303 The 15 Reasons To NOT Specialize Your Accounting Firm

Today we are going through the 15 Reasons to Never niche, never specialize that accounting firm. Okay. We've been talking a lot about specialization lately, and basically I've rounded up the 15 arguments that make up like 95% of the counter arguments to specializing. Because every think person out there, every coach, every advisor seems to be putting you in a headlock, putting your social media algorithm into a half nelson and saying, you need to specialize now or else. Okay. Because it's, it's the only path forward. Is it? What's the flip side of that argument? Come on in. Today we are gonna dive into it. The 15 counter arguments. Let's do. Okay, I'll be honest. Right now I'm feeling kind of like I felt at the end of the value pricing week where I'm like, okay, I feel like we have relatively exhaustively gone through this stuff and I have a much better framework, mental framework for this at the end than I did at the beginning. But I'm also ready to be done with it. That's frankly where I'm at with niching and specialization right now. So we're gonna close this out, round this out, and then shelve it for a couple of months. With the exception of like, exercises in attracting niche clients. I think that's really fun and I always come away with new ideas there. But the whole debate, I want to sort of finalize the whole debate here now. You know, if you tune into this podcast, I am generally pro specialization. And while we're focusing today on the counter arguments, what this, like, won't get into is what are the benefits of specialization? And oftentimes it's like human nature to dwell on the downsides without being like, yeah, that is a downside. But look at the upside. That might be half as big as the downside or 10 times as big as the downside. Right. That's a thing that our brains generally aren't very good at. But I'm generally pro specialization because it will usually lead you to a firm that's easier to run because it can be systematized a little better. Cause you're not doing everything in such unique ways. You can make the process of doing the work a little more turnkey. You gotta be a better advisor if you're talking to a similar type of person the whole time. But maybe most importantly, you are solving a. Or like double clicking into a very specific pain for a specific type of entrepreneur that generally you got to choose because it is a rare pain that will differentiate you from other firms and because it's a painful pain. Folks will pay you well to solve it. Not all niches are made the same. Not all specializations are made the same. What I'm looking for is a rare pain. This is felt by people with money that I can deliver a compelling solution for. So I attract people to that pain. They pay me more than just a random general business owner would because that's a really acute pain that's holding them back. And the result is a more focused firm where people will pay better for that work. And fulfillment can be a little more turnkey because we're doing not the exact same thing for every single person, but at least something more similar than it would be if I was running a general firm. Right? That is my framing for why I am pro positioning your firm and quote, unquote, niching or specializing. And it is a massive spectrum of insanely specialized to not specialized at all. And there is no destination to say, okay, here's where we set up camp. But that is generally why I am pro specialization now. Today we're gonna go through all the counter arguments, and I have no interest in dunking on anybody. And there's so many different versions of cool accounting firms that you can run. And I have so many ideas in my head of like, oh, this would be such a rad firm to go launch. And this would be such a rad firm to go launch. We may go do this someday. Cause wouldn't that be fun? Like to just like go through that journey of all sorts of different types of firms. And when I have those ideas, some of those firms are highly specialized and other ones aren't, and they're both gonna be rad. And I think there's versions of those that can be wildly successful, whether they are or not. So even to say, like, this is the right answer is not the case. Like, there is no such thing. But on a whole, in general, for firms that find themselves in positions where they don't have market power, where a client can walk across the street and not know the difference between what you do and what somebody else does, oftentimes specialization is that path to greater freedom, greater pricing control, all those things. So we're going to run through these 15 most common counter arguments. And I will, I will. I'll weigh in to a degree on how compelling of a counter argument is this. Is this or not? Okay, first up, this is a biggie. It's just marketing niching. It's just. It's not real. It's just marketing. And I'm an accountant. The last Thing I am worried about is marketing. People's needs are largely the same and in some ways it feels almost unsavory to act or hold ourselves out like in any other way. And frankly, many of my clients may, may feel the same way. Like really, you're gonna dress yourself up to be this when behind the scenes it's the exact same machine. So does the fact that it's potentially just a marketing thing, does this fact it feels marketing, does that make it bad? I'm pretty, I'm, I'm mid. I'm like in the middle on this argument. Not super convinced by it. It has some legitimacy. The thing I always come back to when we. In any business where you do something that your customer can't possibly understand or get their head around when they are making a buying decision and they don't understand that thing that you do, they make a buying decision based on anything about that process that they do understand. And