Gill Moakes 0:00
Welcome, welcome back to the heads together podcast. So happy to have you here with me again this week. And actually, this week, you are going to love what I've got in store for you. I'm talking to Alastair McDermott this week, he is my new BFF. So we got connected on LinkedIn. And straight away, I had an absolute aha moment in terms of the subject that Alastair talks about and what he coaches around, consults around with his clients. It really, really resonated with me, and I think this is going to really resonate with you, too. So Alastair in his words, he helps invisible experts remove their cloak of invisibility and become the recognised authority in their field. So they can have more impact and command higher fees.
Gill Moakes 1:02
Doesn't that sound good? Right. So what really resonated with me is that I think, when you get to a point in your business, where a lot of your business is coming from referrals, which is for me, you don't tend to be doing as much outbound marketing. And here's the thing, you can get a little bit complacent in that place, or well, you know, I have a steady stream of clients coming to me via referral.
Gill Moakes 1:36
I'm comfortable, and what I think Alastair made me realise is that really taking things to the next level is all about becoming this recognised authority in your field. And to do that, you've got to have a field, which is what we get into in our conversation this week. So it's all about the advantages of niching down of specialising becoming known for the thing that you are outstanding at. I think you're gonna love this episode. So let's jump into it. Alastair is also the host of an amazing podcast, the recognised authority podcast, and he has a Serial podcast so that like a one off series, almost like a training course podcast, which I really urge you to go listen to called the specialisation podcast, and we'll put links to these in the show notes. So let's dive in. I can't wait for you to meet Alastair.
Gill Moakes 2:42
Welcome, welcome to the heads together podcast, I'm Gill Moakes. And I am obsessed with cutting through the noise when it comes to growing your business each week via intimate coaching conversations and inspirational stories. I share what it really takes to get the results you want, in a way that feels right to you.
Gill Moakes 3:05
I am all about attracting higher ticket opportunities, building authentic relationships, and creating the abundant full fat version of your dream business. I mean, how many of us have even a way creating a lite version of what we really want?
Gill Moakes 3:22
The thing is, I honestly believe when you're outstanding at what you do, there is no limit to what you can achieve. So are you ready to put our heads together and make it happen? Let's go.
Gill Moakes 3:44
Alastair, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Alastair McDermott 3:48
Thanks, Gill. I'm thrilled to be here and to chat with you today.
Gill Moakes 3:51
I've been so looking forward to this, I nearly started telling you something just then suddenly realised that I actually want to share this with people because I realised that we all talk to a lot of people, don't we and sometimes it's someone that we really resonate with. And sometimes it's just a conversation. And that's good, too. Sometimes it's you know, it's it's fairly interesting, but you're not as invested. But since we met through LinkedIn actually, wasn't it? I think.
Alastair McDermott 4:23
Yeah, I think, I think I heard you on another podcast or I found your podcast somehow.
Gill Moakes 4:27
That's it and and we exchanged a few messages on LinkedIn. And you are someone who talks about something that absolutely captivates me, and is almost like a missing piece in the puzzle in my head when it comes to entrepreneurship. So I was so happy when you agreed to come on the show because I think this is going to be of massive interest to my listeners. So when you tell everyone a bit about what you do, because I know you will tell them way better than I will.
Alastair McDermott 5:03
Okay, well, I'm an entrepreneurial consultant type. If I went back to 15 years ago, I started my business. I was a software engineer and in a corporate in a corporation in a, an American corporation. And I wasn't, I was a good software engineer, but I wasn't very good at my job, I was good at the programming parts. And I wasn't in a good place. And I wasn't a good teammate to my, to my colleagues and people like that. And I knew that I needed to leave, you know, for for my own mental health sake, as much as anything else. And so it needs to get my own. The problem was, I didn't really have very many transferable skills, because I knew how to programme an operating system for these huge supercomputers. That doesn't really transfer into being something that you can sell when you're working on your own. And so like, I had one skill, which was I'd been building websites and doing this thing called Search Engine Optimization. So I went out on my own and started doing that. I had a business called website, doctor. And so I was building a lot of websites. And I was doing search engine optimization, I stopped selling, search engine optimization, SEO, it's called, I stopped selling SEO, because I didn't really like the premise, which is or the promise, which is we'll do a lot of work, it'll take a lot of time. And it might work. And it might not.
Alastair McDermott 6:16
It's not a great thing to sell. There's just ways that I'm simplifying it, they're a little bit but I was doing that. And as I was building websites, a lot of people were coming to me and saying, oh, you know, we've got this website problem. And I would dig into it and realise that's not a website problem. This is a business problem. And so I started to almost become a management consultant in what I was doing. And so I was doing this thing called mentoring, which is kind of like coaching, kind of like a cross between coaching and consulting. So with coaching, I think you try and help people to draw the answers out of themselves. With consulting, you're quite prescriptive, sometimes in giving people the answers. And I've, I find, I felt I was somewhere in the middle. And I'm doing this mentoring, I was working on this, I always wanted to have this consulting model to my business, I never wanted to become a web agency and, and grow the business that way. And I saw a lot of people who were in my business, they did that. But I always wanted to keep it like a very small team, just myself, and maybe a couple of like a handful of people. And so that's that's the way the business went. But I ran into some problems with it. And it was very frustrating. I was trying to do for myself what I was doing for my clients, and I was able to help my clients a lot with, with what we call back then we call it online marketing, I guess it's just marketing now, but online marketing I was trying to do, you know, I was trying to do advertising and, and SEO and all these things for myself. And I was getting great results with my clients. But I wasn't able to do for myself. And it was just really frustrating. So that's that's kind of the start of, of the journey for me. Interesting. I didn't actually realise that you had the web Doctor thing, because I'm pretty sure I've heard that. And I mean, maybe there are loads called that. But I'm sure I remember that. Anyway, that's an aside. I think it's like one of those one of those faces, you know, people say, Oh, I have a face that everybody thinks they know, website, doctor, it's a great brand.
