Local vs. Everything Else

I saw a headline asking if local news was now dead (they’ve only been asking this question for the last 20+ years).

But the “local” question does apply when you’re building authority and wrapping a business around it.

Can you become a local authority? Sure you can—but it’s problematic.

Your ability to build expertise will be limited to the opportunities available physically near you. If you’re in a small city or one with limited opportunities to ply your trade, you wind up becoming a generalist of sorts—completing broader assignments without digging deep into thorny, expensive or pervasive problems.

It seems like the wrong way to go if you want to develop the deep expertise of an authority.

Place your bets on tightly focusing the work you do, the transformations you create and the kinds of folks you do it for—geographic limits just don’t apply anymore.