>Be a solver of a specific business problem for a specific type of business.
Totally agree in principle, but I've found it's very hard to do this in practice.
Unless you have a priori knowledge of an industry, before your first consulting gig in it, it's hard to just step into a business domain and know what specific problems an industry has that can be improved with better software and which of those specific problems are generic enough to be shared by many companies in that industry – while not being served "well enough" by an existing product. And you have to figure out if it's a niche that's big enough to support a company, while balancing other desires, e.g., not spending weeks traveling around the country to sell and work with companies in this sector.
I'm not saying it can't be done. It can, obviously; there are companies doing it. But it's not easy to just go do it. From my limited exposure to consultancies taking this approach, many kind of kept their eyes open and fell sideways into it, i.e., they worked with one client in a sector and realized the client's competitors had similar problems.
Totally agree in principle, but I've found it's very hard to do this in practice.
Unless you have a priori knowledge of an industry, before your first consulting gig in it, it's hard to just step into a business domain and know what specific problems an industry has that can be improved with better software and which of those specific problems are generic enough to be shared by many companies in that industry – while not being served "well enough" by an existing product. And you have to figure out if it's a niche that's big enough to support a company, while balancing other desires, e.g., not spending weeks traveling around the country to sell and work with companies in this sector.
I'm not saying it can't be done. It can, obviously; there are companies doing it. But it's not easy to just go do it. From my limited exposure to consultancies taking this approach, many kind of kept their eyes open and fell sideways into it, i.e., they worked with one client in a sector and realized the client's competitors had similar problems.