Alastair McDermott 8:14
A lot of people do, do feel I kind of feel really bad because I'm not I'm not using that brand anymore. And I really loved it. But it's like it's no longer me.
Gill Moakes 8:23
Well, it is it's because you do something very different now, don't you the consulting and I totally agree with you mentoring. I feel like mentoring is much more what I do too. So I tend to call myself a business coach. But actually, a lot of what I do is mentoring because in the business arena, a coach who doesn't actually give you any advice or tell you anything is pretty much redundant. You know, no, no one's gonna pay for that. So tell me about how that pivot happened, going from that software world and SEO world into what you do now. Because what you do now is really quite, I think, I feel like it's quite a bespoke part of marketing that you work in.
Alastair McDermott 9:08
What happened really was, I was listening to podcasts, and I loved listening to podcasts. I've listened to them since 2005. There was a podcast from an English web design company, two guys, Paul Boweg and Marcus Lillington had a podcast called Boy Grilled, and I used to listen to that all the time. And I loved that. And I got really into podcasts from from the moment it came out, having to try and get these MP3 files onto this. This this player before I went cycling or whatever. And so I loved listening to podcasts. And I said, I'm going to have a podcast for my business. And I found it really difficult to create that podcast. And I was planning and planning and I want to say this. I mean I was planning the podcast in 2014 2015. I found my old notes, and I didn't launch it until 2020
Alastair McDermott 9:59
So I actually started 2021 was when I actually launched, I was recording in 2020. But 2021 was when I really launched it. And so the reason I found it so hard was because of this, I only realised this later or realised this over time, is that I was badly positioned in my business, I was positioned as this generalist. And because I was I was so generalist, I didn't really have anything different to say, I didn't have a specific group of people that I was working with.
Alastair McDermott 10:30
If you looked at a list of my customers for the business that my clients, there was a magician for children's birthday parties, there was a shop that sold clothes, there was a mining company that owned trucks and mining equipment, there was just everything across the board. And so like there was a dentist, there was a pharmacy there was every every kind of business you can imagine. And when you try and write a blog post that gives all of those people advice about their website, or try and create a podcast to give all of those people advice about their marketing, it just it becomes so bland, it has all of the flavour of wallpaper paste, but none of the stickiness. And it was just this kind of horrible content that I was creating. I was trying to like I really love writing and, and creating content and recording podcasts and things. But I was creating this stuff that was just kind of insipid, tepid, you know, and it just, it wasn't good at all. And I was really frustrated with that. And at the start, I didn't realise what the problem was. Later on, I realised I'm just too broad here. Like I'm trying to, I'm trying to help every small business with online marketing with every aspect of online marketing. And it's just too much you just can't do that. And so I realised I needed to specialise need to niche down. And that was the realisation took me a while to get there. But that's that's what I did.
Gill Moakes 11:54
I mean, I just couldn't agree more. And positioning is something that I'm obsessed about. For a start, you know, getting that crystal clear on the clients that you can help. Otherwise, I think a phrase that I love is you're trying to boil the ocean, it's just impossible, like you say your messaging cannot buy, it's an logical impossibility for your messaging to be on point. If your spectrum of clients is as wide as that, isn't it, you know, no one's gonna feel like you're talking directly to them. And so, you niched down. So what, what did you change at that point in the business?
Alastair McDermott 12:34
Well, what I did was I looked at all of my favourite clients to work with, and I look for patterns, I looked at the different ways that I could niche down. And I did too much of this by myself, which was frustrating. And that's a that's another story, I think you need some help with this. I put down all of my current clients in a spreadsheet, I put down the value of the single highest value project that I had with them, because they were different projects. So I just picked one project for each one. And I sorted them in different ways. I added in columns, like what industry were they in? How big were they? How good were they to work with what I work with them, again, that type of thing, and I rank them. And I looked at that spreadsheet many times, and trying to figure out patterns. And I eventually realised that I liked working with people who were kind of a little bit like me, I liked working with people who were independent experts, independent consultants, and because they're very smart people, but I also felt that I resonated with them, I could talk to them, both from my expertise, but also from my experience. So I picked them. And I wanted to help them with websites, because that's what my primary skill set was. But when I did some analysis, and I got into it a bit more, I realised, hey, these people don't really care about their websites. And then that got interesting. I was like, Well, why don't they care about their websites? And that's, you know, that's a whole rabbit hole, we can go down if you want. That is interesting.
Gill Moakes 13:58
So every when that's really resonated with me, because I don't think I care that much about my website. And now I feel like you're gonna tell me I should.
Alastair McDermott 14:10
Maybe depends, it depends on some factors. So I know that you talk to me, before we hit record about you listened to one of my episodes recently about research. And this was one of the places that I got this information from. So this was serving a lot of people
Gill Moakes 14:26
And actually, when I was listening to that episode, so if you're listening, I'm gonna put links to Alice's podcast, obviously, in the show notes because you are going to want to head over there after this. It is fantastic podcast. And the episode that I was listening to that was a bit of an aha moment for me was that there's almost a bit of a I'm drawing in the air which is no good on a podcast is it but it's like, like when you're at the beginning a novice you call, quote novice when you're at the beginning of your journey you kind of need to build people's trust. So you need a lot of kind of good content. Then there's this bit in the middle of your journey, which I would class myself, as I am someone who doesn't need to do a lot of outbound marketing, because virtually all my clients come to me by referral, some come through, maybe listening to the podcast, or maybe reading a blog post, etcetera. But most clients come from referral. And so I feel like people like me get a bit complacent. So we almost don't necessarily need people to come by referral, already have that trust in place. And then I'm interested in what happens next? Because I know that's what you're going to tell us now.
