How to Create Win/Win Client and Safety Consultant Relationships – What a Consultant Should Know Part 4: Safety Consultant Excellence, Separate Your Company From the Competition

NOTE: This is part four of a four-part series discussing what safety consultants should know about their client relationships. This blog will discuss safety consultant excellence by how health and safety consultants can separate themselves from the competition and establish exclusive relationships with their clients.

In previous blogs, I mentioned that health and safety consultants have multiple competing responsibilities. While the client should remain a primary focus, health and safety consultants also need to be aware of and find ways to differentiate themselves from their competition. By doing so, this results in increasing client satisfaction as one is offering services different from competitors. Not only does this help you establish a reputation as an expert, but this also helps your clients feel a sense of prestige as they are doing something different from their competition. Interestingly, this can also lead to new business because other potential clients will typically follow suit with what is working for your original client, especially when they are within the same industry.

Background

I have worked for consulting firms and industry (clients) in various health, safety, and environment (HSE) roles. I started my HSE career working for a smaller environmental consulting firm. For the past five years, I have been operating my consulting firm, Risk Defense Inc. I have worked with clients from education, logistics, IT, transportation, staffing, environmental engineering, occupational health, construction, and oil and gas. While working in industry, before starting up Risk Defense Inc., I also got an opportunity to do some consulting for a power generation and distribution company in the Caribbean.

I have also worked as an employee/client in the oil and gas (service and producer companies), agriculture, outdoor adventure, and construction industries. I share this because I have some valuable insights that I can share from both sides of the client/consultant coin.

There are many ways to achieve safety consultant excellence by separating your company from your competition, but for this blog, we will explore how to do so by:

1. Leveraging unique services
2. Identifying micro-niches

Ask yourself, do you offer any unique services to your clients? If yes, great. If no, it is time to innovate and think about how you can help your clients solve problems in ways that no one else is doing right now. Now, this does not have to be as daunting as it may sound. Sometimes a unique service is something new, and sometimes it can be a variation of an existing service. Once you have identified your unique service, it is time to figure out your micro-niche.

A niche is a client segment within a market. Customers who require health and safety consultants would be a market. This is a broad market because occupational health and safety applies to all businesses. Now, not every business needs a safety consultant, but they could. Because this market is so large, it is essential to focus on a particular segment within the market. This is called the market niche.

An example of a market niche would be oil and gas companies in western Canada that need a safety consultant who performs audits. A micro niche is where one gets even more specific to the identity of their ideal client. An example of a micro-niche could be oil and gas producers headquartered in Calgary with over 500 employees and generate >$ 1 Billion in revenue annually who need a safety consultant to perform an audit. One can continue to define and refine their micro-niche, but at a certain point, it restricts the number of customers where operating a safety consulting business no longer becomes feasible.

Unique Services to Achieve Safety Consultant Excellence

Let us go back to unique services. Suppose you build HSE management systems (some people call them programs or manuals). This is your core business, but there is lots of competition. So how does one stand out by integrating a unique service into an existing offering? For example, you could add a comprehensive mental health program to your HSE manual based on the CSA/BNQ standard: CAN/CSA-Z1003-13/BNQ 9700-803/2013 – Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. Here is a link to the standard.

This would be a differentiating factor as a unique service because few HSE management systems include this element (or if they do, it is extremely basic). With mental health awareness on the rise due to COVID, it is likely in the next five years that this differentiating factor will no longer be so as every manual will include a mental health section (and then it will be time to find a new unique service!).

At Risk Defense Inc., we offer Mindful Safety programs where we integrate mindfulness into traditional HSE programs or management systems to help workers improve focus and awareness with simple, practical exercises (created in the west) that can be practiced anywhere, anytime. Click here for more information on mindful safety.

This would be an example of a new unique service as this is not currently offered (to the author’s knowledge) by other health and safety consultants as there are few certified health and safety professionals with over 15 years of HSE experience who also have over 25 years of experience teaching martial arts, meditation, and mindfulness.

Micro-niches for Safety Consultant Excellence

To identify your intended micro-niche, I recommend that you think about the ideal services you would like to offer to your ideal clients. What is an ideal service, you might ask? This is the service that you enjoy providing to your clients the most that at the same time results in the required revenue to sustain your business goals. The same goes for the ideal client. Who do you enjoy working with? Who values you as a consultant, and what you distinctively bring to the table? If you are going to engage in this exercise, you might as well focus on the work you enjoy providing to your favorite clients.

The more specific you can make your micro-niche, the better. One helpful approach is to dig deep enough where you do not have enough potential clients and then move up a level or two from there. There are so many ways to slice and dice micro-niches. The simplest way is to classify potential clients based on certain criteria such as industry type, location, role in the industry (i.e., client, contractor, etc.), services provided, annual revenue, number of employees, HSE management system metrics, organizational culture, organizational values, etc.

Unique Service Micro-niche

What can help take your business to the next level is to line up your unique services to the potential clients that fit your micro-niches. At Risk Defense Inc., we offer five primary services including:

1. HSE management system development and integration
2. Mindful safety
3. Contractor management
4. Audit services
5. General safety consulting services

If we modify the above five services, so they all become examples of unique services and identify potential micro-niches, then it might look something like this:

Conclusion

When a health and safety consultant identifies their unique services and micro-niches, it allows them to achieve safety consultant excellence: 

• Firstly, by separating themselves from their competition 
• Secondly, by focusing on fulfilling work 
• Lastly, by working with clients who value their specialized services. 

These are necessary ingredients for a successful and mutually beneficial client/consultant relationship. If health and safety consultants remember the importance of unique services and micro-niches, the consultant has added another piece to the successful consultant and client win/win relationship puzzle.

For more information on how to maximize client/health and safety consultant relationships and how this can benefit your company (or to discuss other ideas on how to take HSE at your company to the next level), please contact Risk Defense Inc. by filling out the contact form below.

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