Name Your Niche and Keep Your Range
TLDR: 3 Takeaways from this Post:
Focus your market, not your capabilities. A niche gives your range a place to matter.
Lead with the problem customers need solved. A service list makes prospects work too hard.
Make yourself easy to refer. People should know who needs you and when to send them your way.
“I can do anything any client needs. If they tell me what they want, I’ll find a way to get it done.”
That is not a position, and it might just hold back your growth.
Your adaptability may be one of your greatest strengths. But a position like this leaves a potential client with the work of figuring out when to call you and why you’re the right person or business to help.
A clearer position starts by naming the customers you help most naturally and the situations where they need you most. A niche gives people a reason to notice you, and it doesn’t shrink the range of work you can do inside it.
The focus fallacy: “If my niche is too narrow, I’ll miss out on opportunities.”
The truth: No company does everything well. Naming where you’re most useful gives the right customers a reason to start a conversation.
Revenue and leadership strategist Ana Lazic connects weak positioning to weak sales results:
“Sales slow down, and the response is often to push for more leads, more activity, more pressure on the sales team. But if customers don’t understand why they need what you’re selling, more leads won’t fix that. Leadership needs to clarify the offer and who it’s for. Otherwise, salespeople spend their time trying to create clarity that should already be there.”
Here are two steps to take your position from hard to describe to impossible to ignore. By the end, you should be able to name who you help most naturally and the problem that gives them a reason to call you.
1. Identify who you help most naturally
You probably already know which clients bring out your best work. You may be tempted to list every company that could, under some circumstance, benefit from your capabilities. Don’t. Focus on the customers and work that come most easily.
Why? With these clients, you understand their situation quickly. You know what to ask. Your experience gives you a head start, and you can see connections that are hard for them to see. That’s the first step to finding your niche.
When I started my business four years ago, I assumed I would be broad on industry and narrow on services. What developed was almost the reverse. My range turned out to be especially useful in midsized, founder-led B2B services companies.
These businesses sell people’s expertise and time. I’m good at bringing together how they position the business, what they offer, how they sell it, and how their leaders align around growth. In organizations where those responsibilities are closely connected, working across all of them is a strength.
Because the context is familiar, I can contribute sooner and recognize which questions matter. The client’s situation is still their own, but I start from a better place, and the work tends to be easier to deliver.
That’s one reason I value a niche: you can use a broad range of skills in a context where those skills are especially productive. You don’t have to narrow your offering to a single service to make the business more focused.
Give yourself permission to focus
When a services business is just starting out, there’s a powerful instinct to get into what I call “the saying yes business.” I spent my first year saying yes to everything. Need a case study? I’ll make a case study. Need a brand strategy? I’m on it. Want me to walk your dog? Let’s go.
But too much shapeshifting erodes focus and weakens positioning.
The habit returns when growth stalls. When revenue is tight and every possible project feels important, choosing a focus can feel like turning away money you can’t replace.
To be clear, I deviate from my niche when it makes sense. But when I’m going to market and trying to attract the right kind of customer, I lean into my zone.
Choose the customer group where your experience is most useful. Start there, even if you can help others.
2. Name the problem you solve when they need you most
Once you’ve identified who you help most naturally, name the situation that makes your help relevant.
Services companies are tempted to list everything they can do: every technology, every type of project, every deliverable. Fight the urge. The strength is in naming the problems you solve, in words your customers would use. That takes two moves: understand the problem behind each client’s request, then zoom out and find the pattern across them.
What’s the problem behind the problem?
Consider what clients say before they can name the service they need. What are they trying to achieve? What isn’t working? What keeps coming up in their meetings?
“I need a new logo” may mean “customers aren’t attracted to my brand.”
“I need a new sales leader” may mean “customers aren’t buying what we sell.”
“I need a mission statement” may mean “our leadership team has lost its focus.”
The request is a starting point. Ask questions to understand what prompted it and whether the requested service will address the underlying need.