Alastair McDermott 15:46
Okay, so let me step back and answer the question that we didn't answer a minute ago, which is why should you care about your website, I see this, this journey to authority is having these four stages, there might even be a fifth stage. But I don't want to complicate the model. So let's just, let's just go with four. So everybody starts out as a novice, and you can be really smart, it doesn't reflect on how smart you are or anything like that. But everybody starts out, you know, at ground level as a novice, and then people go on to be experts, and they become this generalist experts. So they're really good at lots of different things. You will spot this on websites where people talk about their their capabilities, and somewhat boastful websites, sometimes you see in the consulting world, where they talk about their capabilities and have a great processes great people, quite often they're generalist at this point. And it's very much focused on kind of, we can handle any problem that's thrown at us. And most people will actually stop there as a as a consultant, or as an expert, as some kind of most people will stop there. And I say this after serving over 1000 consultants, that's, that's why I know they stopped their research again, but some people will go on and niche down and get very specialist. And those people who niche down can go on to be a recognised authority in their field. And the reason I say this is because that phrase, the recognised authority in your field, it means you have to have a field, you have to be specialist, you can't really be a recognised authority in everything. It's very difficult to go from this generalist position to being an authority. There are ways to do it, particularly for people who were early. I think that like if you look at people like Mark Schaefer, Alan Weiss, there's some some folks I had on my podcast, both of those were in on the ground floor when it comes to internet marketing and things like that. And so they're both very prolific in terms of writing as well. But even when you dig into people who are seen as journalists, quite often, you'll see that if you look at their backstory, they're very specific. Like another example is Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vee. And if you look at him, you know, he seems like this generalist expert in marketing. But if you go to his backstory, he originally was an expert in wine, and in promoting wine through videos with his Wine Library TV. And that was what made him you know, so popular. Now, you can usually take that and then use that kind of authority in one area to become the celebrity. But if you dig into these people, what you'll find is they usually started out as a specialist, and that's really interesting to me is because it's that specialisation part. That's the key step for me. And the problem with specialisation is as a process, it tends to terrify people, yes. Because what you're doing when you specialise, is you are turning away, most opportunity, right, deliberately, in order to say, a bigger yes to a small opportunity. And that is terrifying because it you know, it triggers the, the the crocodile part of our brain, you know, it kind of runs runs away from that, because that's, you know, it seems wrong. But I'll go back to if you want to be the recognised authority in your field. First, you have to have a field.
Gill Moakes 19:02
Absolutely right. And it is, I think it is scary for a lot of people to niche down and I think it puts it plunges people into scarcity mindset. I just won't if I if I narrow my field like that I'm not going to get enough clients. So I can't possibly say no to a paying client. Yeah. And it's it's really chicken and egg as well, isn't it? It really is. It's kind of until you do. The steady stream of perfect clients isn't going to start coming. It's only when you start saying no to clients that aren't a good fit. And I mean, I talk about this a lot with my clients and on the podcast that there are so many reasons not to work with clients who aren't a good fit for you. And actually a really good way of making sure you only work with the right clients is to niche down so that it becomes crystal clear who the right clients are. Because that's the other thing isn't it? I think if you're a generalist it's hard to tell who's going to be a good fit client.
Alastair McDermott 20:05
There's really not that many more. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's one thing you mentioned there. And I think it's really important to draw attention to, it's very difficult to make a good specialisation decision. If you are in a scarcity mindset, it just I think that can't be done. Because what what happens is, you instinctively go too broad, because you're scared. And so I think that you have to be approaching it. And you have to be in a place where you know, you're not struggling, you have to be in a good place to do it. I think that's really important. Because otherwise, you will tend towards being you know, to to refs and to make the decisions that you need to make. But there's one other thing I think we didn't actually answer the question earlier on of why the website is important.
Gill Moakes 20:49
Yeah, I've genuinely managed to party service past it twice now. Right? We definitely do it.
Alastair McDermott 20:58
Right. Your website is important. If you are a specialist or an authority, but not so much if you're a novice or a generalist. Because most of your business, when you're a novice, a lot of your business is coming through outbound, you're reaching out to people, if you're get to that generalist expert stage that a lot of people go to, they get most of their business, through referrals through word of mouth. And in our business, Trust is everything. So we need to build trust, that's really what it's all about trust credibility. And if you're getting recommended through word of mouth, then your website as a trust building element isn't really all that important, because you're getting the referral. And so people will go check your website, just to make sure you look legit, there's a very low bar, they just want to make sure, okay, they've got a website, there's a semi professional photograph on there, they list what they do. Yeah, that's, you know, there's a bar. And once you meet that bar, you know, that's okay.
