right?
If you have the travel, if you’re willing to travel you’re probably going to be able
to do more with your specialty.
That takes care of that.
Number 2 he says here, “When I started my career in the 90s and early 2000s independent
consulting was prevalent.
At some point I noticed the majority of corporations started to standardize a shortlist of approved
vendors that can be used and typically there are no exceptions especially for independent
consultants.
Have you noticed a similar trend and how do you circumvent this common limitation as an
independent consultant?
Thank you so much and I hope to see your response on your blog?”
Well, how about a video?
This is what Jim is talking about here is that sometimes big corporations will have
this list of approved vendors.
If you’re not on that list you can’t do any consulting for them.
Yes, this is true, this does happen, but it doesn’t happen all that often and it’s
quite possible to get on that list.
Now, sometimes they have—they look at Dun & Bradstreet and they say, “Okay, you have
to be this big of a company and you have to have this many employees” or whatever or
“You’ve done this many million dollars of contracts” so there’s no way that you’re
going to get into those.
Don’t bid for those jobs.
You’ve got to start somewhere—look for the smaller things especially if you’re
just a single person, an independent consultant, you don’t need to go get HP or IBM as your
client.
Maybe you can but that’s probably going to come from a personal referral inside there
anyway and when that happens they have certain ways of circumventing the rules and they know
their ways around their system.
Even government agencies, this is common.
I’ve done some contracting and consulting for government agencies that had an approved
list of vendors and somehow I was magically allowed to participate.
Now, what they did in that case was they just put me under one of their vendors and I subcontracted
out for that person.
Essentially I wasn’t truly a subcontractor but they made the books or they make it look
that way, right?
They made the contracts in such a way so that I was a “subcontractor.”
There are ways around this.
Most corporations could probably do the same thing.
In general I wouldn’t focus on those types of consulting gigs because that’s going
to be difficult to get.
If that opportunity presents itself, sure, but in general there’s enough small businesses.
In fact, the majority of businesses in the United States are small businesses.
Focus on them.
They’re not going to have an approved vendor list.
It’s going to be a lot easier for you to get in there and to do consulting and there’s
a lot more.
Again, I wouldn’t worry about this.
There’s definitely always going to be work for an independent consultant.
You might have to go and find your business.
In fact, you will.
Don’t just look for the HPs and the IBMs and the Apples.
Look for the small businesses and you won’t have a problem.
Thanks for those 2 excellent questions Jim.
I think those are both really good questions here.
If you have a question for me, email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com and don’t forget
to subscribe to the channel.
Take care.