You are a B2B Service Provider

This week's 2¢ - As the world of work changes, are you now a B2B service provider?

About six months ago, I decided to join the “Peer-to-peer mentoring for business leaders” program at the Institute of Directors (IoD), an esteemed establishment here in London, as a mentor.

I immediately started working with some interesting professionals, either growing their businesses or transitioning from corporate roles to doing their own thing.

Throughout my career, I’ve done a lot of this - call it mentoring, coaching, or 1:1 advisory - in my roles as a leader or trusted advisor to larger companies, and then, as now, working one-to-one with company directors has been very rewarding.

Maybe it shouldn’t be such a revelation, but the fundamentals of B2B sales and marketing that I’ve lived my whole career and applied in larger organizations are really valued by solopreneurs starting their journeys as fractional executives, consultants, advisors, Non-Exec Directors, and folks looking to build a portfolio career.

By choosing this path, you are a B2B service provider.

Which I think most underestimate, and, like most of us, just think about the work, the value we add, the thing we enjoy, our craft, or maybe the job we’ve been doing that has defined us for the last couple of decades - not the business of me as a business.

But the idea that “You are a B2B service provider” is not just for those folks who decide to cast aside their master’s lance (the origin of the word freelance).

It could mean YOU, because the world of work is changing.

I saw some job-seeking advice on LinkedIn the other day that read like a marketing and sales campaign, straight from the B2B playbook. The advice was to identify the ideal company, the stakeholders, and create a comms strategy around relevant content - all of that.

As a job seeker, you are a B2B service provider.

Then this very morning, I listened to a podcast that referred to a presentation by author Rishad Tobaccowala, who talks about how in America “work” and “jobs” have uncoupled and a prediction of “full-time jobs being replaced by a mix of a smaller number of full-time jobs and an explosion of freelance and fractionalized jobs plus agentic workers”.

(You can read more on that here).

A prediction many are already finding to be true, as evidenced by The Slice Network, a fabulous community of fractional marketers that quickly grew to over 1,000 members. Astonishing, perhaps, but probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the global fractional talent pool.

OK, so you may be thinking, OK Ian, you said YOU, but that’s not ME, as I am neither a freelancer nor a job seeker.

But, if Tobaccowala’s prediction is true, and the workplace becomes, what I am interpreting to be, a project or function-based collective of freelance, fractional specialist talent, AI agents, and full-time employees, and those edges blur, it seems to me those FTEs will need to demonstrate their value in a different way and sell themselves internally onto these projects.

Then, even YOU are a B2B service provider.