Alastair McDermott 21:57
When you go to becoming a specialist, and then an authority, what happens is, first of all, you start publishing a lot more, because you're able to write a lot more. So you've got more content. So typically, your website is this vehicle for all of this content that you've got. And most of your business starts to come through inbound, not through word of mouth. And those inbound inquiries, your website is really important to them, because they don't know you so well. They don't have this word of mouth referral to pass trust. So they're getting trust from your content, and your content that they see on social media, and then the content that they see in your website. So your website becomes much more important at that point. Because it's a an important factor in the trust building process. Whereas it didn't need to be earlier on because you were you were getting all of this business from referrals. And now you're moving to this inbound. So that's the reason where websites are important for people who are at that later stage, but less so for people who are in the generalist stage that makes complete sense. That makes complete sense. What else is the difference? What else helps the shift? So I suppose I'm layering the questions a bit here. But one of the things that quite often when I talk to clients about what their goals are, the words that come up a lot with entrepreneur is two words. He's thought leader, everyone wants to be a thought leader. Now I see that as being the same really as a recognised expert in your field. I think it's, it's Yeah, absolutely. So I'm just really intrigued as to what's the path that we need to follow. If we want to be that recognised authority. It starts with the niching down. First off when I was when I rebranded front away from website doctor, I originally was looking at websites for consultants realised that websites for consultants were not the best option because so few consultants thought they were important. So I called it marketing for consultants. And that's me being a former engineer, I take a very logical approach to things sometimes does what it says on the tin brand. That's does what it says on the tin. So marketing for consultants was the name of the podcast on the brand for the first 20 episodes of the podcast actually. And I realised like I do want to niche this down a little bit more and get because it's still brought up marketing for consultants. So but it was trying to figure things out still and this what you do is you course correct, you know you as you learn. And so I realised I wanted to help people with this type of inbound marketing for consultants, which is thought leadership or building authority. And so I put in a spreadsheet because spreadsheets the tool I use the most often, I put down all of the different options like I help independent consultants become thought leaders, I help independent consultants become niche famous was another option. I help independent consultants become the recognised authority, and I had like 50 different variations of this. I asked people on all the socials, I ask them for suggestions. And I put these all in spreadsheet and I looked at them over and over again, I talked to my business coach about them. I ultimately I picked the recognised authority thought leader was second. And the reason I didn't pick top leadership was because when when you're helping somebody become a thought leader, it's more about the thinking part. And when you're helping somebody become a recognised authority, the recognition part is very important. So I'm really into that part of the visibility part as well, you know, because we can build it we can be a thought leader was not really be recognised all that much. I know, lead the word leadership is in there. But I think being recognised as really important in it. So I picked the recognised authority. And so that's where that came from. Sorry. Now I've gotten distracted and forgotten what your original question is.
Gill Moakes 25:44
That's fine. I was just going to add it. Because I think you're so right. I think the thought leadership, if you focus on that, you can still stay wrapped in that cloak of invisibility that you refer to, often. And I think that's true. Whereas becoming a recognised authority, by by its very nature, is the visibility part, isn't it?
Alastair McDermott 26:11
Yeah, and that's the part I was always interested in, because it wasn't working for me originally, when I was trying to help my clients, and I was getting them. And they were different types of organisations and different hosts businesses. And it's just different. When you're an expert. When you're a consultant. We're not competing locally with everybody within, you know, a 50 mile radius, we're competing globally with the world, usually, you know, and it's a totally different ballgame. So you need to have that recognition to stand out. I think that's, by the way, that's one of the kind of indicators of your, your level of maturity in terms of the authority maturity model, which I'll talk about, but you know, it's an indicator, are you getting most of your business locally? Or do you get most of your business globally? So I get 100% of my business now is from outside my local area, whereas before, it would have been 100%, inside my local area when I was working with website, doctor. So that's, that's kind of the big shift.
Gill Moakes 27:09
Yeah, absolutely. So the authority model. Tell me about that. That sounds intriguing.
Alastair McDermott 27:18
Okay, so I was thinking about the stages on this journey to authority. And the novice and I had different names to them at the start, and I was trying to figure it out. So what I did was, like, I talked to a lot of people, I did maybe 40 5060 research calls with people. Anytime I've had a podcast interview, I've always asked the guest, could they take five minutes at the end? Could they have a look at something for me, I just want to validate some ideas that I have. And so I've been validating constantly and tweaking and making changes to this model. But I wanted to have some kind of model of what this progression look like. And so the progression of already mentioned, its novice to generalist to specialist to authority. And most people will stop at that generalist experts. And at that point, they're still usually fairly invisible. But they, their level of success really will depend on the amount of networking and referrals that they're doing. And so once I had those different categories, or stages, what I wanted to do was I wanted to look at all of these different elements, like visibility source of business, how specialised they are, the range of work that they're doing, what kind of pricing tier pricing type they're doing. And I started seeing because I was seeing patterns. And this is something David C. Baker talks a lot about, about when you specialise is that you start to see patterns, you just start to get this deeper expertise that you don't get when you stay a generalist. Because you're, you're not working with the same types of people and the same problem over and over again, and you just develop this much deeper understanding when you become a specialist. And for me, this was one of those things, this is one of those patterns. But I'm going to I'm going to share my screen here with Gill just so that she sees what I'm talking about here. But but we will talk about and I'll put a screenshot of this in the in the show notes for a job, but this is the the authority maturity model, which is kind of a representation of this journey to authority. Let me see so so that we have these stages novice generalist specialist authority, and and then what does it take, for example, this one thing I was really interested in? What does it take to go from one stage to the next? Yeah, well to go from novice to generalist. That one's fairly simple as you just need to get more experience more broad experience because in order to become a generalist and become that expert, you just need to get miles and under your belt, but it takes to go from generalist and take that next step to specialist you have to niche down you have to specialise. And that is the tough one. I think that's the hardest step in the whole thing. And I kind of visualise this as a mountain range that you've got to find your way through. And there are different paths through it. But it is tough. And it's easier if you have somebody to help guide you. And that might sound a little bit self serving. I understand that. But I found that one of the mistakes I made was trying to do this by myself.
Gill Moakes 30:12
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think you're absolutely right, this so much, that is so difficult to identify in ourselves without having someone to bounce it off. Without having another opinion or another pair of eyes on what you do we have so many blind spots.
Alastair McDermott 30:35
Yeah, I think David C. Baker has this in his book, it's hard to read the label from inside the jar, I don't know if that's originally from him. Or if that's older than that, I think it's just, you know, it is it's really difficult, we need some sort of, so what I say to people is, look, if you don't want to work with a coach, you can't work with a coach, at the very least have some trusted peers who you can bounce these ideas off and get feedback from, like maybe a mastermind group or some sort of network or, you know, a friend who understands business. But it's really important to to get feedback on this stuff and not just make the decisions in a vacuum, you know?
