Escaping the Generalist Trap
- Susan Tatum
- Sep 18
- 21 min read
In this episode of Stop the Noise, Susan Tatum talks with Corey Quinn, a former CMO turned growth advisor, about why being “everything to everyone” leads to burnout and mediocre results. Corey explains the dangers of the generalist trap, introduces his deep specialization flywheel, and shares how narrowing your focus can create higher fees, stronger positioning, and more leverage. He also reveals practical ways he uses AI as a solo consultant to sharpen sales conversations, design better workshops, and deliver more effective coaching.
Notes from the Show
The “generalist trap” leaves consultants overextended, commoditized, and vulnerable to client churn.
Specializing around a vertical market or a specific problem creates efficiency, reputation, and pricing power - the foundation of Corey’s “deep specialization flywheel”.
A signature system tied to your unique point of view makes your services harder to compare and shop.
AI can serve as a powerful “virtual coach,” helping consultants review sales calls, design workshops, and generate tailored marketing content.
Investing time upfront to train AI tools pays off in leverage, time savings, and sharper delivery.
Quotes to Remember:
“When you’re everything to everyone, you’re nothing to anyone.”
“Specialization creates authority, authority creates premium pricing, and premium pricing fuels reinvestment - that’s the flywheel.”
What’s Inside:
How being Everything to Everyone is a fast track to burnout.
Using AI as a sales coach.
Is it time to narrow in and stand out in your business?
Mentioned in this Episode:
Transcribed by AI Susan Tatum 0:00
Welcome to stop the noise. I'm Susan Tatum, and my guest today is Corey Quinn, former CMO turned growth advisor, who helps agencies escape what he calls the generalist trap. We talk about why trying to be everything to everyone is a fast track to burnout, and how deep specialization done right can lead to higher fees, less competition and more leverage. Corey also shares some smart specific ways. He's using AI as a solo consultant to improve sales conversations, build better workshops and make his own coaching more effective if you're at a point in your business where it's time to narrow in and stand out. This one's for you. Let's get into it.
Susan Tatum 0:48
Corey welcome to stop the noise.
Corey Quinn 0:51
Hi, Susan. I am super excited to be here with you.
Susan Tatum 0:55
I'm so excited about this conversation too. I want to start with a question. You went from being the CMO of a $200 million company to building your own consulting business, I'm curious about what either pushed you or inspired you to go out on your own.
Corey Quinn 1:12
Sure. Well, I had dabbled in entrepreneurship after graduating college from UC Santa Cruz, I started a .com business back in the late 90s with my best friend, we actually raised a bunch of money, and it was an amazing experience. I learned a lot, but I got a taste for what it's like to be an entrepreneur. And unfortunately, that business closed down after a couple of years, and then I kind of went into corporate America and eventually got into the agency space. And what at my last role at the agency, you mentioned. The name of the agency is called Scorpion, and we grew the company from 20 million to 200 million, about seven years, massive growth, a lot of learnings, fantastic outcomes. And all the while, even before I took the job, I've always had a desire to be an entrepreneur, and it was kind of this, this splinter in my soul when I wasn't feeding that, that desire working for an entrepreneur, helping him to create the business of his dreams and to achieve all these wonderful outcomes, which, of course, was wonderful for me to be a part of. However, at a certain point, I looked at my career, looked at my life, and I said, Hey, I want to start to really build my own dreams and really build my own legacy from a business perspective. And so I'd been there for almost seven years, and it was an inflection point in the company. It raised about $100 million and I had an opportunity to stay there, but I saw that as my my ticket to start building my own consultancy. So I left the company, and I vowed to just be a solopreneur, just be a consultant and a solo business. And I've actually since rethought that, and now I'm actually building an actual company where I'm hiring employees and stuff like that.
Susan Tatum 2:57
Do you have employees now? I have, well, I'm a virtual assistant.
Corey Quinn 3:02
I'm not sure if we can call that an employee or not, but that's the extent of my my team today.
Susan Tatum 3:07
Well, it does change the game, doesn't it, when you decide that you want to build a business,
Corey Quinn 3:12
yeah, it's different.