usually that's how it makes them feel. Did they like you? How did you come across in your meeting? Did you have a cool website aesthetic that aligned with what they think is cool? None of these things have anything to do with the technical aspects of the way that we deliver our service. And as a result, as accountants, we want to be purists. We're like, well, no, I'm going to go do another technical education, another hour of cpe, because having a better looking lobby is not going to lead to better results for my clients. And that's true. But you know what impacts their buying decisions? That stupid lobby. I mean, a lobby is an example. Virtual firm, doesn't matter. But all the other things, you know how you come across and present on video that knickknack you had in the background that maybe they could relate to. When they don't understand the technical stuff, they make buying decisions based on everything else. So when they don't understand what you do, their perception is reality. And you know what kills me about this, and I'm not any happier about it than I know you are, is it means we have to invest in perception. I don't like it, but the reality is it matters. And if we pretend that it doesn't, then we are like these kind of purists. We could be these technical wizards. You could be the best person in the universe at this stuff, but because nobody understands it, they'll never know. And because we don't care about any of the other stuff, we can't build a business around it. And so it won't get you home for Dinner. And that's kind of the sad thing, particularly for the. The purist accountant that just wants to focus on the craft. Right? Can't it just be about the craft? I think perception matters and that's why this argument is just marketing. Even if it. Even if that's the case, if it is just marketing, it still matters, unfortunately. Okay, second counter argument. The work is the same. Don't act like it isn't. The needs of different companies are largely the same. When it comes to accounting, a tax, it's just debits and credits. We're all filling out the same tax forms. In many cases this is absolutely true. In some cases it's not, but in many cases it is. I will tell you, we're getting unbelievable rain here right now. We'll see if my mic picks this up. So we've got like fun lo fi vibes for this episode. I will tell you why this argument has gotten less legitimate for me just in the last few months going through that value pricing exercise. While there's a whole ton of aspects of value pricing, I don't get excited about one of them. One of the aspects that really resonated with me is ultimately what is going to make you a good advisor. What we will usually do is we will take all the services that we deliver and we'll. We'll look at a client and they'll tell us about what they're doing and they'll be like, yeah, this or that payroll issue. And we'll be like, bam, new payroll system. This one's better. And they'll be like, oh, yeah, this or that problem. And we're like, bam, service that solves for that thing. And we've got like this bag of triage kind of bandages and stuff like that. We're just looking, we're just chomping at the bit for an opportunity to plug what we do into that. But what I've come around to, and a lot of it was those value pricing discussions, is being a better advisor means developing an understanding of how that company and that type of business makes money. Developing that understanding first and then from there having recommendations. The much, much easier thing to do that requires less conversation and less expertise is to look at them and project and say, this is the value of all the things that I do. But then we get mad when the way that we value it isn't the same way that they value it. Right. But like a deeply embedded advisor is the one that understands how does this company make money? What keeps the business owner up at night and what will not just solve a problem, but drive future success and flexibility for the business. And for the entrepreneur, it is a how their business works first approach rather than what do I have to sell you approach. And so while at the end of the day it is all debits and credits and they're all going out the door on the same tax forms, I probably now more than ever do truly believe that if I have a deeper understanding of how their business works and how they make money, I'm fairly certain that will have some impact on how I do the accounting, on how I do the tax. Now, from the outside, if I don't know anything about that space, as with all things in life, it looks much more simple on the exterior than it does on the interior. When you're living it, right? Just look at all the people that look at accounting firms and say, boy, like, why doesn't somebody just go launch a modern accounting firm for once, right? And how irritating that is for us to hear it for a bookkeeper or for somebody else to come in and be a service provider for an accounting firm and project a perceived simplicity onto it. And then we're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. What about this thing I need and that thing I need and that thing I need? While many businesses like behind the scenes, the accounting, all that stuff, it will look largely the same. Understanding in a deep way how those businesses work, I do think will make you a better accountant, I do think will make you a better tax preparer for that type of person. At the very least, I can speak in that person's vernacular and have a better understanding of their pains and better relate what I do to those pains, right? And so there, to a degree, we're coming back to that whole perception is reality thing. We're a better advisor because we are more in tuned with what their headaches are. This episode is sponsored in part by TeamUp. Common