To get at the problem behind the problem, ask clients about the period before they hired you:
What was happening when you started looking for help?
What had you already tried?
What made this a priority?
What did you hope would change?
What made you think we could help?
Their answers show you what each client was really trying to solve. Write it down in the words they would use themselves.
Zoom out and find the pattern
Naming the problem behind the problem tells you how to help one client. To position your business, you need to zoom out.
List the clients you’ve helped most naturally. For each one, write down the request they came with and the deeper problem underneath it. Then look across the list:
What was happening in their business when they called you?
What decision were they facing, or what wasn’t working?
What do these clients have in common, even when they asked for different services?
The pattern across those deeper problems is where you’re most useful. It usually describes a situation, not a service.
Look back at the three requests above. A new logo, a new sales leader, and a mission statement are different services, and the problems behind them differed too: customers aren’t attracted to the brand, customers aren’t buying, leadership has lost its focus. Zoom out, and they share a pattern: a founder-led business whose growth has stalled. That’s where my range matters, because the fix may involve brand, sales, leadership alignment, or all three.
Check your result. If your pattern still sounds like a list of services, keep zooming out until it describes what is happening for the customer.
Put it together
When I combine the two steps, I start with my niche, “founder-led services companies,” and layer in the pattern I found across their deeper problems: “that have hit a growth wall.”
Starting with their problem lets us figure out what needs to change and how I can help. My range is useful because the solution may involve brand, marketing, sales, or a combination. They don’t have to know which service to ask for. We work that out together.
Now write your own introduction:
We help [specific customers] solve [recognizable problem].
Keep it to one sentence. Here is how it might read for a few types of firms:
Software engineering: We help growing product companies add engineering capacity quickly when their roadmap outgrows their team.
Interior design: We help law and accounting firms redesign offices that no longer fit the firm they’ve become.
Marketing: We help B2B software companies stand out when customers can’t tell them apart from competitors.
What this looks like in practice
I worked with a consulting firm serving healthcare organizations. Its team could help with affiliations, strategic planning, executive coaching, board governance, technology, and market intelligence.
The breadth was real. But listing all those services left potential clients to figure out what connected them and when to call.
We started by identifying where the firm’s experience and judgment were most valuable. Which services were central to that value? Which supported it? Which distracted from what the firm wanted to be known for?
Rather than sort the offerings into categories, we looked at the problems potential customers were facing. A clearer position emerged: helping leaders navigate growth, affiliation, and organizational change. The team’s range mattered because those decisions involve more than one discipline. Leaders need to understand their options, weigh the consequences, and decide how to move forward.
That gave the services a shared purpose. Market intelligence could inform an expansion decision. Governance and executive coaching could help leaders prepare for change. M&A expertise could help them evaluate a path to growth.
The firm could still offer the same range of support. Its position gave customers a clearer reason to seek it: a consequential decision about their organization’s future.
Pressure-test your sentence
Before you settle on your sentence, run three quick checks on your own:
Can you name three real companies that fit? If you can’t, it’s probably too vague. If you can name only one, it may be too narrow.
Would a prospect recognize their own situation? If they’d have to translate your sentence into their own words, keep working on it.
Do you know where to find these customers? A good niche points to places you can show up: communities, events, referral partners, or lists.
Then test it on other people. Try your sentence in your next few conversations and see whether it helps them know who to send your way.
You can also ask directly: “What would be happening for you to recommend a conversation with me?”
If the answer points toward the work you’re best equipped to do, you’ve given them something useful to remember. If it consistently points somewhere else, reconsider the customer or situation you’ve named.
Let your focus make your range useful
You don’t need to capture everything you can do in the first sentence. You need to get the attention of the people who can benefit from it.
Start with what you already know about where you’re effective. Describe the situation that makes your help relevant. Your range gains meaning once someone can see how it applies to them.
If your business is hard to describe, I can help you clarify who you’re best for, what makes you compelling, and how to bring that story into your brand, marketing, and sales. Let’s talk.
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