Susan Tatum 3:13
Well, so you were working for an agency, and now in your consulting business, you are what you are, a growth advisor for agencies. So great synergy there. I mean, you obviously know what you're doing. What was different when you started your own consulting firm and you didn't have, let's say you didn't have the resources of a brand or a marketing machine or something like that.
Corey Quinn 3:35
So as I was stepping out, I was clear that I didn't want to work for another entrepreneur. I was clear that I didn't want to be kind of a fractional CMO. I even tried that for a little bit. What I wanted to do was to create a more scalable consulting practice that would effectively set me up to have the kind of lifestyle I wanted. Of course, from a practical perspective, I needed to make money. And so instead of going into consulting or consulting on a topic that I had no experience in, or I didn't have any context or reputation or or experience in, I decided to focus on agencies as my primary client. And it was almost presented to me as the obvious choice, because when I announced on LinkedIn that Scorpion, naturally, a bunch of people reached out to me and said, so can you help me do what you did with scorpion? Could you do that for my company? And a lot of these were agencies, a couple of SaaS businesses, and that was really, I consider, sort of a soft landing into the consulting world, where I was able to have the luxury of choosing from a couple of opportunities, of which I took a handful of them. And that got me going.
Susan Tatum 4:41
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the for the background of where you've been. What? So you do you talk a lot about escaping the generalist trap,
Corey Quinn 4:50
yes.
Susan Tatum 4:51
So what? What do you mean by what's a generalist trap?
Corey Quinn 4:56
So in the world of agencies or this, this doesn't necessarily only apply to agent. This is for really any service based business. And by the way, product based businesses also fall into this trap. But in the context of service based businesses, consultants, accountants, attorneys, agencies, the typical growth of an agency is you have a founder that has a technical skill, could be marketing, could be SEO, websites, PPC, I'll speak in the context of agencies. They typically are Moonlighting, or they get started because they have a passion in this area, and they let all their friends and neighbors and alumni and cousins and everyone know, like, hey, who needs a website, for example. And as a result of that outreach, of course, people want to support that entrepreneur. They give them some business. And now this new entrepreneur, this new business owner, is is excited to be in business, obviously, and will typically over deliver for the first clients. That leads to referrals. And eventually that entrepreneur has, maybe employees, has actual MRR monthly recurring revenue. And then eventually they look up at their business and they realize that they build a business that's full of context switching. Maybe one day they're doing SEO strategy for a dentist. The next day they're doing a social media campaign for a manufacturing company, and maybe the next day they're doing an E commerce strategy for a local furniture store. And of course, when you have a business where every new client is a new service or a new skill set, you build a business that is operationally inefficient. Sure, you maybe have SOPs and you may have processes, but these things collect dust in the drawer because they're just not useful. They suck because no one they just don't not helpful, because every none of the clients you're bringing on are applied to that that process, and of course, the natural byproduct of that is that you build a business full of bottlenecks. And the biggest bottleneck in the business, of course, is the founder, because they're the only person who knows everything that was sold, what was promised, all these people exactly how it should be run. And so when you have a business that is bottlenecked by the founder, you'll end up with things like scope creep, and you have a mediocre product, because you can't. There's only so many hours in a day for the founder to run around and make sure that everything is as it should be that results in creating more of a commoditized positioning in the market. Your clients say to themselves, wow, we're spending a lot of money with this agency, and we're getting kind of mediocre results. I bet we can find the same thing, or better, somewhere else, for cheaper. And when clients churn, that causes the worst part, which is, as a founder, when your clients leave, creates a hole in the business. It creates a deficit. When you once had revenue, that revenue is gone. Of course, you have to replace. That revenue. Causes you to chase revenue. And when you're chasing revenue, that's when you're going back to the start of the cycle, which is you just say yes to anyone. And that cycle goes round and round and round, where you're caught trying to replace clients who left saying yes to revenue because you need to replace the lost revenue, leads to bottlenecks, leads to burnout, and it is truly my experience, a race to the bottom, especially in this world of AI. Now there is a way out, but a lot of founders will try a lot of things before they actually figure out how to escape. And I'd be happy to share with you a couple of things that they try before they figure it out.
