Business coaches have taken a step that many coaches never do.  They have decided to specialise.  Small business coaches are specialising further and small business coaches working with the hospitality industry yet further.

Now, it’s a well worn question but if you were a hotelier, who would choose here if all else was equal?  The generic coach, the business coach, the small business coach or the hospitality coach?  It’s a no brainer if the last coach has results to back up their specialism.

And who would you choose if the last of these was considerably dearer?  Well, the choice certainly gets more complicated but if you really feel that the specialism allows you to get the results you’re after, you’ll pay for it, right?

I was inspired to write this post because I’m looking for a specialist in social media marketing right now, specifically someone who can help spread the great content that my course heads are creating on their blogs.

What fascinates me is that, from the huge list of respondents, I’ll have people who have one core skill such as social media marketing (which, by the way, is getting ever harder to call a single core skill as the each platform get individually more complex and demanding of knowledge) and I’ll have people who claim to be experts in social media, data entry, SEO, SEM, craiglist…in fact. don’t just take my word for it.  Have a look:

Now look what they’re charging! $2.22 per hour.  I have to say my heart goes out to them!

If they became true experts at one thing, they’d have more business and charge more money.

It’s like going to a pub and you open up the menu and every kind of food type is there! Yep! We’ve all seen them.  Faux leather covers, laminated inner pages covered in sticky stuff and salt and a who’s who of culinary cliche!  Indian, Thai, Chinese, English, Italian; burgers, pasta, curries and fish vie for attention….it’s just a list of every recognisable food type you can imagine.

Yet, if you decide to go out for an Indian, do you think, let’s go that pub that does everything?  No, of course not!

At best, you’ll go there for convenience or because of a different aspect to the experience – live sports, it’s your local or you want to see your mates for a drink, etc.

So I’m calling on you to ask yourself, who are you? The specialist who charges what you’re worth or the jack of all trades who charges what you can get?

Do you agree? Let me know your thoughts below.