question when you are hiring people around the globe, how do you even time zone? When do people work? Do you work at the same time? Do they work at night while you work during the day? Gang, it's your team. You get to make the rules. But common things that people do when they're hiring folks in the Philippines, sometimes they'll just have them stick to your business hours so they will literally work at night during. During your firm's hours. When I was running a firm, this is what we did. Everybody worked during our hours and it was all pretty straightforward. But increasingly what folks are doing and this is a little easier on lifestyle because like, would I like to work graveyard myself? Probably not. So is it unfair for me to ask my team to do that? Maybe. But increasingly common now is folks are looking for getting like two to three overlapping hours a day with your team. Now, increasingly this is less of a big deal because we're all sort of moving to a more asynchronous version of work where we're not always hopping on live calls and needing to take meetings and all that trending towards working from anywhere, anytime you want. But I can tell you, in my firm, what I ended up with was we actually had like a three hour block a day where it's like everybody needs to be on during this time each day to take care of any of those synchronous things that may need to happen happen. Otherwise, go wild, work whenever you want. And that framework works really well with, with this offshore hiring approach is you pick that two to three hour window during the day when everybody's going to be available, everybody has to be on then, otherwise up to them. As long as they're getting their work done, I don't care. At the end of the day, you're making the rules. So if you want them working during your regular business hours, you could certainly do that. They're going to be available all the time. You may be asking a little more of them. So maybe it's harder to find the right fit folks because they may not want to work at night or bookend it at one end of the day or the other. So when they're getting on, your team's getting off or the other way around. Now, if you want some help to find some talented accountants in the Philippines to come work with you, check out Team up link down in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by liveflow, the company that helps you put a jetpack on your spreadsheets. Connect any old QuickBooks file to your Excel, to your Google Sheets, sync data in one time, sync it in on an ongoing basis. One thing I really like is when I pull those reports in From QuickBooks to the Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets, I can move all those individual cells all around and they will continue updating. So if you think about all of the values, all of the things that you can get with a QuickBooks report, pulling all of that into a single place and then having the power to rearrange those things however you want into a, a single view for a specific company, even a single view across a bunch of companies like, I don't know, maybe in a Single sheet. I wanted every transaction and ask my accountant across all my QuickBooks files or something like that. You have complete flexibility to pull that stuff wherever you need it, rearrange it and it won't break. It'll continue updating. Pretty cool. So start getting crazy with your sheets with with live flow link in the show notes. Okay, third counter argument exposure. And the example everybody runs to look at all the restaurants during COVID It's funny how that's like the global kind of explainer for why this is a bad idea now is to look at a once in a hundred year event and a one in a hundred possible niches. Niche. I mean there were a bunch of other, I mean events. I mean there were so many other industries that were impacted by Covid. But in general, just the exposure of going super deep on one niche and something happens, happening to that niche. Right. What I'd say to that is, is the. Actually the, the real value of, of niching down is actually the skill of niching the skill of getting more specialized. Because the likelihood that you get at first, the right time is, is almost zilch, almost nil. We're not going to niche to pick that thing that we're going to ride out for the next 60 years. Like that's not what this is about. It's about learning how to specialize and get more specific and how that enables building better systems so that we can do slightly more specialized work now, starting one client at a time, not flipping my entire client base overnight. But then that leads me in a place where I am much better suited to specialize in something else. In fact, you don't even need a niche. And just a single thing. Maybe it makes sense to look at two or three different specializations. You mitigate some risk. But I don't know how real that risk really is. It's seems very unlikely that there's going to be like an extinction event for the type of people that you work with. And as we've talked about in the past, when you get into a specialization, you actually learn about an entire ecosystem of even more specialized companies that you wouldn't have known existed had you not walked through that door. So the old analogy I always come back to, you're in a room full of doors. You're afraid to walk through that door because you can't go through any of the others that were there. Now I said that completely wrong, but you know what I mean. So you walk through that door mourning the loss of what all those other doors could have been. But when you walk through that door, you realize you're in a new room full of doors that you wouldn't have even known about had you not gone through that one. And it's those specializations that are actually several doorways deep that I think are really