There Are Too Many Consultants

If building your independent practice feels harder than it should right now, it's not just you.

If it somehow feels more crowded, more competitive, and more exhausting than when you started — that's not a trick of mind. Something structural is happening. Something real. And almost nobody in our space is talking about it honestly.

There are just too many consultants.

Too many advisors. Too many fractional leaders. Too many coaches. Too many specialists. All saying roughly the same thing, to roughly the same people, in roughly the same way.

Let me show you what I mean.

Go to LinkedIn right now and search for any independent professional in your space. You'll find dozens. Maybe hundreds. Every one of them has deep expertise. Every one of them delivers results. Every one of them has testimonials from satisfied clients.

So that's condition one: a lot of players.

Condition two is just as important: a limited number of ways to describe what you do.

"I help leaders navigate change."

"I help organizations scale."

"I help teams perform."

There are only so many ways to frame consulting expertise before the language becomes interchangeable. And we reached that point a while ago.

The "niches" that new independents try to carve become ever more marginal. Ever more forced. Until everyone is threading the same needle with the same thread, wondering why the market can't tell them apart.

Too much supply. Too little differentiation. Simple. And it's accelerating. Fractional leaders doubled from 60,000 to 120,000 in two years. Full-time independents hit 27.7 million in 2024. AI tools have dropped the barrier to looking professional to near zero — anyone can have a polished website and a sharp LinkedIn profile by tomorrow morning.

Which means the thing that used to quietly differentiate you — your experience, your credentials, your track record — is now table stakes. Everyone has it. Or at least everyone looks like they have it.

So what do most professionals do? They dig harder. They try to niche down further. They tweak their headline. They post more. They redesign their website. They add another certification. They look for the gap in the market that nobody has filled yet.

My advice: stop digging.

That gap — that perfectly unoccupied niche — you will not find it by looking at the market. Because every obvious gap has been claimed. Every generic position has been taken. Every "I help X achieve Y" formulation has been written a thousand times.

But what hasn't been taken — and never will be — is what's buried in your work.

The way you think about problems that nobody else approaches the same way. The methodology you've developed over fifteen years but never named. The point of view you hold about your field that contradicts what everyone else accepts as normal.

That is your position. And it's unoccupied — not because nobody found it yet, but because nobody else can occupy it. It's yours.

I see this with every client I work with. They arrive thinking their problem is visibility. Or content. Or confidence. What they actually have is the most distinctive asset in their practice sitting unnamed and unbuilt — while they market themselves with the same language as everyone else.

When we uncover it — when we name it and build the brand around it — something shifts. They stop competing. They stop explaining. The market reads them differently because there's finally something to read.

The professionals who will thrive in the next two to three years are not the ones who niche down harder or post more consistently. They're the ones who build around something the market cannot replicate.

Not a cleverer service description. Not a tighter niche. Something genuinely theirs — drawn from how they actually work, made visible, and built into architecture that doesn't depend on them showing up every day to perform it.

Wouldn't it be nice to stop convincing people why you're different? To stop competing on credentials with dozens of equally qualified professionals? To have the market come to you — not because you showed up most recently, but because your positioning made you the only one who makes sense?

I think it would. And if you've been feeling the weight of that crowded market pressing in, the answer isn't more activity. It's architecture.

Around the thing that was always yours.