Stuck finding your lane as a solo consultant?
āØ The NicheFinder Sprint āØ
May slots now open
Bottle your secret sauce.
Hi! Iām Wes Wheless
I help solo consultants find their niche
and build lightbulb-inducing IP
to become known for it
First time here?
The best way to get oriented to my āIP-firstā approach is to subscribe to The Lightbulb.
Itās my daily micro-email offering free tips and frameworks to get your hard-earned expertise out of your head and deploy it front-and-center of your consulting business.
You can jump in here:
ā Jonathan Stark, host of Ditching Hourly and
The Business of Authority podcasts
Popular Free Resources
My daily micro-email: š” The Lightbulb
A lightbulb in your inbox every day, specifically written for fellow independent consultants
Yes, I write every day, and yes, subscribers stick around :)
Browse the archive or sign up to get your first tip today
Framework: First Mile Foundations
New to solo consulting? There are 5 core foundations to establish a firm, viable market position
Framework: The Consultantās Expertise Loop
Understand how synthesizing your insights into unique IP can turbocharge your consulting business
Framework: Price Triangulation Mental Model
Identify three data points as reference points to price your consulting service
Framework: Whatās Your Helper Persona?
Understand how you want to help your clients as a first step to building your business model
Framework: Monetizing Expertise Through Content
Understand the flow from stray insight to revenue
Case studies: Past IP Collabs
Recent examples of crisp codification of frontier concepts with some of techās brightest executives
About Wes
Hi! Iām Wes Wheless - Iām a niche discovery and IP partner for solo consultants and also what you might call an āexpertise whispererā.
Iāve spent the bulk of my 20-year corporate & consulting career synthesizing expert insights into monetizable IP for Fortune 500 companies, early-stage startups, and prominent tech executives.
This ācaptured IPā has been deployed commercially as:
frameworks for corporate strategies
talks at industry conferences
premium courses priced up to $1,000+ per seat.
Past IP collaborations include execs and experts from Uber, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Expedia, Adobe, Graphite, Persefoni, BCG and moreā¦
These days, I exclusively serve new & aspiring independent consultants, the segment of professionals I believe are chronically underselling their hard-earned expertise and losing engagements when they shouldnāt be.
Sound familiar?
Where are independent consultants going wrong?
As ICs, most of us rely too heavily on our warm network to source leads, and then lean on our experience to convert those leads to clients
This isā¦fineā¦for your first year. But itās not a sustainable strategy
You will eventually exhaust your network, and perhaps surprisingly your experience alone is not a great differentiator ā especially in todayās flooded talent market
Why isnāt our experience enough?
To be sure, clients appreciate an experienced consultant, but more importantly, they want a solution to their urgent problem
They care less about what youāve done, and more about what youāll do for them
If youāre winging it when describing how your past experiences can apply to their context, the client will notice, and theyāll move on to someone who can paint a clearer path to relief
What should we focus on instead?
The most effective consultants will take the additional step of organizing their experiences and insights into intellectual property, or āIPā.
A consultantās IP typically looks like frameworks, processes, playbooks, and tools that you can readily apply to a clientās situation
By centering your business around your IP, you will attract potential clients based on your unique POV on their domain & problem
The benefits continue ā an āIP-firstā marketing & sales approach:
Demonstrates your domain authority
Focuses the sales conversation
Provides visibility towards a solution within a clientās context
Accelerates trust
Shortens the sales cycle
Elevates your achievable rates
BONUS: your IP can often even help structure the proposed project itself
Simply put:
IP is a consultantās #1 marketing & sales tool.
Itās a magnetic tool that attracts high-quality prospects,
communicates your differentiated value
and turbocharges your sales cycle.
For most consultants, that tool is stuck on a shelf in the back of your head.
I help you get it out and put it to work for your niche consulting business.
Take a look around. Get acquainted.
When youāre ready, letās talk about
bottling your secret sauce.
I believe in collaborations, not hard sells.
All consultations are 100% commitment-free.