interesting. Those are the things, honestly, that I geek about, not the stuff that's. That consumers are aware of and is on their radar. We were talking in the comments about, you know, specializing into state farm, whatever you call them. State farm. What's the word I'm looking for? Folks who run state farm agencies. We all know what that is, right in the US like that's a. They provide, you know, homeowners insurance, auto insurance, all that stuff. Cool niche to get into to start with, at the very least. But you think of how many other little nooks and crannies there are in the insurance world of people who have very, very specific, specific needs. Think of the hundreds and thousands of other specializations that could lead to. That's why we want to start like, it is a way of building a business. It's not a decision that I make once. It is a way of building an accounting firm. It's a way of building any kind of business where you have a different process to find a more specific problem, a rarer pain that people will pay you better to solve. That's why the exposure thing wouldn't super keep me up at night because I'm developing a skill, a reusable skill. I would say of all the things on this list, this one might have the most validity. Because if you did go all in on one and then something happened, that's gonna be a problem or any macro factors that impact that entire industry. It impacts your entire client base at a time. But for me, the risk of that still doesn't outweigh the benefits. And you can also just go look at several niches if that's something that really keeps you up at night. Number four, they enjoy variety. Getting to see into different types of businesses. There's some truth to this for sure. Going back to the walking through the door thing, I would say niching also exposes you to variety of a different kind. You get into there and you realize, like, you go to the trade show and you're like, oh, yeah, of course somebody does that. And of course somebody does this. And we're at like that second level of depth now that you didn't know existed before. We've been talking about golf caddies in our niche examples lately. Not that we're turning our Back on beekeepers, but for some reason that one's stuck lately. And we did an exercise where it was like, okay, what's the next level deep in that caddy ecosystem where if I started working with caddies, what people would I meet that are like, oh yeah, this is actually a whole other corner of this market. Caddy training academies. There's actually a ton of these I learned training academies where all they do is they like teach people how to be caddies. Which on the outside were like, why is that hard? Why is that a thing? Again, like, everything looks way more simple on the outside until you get there and you're like, oh, there's actually a lot to that. Caddy team management, because fancy golf courses will send a caddy out like to play with you. And the management of those people is like one of the most difficult aspects evidently of running those higher end courses. Caddy management software developers, actually the software platforms that groups use to manage that team of caddies, rangefinder companies for caddies. So the people that develop the, like the hardware for the rangefinders or the software for them. Caddie bagger supply manufacturers, caddy recruitment agencies, caddy tip management platforms. I could say for myself, the stuff that I've, I think I've enjoyed most, and maybe this is specific to me, the stuff I've enjoyed most isn't the mainstream stuff. It's the weirdly deep stuff. It's where you go in a layer deeper and you're like, oh yeah, I guess somebody does have to print Pokemon cards. Or I guess somebody does have to be the copywriter for a trading card game like that writes all the text that goes on the cards. Oh, of course somebody does do the art. Of course somebody does do the coloring. Like that's the stuff that I've geeked on personally is like the super deep stuff. And because the Internet makes it easier than ever before to run a micro niche firm, because we're not subject to like, who can we meet at the local chamber meeting, it's more realistic than ever before to run a very specific firm for a niche that otherwise would have been too small. So they enjoy variety. Is there validity to that? Absolutely. But I do think that you're also getting exposed to a different version of variety when you niche your firm. I would also say if specializing a firm gets your firm to a point where you can charge top dollar and you just have greater flexibility in your life in general as a result, because you're not having to work yourself to the bone, an even better version of Variety is probably touching grass and working less and seeing the world and traveling and all those things. Right. If the only flavor of variety that we get is getting to work with both pet groomers and drywallers. I'm being facetious here, but. But you know what I mean. Number five, what do they get bored of this niche? What do they don't want to work with these people anymore? Yeah. I would say my counter arguments are largely the same as the last one. What if I get bored of work? Like I would, I might. I would much prefer having a profitable business that I can do whatever I want with. And if the worst case scenario is you have a profitable firm and you're bored of it, you're bored of this machine that's just making money, then. Then you sell it, then you put somebody else in charge of it. That's not the worst, worst case scenario. And I would still trade that. