March 31, 2025

Pivoting Out of a Platform Specialization

In my last message, I explained how platform specialization can end up hurting your biz and shared three warning signs to watch out for so you can pivot before things get bad.

But what if you missed the signs a long time ago, and now you’re stuck in a dead end?

What to do if you’re stuck in a dead-end platform specialization

One way to escape a dead platform specialization without starting over from scratch is to start talking about the business benefits your work delivers to your clients and stop talking about the tool you use to do it.

Here’s an example...

Let’s say you used to market yourself as a “FileMaker expert”, and folks who used FileMaker and knew they needed a FileMaker expert would hire you all the time.

Now, let’s say twenty years go by, and there are not as many people who need FileMaker experts, and the demand for your services has dried up.

What to do?

Stop selling yourself as a FileMaker expert and start selling the business benefits that you deliver.

FileMaker was mostly used for streamlining processes in medium-sized workgroups, so the business benefits would be things like increased productivity, decreased costs, increased capacity, and so on.

The best part of this kind of pivot is that you’ve been delivering these kinds of business benefits for years (because that’s what FileMaker is/was good at), so you could reach back out to past clients and get testimonials that focus on the business transformations that you enable, instead of saying what a great FileMaker expert you are/were.

Once you start attracting people who want the business benefits you can deliver, you can use FileMaker to do it, but that’s incidental.

Yours,

—J

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