Positioning Your Expertise Business:A One-Day Walkthrough of Dunford's Ten Steps
Most consultancies describe themselves; almost none actually position themselves. Here's April Dunford's ten-step exercise rebuilt for firms that sell expertise instead of software — four phases, one day, one defensible position.
Try a thought experiment. Your firm shuts its doors tomorrow morning. By noon, what do your clients do instead? Call a big consultancy? Pull a generic framework off the internet and run it themselves? Quietly decide the problem can wait another year? If you can't answer that question with confidence, you don't actually know what you're competing against — and you cannot position a business against competition you can't name.
That question is the opening move in April Dunford's positioning exercise from Obviously Awesome. What makes her book different from nearly everything else written on the subject is that it's a procedure, not a pep talk. Work through ten concrete steps and you finish with a structural answer to two questions most founders never settle: where do we compete, and why do we win there?
Dunford built the exercise inside technology companies, but almost nothing in it depends on software. Below is the full walkthrough, rebuilt for expertise businesses — consultancies, agencies, training and coaching firms, especially those built around a named methodology.
Block out one uninterrupted day. Ten steps, four phases, and at the end of it, a position you can defend.
Phase One: Take Honest Inventory
Steps 1–3 — What You're Up Against, and What You Actually Have
Step 1: Name your real alternatives. Notice the word choice — alternatives, not competitors. The thought experiment that opened this article is the test: what would a buyer genuinely do if you didn't exist? For an expertise firm, the honest list almost always lands in five buckets: doing nothing at all (the quiet giant that kills more deals than any rival), bringing in a large consultancy such as McKinsey, Accenture, or Deloitte, self-applying a generic framework with no expert in the room, hiring a different boutique with its own approach, or building the capability internally and skipping outside help entirely.
Write down what buyers actually weigh, not what flatters you. A list built on wishful thinking produces a position built on sand.
Step 2: Inventory what only you have. Against that list of alternatives, what do you hold that none of them can match? Maybe it's a proprietary diagnostic. Maybe it's a certified network of practitioners, a documented methodology with a track record, depth in one narrow vertical, or a benchmark database built from hundreds of prior assessments.
The discipline here is ruthlessness about vagueness. "Experienced team" is not an attribute — it's table stakes that every firm in your market claims. Compare that with something like a proprietary 30-question diagnostic that returns a maturity score benchmarked against 500 organizations in the client's own industry. One of those statements can anchor a position. The other can't anchor anything.
Step 3: Convert attributes into value the buyer feels. An attribute is what you possess; a value theme is what the client walks away with. The 30-question instrument becomes a board-ready maturity score delivered in 90 minutes. The certified network becomes a local expert delivering a global methodology. The 500-organization database becomes the ability to tell a leadership team precisely where they sit against their peers.
Aim for three or four value themes. Beyond four, the message blurs. Below three, you may struggle to justify premium fees.
When Phase One is done, you hold three things: a truthful map of the competitive terrain, an inventory of genuine differences, and those differences translated into the buyer's language. Most firms leap straight to writing taglines. This phase is what makes the taglines true.
Phase Two: Make the Two Decisions Everything Else Depends On
Steps 4–5 — Who You Serve, and What Shelf You Sit On
Step 4: Choose the customer who cares most. Your value themes don't matter equally to everyone. Somewhere there is a specific buyer for whom they matter intensely. That buyer — not "any company that needs consulting" — is your target.
The evidence for narrowing is overwhelming. Baker, drawing on more than 900 advisory engagements with expertise firms, found that tightly focused firms beat broadly positioned ones on every metric he tracks — revenue per engagement, close rates, client satisfaction, and referrals. A wide net feels safer; it differentiates nothing and therefore catches nothing.
So define the target until it feels uncomfortably narrow: the industry, the company size, the persona who signs (CTO? COO? a board member?), the triggering event that starts the search, the budget range, and the approaches they've already tried and been burned by. Precision in the definition is what creates resonance in the message.
Step 5: Pick your category — the highest-stakes choice in the whole exercise. The category you claim decides what buyers compare you against, and the comparison decides whether you win. Dunford gives you three plays: stand inside an existing category with sharp differentiation (the AI maturity assessment firm within management consulting), carve out a subcategory you can own outright (diagnostic-led transformation for mid-market logistics companies), or invent a category from scratch — highest risk, highest potential reward.
Russell Brunson's Expert Secrets sharpens the stakes with his distinction between an Improvement Offer and a New Opportunity. Promising "better consulting" is an Improvement Offer — it begs the buyer to line you up against everyone else. Offering a certified methodology, a proprietary diagnostic, and a global bench of specialist practitioners is a New Opportunity — there is nothing to line it up against.
"How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess."
— Russell Brunson, Expert Secrets
The selection rule is simple: pick the category where your Step 2 attributes make you the evident winner. If no honest reading of the landscape has you winning where you currently sit, the problem isn't your marketing — it's your shelf.