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe this is too much of a generalization. Would you trade a boring firm that's printing money and gives you lots of life flexibility for a firm that's working you to death, but you get to do a lot of different things? I could see people actually arguing either side of that. I would say if you, if you go the route of building a specialized firm that makes money, you can still do all the other stuff too. And I think when we're thinking about this, oftentimes it's much too binary. The notion that running a niche firm means never talking with anyone outside of that niche ever again. If you wanted to, you still could. I think once you get far enough into specialization, you see the clients on your client list who super appreciate you and are paying you twice as much, and those projects are much more profitable. I think it makes it harder to rationalize doing those other projects. But there's also a bunch of versions of this that aren't like the all or nothing, fully whole hog, 100% golf caddy approach. Right. Number six, there's value in being a jack of all trades. I work across a bunch of different verticals and often see things that can be applied across all of them. There's for sure truth to this, but I'd also argue if you were comparing going to two conferences or two trade shows, and one was a general business trade show and one was a trade show specific to your domain, you would have insights coming out of both. But the version that's specific to your domain is going to have more insights specific to your domain. You can for sure get Tunnel vision if you're just inside that space, but you can also still engage with general stuff. And kind of similar to like, what if I get bored? Having a firm that gives you more flexibility to pursue your own interests and do other things, I would argue adds a richness and diversity to life that would be hard to capture if you just had to run a firm where you were working 60 hour weeks and didn't have the same life flexibility. That one's got some validity. I'm probably 5050 on that. I'm presenting the counter arguments to the counter arguments here and something about myself where I often get myself in trouble. I can make just about any argument and it can sound convincing and people will think, I'm totally sure of that thing. What I actually think is interesting is like taking both sides and thinking them through all the way. Because in most cases there isn't a 100% answer. But if you can take either side of the argument and think through it, it just gives you a much more holistic mental model for like, what is legit, what isn't legit. This might be a downside, but how big is the relative upside? That sort of thing? Like, that's the value of exercises like this, I think. All right, number seven, I'm not a marketing person. That's relatable. Most accountants don't get excited about marketing. I got a peek into a soon to be released book the other day, kind of around the creativity of accountants. And they talked about an exercise they did with a room full of accountants and said, it is now going to be part of everyone here's responsibility to develop marketing materials for the firm. How does that make you feel? And everybody's like, well, that sucks and I'm scared and I don't know how I'm going to do that because I don't know anything about marketing. I'm generally just kind of uncomfortable with that. They tabled that and they said, everybody share the questions you've gotten from clients over the last couple of weeks and how you responded to those questions. And the room kind of came alive and everybody had all these questions that clients were asking them. And I said, great, this is all of your marketing content. And everyone went from being scared and confused and not knowing how to do marketing and not identifying as marketers to, oh, I know how to confidently answer all these questions. We could totally put together a one pager about this question that we answered and put it out and a bunch of people would get value from it. And just like that, their brains flipped from Fear to. Oh, I actually do have a lot to share. And you do because you sit there talking about this stuff all day, every day. So while we don't identify as marketers, you have all the information up there in your head to put out all sorts of great content. And that last. And that's the hard thing to have is the expertise. I mean, we've all seen the people online who are great at making content but have no expertise. The much harder thing to develop is expertise and experience. Like, having actually done it. Like, you know what you're saying? Unlike people who don't actually do this stuff, you can either develop the skills of like, okay, how do I put that into a LinkedIn post? Or write a book or a tweet or something like that. Make a reel. You can either develop that skill, which frankly doesn't take all that long, and you don't have to be very good because you're an accountant. People aren't expecting amazing production value. Or you can partner with somebody. Hire an admin, hire a marketing agency who will do that last mile for you. And then you provide the content and the subject matter in whatever form is easiest for you. That could be literally just voice memos in your phone that you share with the marketing agency. Common question, common response. And they can make 20 pieces of content out of that. Whether you do the last mile yourself or somebody else does. You have everything that you need in that noodle already to market to a specific type of person, because you do it all day, every day, answering questions. So we already have all the tools that we need to attract that stuff. It is the expertise that is the most important tool, the stuff that actually leads to value. Not just noise on social media, but what's actually useful. You already know how to do that. Today's episode is sponsored in part by ClientHub. When it comes to choosing a PM, it comes down to the 4C's capabilities, client experience, clarity, and community. I already told you