Gill Moakes 31:09
Absolutely. The little thing that we're going to put the screenshot of it in, in the show notes, is I love this because it shows the markers. It shows what the markers are for each of those levels. Right? And some assessment questions.
Alastair McDermott 31:28
Yeah, so actually, what I was doing here, and this is one of my spreadsheets, typically with all my notes, so what I was doing here is I was I was trying to create an assessment like a quiz, like, you know, like one of those like personality quiz, like, what, what Marvel character are you will this is what authority level, are you the authority maturity model. And so, and by the way, the reason I call it that is because I've seen this, there's the Capability Maturity Model, which is well known in the software world, which is this way of kind of assessing where an organisation is at in terms of software development. This is just the same thing, but just in terms of individuals. And look, these are frameworks and models, they're not perfect. You know, as engineers, we tend to put things into boxes, it's good as a kind of representational thing. And it's good to, but of course, the lines are going to be blurred in reality. But I think that this is useful for kind of showing you where you might be right now, and then what you need to do to move up. I think it's incredibly useful. I really do.
Gill Moakes 32:26
And I think it it's an eye opener, I think, because sometimes we, I think probably I before speaking to you, I would have said I was definitely a specialist. But when I read some of the markers, I'm not sure if I am I think I'm I'm halfway between generalist and specialist. And I know that I want to be an authority in my field. So for me looking at this, it's a pathway, isn't it? Like you say it's an it's a navigational tool that that helps you look at what you need to be working on to move to that next level.
Alastair McDermott 33:10
Exactly. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's what we want to help people do is move up the tiers and move to the next level. Because things get a lot better when you get to that authority level. But the interesting thing is, things get a lot better in your business. Typically, once you move from generalist to specialist, the reason for that is because you start to immediately get some benefits of working on the same types of projects over and over again. And I know a lot of people think you know, that sounds terrible, because that's going to be boring, or I'm going to you know, there's that kind of thing. But that typically doesn't happen in most people don't get bored. And it's one of these kind of false fears that people have around specialisation, I actually have a an audio course, a free audio course, which I put out in form of a podcast just called the specialisation podcast. And there's eight episodes of that. And I just talk a lot in that actually about the fears that people can encounter when they're niching down. But if you want to help with niching down, yeah, go and listen to that as eight episodes will take about an hour to listen to the whole thing. And it's just basically an audio course in this. But there's so many benefits in being specialists because you're able to do this pattern matching thing, you're working on the same types of projects, you're not learning on every project anymore. And you're you just get efficiencies of scale efficiencies of working on the same things. And you start to move away from being on that hamster wheel. You know, the the hourly rates locking thing where people are just working on hourly rates, and they're working every hour that they have, and they they don't want to take any time to do any kind of marketing because they're totally focused on doing client work, you know, and, and then you forget to build out your pipeline. So then you end up in this feast or famine thing. This moves you away from that. When you you niche down the specialise. You're able to charge more money because you're seen as more premium because you're specialised and you can start to do things like productize your services to get the way from customers stuff. And when you productize services, it all becomes more efficient as well. And so there's huge benefits in that huge.
Gill Moakes 35:09
I think another benefit as well is that, as you I mean, for me, the key thing with any business owner, I don't care how big or small, what kind of business it is, understanding your clients is, there are two massive non negotiables. One is that you're good at what you do. And the other one is that you understand your clients so that you can market to them. There's a kind of like two non negotiables, in, in growing a business, in my opinion. And I think what this does, what this encouragement to specialise, if you want to be an authority in your field does is one, it helps you understand those clients, like you say, because of those, you're repeating the same work with similar clients. So you're getting to understand those clients deeper and deeper and deeper, the more you go. And I think the byproduct of that, then is the other non negotiable is that you get better at what you do. Because every time you're doing that with those same kinds of clients, you're getting them even better results. You know, if you're a lot of my audience are coaches and consultants. So I know that for coaches, if you're coaching people with similar problems, and you are suddenly getting such incredible results, because you're starting to know, with crystal clarity with every client, you work with what's going to work. So I think it's two fold, that the benefits were more than two fold. But certainly those are massive benefits, right?
Alastair McDermott 36:45
Oh, yeah, I completely agree with you. I just think there's so so many huge benefits. And I almost forget about the benefits, because people focus so much on the negatives and talking about the fears and things. But the benefits are so huge in in becoming specialists even before you, you start to get all of those inbound leads that come from authority, and being recognised. But you definitely get a lot better at what you're doing. And I think that people who haven't specialised who are generalist, they genuinely want to do the best for their clients. And they are very, very good at what they do. They're very smart people. And they're very good at solving lots of different problems. But I think that they don't have a comprehension of what the deep expertise is, like, when you are a specialist. It becomes it's, it's, it's very different. A lot of people I've spoken to said, you know, I just I feel now that I have this much greater understanding, I can do this, what Jonathan Stark calls a cold read, where he gets on a call with somebody, and he can tell them what their problem is exactly. Before they open their mouth. Because he knows exactly what that is. I'm not saying that's a good idea to do that. But but you know, that the fact that you can do something like that, you just have this deep understanding of their problems. And also, when you're a specialist, there's simple things like you understand their language. So you can like if there's different languages in different industries and industries, specialisation is one way you can go, you can actually learn all of the insider language in an industry. And that helps a lot to see other benefits like that.
Gill Moakes 38:15
And that's a really interesting point. You just touched on them in that sometimes, people when they think about niching down, they just think about a certain job that people do or a certain problem that people have. But would I be right in thinking that you can niche in a lot of different ways to that? I mean, you just touched on there, you can niche down to an industry. And it's not necessarily one specific avatar of person within that industry. Would you agree?