Susan Tatum 8:09
Yeah, I'll tell you what's going on in my mind listening to you talk is that. So my work is with independent consultants, and there's the picture that you paint of a lot of work coming in, and you're just taking what you can get. I think is absolutely true, because some people will start a business and they've got a runway that they don't have to take whatever comes along, but a lot of people do, and sometimes they don't know at the very beginning what they want to specialize in anyway.
Corey Quinn 8:48
Yeah, that's right,
Susan Tatum 8:49
but you and so they're good, they get to a point where it's okay to take work while you need the work. But don't get lost in thinking that this is a good idea to offer a whole bunch of different things. The thing that came to my mind that I didn't hear you say, was, the more general you get, the more different things you're doing, the more competition you just gave yourself. And it's
Corey Quinn 9:00
yes, because you you're able to open yourself up to a lot of different opportunities, which, of course, would be competitive in nature. The other byproduct, of course, is that when you're everything to everyone, you're nothing to anyone, right? It's much harder to stand out, to be distinctive, to have that Rolodex moment for your your clients.
Susan Tatum 9:17
So what? What does the answer that you came across.
Corey Quinn 9:21
So interestingly, this relates to my professional background. Before I went to Scorpion, I was at a generalist agency, and we depended heavily on the founder to find new business for us. It turned out that he was the he was an MBA graduate from the Harvard Business School. And so if you're familiar, it's a great network of HBS alumni. And so that's how he built the agency. Of course, we tried to do cold calling, we tried to build new new deals outside of his network, but nothing ever really worked as well as his network. That was the before state very heavily dependent on founder led sales at scorpion. We built a business that had 60 sales people that closed six, 600 deals, a quarter of which the founder was involved in. None of them. And the kernel, the thing that sort of the crux, or the thing that made it possible, was the fact that we weren't generalists doing anything for everyone, but instead, we had chosen a vertical market to specialize in, and in the case of Scorpion, we initially specialized in attorneys law firms. And then once we had built that out, we went to another vertical market, which was home services. We built that out, and then we went to franchise and medical that allowed us to kind of scale while maintaining fantastic profit margins. And so the insight that I had, and that I experienced at Scorpion was what I now call the deep specialization flywheel. And it is a flywheel. And how it works is you start by, instead of saying yes to everybody through maybe time and experience, you realize, hey, I really want to build a specialization in serving this industry. It could be dentists, could be other types of doctors. Could be associations. I mean, there's
Susan Tatum 11:03
manufacturing for almost a yeah
Corey Quinn 11:04
evident number of Yeah, places. And there's a process that I teach to how to how to choose the right vertical market. But effectively, once you begin to build your client list around a specific vertical market, let's call it dentists. Once you get 5, 10, 15 dentists, you begin to build some expertise through course repetition. It's like the old Bruce Lee quote, he says that it's not I fear not the man that's practiced 1000 kicks once. I fear the man that's practiced one kick 1000 times. Right? And so through repetition, you're able to build systems. Every client that you sell, you bring into your agency or your consultancy has the same problems. They have the same needs, and you're able to build products and solutions that you can reuse over and over again, of course, that builds systems, builds in operational leverage. You're able to produce a predictable outcome for your clients in that vertical market. When you do that repeatedly, you begin to build a reputation for yourself. You begin to build some authority as a go to solution. When you build that authority, of course, leads to the ability to raise your prices. When you are a the go to solution, the sought after solution, with rare and valuable skills. Of course, you're able to be more of a premium positioning, premium pricing. And then the thing that makes this a true flywheel is the last step, which is that when you have operational leverage, when you have authority in the market, when you're having people pay you a premium and love working with you because you understand them at a deep level, that produces great margin. And when you have that margin, you need to reinvest that margin back into the vertical market. So what that means is you want to invest in things like hiring more people, hiring better trainers, train your team better build better software so that you can create an even bigger moat in the market for your service. I'll give you an example of what we did at Scorpion to help really reinforce this. When I arrived in 2015 we were selling to primarily to attorneys, and we had built such a flywheel around our expertise. We've been doing it for 15 years. We would sell personal injury attorneys as an example a they would hire us for 5, 10, $15,000 a month, and they would stay with us for 30 months. So the next closest generalist competitor, though they were selling those same personal injury attorneys a $2,000 package, and they would churn. They would leave after 12 months. So if you look at the overall economics of what we were able to produce, one new personal injury client was worth, let's call it $300,000 in revenue to us, our competitors would only be able to get about $24,000 that difference allowed us to invest in really great sales and marketing. That happened to be the role that I was in. We did things like we gave away cars and trips and give away gifts and cookies, and did all this amazing stuff that our competitors couldn't touch because we had built in so much more of a profitable model when compared to them. And so that's really that. That's when I talk about the deep specialization flywheel. It requires a reinvestment in the vertical.
