Can You Specialize In The Nearly Impossible For Your Clients?

Your career success often hinges on what you are offering. Can the client do it themselves, but it is just easier to have you do it? Or is it a service that the client could (almost) never figure out on their own, unless they went through months of training and research?

The more you match up a service with a client correctly, the more successful you will be. Move from pawn to knight, specialize in the nearly impossible for your clients, not just the inconvenient.

Let’s take photography for an example. A client needs pictures of a building or an event. You offer photography services, you can do this job. The client could snap some pictures, it would be quick, but it’s just not convenient for them. Since it is just grabbing some shots, they could have someone in their office do it, in fact they could have any number of local photographers do it. You would do a great job, but it is hard to have any kind of leverage against others in this scenario. If you charge the going rate, they may come back and say, well we can just grab the shots this time, but we’ll keep you in mind.

Along the way you discover that what they really want is to create an on-line photo gallery for their company, that is constantly updated. They also would like the pictures to look professional and be updated with regular events. Oh and they want them to come up randomly, so a different one appears each time someone visits the website.

You discover all this as you talk more and more with them. You investigate and find out what the bigger picture (so to speak) is and how you can offer a solution. You have a friend who is a web guy, so he can do the back-end coding for the slideshow, you subcontract him to do it for you. You also work out a monthly agreement with the company to shoot a certain amount of images per month. You also promote to them your Photoshop skills, you will tweak and sharpen the images so they not only look fantastic and professional, but they are highly optimized for fast web delivery. You also work out a method where you upload the pictures via a server to the client, supplying them with web optimized versions as well as print versions, that they can use for their brochures and newsletters.

Through constant communication and talks with the client, you have gotten a grasp of the bigger project and taken a lot of the burden off the client to make the process happen. You moved from a pawn, who is utilized but not very valuable and quickly sacrificed, to a rook or a knight, who is pivotal to the bigger strategy, and who must be held on to longer for on-going success.

I love chess metaphors.

Start to think about expanding your scope, offering products and services that branch off in directions you enjoy. Move from being a small circular bush, with just a few services, to a large expanding tree, with a combination of client solutions.

Instead of focusing on a small group of services that can be found anywhere, with little to differentiate you, start to package up solutions that do more and more of what the client needs. You begin doing what is a huge task for them, instead of just saving them a bit of inconvenience.

It’s one thing to hope a client calls you, as they survey a sea of other candidates doing the same thing. It’s another matter entirely where they have to call you, you are the person who can make it happen, solve their problems and offer a range of services and solutions that the others cannot.

Can you offer services others cannot? Can you expand what you offer?

How valuable now are you to your clients and potential clients?