Alastair McDermott 38:50
Oh, yeah. So let me monologue for a minute, I'll just talk about the different types of specialisation. So, horizontal specialisation is the most well understood one, or the most well known one, which is where you concentrate on a particular problem. And so web design might be a horizontal specialisation. Search engine optimization, business coaching, life coaching, all of those are a type of specialisation and you can get more specific in there but what you're really doing is you're focusing on one problem type. And then the industry one is vertical specialisation so that's where we pick an industry vertical to work with. And vertical specialisation it's the simplest one. But it's the one that people tend to resist the most I don't want to work in just one industry I'd get really bored. Or you know, there's not enough business in one industry in one entire industry in the world is not enough business for me. That's the fear that people have you know, that's it's so ridiculous when you think about it, but you know, it's this is what our little crocodile is saying in the back. It's, it's resisting us and it's you know, making us flee from this concept. So, so that's horizontal and vertical. Then there is plotform of specialisation, which is where you pick a tool or a platform to specialise in. So for example, when I started out, I specialised in WordPress as a web web design platform, which in 2007, 2008, that was quite unique to be to be a specialist in WordPress. And now saying that in 2022, it's totally different. Because it's, it's a big winner. So it's, it's just, it's everywhere. So it's not really a specialisation at all, because everybody does. Absolutely. There is another type of specialisation, which is specialising in big companies or specialising in being big. But I don't, it's not really a true specialisation. But there are, there are big companies out there who just do everything. So you know, Unilever, and people like that. And, and that's its own thing. That's kind of different. So then there's when you start to combine some of those. So I like to combine horizontal, vertical. So you focus on this problem for this group of people or this this industry. So most people when they want to specialise, they want to choose a horizontal specialisation and they focused in on that, but they don't want to do the the vertical one, platform one has its own pros and cons, if you can get in on the platform at the start, when it's not so popular, but it's going to become popular, then you can do very, very well, because what can happen is you can grow as the platform grows. And because you're early on, usually the owners of that platform want to promote you, because you're one of the few people working with them. But platforms and tools tend to commoditize over time. And just like I saw what WordPress, let's say you did programming for iOS, for iPhones and things like that, if you were doing that, in the early days, you would have been very, very popular. But if you do that now everybody else is doing it. So it's kind of commoditized or if it doesn't commoditize, the the opposite can happen is it can die, then you have to jump ship, you have to go pick another specialisation because your platform is dying. I'm sure there are like exceptions, like, I don't know if anybody even listening to this will know what COBOL is. It's a programming language from the 60s. But there might be COBOL programmers out there, there's probably so few that you because it's not very popular that there's probably so few people out there who know it. So if you do know, you probably would be what we'll be doing. Okay. So I'm sorry, somebody, these are tech examples. It's just the industry as I know so well. That's okay. They're good examples. I like to combine. For me vertical specialisation is the silver bullet, it really is fantastic. Because what happens is when you pick an industry to work in, if you can speak pick a specific industry. First of all, there's usually industry specific language, and you can get to, you can get to know all of the insider language. And that immediately sets you apart. And like a really simple example of this is like if you put stuff up on your website, and if your clients are hotels, they probably call their customers guests. If your clients are doctors, they probably call their customers, they probably call them patients, if they're consultants, they probably call their customers clients, and you know, and so on, and so on. And so that's just that's a really simple example. But you get this industry insider language that that people have. But the big one for vertical specialisation is that when you have industry, a vertical a single industry, what you'll find is that people in an industry tend to congregate. And so they tend to all read the same trade magazines, they tend to go to the same conferences, they all have conferences, they have industry associations, sometimes that you can join as a as an associate member. And so you can find them, they're all hanging around in the same place. And they all tend to know each other as well. And so you can actually dominate within one industry and one of the guys out on the podcast, Wolfram arts, he did this in the energy sector in Germany. And they his small firm of six or seven people became really well known in that one industry to the point that the European Union were using their papers to help decide policy and things like that. And they beat out for a project, they beat out a one of the large consulting firms, I looked up how many they had, they had over 280,000 staff, and this little firm of six or seven people beat them for a project. Because they were specialist, you know. And that's the power of this specialisation. And so I personally I love vertical specialisation I think it's one of the best. And if you combine if you combine some of those specialisations, like a vertical and a horizontal, so I focus on this problem for this industry for this very specific group of people, then I think that's when it becomes really super. So there you go. Apologies for the monologue.
Gill Moakes 44:37
No, that was so helpful. So I just want to repeat something you just said. So I focus on this problem for this industry. So I think that's the key thing. To me, that makes so much sense. And like I say, though, it ticks the boxes for me of really understanding your clients and getting really good at what you do the two non negotiables. And yeah, that just makes complete sense. I really would like to come up with some more examples of that. So say for example, you're a branding consultant. What would be an example of a branding consultant choosing to niche by industry?
Alastair McDermott 45:23
I do branding for craft beer companies. How powerful is there's an example how there's an example of, yeah, it's instantly powerful. And it's an so the craft beer company, this this new, the owner of this new craft beer company is going around, and she's looking for somebody to work on their branding. And she sees two branding companies, one say we do brands, branding for everybody. And the other says we do branding only for craft beer companies, who they're gonna choose simple.
Gill Moakes 45:56
It's just a no brainer. And we do it ourselves, don't we? I always look for something that speaks directly to me. And that is specialised. So, you know, why would it ever be a surprise that it's what makes the most sense for our own businesses? To be specialised?
Alastair McDermott 46:12
Yeah. And it's the same, you know, like, specialisation. In particular, like when you see in the world of consulting, if you look at the other professional services, if you look at lawyers, and if you look at people like doctors, they have lots of specialisation, that it's been really well embraced. And you know that a brain surgeon is going to earn more than a GP, and GP is the general practitioner.