about capabilities and client experience. Today we are talking clarity. How approachable is that system? I tell you what, as these systems have matured, they have turned into monsters, frankly, some of them, when you look at them now is like, it's just a lot. And there's a certain element of vibes to software. Like, you see a software and you're like, yeah, that's me. I can get into that. Like, when I first saw Notion, I was like, this is my vibe. There's other people when they see Notion, they're like, I hate this client hub, man. It's the whole vibe. It's got a vibe. It's pretty clean now. There's usually a linear relationship between our first C capabilities and another C. You don't want complexity. The Holy Grail is a platform with clarity. Lots of powerful features, but not complicated. Flying Hub it has the magic of clarity. Makes everything simple for a firm owner and their team and their clients. Clear layout, Powerful features, yet simple to use. Makes it easier to onboard new team members. Spend less time supporting your team's questions. You don't have to run tech support for your clients because they can't figure out what the H is going on. Oh, that's the worst. That is clarity as delivered by Client Hub. Spend more time delivering value, not trying to figure out how your PM work. Okay, Learn more about Client Hub. Check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing and I got another resume for you to look at here, gang. I got a live one. This is an actual resume the Cloud Accountant Staffing got for an accounting firm they were working with. How's this sound? Especially for you tax firms out there. Graduated with a bachelor's in accounting in 2017. Spent two years in audit before going to Tax. Good for them. So you know they got a good head on their shoulders. Spent their next two years with a Western firm just doing tax work. Two years after that with a top 100 firm whose name if I uttered here, you would recognize. There they were a senior tax associate also in charge of training junior tax associates. All sorts of accolades here around like culture awards they've won. Sounds like a real addition to the vibe to the vibes of your firm. Good vibe manager experience in the CCH access suite and everything else associated with business. Tax Prep gang. Super talented folks out there just looking for a happy home. And that happy home could be yours. People like to talk about like trying to hire Big four talent and that sort of thing in the US and just how hard that is. Do you know how many big four and top 100 employees there are all around the world in the Philippines? The massive offices they have set up in the Philippines. Those people just like stateside where they're like, man, I don't want to go work for this giant machine. Those people are looking for cool, small, progressive firms in the Philippines just like they are in the US Incredibly talented people and Cloud Accountant staffing. They're going to help you track them down. Looking to build your team of accountants in the Philippines? Check out the link to Cloud Account Staffing in the show, notes number eight, you don't want to leave money on the table. You can take these general clients and it feels wasteful to not take them when that non niche engagement is within arm's reach. Why would you not take it? The counter argument to this counter argument, I'd say number one, then don't leave it on the table. You can take it. But there's gonna be a day when you hit capacity and maybe that's the time when you start thinking more about specificity, get to capacity and then refine from there. Again, this isn't like an overnight thing. I mean, some people approach it this way. I don't think you need to. It doesn't have to be like a. There was a day when I worked with anyone and then the next day I only worked with scuba divers. I think in reality it isn't that extreme. You baby step into it and along the way you may find, oh, this isn't actually who I want to work with. But now I know a lot more about how I want to next specialize. And that's not wasted time. It absolutely isn't. It is you that is like, you are the main investment here. You learning how to do this. This is repeatable for as long as you run a business. This is valuable stuff. So my first thought is, if you don't want to leave the money on the table, then don't and pick up that client. But when you get to capacity, you're gonna have to start making harder decisions about who you let in, who you don't. So maybe then you start getting more specific. Now this stems from like our human inability to see into what opportunities would have arisen had we gone down a different path. So if you imagine all of the past opportunities you've had that you wouldn't have had if you'd gone down that other path to say, well, I would never would have gotten this big client or that big client. Well, you have no idea what you would have gotten on the other path. Right? Some people refer to this as opportunity cost bias. I've heard it referred to as hindsight bias, but just the fact we have 2020 vision for what we've done, but we can't see anything we can't see into at all how that timeline would have been different had we gone down a different path. So yes, you will miss opportunities. What we're betting, like the bet we're making, is that the opportunities we'll be exposed to on the other path will just be probably more profitable and lead to a more calm, sustainable approach to building a firm. So while you could be leaving money on the table by walking away from the known, if you don't, you are leaving money on the table by walking away from what is unknown. And that's scary. Like, we don't have to pretend that that isn't. But the fact that we can point our fingers to a lot of other firms that are super niche and super, super profitable. And