Susan Tatum 14:04
So when you selecting a vertical like you, you started with lawyers. Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned all these different things that a digital marketing agency could do.
Corey Quinn 14:14
Yeah,
Susan Tatum 14:15
sto websites pay per click, whatever you knew or do you do? You advise your clients to continue doing all of that stuff, and their specialization is that vertical, so they're doing it for lawyers or dentists, yeah, whatever.
Corey Quinn 14:29
So there's a number of ways you could specialize. Two big, broad categories are you could specialize in who you serve. Call it lawyers and then and or you can specialize in what you do SEO. You could do SEO for everyone, or you could do SEO for one vertical. And so you think about kind of an XY plot, if you are all the way on one end of the plot, as relates to the industry, that would be you serve everyone on one end, and the other end you serve one vertical, same thing with the. The, let's say the vertical access, where you you do everything for for everyone, or you do one thing for people. And so when you one way to specialize that helps you to stand out in a very clear way, is specialize in one vertical market with one service. So for example, SEO for personal injury attorneys, that's very distinctive, and it's and the challenge with that, of course, is that it's a relatively small market, so you have to be careful in how you combine or blend these two to answer your question, usually, when you are focusing on a vertical market, how I advise my clients? What I advise them to do is to specialize in solving a problem, not in a service, because you have things like AI, which has come in and is disruptive to a lot of businesses that are positioned on SEO, well, now they have to reposition. Now we're not SEO, we're AI powered SEO, or geo, or whatever the terms are these days, right? And so the answer to this is to be clear about what problem you're solving for your vertical clients, the tools you use will change over time, but when you are positioned as that go to expert for solving that problem, that's when you have a more of a protective positioning in the market.
Susan Tatum 16:11
Okay, yeah, I think the I find the problem, what problem is it that you're solving is particularly in this business environment with and with so much competition, well, for the independent consultants anyway, there's so much competition out there, really talented people, that solving that problem in your own particular way is, I think, really key to being able to stand out and get these premium fees that you were talking about.
Corey Quinn 16:37
Yeah, I'm a fan of having a signature system. Not just say I do coaching, or I do copywriting, or I do one of these things. Instead, you've built a system, a productized or, you know, a named system that helps you to create something that's proprietary, that can't be shopped to your competitors.
Susan Tatum 16:56
What do you I'm gonna ask you, how do you do that? You know, I see a lot of proprietary or our system is different. And then, because we're different, because we do discovery, and then we do the solution, and then we and they're all the same. They just put some some different words on it.
Corey Quinn 17:12
Sure. Yeah, there does need to be some, some magic dust in there, some something that is unique to you and the way your philosophy, maybe your point of view, whereas maybe you're very heavy into audience research relative to your competitors, and that's the basis of your system, right? So it should tie to your overall point of view, or the sort of the industry problem that you're solving,
Susan Tatum 17:33
what you're good at, yeah, that makes sense. Well, let's talk about AI, because that came up before we hit record, and you just mentioned it when we talked before, you mentioned that you've been experimenting with AI as a sales coach, I wanna hear all about that.
Corey Quinn 17:49
Yes. So as a consultant, I don't have a sales manager or anyone I can go to to coach me on what's working or what's not in my sales calls. However, now with chat, GPT and all these wonderful tools. I'm able to upload transcripts of a sales call and to be able to ask it, tell it, of course, you are a highly paid B2B sales expert. Will you give me? Will you break down my conversation with this sales prospect? Give me feedback on what worked and what you think I should do differently, and so I will add that prompt copy in the the transcript, and what comes back is usually pretty good, right? It is an object, quote, unquote, objective perspective on the things that I did well, and advice on what to do next. One of the other things I like to do is to ask it, what is, what is a good next step? I may already know the next step, but I'll ask it, what would you recommend as far as the next step, or what should the follow up email be? So I do, I do that fairly regularly, especially on high kind of high value sales calls, where I'm not sure if I did I was able to achieve the outcomes I wanted.
