Seeking Advice: Productizing Advisory Consulting Business
Hello everyone!
I'd like to get some advice from the IH community about productizing an advisory consulting firm and how best to go about it.
Background:
I have a side consulting business, Fraction Consulting, I am trying to get off the ground. Right now my focus areas in broad buckets include:
Fractional CTO/CISO Services
- Helping companies understand how to build security into their technology at the product, infrastructure, and human levels of their company (i.e., helping stand up cybersecurity programs, technology investment roadmaps, hiring talent, working with 3rd party vendor security questionnaires, etc.)
- Helping companies optimize the business model and operations by way of technology (i.e., helping an eCommerce company make the operations of their inventory management more automated and streamlined by way of technology, enabling better customer service workflows by way of technology stacks)
Private Equity Market Intelligence
- Providing market intelligence on specific domains like Fraud/AML and cybersecurity technology product/SaaS companies (i.e. would I be willing to buy this product as a hypothetical customer?)
- Identifying technology and cybersecurity companies who have the potential for market or incumbent disruption
- Offering insight into strategic decision making around technology investments and how enterprise companies "think about" taking in new technology or replacing parts of their stack
On the Fractional CTO/CISO side, customers are paying for guidance and outcomes. On the Private Equity side, customers are paying for access and insights.
Target Market:
My target customer avatars are broad:
- Private Equity / Venture Capital groups investing in technology companies of any size
- Startups and SMBs
Each potential customer could have a different problem set to solve for which has made it a bit challenging to offer consistent pricing (that people will pay for), even if the advisory consulting services are similar.
My "playbook" is to consult until I identify a product space and then I would pivot to build the product and advisory services to play off of each other.
My Questions:
- Does this advisory consulting business seem like it can be productive (in part or altogether)?
- With consulting I can obviously reuse approaches and artifacts, but how can I make my services more structured when each customer could have a different need (i.e., like standardizing an "assessment" as the only entry point and then going from there to build more custom proposals as needed)?
- Does my playbook seem like a good approach?
- Am I being narrow enough on my offerings and ideal customer avatars?
Thanks so much for anyone who actually read this far!
You are offering a mix of services based on expertise you have developed in a variety of settings. There is a tendency to spread all of your watches on the blanket and see what customers are interested in but the risk is that too broad a range of offerings starts to look incoherent / unfocused and I think that's what you are risking here.
At a minimum you need two different sites or sets of services for "Fractional CTO/CISO Services" vs. "Private Equity Market Intelligence." For a first pass I would focus on Fractional CTO/CISO since that's where you have the most strength and use email or networking to reach out to private equity with a different message.
Your background from https://fractionconsulting.co/about:
This communicates a depth of experience on CTO/CISO. I would defer the PE mkt intelligence. This blog post https://fractionconsulting.co/securing-your-startup reads like a start on a standardized "Checkup" service or security audit. I would pick a low price and use it as a get acquainted offer. You comment https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-do-you-monitor-your-website-security-5e8108b567?commentId=-MBe1G1ByKOQ1K4sTDLL&utm_campaign=digest-daily&utm_medium=email&utm_source=indie-hackers-emails is a good start on an offer description
"A couple of ways I setup security for my websites include:
I hope that you this remarks useful. We work with a number of experts and teams of experts to help them package their expertise into content, structured consulting, and standard products.
Sean - thanks so much for the feedback here, and I meant to follow-up sooner. I had not intended to write that "How to Secure Your Startup" blog post as a checklist format, more of a primer or orientation, but I can see what you mean here and I think I can use that.
I took your feedback and some other feedback I got around the same time and consolidated my service offerings into just "Fractional CTO/CISO" and "Private Capital Intelligence". I realized that the four "areas" I had before were really not as specific as they could be and left too much to interpretation from potential customers.
I'm trying to move away from the concept of "serving anyone, anything" in those realms, and instead "serving very specific services to a very specific customer". I wasn't sure how to do this exactly, but even writing this original post made me think a lot more about what exactly I was doing, so I did this:
I'm now trying to have conversations with potential customers, and even customers who already told me NO but are willing to give me feedback, about the breakdown of the services to see if it resonates better.
I will report back on any feedback I get, but certainly open to more and may take you on that offer to connect, Sean!
Mke: Please help me improve my contributions to the IH community. Take three minutes and answer four questions:
What was the most useful question or suggestion in this response?
What was the least useful?
How have your plans changed, it at all, as a result of reading this.
Any other suggestions you can make to help me improve my contribution.
Hi Sean -
Happy to provide feedback on your feedback.
I don't think any of it was not "useful", but this area I am still going to pursue. I can understand why you would say to defer it, as it does not seem to fit with the other service, but this area has proven as a differentiator for me as compared to other fractional/virtual CTOs/CISOs. I've spent years sourcing, buying, installing, and then "living with" hardware and software platforms in my space and managing teams of people who operate them. I can tell you why I would or would not buy a particular product and what the buying habits and product lifecycles are of certain product categories are at various enterprise companies. Private equity groups have found value in this for their portfolio holdings and I've made traction here with paying customers.
My plans haven't changed, I've just gotten more focused on your feedback and I think this is a very good thing.
No other suggestions I could think of, as this has been really helpful for me and I hope for others as well.
Happy to dive in further on any of these, but thank you again!
Thanks this is helpful. I did not discern your extensive experience working with PE firms from Linkedin or your website.
I would suggest you do more to highlight this. Please consider documenting at least some short anonymous case studies where you describe the opportunity or threat you were retained to assess, your process or solution at a high level, and the impact of your work on the PE firm's subsequent decisions or actions.