Niche Series – Part 3: What makes a good CFO niche?

16 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker outlines the essential factors for selecting a profitable CFO niche. The core checklist includes finding a market with a clearly perceived deep problem, ensuring the target can afford CFO services, confirming the niche is growing, verifying it is easy to reach, and confirming a sizable total addressable market (TAM). Beyond these objective criteria, the speaker stresses personal alignment: you should enjoy working with the client avatar and the type of problems they face. Personal preferences can rule out entire sectors (e.g., the speaker avoids lawyers). The talk then categorizes businesses into product‑based, project‑based, and service‑based models, explaining how each leads to different CFO work. The speaker shares a personal bias toward product/e‑commerce businesses—enjoying inventory‑related finance—while disliking project‑based firms like construction, illustrating how personal fit shapes niche choice.

Chapters

What makes a good CFO niche? They have to have a deep problem as perceived by them. They have to have enough money to be able to pay you. They have to be growing so you're not going to find yourself with no clients. And then they have to be easy to get in front of and they have to have a decent total addressable market. There are two things that you should also consider that are not on here. One is, do you like working with this avatar? Do you like solving the type of problems do they have? So a good example, I don't really like arguing with lawyers. Not a fan. Don't enjoy it. I don't want to serve them. That's a personal preference of me. The next thing we look at, what are the type of work? There's multiple types of businesses. There's product-based businesses, there's project-based businesses, and then there's service-based businesses. Those are different types of clients and different types of work. I love working with inventory. I love product-based businesses. I don't like working with project-based businesses. So an e-commerce retailer, I'm gonna significantly enjoy more than I would a construction company who builds big projects.