Phase Three: Pressure-Test Before You Go Public
Steps 6–8 — Treat the Position as a Hypothesis, Not a Decision
Step 6: Run Baker's five pre-tests. Before a single buyer sees your draft position, screen it against five criteria Baker uses to predict whether a focus will hold up commercially:
- Competitor count: Between 10 and 200 firms should be identifiable in the space. Under 10 suggests the market is too thin; over 200 suggests you haven't actually narrowed.
- "Drop and Give Me 20": You should be able to reel off 20 specific insights, patterns, or recommendations for the niche on the spot. If you can't, the expertise claim is premature.
- Geographic reach: The niche should be serviceable nationally or internationally. A position bounded by geography is a position bounded in scale.
- Specialist hiring: There must be people you could hire or train into the specialty. No talent pool means no growth through certification.
- Purchasable lists: The buyers must be findable — through databases, events, or publications. An audience you can't locate is an audience you can't market to.
Fail any one of these and the position deserves another look before it goes anywhere near your website.
Step 7: Put it in front of real buyers. Bring the draft to five existing clients and five prospects — explicitly framed as a work in progress, never as the finished answer. Ask whether the framing matches what they value about working with you, and whether it describes the problem they were carrying when they first picked up the phone.
One of two things happens: the position gets confirmed, or it gets dismantled. Dismantled is the better outcome at this stage. A position that dies in ten conversations costs you a week; one that dies in the market costs you a year.
Step 8: Revise with what you heard. Expect the conversations to surprise you. Some value themes you loved will land flat. Buyers will name competitive comparisons you never considered. Your category choice may not match the mental shelf they actually use. Fold all of it back in.
In practice, two cycles do the job — draft, feedback, revision, second round of feedback, final version. The result is a position that's honest about who you are and compelling to the people you want.
Phase Four: Write It Down, Then Say It Until You're Bored
Steps 9–10 — Artifacts, Ownership, and Relentless Repetition
Step 9: Capture the position in three working documents. A position that lives only in the founder's head dies the moment someone else opens their mouth. Codify it:
The Positioning Canvas compresses everything onto one page — alternatives, unique attributes, value themes, target customer, category. Every strategic decision afterward gets checked against it.
The Sales Story turns the canvas into a narrative with a four-beat arc: the world changed, the existing options fall short, your methodology answers the gap, and here is what clients experience when they engage. It should take three minutes to tell and one hearing to remember.
The Messaging Document is the master file — taglines, value propositions per segment, differentiation statements, objection scripts, proof points, and the single sentence every person in your firm uses to say what you do.
That last item matters more than it looks. Beckwith calls it the Cocktail Party Principle: communicate one thing memorably, because several messages at once communicate nothing. When someone asks what you do, "I'm a consultant" ends the conversation. "We measure how ready an organization is for AI and show them exactly what to do next" starts one.
Step 10: Claim your words. Harnish frames the endgame as "Words You Own" — a specific phrase you bind to your brand through sheer repetition. Volvo owns "safety." FedEx owns "overnight." The phrase has to thread a needle: narrow enough to be claimable (nobody owns "strategy" or "consulting") yet broad enough to carry commercial weight. A quick reality check is Google Autocomplete — type your target phrase, and if it completes with competitor names, the ground is already taken.
Then comes the unglamorous part: say it everywhere, forever. Every article, every deck, every conversation. The moment you're tired of the phrase is roughly the moment the market starts to hear it. And in a firm with multiple practitioners, consistency is existential — when each person describes the business differently, the brand splinters and so does your pricing power.
One final fork in the road from Baker: vertical positioning targets an industry ("we help healthcare organizations measure operational maturity") while horizontal positioning targets a discipline ("we help organizations of any size build data infrastructure"). His research shows 85% of successful expertise firms go vertical. Either route can work — but straddling both is a way of choosing neither.
The One Belief That Carries All the Others
There's an element Brunson adds that Dunford's ten steps don't cover, and it's worth bolting on: the Big Domino. It's the single belief that, once a prospect accepts it, knocks down every objection behind it.
For a firm built around a diagnostic, the domino usually sounds like this: if you accept that this area of expertise can be measured accurately on a structured scale, the rest follows on its own. Believe the measurement, and the need for expert guidance becomes self-evident, the fee becomes defensible, and the ROI case writes itself.
So aim every presentation, every case study, every marketing asset at establishing that one belief. Brunson's instruction is blunt: "Pick ONE belief and hammer it." Arguing ten claims at once is how you win none of them.
Step back and the bigger truth comes into focus. Positioning is not a marketing task you delegate; it's a strategic choice about which game you play and on what terms you intend to win it. Dunford supplies the procedure. The authors cited above supply the depth. The uncomfortable work of deciding what makes you different — and for whom — can't be outsourced to anyone.
One day of this work buys you more than a year of unfocused marketing ever will. Put it in the calendar.