Proposition specificity creates commercial strength for consulting firms

If you run a boutique consulting firm, what's your answer to "what do you do?" Is it still some version of "we are X experts and we can help with anything in X"?

If the answer's yes, then you're sitting at the front of the AI risk queue. That's the message Luk Smeyers and Florian Heinrichs, co-founders of The Visible Authority, brought to ConCon26.

Luk built and sold his own data analytics consulting firm to Deloitte in 2016, and then spent four years inside the firm helping turn around struggling practices. Florian came up through Accenture, marketing agencies, and a stint marketing Accenture's Industry X business. Together they help consulting firms do one thing: get specific about the issue they solve, and let that specificity do the commercial heavy lifting.

Here are five key insights I took from their session at ConCon26:

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1. Visibility isn't the same as authority - specificity is

Luk's original firm earned the name 'the visible authority' in the early days of data analytics.

But Luk and Florian have come to a sharper conclusion: visibility alone doesn't sell. Specificity does. Authority follows specificity, not the other way round.

"Proposition specificity creates commercial strength."

• Stop describing your firm by capability ('we are SAP experts')

• Start describing it by the issue you own ('we run first-time, resource-constrained Salesforce migrations for mid-market companies')

• Be willing to walk away from work that doesn't fit the proposition - it's the only way the proposition compounds

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2. The capability-led trap puts you in the AI danger zone

Florian was direct: if you sell capability ("here's what we can do - who needs some of that?"), you've handed the client the locus of control.

They tell you how your expertise gets applied. They benchmark you against every other firm with similar credentials. And now, increasingly, they benchmark you against Claude.

"If Claude can do this, what exactly are you adding? Claude can write the report or build the dashboard or prepare the slides. So what are you adding?"

• Audit your own services line by line - which of them could a competent client run with Claude and a forward-deployed engineer?

• Move upstream: judgement, change management, the work that requires people in the room

• Stop selling chunks. Start selling the whole change.

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3. The AI double squeeze is happening now

Luk's name for the dynamic playing out across the consulting market is genuinely useful. There is a revenue squeeze (clients doing the lower-level work themselves with AI) and a cost squeeze (firms reducing juniors, which loads work onto more expensive directors).

The firms in the order-taker zone are getting hit by both at once.

"There is a revenue squeeze and there is a cost squeeze because higher cost specialists are now dragged into the work that used to be leveraged. The double squeeze risk is watching you."

• Identify which slices of your firm sit in the AI danger zone - be honest

• Re-package those slices into outcome-led offers, not hour-led ones

• Use AI to compress your delivery margin in the danger zone while you move your firm upstream

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4. The "every client is unique" objection is a selection bias problem

When firms push back on specificity by saying 'but every client is unique', Florian's answer is sharp.

The clients who tell you they're unique are the only clients you see... because your capability-led pitch attracted them.

There's a whole market of buyers who would prefer a prescriptive process, but they don't call capability sellers.

"If I go to a neurosurgeon, I hope I don't have to hand them an RFP with my requirements for how the project should work. I hope they have a prescriptive process."

• Imagine your firm running on a single repeatable approach, tailored at the edges to context - what would you stop doing tomorrow?

• Re-position around 'a proven approach we tailor to your context' (Luk's line) rather than 'we customise everything'

• Watch what happens to win rates, sales cycle and pricing power

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5. The gold is in your own case studies

The single most actionable line of the session.

Most boutiques have the problems they solve buried at the bottom of their website, in case study PDFs nobody opens. Their capabilities live at the top.

Flip it.

"Look at your case studies, find patterns. If you have 15 out of 100 that solve the same problem - maybe you're onto something. Maybe that could be your business."

• Pull every case study from the last three years into one spreadsheet

• Tag each by the problem it solved, the outcome delivered, the margin earned, and the time spent

• Find your top 3 highest-margin, highest-impact problem patterns - and rebuild your homepage around them

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Final thoughts

Luk and Florian have given firms permission to narrow, to refuse work, to put the proof at the top of the website. And, increasingly, permission to step up and sell the bigger change - because that's the only part of the work AI can't ship.

For any boutique founder who walked away thinking 'we should niche down', here's the more accurate version: don't niche. Get specific. Find the issue you own better than anyone. Then build the firm as the machine for solving it ever better.