Drafting your position

Read the foundational page on consulting visioning before doing this. Then answer the four questions in writing, at length, and only then compress.

The compression is where the work is. A first draft runs to two pages. The useful version is two sentences. Cutting forces the choices that the long version allows you to avoid, and the discomfort of cutting is the sensation of actually deciding something.

Three tests to apply to your draft

1. The exclusion test. Read it and ask who it rules out. If it rules out almost nobody, it is a services list. A good position excludes 95 percent of organisations and that is not a defect.
2. The budget test. Does the client have an existing budget line this fits into, or would engaging you require creating one? Creating a budget line is far harder than occupying an existing one, and this single question kills a lot of otherwise appealing positions.
3. The recurrence test. Does this problem happen once per client, or does it recur? Once-only problems require constant new client acquisition. Recurring problems build a practice.

Expect this draft to be wrong. It is a hypothesis about where you can be useful, and the following levels are partly a test of it. Date it. The revisions over three years are a better record of your development than any qualification.