why, like that is the source of a lot of people's convictions who can't imagine and are just beside themselves that people don't get. No, there is no other way to run a firm like that. Conviction comes from their own successes, from the successes they've seen in other firms who have gotten really specific and say, I'll never go back, it's just a better way to run a business. Number nine, some version of, I would rather niche horizontally than vertically. So vertical niche is like your industry. Horizontal is other demographics, the type of person, geography, that sort of thing. And this is niching like specialization is a massive spectrum. If I say I'm only going to work with people in my county, in my state, that sort of thing, that is, that is a level of specialization and it's better than no specialization. This argument, I think is basically just saying, I'm comfortable with this level of specialization, but I'm not comfortable with the next level of specialization. So it could be industry and region. In fact, anytime you niche into a space, let's say I get to the point where I niched into scuba divers and now 80% of my clients are scuba divers. Once you get there, what do you do next? Do you just park the bus and that's it? No, you assess that 80% and you say, just like we talk about now, who are my A clients there and who are my C clients there? And why do my A clients value me so much more than my C clients? Well, it could be because these scuba divers have this specific need or this pain that we didn't even have on our radar that we now know makes our services really valuable to them. Great, let's go find more of our A clients. That never stops. Like, you just keep doing that until the end of time. Like, in my mind, this is how your firm is just always attracting more valuable clients who value you more so that even once you're niched, you are still cycling out, you know, two projects for every one new, better fit project you bring in, where the profitability of that new one is equal to the two that you just got Rid of that specialization. Like, I mean, it's a massive spectrum. Only talking about region, only talking about aspects of the individual that is a form of specialization. It's just not super far down that spectrum. And so we're really just talking about something that's slightly less specialized. Number 10, I would have missed out on X opportunity. We talked about this one on not wanting to leave money on the table. We do. There's a hundred different versions of this that we do every single day. Not taking into account unrealized opportunity because we can only see what we actually got, what actually happened, as if that was like the maximal best possible timeline. That's kind of just human nature, but something we need to be more mindful of to ensure that we are dictating the path that we go down. It's not being dictated to us by the universe. The fear of calling yourself an Expert, that's number 11. I'm not an expert in that thing. How could I do that? Well, the alternative approach is being a generalist and instead serving one handyman, one golf caddy, one Internet streamer, one dog groomer. Does that make you an expert? I don't know. Kind of coming back to the jack of all trades thing there where the more that they know, I think the more, the more it absolutely does equip you for the next thing that you do for the first time. I think that's probably what the jack of all trades best equips you for is the next thing that you've never done before. But if you do 10 of one thing, in all likelihood you're better than that, better than that jack of all trades at that one thing now. And if you don't yet feel comfortable enough to hold yourself as an expert at, hold yourself out as an expert at that thing. Just look around you and look at the current providers for that domain and I think you'll find, oh yeah, no, these, these people actually aren't experts in the grand scheme of things either. If all they do is one dog grooming company. And I have an interest in this thing and I read about it and maybe I have some friends that do it. That expertise has to start somewhere. Maybe it starts with your very first client, but it will not take you long if you're collecting a few of those to be ahead of the curve. Sometimes it's easy to look at other people and think that they have it more figured out than we do, but that's usually not the case. Number 12, what would I do with my existing client base? Or it is the fear of having to make a hard decision that keeps you from specializing and a lot of indecision stems from just something being emotionally, emotionally taxing. And it's as simple as that. It's not profound belief in something concrete or disbelief or something like that. It's just, boy, to have to commit to that and get over the hump like that just feels really scary to me. And that's why we don't do it. And sometimes there's enough wrapped up in what makes that emotionally taxing where it means you shouldn't do it. That's kind of a decision you have to make for yourself. But to this I would say starting to specialize usually doesn't mean dumping a huge part of your client base. It's usually much more humble and like tippy toeing into it than that. And it's a transition that actually takes place over a longer period of time. And as you find success within a niche that makes sense, that's paying you well and giving you flexibility, there's a certain inevitability to those other projects going away because it gets harder and harder when you look at them to justify. These ones are making like a quarter per project as the ones that are a great fit over here. And eventually those things just start falling away. But it's not usually this big dramatic, mass specific dump sort of event. Unless you wanted it to be more accelerated like