Stuck finding your lane as a solo consultant?
✨ The NicheFinder Sprint ✨
1-week 1:1 intensive + 1-month follow-on support

Bottle your secret sauce.

Hi! I’m Wes Wheless

I help solo consultants find their niche
and build lightbulb-inducing IP
to become known for it

First time here?

The best way to get oriented to my “IP-first” approach is to subscribe to The Lightbulb.

It’s my daily micro-email offering free tips and frameworks to get your hard-earned expertise out of your head and deploy it front-and-center of your consulting business.

You can jump in here:

— Jonathan Stark, host of Ditching Hourly and
The Business of Authority podcasts

Popular Free Resources

  • My daily micro-email: 💡 The Lightbulb

    • A lightbulb in your inbox every day, specifically written for fellow independent consultants

    • Yes, I write every day, and yes, subscribers stick around :)

    • Browse the archive or sign up to get your first tip today

About Wes

Hi! I’m Wes Wheless - I’m a niche discovery and IP partner for solo consultants and also what you might call an ‘expertise whisperer’.

I’ve spent the bulk of my 20-year corporate & consulting career synthesizing expert insights into monetizable IP for Fortune 500 companies, early-stage startups, and prominent tech executives.

This ‘captured IP’ has been deployed commercially as:

  • frameworks for corporate strategies

  • talks at industry conferences

  • premium courses priced up to $1,000+ per seat.

Past IP collaborations include execs and experts from Uber, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Expedia, Adobe, Graphite, Persefoni, BCG and more…

These days, I exclusively serve new & aspiring independent consultants, the segment of professionals I believe are chronically underselling their hard-earned expertise and losing engagements when they shouldn’t be.

Sound familiar?

Where are independent consultants going wrong?

  • As ICs, most of us rely too heavily on our warm network to source leads, and then lean on our experience to convert those leads to clients

  • This is…fine…for your first year. But it’s not a sustainable strategy

  • You will eventually exhaust your network, and perhaps surprisingly your experience alone is not a great differentiator — especially in today’s flooded talent market

Why isn’t our experience enough?

  • To be sure, clients appreciate an experienced consultant, but more importantly, they want a solution to their urgent problem

  • They care less about what you’ve done, and more about what you’ll do for them

  • If you’re winging it when describing how your past experiences can apply to their context, the client will notice, and they’ll move on to someone who can paint a clearer path to relief

What should we focus on instead?

  • The most effective consultants will take the additional step of organizing their experiences and insights into intellectual property, or “IP”.

  • A consultant’s IP typically looks like frameworks, processes, playbooks, and tools that you can readily apply to a client’s situation

  • By centering your business around your IP, you will attract potential clients based on your unique POV on their domain & problem

  • The benefits continue — an “IP-first” marketing & sales approach:

    • Demonstrates your domain authority

    • Focuses the sales conversation

    • Provides visibility towards a solution within a client’s context

    • Accelerates trust

    • Shortens the sales cycle

    • Elevates your achievable rates

    • BONUS: your IP can often even help structure the proposed project itself

Simply put:

IP is a consultant’s #1 marketing & sales tool.

It’s a magnetic tool that attracts high-quality prospects,
communicates your differentiated value
and turbocharges your sales cycle.

For most consultants, that tool is stuck on a shelf in the back of your head.

I help you get it out and put it to work for your niche consulting business.

Take a look around. Get acquainted.
When you’re ready, let’s talk about
bottling your secret sauce.

I believe in collaborations, not hard sells.
All consultations are 100% commitment-free.