General Consultant Discussion

TL;DR: The future of the VAR (he likes to call them Professional Services Business) is in specialization in industry niches and no reliance on publisher margins. None of these are new concepts but they are especially hard ones to implement. Moving away from publisher margin is for most VARS like kicking a 25 year heroin habit.

So is 90 Minds going to sponsor a ""Margins Anonymous"" meeting at Summit?

In my experience/observation it is a lot easier to talk about entering a niche service market than to actually do so. Oddly customers in these niches expect that you know their industry thoroughly and that's not something learned in a webinar or through a whitepaper. The customer can sense right away if you really know their industry. Niches are also funny because they tend to narrow down the pool of customers and that can mean you're regularly traveling outside your home area. Sure some of this can happen via Internet but the good customers are ones that you're going to see in person -- especially on a new deal where I find prospects typically prefer local (at least good prospects who aren't purely price shopping). I agree 100% that software / service margins from publishers are going away. The only question in my mind is how quickly.

That's the problem. If you develop and own the niche IP, you can get other var's to introduce you to opportunities (but its tough). Selling somebody else's IP in your geography has always been a complete dead end for us