50 clients or 5,000?

At their best, an authority is someone who delivers high value to few.

They speak to one painful frustration, as experienced by one specific group.

It's a small competition pool. Differentiation is baked in through the specificity of problem and audience.

They give all their unapplied thinking away for free – it’s the marketing mechanism that attracts the right people to pay for the expensive applied thinking.

They borrow audiences from authorities who already have the attention and trust of their specific group, creating insights so valuable that sharing them earns social currency for those authorities.

Books and speaking engagements are marketing tools first, products second.

They charge high per-client fees to a small client base.

An influencer works differently.

At their best, an influencer is someone who delivers little value to many.

They speak to challenges within a horizontal category, as experienced across industries.

It's a large competition pool. Differentiation comes through the craft of creating engaging content for the chosen social media platform.

They give away plenty of thinking, but always hold a piece back to sell later as a product.

They master one social media channel to build their own audience, creating content that resonates broadly enough for algorithms to amplify.

Books and speaking engagements are products first, marketing tools second.

They charge low per-unit pricing to a large customer base.

What happens when you commit to neither model?

You won’t optimise your energy and resources for either.

Both paths require different content strategies that don't align. You're either optimising for deep insight that resonates with a specific group, or you're optimising for broad engagement that algorithms reward. These two goals are incompatible.

Yes, authorities like April Dunford and David C. Baker get LinkedIn traction. But they didn't build that audience on LinkedIn. They borrowed it from other authorities first. Their existing followers drive engagement, not the algorithm.

Without clear direction, you have no filter through which to make decisions.

You try the LinkedIn engagement game for a month, get no results. LinkedIn Live sounds promising, so you switch, still nothing. So you switch again.

The problem isn’t a specific tactic. It’s that you have no filter to determine which business model you’re building and which tactics align with that model.

But when you know what you're building, the decisions reduce dramatically

If it's authority, the maths becomes simple. Maybe you need 10 strategic engagements to hit your revenue goals. If you put the right message in front of the right people, consistently, how many people do you really need to reach? You're not dealing with single-digit conversion rates. It's closer to 10%+.

The focus suddenly narrows. Craft the message, deliver it consistently, get it in front of the right people. Develop insight that authorities with your ideal audience would want to share.

The decision is: How many clients will you serve this year to hit your revenue numbers?

50 or 5,000?

Authority or influencer?