Susan Tatum 18:58
So a couple of things about that we use when you ask it to recommend, like Help, Help recommend an email, a follow up email, or something like that. Do you ever find because I do, that it gives you crap.
Corey Quinn 19:13
It's getting less crappy every time, yeah, with more and more versions. And of course, I was on the call so I can know I could kind of spot the crap, but usually it's pretty good. The other, the other thing that comes to mind is, when I'm in a conversation, I tend to be very present and I'm doing the act of listening, but I may, if I was relying on my memory, I would forget all the follow ups, typically, especially with clients. I forget the things I promised them on the call. And so it's really helpful for me to just go, what did I promise? As a follow up on this call.
Susan Tatum 19:44
I find that I have to, if I'm having a do notes for me and suggestions, I'm like, I have to ask it, is there anything in in your suggestions that we didn't actually talk about? Because sometimes
Corey Quinn 19:57
so good
Susan Tatum 19:58
it will, it will make some stuff up. It probably could go in a prompt somewhere, and I just haven't done that. So you mentioned that you upload a transcript. So I am a huge believer in recording everything that I can possibly record for a number of different reasons, and that's a good one. Do you ever find that the person you're talking to gets a little uncomfortable with that? Are we all just used to it now
Corey Quinn 20:14
with recording,
Susan Tatum 20:15
with being recorded?
Corey Quinn 20:16
Yeah, no, I It rarely comes up back in the day before covid, before all this technology really took hold, it was more of a awkward thing where it felt like there was another person in the room. But now I think people are fairly at least in my experience, so I'll speak for myself, I'm fairly immune to it, and I'm assuming that people are recording me all the time.
Susan Tatum 20:39
Yeah, that's hard thing to do. Years ago, I think there was when, when corporations thought it was a good idea to control more of the communication that their employees were doing that you would get like, I'm not allowed, I don't have permission to talk about this, or I'm not allowed to do this, but not not as often as I would have thought, yeah, how do you think in advising other consultants, that consultants should think about AI in their work.
Corey Quinn 21:03
Yeah, I think of it as a external business coach. So for example, if I have a three hour strategy session yesterday, a three hour strategy session with a client, and my goal was to hit certain outcomes, I would again upload that transcript up into chatgpt, and I would ask it, these are my outcomes, how did I do and what are the gaps, and what are my blind spots? And again, as a solopreneur or as an independent contractor, consultant with a small team, or for solos out there, I think it's worth getting, uploading it or copying the transcript in telling it what you're hoping to achieve. And what I've found is the response is pretty darn good, like it is. It has given me a lot of insights that have been useful, that I've used. I'm just thinking in real time here another, another aspect for that I've been really using for the for chat GPT, is part of the way that I market myself is by doing workshops. I'll do public workshops, paid workshops, I'll speak from stage. And one of the ways that I love using chatGPT is I've trained it on sort of the best practices for a workshop, which I leveraged from different books that I've read. And I'll create a chat GPT, or a custom GPT with that framework, and then I will ask it to help me to build a workshop according to that framework, and always it helps me to create a much more effective and and compelling workshop than if I was just gonna do it from scratch.
Susan Tatum 22:31
Did it actually help you create the frameworks? Or you? Did you sort of know,
Corey Quinn 22:36
I added the frameworks so I didn't, I didn't, I didn't ask it to find frameworks for me. I've read a couple books, and then I fed those frameworks into a custom GPT, which is effectively a set of instructions
Susan Tatum 22:48
if you ever make your framework available, yeah, let me know.
Corey Quinn 22:55
I'll be able to share it with you.