Gill Moakes 46:37
Yep, absolutely. Isn't that I mean, you could use that analogy for it's a little bit like a hairdressing salon, I often use this, you know, you're, you know, if you go in and you're going to use the one of their students are trained, you're gonna get it done really cheaply. If you want the colour technician expert to do or hair colour, you're gonna pay through the nose for that, because they're a specialist in doing that. It's funny, isn't it? The more we explore this conversation, the more obvious it becomes. And yet, so many people are still resisting it so hard.
Alastair McDermott 47:16
Yeah, because we make that decision, we're going to say no to a lot of people, yeah, we're going to have to say no to a lot of people, we're going to have to turn people away. And that just feels so wrong. Is there any way for me to specialise and niche down, but still take on everybody, you know, that's what people want to do. And in fact, the irony is, it is actually true, you can do that, you can do that to some degree. So what you can do is you can change your positioning your your, your published positioning, that you have on your website, and your LinkedIn and everywhere that you have that mentioned. So you can have that talk about your specialisation. But if somebody comes along to you through a referral, you can still take them on as a client, right? You know, there's no specialisation place that are going to come along and lock you up. Because you took on somebody who's outside of your specialisation, it's absolutely fine to do that. But what you'll find is that after a while, you won't want to take those lines on anymore. Because they no longer fit your systems, your process. You don't you don't work with with their problem anymore. But you will develop relationships with people in shoulder industries and people who do work with those people. And this is another big advantage of specialisation is you start to develop relationships with people who are complementary to you. Because when you're a generalist, you're competing with everybody, so everybody's a competitor. Whereas when you're a specialist, you only focus on one part of the problem. And so you can talk to the people who solve the other parts of the problem. And you don't feel like you're you don't feel like you need to hide yourself or protect yourself from them.
Gill Moakes 48:51
And I think collaboration becomes much easier as well. And that kind of genuine referral passing between each other. If your peers are experts in other fields, there become this natural circle that you're going to pass referrals to so that the client gets the best fit option for them. Tying back into that, you know, you're not going to want to work with clients who aren't the right fit for you. So you will want to have this circle of people who are experts in their recognised authorities in their fields. And so that becomes a more natural process as well.
Alastair McDermott 49:30
Yeah, it just it makes life so much easier. I mean, there are other things by the way, like you're missing out if you don't niche down. Well, first of all, like you can't become a recognised authority in your field because you don't have a field. That's that's the obvious one. But if you don't niche down, why would somebody invite you to speak at an event? Like what would you be speaking out if you are not niched down? I don't really know. I don't think you're gonna get invited to speak and that's probably why you haven't been invited to speak if you are a journalist is because you're not specialist. You miss out on all of that. That pattern matching that deep expertise that we talked about, you probably won't build an audience, because you're moving from one problem area to another problem area from one from one type of sector to another. And so you're not, you know, your latest post isn't relevant to your previous audience. And so it's changing all the time. That's the one I had and finding a difficult, great content because it was so bland.
Alastair McDermott 50:23
And and then you're missing out on those relationships. Like, I think there's so many different things that you're missing out on, when you you don't. And that's what I like to talk to people about is what you miss out if you don't become a specialist if we don't niche down, because we're driven to run away from negatives rather than towards positives. So I know that this specialisation decision is terrifying. So I want to talk about some of the negatives of not specialising. So that sort of there's an impetus to do the right thing, you know. So yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
Gill Moakes 50:56
So I think this has been incredibly interesting. I want to just kind of wrap up by really getting your take on, what does it do for your business to become a recognised authority in the field? How does that what does that look and feel like when you are?
Alastair McDermott 51:18
Okay, so it's interesting. So and by the way, one of the things we didn't mention is that the last step to go from just after you've, you've become a specialist, to move on and become an authority, what you really need to work on at that point is publishing. So it's publishing and speaking and doing some research, usually things like that. And the reason that's relevant to this is because that's what you tend to be doing, you tend to be doing a lot of publishing a lot of content creation, a lot of speaking, and, and hopefully, some research as well. And so that's part of what your business becomes, it becomes like, I hear people say, you know, I don't have time to write blog posts, I don't have time for this, I don't have time for that, you hear that you should be putting out more content on social media and places like that. And you do have time when you become an authority, because you're getting a lot more inbound leads. So it starts, you know, once you start to gain a bit of visibility, for example, you wanted to have me on the podcast to talk. And that's because, in part, because I have a body of work out there, that I've put out there that I've published with my thinking, and I wouldn't have had any of this, like, I wouldn't have thought of any of this, if I hadn't niched down, because it just wouldn't have been relevant. And so what happens is you develop this body of work, you develop this point of view, and you have a lot more people inquiring with you. So you can take as many of those or as few of those on as you want. Usually, you can charge a premium, because you're much more in demand. Yeah. And you can also do things like you can have productize services, or, you know, you can have things like elearning courses, or books or whatever you want to have in terms of intellectual property that that has all of your thoughts and your point of view, and your learnings, all wrapped up, and you can sell those. So you can disconnect from that hourly rate thing. And that's really the big thing is you get away from working on this hourly rate. And into you can do value pricing and, and value pricing is a difficult thing to do on its own as well. I talked to Ron Baker, who, who wrote the book about value pricing, and created the concept. And he's like, he acknowledged that you know that that very few people do value pricing well, and it's very difficult thing to do. But it's much easier to do that when you're coming from a position of authority. Because how people come to you is different. They come pre sold. So like I had an inquiry from somebody, and they had listened to 50 episodes of my podcast 509. That's like that's like they've already spent. That's like they've already spent a week with me well.
