The Smaller Pond Strategy: Why Local Focus Wins in AI Consulting

The case for owning a place instead of chasing a vertical

August 16, 2026
Read Time: 8 minutes

Win of the Week:

Jos Weiss joined the community late last year after twenty years in IT, looking for a way to move into consulting. Less than a year later, he's quit his full-time job, brought in around £70,000 in audits and implementations, landed his first monthly retainer client, and has six figures in annual recurring leads stacked up to close.

He's been selling audits anywhere from £2,000 to £10,000, and just closed another £10,000 with a forty-person construction firm.

We talk a lot about niching in this newsletter. Pick a vertical, go deep, become the AI consultant for accounting practices or manufacturing firms or law firms.

That advice is sound. But there's a second version of it that almost nobody talks about, and in a lot of cases it's more powerful.

Instead of becoming the best AI consultant for HVAC companies, become the best AI consultant in Atlanta.

Same principle. Completely different execution. And the advantages are significant.

The Single Biggest Advantage: You Can Meet In Person

This is the one that matters more than everything else combined.

From my own experience, and from working with hundreds of people building AI consulting businesses, there is a significantly higher close rate when you can meet a prospect in person.

Not marginally higher. Significantly higher.

A Zoom call has to work extremely hard to build the kind of trust that a coffee and a walk around someone's office builds almost automatically. When you're physically in the room, you're not another vendor in another browser tab. You're a person who showed up.

And it goes further than the sale. When you run the audit itself in person, walking the floor, sitting with the team, watching how work actually moves through the business, you see things that would never surface on a video call. You spot the workarounds. You notice the friction. You see the whiteboard covered in a process nobody documented.

You can also charge more for it. An in-person engagement carries a premium, and clients happily pay it, because the perceived value of someone physically coming into their business is fundamentally different from someone dialling in.

This Is the Palantir Model

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's essentially what Palantir built their entire reputation on.

Their model runs on Forward Deployed Engineers and Forward Deployed Strategists. People who don't sit in a head office analysing from a distance, but who embed directly inside the client's business, on site, watching how things actually work.

It's expensive, it's high touch, and it produces outcomes that remote engagements simply can't match. Because you can't see the real system from a distance. You can only see the version of the system people describe to you.

Interestingly, OpenAI and Anthropic have both adopted exactly this model for their new deployment companies. Forward deployed engineers, embedded in client businesses, building from the inside.

The most sophisticated AI organisations in the world have concluded that in-person deployment is the way to do this properly. That's worth paying attention to.

The Trust Advantage of Being Local

There's something psychological that happens when a business owner knows you're down the road.

They know they can find you. They know you're not going to disappear. They know you're going to bump into each other at some point, at an event, at a networking group, at the same coffee shop. That accountability is real, and it makes people more comfortable writing a cheque.

Local reputation also travels differently than online reputation. When you do excellent work for a business in your city, that story spreads through a network of people who all know each other. The accountant tells the lawyer, the lawyer mentions it to a client, the client brings it up at a chamber of commerce event.

Word of mouth moves faster and further in a defined geography than it ever does across a diffuse national market. Referral velocity in a local market is genuinely one of the most underrated growth mechanics available.

How You Actually Own a City

This isn't complicated, but it does require you to show up in physical rooms rather than hiding behind a laptop.

Networking groups. Chambers of commerce, BNI chapters, local business associations, industry meetups. These rooms are full of business owners who are quietly anxious about AI and have nobody credible to ask about it. Darren closed his first audit from a networking group. That's not a fluke, it's the model working.

Local events. Attend them, and eventually speak at them. Every business association, chamber, and industry group is desperate for someone who can talk credibly about AI to their members. That's a stage nobody is competing for right now.

Sponsorship. Sponsoring a local business event, awards night, or association newsletter puts your name in front of the exact people you want to reach, and it costs a fraction of what equivalent digital reach would cost.

Local press and PR. Regional business publications, local radio, city business journals. These outlets need content and expert commentary constantly, and there's almost no competition for the AI expert slot in most cities. Colette got fourteen press features in two months by simply being available and credible.

Local referral partnerships. Accountants, lawyers, MSPs, insurance brokers, business coaches. Every one of these professionals has a portfolio of local business clients and no idea how to advise them on AI. Become their answer. One MSP relationship can hand you access to dozens of businesses.

Just being visible. The pub conversation I wrote about a few weeks ago turned into a full AI opportunity assessment for an international engineering company. That happened because I was in a room, having a normal conversation, and was clear about what I do. Multiply that by every room in your city.

The Obvious Objection: Doesn't This Make You a Generalist?

Yes, to a degree. And that's a genuine trade-off worth being honest about.

If you're serving every industry within a city, you lose some of the depth advantage that comes with vertical specialisation. You won't build the same library of repeatable implementations that someone focused purely on accounting practices would. Productisation becomes harder because your engagements are more varied.

That's real. But here's the counterweight.

Vertical niching has its own downside, which is that you're competing against every other consultant in the world targeting that same vertical. There's no geographic moat. Someone in another country can go after the same accounting practices you're targeting.

A local moat is genuinely defensible. You can meet in person. You're embedded in the referral network. You're at the events. You're in the press. Nobody remote can replicate that.

And if you happen to be in a region that's known for a particular industry, you get to have both. If your city or state is dominated by manufacturing, then being the AI consultant for manufacturing in that region gives you geographic and vertical focus simultaneously. That's the strongest position of all.

Does City Size Matter?

Genuinely, no.

This opportunity is so new and so underserved that it works in almost any market. Large metros have more businesses but more noise. Smaller cities have fewer businesses but almost zero competition and much tighter referral networks.

There is no city on earth right now where the AI consultant position is properly occupied. Nobody has claimed it. In most places, nobody is even trying.

That's an extraordinary thing to be able to say about a market this valuable.

The Actual Point

The instinct when starting out is to think nationally, or even globally. Cast the widest possible net. Reach as many businesses as you can.

But reach isn't the constraint in AI consulting. Trust is.

And trust is built fastest where you can shake someone's hand, walk their floor, sit in their office, and be visible in the same community they operate in.

Pick a place. Show up in it relentlessly. Get in the rooms, the groups, the press, and the partnerships. Become the person everyone in that city thinks of when the subject of AI comes up.

It's a smaller pond. That's exactly the point.

See you next week,

– Andrew