Thank you for this article Michael. We built a tech services company and took it to an exit in 2019. And now are building an accelerator for tech services company and this article is the underlying thesis we are acting upon. Check out this post on our blog about a years ago: https://www.vixul.com/post/emerging-technology-services-a-new-opportunity . Really appreciate the post and a couple of comments.

One suggestion I would make to your playbook is instead of starting with a newsletter start with attending an event. You can quickly get the feedback of several dozen people. You can also do it before you quit your job. Doesn't require any long-term commitment, just a day out of your life. And it is enough to tell you about what is possible. I do like your list, and it probably needs to be a follow up to this article we wrote: https://medium.com/vixul-inc/overcoming-fear-89f75bb38765

Now your diagram is interesting. I recently read David Baker's book the "Business Of Expertise" and it reminds me of that. You are looking at the problem with the lens of you consulting rather than creating a consulting company. Obviously both of those are valid approaches and to some extent you have to ask a question on what your personal ambitions are. I feel the consulting route will create a lot of personal brand recognition, and definitely a lot of wealth and personal freedom but it is harder to be done and to capitalize on it for an exit. It's a lot easier to exit a consulting company once you've reached some level of scale.

I may be judging a bit from the labels on scalability. But looking at it with the lens of someone that built a consulting company. Content, Ebooks, and courses are products. Whether you monetize them or use them as lead gen by establishing credibility they are products. If you decide to make them the primary revenue stream by reaching out to a very large audience then they are products. For our round two we were actually thinking about pursuing them ala "A Cloud Guru" and "Linux Academy". The reason we balked is that they are a product so you still have to find product market fit, it is a very quickly deprecating product especially in tech so you have to continuously invest in it, and you're not there to really harvest it for money. And while a few of these companies have seen great success they are a drop in the bucket compared to the companies in the services space and in the product space that have had success.

For consulting it says it is difficult to scale. And that is true in the sense that you have to hire people and manage them to scale. But it's important to remember that almost every business needs to do that to scale. There are only a handful of product companies that don't try to scale. Similarly to really unlock wealth in a services company you also have to scale it. Which brings all the problems of managing people. And to be honest that is a lot of work but while the work is on scaling the delivery the scaling of the marketing effort is not as hard. The key is that your true expertise may be difficult to scale but to unlock the value of your expertise a lot of implementation work needs to be done. And so if you want to scale, scale the implementation of the solution with you leading and guiding others. Grow the team, and use one of the people that you have grown to increase your expert bandwidth. In a few years you won't be doing any actual implementation work and would be building and growing a company.