that. And then you're probably carving something out and maybe selling it to another practice. But again, that's totally up to you. You could basically split that firm into two. This is actually what I did in our firm. We built a dental practice and didn't really ditch. At least in the beginning. We didn't really ditch all that much of our core kind of general business. But. But as the dental practice started picking up speed, we stopped taking in hardly anything non dental because we could compare how profitable those different projects were. And we're like, well, why would we do this E Commerce or this one thing that isn't really our expertise when it would consume the capacity that could instead go into one more dental project that's gonna be much more profitable for us. So I think that stuff just kind of happens organically over time. Think of it more as baby stepping into it rather than having to like make this big dramatic decision number 13. I don't know if that client's going to be a fit. You don't. That's true. That's a completely valid point. That's why we baby step into it. That whole cannonballing straight in, like, that's just not going to be the way to do it. If you're like acquiring a firm in that niche, there's a little more risk with that in some ways when it comes to like, am I going to enjoy this or not? But on the flip side, you've also got something very mature that ought to be very profitable. And again, if the worst case scenario is you have this profitable business that's running itself, then that's an asset you can sit on. Hire somebody to run it, sell it to someone else. Like that's not a, that's not too bad of a worst case scenario. Number 14, the team will get bored doing the same stuff over and over again. What a problem to have repeatable systems. I don't want to make light of that too much, but it did come up a couple times on social media where it's like our systems being gnarly and every single project being different. That's kind of the enemy. Like we're trying to do the opposite. We're trying to systematize and standardize and we can't have it both ways. We can't both strive to do that while also being like, well, that'll just be boring when we get there. I don't know. I mean, I had this problem like in bill pay, like in accounts payable processing. And this is what first led us to offshore hiring is I could hire folks offshore who would happily do this same stuff. And they were making great money and they were like the breadwinners in their family. And, and that thing that an onshore hire was like, I'm above that. I'm not going to do repetitive work. These offshore people would sit there and they would do it for years and they were so, so appreciative of the opportunity. Like it was just such a different perspective. They did great work. This was driving like generational change for them because they were making really good money. Yes. Is it hard to get, Is it hard to get onshore people to do repeatable things? Yes. But is that a reasonable reason to not try to develop repeatable systems? Probably not. And then the Last one, number 15, I haven't found it yet. We're still growing, we just haven't gotten there. I think sometimes we can convince ourselves of this, that one just hasn't come and punched you in the face yet. But I don't think in most cases that that actually ever happens. I think what this really is is a degree of procrastination and just it takes a degree of Deciding, like, what's the best decision I can make with the information that I have today, Knowing that I'm almost certainly not going to get it right on the first try, but that I will learn along the journey. It's not a destination for my firm. And the final thing that we'll ever do, it's a framework to go about building a business in a more specific way. And we will just always build this way. Whether it's for scuba divers or beekeepers or whoever it is. It's actually not really about who it's for. It's about developing the skill of being able to get more specific and solving more specific pains and always being on that journey one way or another. Even if there's an extinction event inside of that niche or that industry, we're still on that path, whether it's that industry or a different one. Now, that's just how you run the firm. And so if you're waiting for that burning bush or that light from the sky to tell you like, oh, here's what it is, here's what it needs to be, that's probably just never gonna come. But as Geraldine Carter frames it really nicely, I think that procrastination feels like too severe of a term, but that not just committing. Even if you have incomplete information, the longer you wait to commit, the more you're deferring results. I think that's a good framing for it. Okay, I pinky swear we're not going to geek out on the, on the specialization stuff again in the next couple of months. Besides, some cool ideas I've got for like making content to attract niches and just ideation around that because I think that's fun and everyone is looking for better clients. So like ideation around how to find better clients, that's just a fun one to always come back to. But the whole inside baseball of Tanish or not Tanish, I'll table it for a couple months. Frankly, I'm burnt out on it, just like I was by the end of the value pricing stuff. But I will say a ton of people have spoken into this on both sides of it pretty equally. Probably 50, 54, 50, 50 against. And just by going through this, I do have a much. I feel like I have a much more clear framework of what I like and what I don't like about it because there's goods and bads to it. That's all we got for today. Thanks for coming and hanging. If you haven't left a comment yet, this is going to be one that people have a lot of thoughts on. Pop it down Below. I'll see you in the next one.