Susan Tatum 22:56
that's interesting. What about delivery to clients once? Once you have a client delivering your services,
Corey Quinn 23:01
yeah. So one of the things that I talk about with my clients is obviously specialization, and part of that is to understand who the buyer is. And I would say my go to tools for that. Actually, I have three tools for that. One is perplexity. So perplexity is very powerful for doing research that's based on actual websites like it will, it will cite all of the sources that it pulls the responses from, which is very useful. So you can double check the work, and the responses are fairly, fairly high quality. So I like doing that for things around like, for instance, let's say a client wants to specialize in the dental industry. I would go to perplexity, and I have a I have a Custom Prompt, but effectively it's saying, Go out and find out, find all of the dental conferences in the north northwest in the next 12 months, and it will go and find all of these great conferences that my client would therefore, we'd work together to identify whether or not that makes sense to attend those. Another example might be for perplexity is help me to find the taste makers, the people who have the audience or have the trust of the buyers that I'm trying to attract, and help me identify who those are, and ideas for ways to engage with them. Perplexity is great for that. I also have an ICP prompt. It's a fairly big prompt that creates this like 25 page ICP document. ICP stands for ideal customer profile. So I'll use things like grok for that. I'll use chat GPT. I'll even use perplexity for that. And the reason why I would create a 25 page ICP document is that, as we know when we're writing copy, we all use, or a lot of us use, chatgpt for that now, but the better the context it has, the better the copy will be. So that's why I like building out these really large, detailed ICP documents. Upload that into, let's say, chatgpt, and then use that as the basis for writing copies. So in other words, here is an ICP document that's the person I'm writing for. Help me to write five LinkedIn posts specifically to this buyer.
Susan Tatum 24:55
You know, I think what comes to my mind with that Corey is that, um. Initially upfront, it's going to take a lot of time to make it help you. Any kind of AI be able to help you correctly, but then it's going to save you tons of time on the back end,
Corey Quinn 25:09
oh my gosh, it knows me like it knows my business, knows my ICP knows all my workshops, because it's it's helped me to create them. So it has it all there in the memory, I guess. And so it's very powerful.
Susan Tatum 25:20
Yeah, you ever worry about, what happens if it's taken away from us?
Corey Quinn 25:24
Ah, do you mean the AI taken away from us? That would be a big step backwards I think.
Susan Tatum 25:27
yeah, well, I mean, if just all of a sudden it lost everything that it has, and you couldn't go, you couldn't go, do the things that we've become accustomed to doing, I will.
Corey Quinn 25:36
I still have all the source documents on my, you know, my Google Drive. So, yeah, I guess I could. I can get along, but it wouldn't be as easy.
Susan Tatum 25:43
Wouldn't be as fun. Thank you so much for being here. This has been, this has been perfect. Is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn't
Corey Quinn 25:52
Well, there is a resource I would love to share with your listeners, which is my book. I have a book that I wrote when I left scorpion. It's one of my ways of starting my consulting practice is, you know, you want to be an authority, you have to be an author, type of type of thing. And so I wrote a book. It's called anyone, not everyone, and it is by five steps for escaping the generalist trap to becoming a vertical market specialist, a sought after vertical market specialist. And it's been endorsed by people like Dr Benjamin Hardy and Jonathan Stark and Allen Weiss did not. I was gonna say Allen Weiss, Allen Weiss did not endorse my book, but a whole bunch of really powerful people have endorsed it. We just got over 105 star reviews in Amazon. It's a great book. So if people wanna lean into this idea of specialization, that book is available, and I'd even be happy to offer a free copy of the audible version if folks want to download that.
Susan Tatum 26:48
I'll put the link to that in the in the show notes, and I will say I have read it, and I think that it's excellent. Yes,
Corey Quinn 26:57
thank you. Thank you.
Susan Tatum 26:58
Just like all the info you gave us today. All right, so the people that want to follow up with you. How do they find you?
Corey Quinn 27:01
Yeah, best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Just go to Corey Quinn, there's two of us out there. I'm the handsome one. No, I'm kidding. I'm the one who talks about specialization. The other one, interestingly, is an is a specialist in AWS, Amazon Web Services. Is also a big platform, so
Susan Tatum 27:18
interesting. It doesn't seem like a name that would be,
Corey Quinn 27:22
I know.
Susan Tatum 27:23
All right. Well, thank you again. It's been wonderful, and
Corey Quinn 27:25
thank you so much.
Susan Tatum 27:27
Been a pleasure. We'll talk. We'll talk soon.
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