Gill Moakes 53:50
They will feel that they know you already won't be. Yeah, so much of that groundwork is already done. They already trust you. They already know what to expect from you to a certain extent.
Alastair McDermott 54:05
Absolutely it. So they call it a parasocial relationship, this one sided relationship. And we have it with celebrities too. But and that's that's why kind of the next step after authority might be celebrity. I think a lot of people won't go there. And it's, I think people like Gary Vaynerchuk people like that break into that kind of celebrity, you know, he's recognised now when he when he goes places.
Alastair McDermott 54:27
But that's I think that part is not necessary. But this thing of having these inbound leads from people who already trust you, you don't need to sell them on on what you're doing. They say no, look, you know, you don't need to sell me on this. I already know that you're the right person. For me, I just want to, you know, make sure that that you know, it's a good fit and all that good thing, but it's a very simple sale, but it totally changes and so your marketing and your sales are much easier. In fact, they change completely because your marketing becomes writing blog posts and writing content. Writing books,
Alastair McDermott 55:00
And so your marketing is writing and speaking, or teaching and learning isn't is another way to think about it. So you're teaching people, and then you're learning through through research. And research, by the way, it can be doing things like surveys and things like that research can also be 20 minute phone calls with people. And you know, if you have a view set up 20 or 30 minute phone calls with a whole bunch of different people, at the end of that you will have enough information to write a book guaranteed. If you if you ask the same questions from from a similar group of people, you will definitely get enough insights to give you huge insights and into whatever you're doing the research on, that's not really that hard to get is to get a gift, you know, to get that many people to commit to a short phone call with you.
Gill Moakes 55:47
I do that periodically in my businesses interview. And it's something I encourage my clients to do, I think it's really important because otherwise we what we're actually doing is reading what other people's clients think and say, and not our own and not our own prospects and clients and so I think I am totally with you on that I think you learn so much from actually speaking to them.
Alastair McDermott 56:13
Yeah, and you can also do things like you can start a podcast. And I have now spoken with people who I never would have been able to speak with before, because I have a podcast gives you this platform. But I've also been able to validate my ideas like this model with some of the smartest people in marketing in the world. You know, and that's, that's really cool that you're able to do that. Or you can use your podcast, friends and how you do it, you can do it in different ways. But you can use your podcast to interview your clients, and interview ideal clients for you. And you can use it to actually generate clients. So there's lots of different things that you can do. But again, that requires that you're specialist. I mean, you have to your podcast has to be about something. So. So you have to have that part. And that was the part, you know, to wrap it all the way back to the beginning. That was the part that I had the problem with my podcasts wasn't about anything. It was about everything. And and that's why it never got off the ground originally.
Gill Moakes 57:07
Yeah. And now you've got I think, ooh how many episodes now you want, like 65?
Alastair McDermott 57:15
So far? Yeah. Yeah. And like I'm interviewing Christo this week, who's I think a lot of people listening to this will know who he is. But he's the he's got a very, very well known in the web design and design industry. He's got 2 million subscribers on YouTube. He's, he's huge. And I was able to get him. He's a very busy guy. But I was able to get him to come on the podcast because of the other people who had had on the podcast. And I said, Hey, Chris, you know, I had I had David C. Baker. And I had Mark Schaefer and Marcus Sheridan and these people on, I said, When do you want to set up an interview? And he replied, within 20 minutes and said, Here's my booking link. And you get that because of this whole machine, this whole authority that you have, and, and all of that comes again, from being on this journey to authority. And I'm not stopping at that stage where you're generous.
Gill Moakes 58:05
Yeah, absolutely. I think that is so interesting. What if people want to reach out to you after this Alastair? How do they get in touch with you? Well, I've got two podcasts. And that's probably the best way because one is called the recognised authority. And it's, it's an interview show a bit like this one where I interview people about building authority and different aspects of that. And then the other one is called the specialisation podcast. And it's spelled the American way. So apologies to everybody on this side of the pond, but I figured that we'd be able to handle the wrong spelling better than they would. So
Gill Moakes 58:41
I tend to do the same. Actually, I'm practically bilingual now. Because my audiences I'd say probably about 80% is in the US. And only 20% of UK so I definitely feel like I'm bilingual.
Alastair McDermott 58:55
Yeah, yeah. Well, what I do is, I tend to write specialisation with with a with a Zed or a Z, as they say, and everything else that I have in in British English. It's, it's really messed up.
Gill Moakes 59:09
I like it keeps on our toes.
Alastair McDermott 59:10
So anyway. Yes. We were talking about where people can go to find me. Yeah, go go, go check out the specialisation podcast, if you're actually interested in that process of niching down and specialising because it'll it'll help kind of guide you on that journey. And I think you'll find that useful if you're if you want to do that. And the other one is, is interesting, I think, because I think it's interesting, because the people I get to talk to her fascinating, but it's all about building authority.
Gill Moakes 59:34
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a fantastic podcast. And like you said, You've had some great guests on there as well. But also you do a few solo episodes as well, which I really like. So I've been picking out those to listen to too. And yeah, really, really good. And it has been such a pleasure having you on today. Like I said at the beginning it's something that since speaking to you it's really sparked a bit of a kind of an aha moment.
Gill Moakes 1:00:00
For me, definitely. So I'm keen. I'm keen to keep the conversation going after this. So, thank you so much for coming on.
Alastair McDermott 1:00:09
Super than it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Gill Moakes 1:00:11
You're so welcome.
Gill Moakes 1:00:15
I hope you enjoyed this episode. And getting our heads together this week has filled your mind with what's possible. If you love the show, would you do me a massive favour please? Would you leave a five star rating on Apple podcasts? It would really help you put more heads together, which will ears and expand more minds. Until next week. Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
