My business partner Adam Gray tells a story.
Say you have a really bad knee and you need surgery and you find somebody who says she or he is the best knee surgeon in the world. That would be the best person for you? The best knee surgeon would be the best person to fix your knee?
Then, if they said, "after you have knee surgery, you won't be able to drive for a few weeks, so I'm also a part time taxi driver, so I could drive you around." and then they said "and I'm also a part time Gardener, so I could come and look after your garden".
At that point you would probably run (well hop) away. What you wanted was the best person in the world to do a job and the more the person adds additional capabilities into the mix not only does their "super power" no longer seem useful to you. But in fact the more and more capabilities they add, the worse it becomes.
We've all had these spam emails with this long list of abilities and we read them and think "there is just no way, a company that can know all of that!"
We have a saying in the UK "a jack of all trades and a master of none".
When we started Digital Leadership Associates www.dlaignite.com we always said we would focus on social and transformation with social. That is, transforming sales teams with Social Selling, transforming Marketing teams with Social Marketing, transforming Human Resources (HR) teams with Social Human Resources, etc etc. We just focus on the power of social.
We are not and will never be a "full service agency" we want to offer our clients the best service not a mediocre service. One Managing Director of a "full service agency" once said to me. "Our clients came to us about social selling, we don't know anything about it, but it will be good enough, I guess".
We are seeing more and more clients seeking out the best, because that's what they need to be in today's highly competitive world. I guess that is the choice; "the best" vs "mediocre".
An April 2019 poll conducted by Digiday showed that 22% of client-side marketers planned to shift work from agencies to consulting firms. While the majority of respondents (52%) planned to maintain their agencies, consultancies are gaining traction with agencies’ clients.
https://www.emarketer.com/content/to-stay-competitive-ad-agencies-mimic-consultancies?ecid=NL1001