How To Pick Your Niche In Accounting (Full Guide)

I've generated over 30,000 leads for accounting firms and I have helped them make a lot of money from these leads. And whether they offer tax strategy or bookkeeping or CFO services, the common thread of my most successful clients is they all have a highly specific niche. So whether you're already bought into niching down your firm and you just want to know how to do it, or maybe you're not sold just yet and you're trying to figure out if this is the right move for you, this video is going to be a masterclass on how to niche down so you can charge the big bucks. And I want to show you one client of mine in particular, a guy named Daniel. Now, Daniel does not have a lot of social media followers. He doesn't have this huge brand. And before we started working together, he was doing anywhere in the neighborhood of like 50 to 60k a month on average. Now he just closed out December 2025. He messaged me about this like two weeks ago. This is January. As I'm filming this, he messaged me they had a $400,000 month in December. They did $400,000 in tax planning sales, collected about 130,000 of that up front. And the rest is coming over the next few months. And they used some of that money to buy out another local CPA firm so they could merge that into their practice and get his talent. Now, in case we haven't met yet, my name Peter Vanderwaal. I'm the accountants marketing guy. My whole bio is down in the description below if you want to know more about me and my story. But let's get into the video now real quick. Let's get clear on why should you niche down? Right? Because a lot of people ask me, they're like, peter, won't I just be cutting myself off from otherwise good clients who might find me? Like, they might not be in the niche, but there's somebody I can help. And the answer to that is yes. But when you try to sell to a broad audience like small businesses or real estate investors, you have to speak very broadly in your marketing material. So if I'm a real estate investor and I'm shopping between two different firms, right. Who am I going to choose? Am I going to choose firm number one that says we help real estate investors save money on taxes, or am I going to choose firm number two who says we help short term rental investors build wealth tax free so they can change their family tree? Well, if I'm a short term rental investor, I'm absolutely Without a shadow of a doubt. I'm going to go with firm number two. If I'm not a short term rental investor, then I don't know which firm I'm going to go with because neither one is really talking about something that applies specifically to me. But obviously if I am in that short term rental investors pool, then I'm going to pick firm number two right now. Why is this the case? It's because this is the stereotype in the accounting industry, right? It's an old guy with hair growing out of his ears and pens in his pocket and he's a good number cruncher, but he doesn't know anything about you, your situation, your business, or any sort of like proactive strategies to be able to grow more profitably, to be able to invest more profitably. The average business owner, the average real estate investor, they know this guy doesn't understand my business. He's just a number cruncher. And this is the stereotype, this is what most people think of when they picture an accountant. So how do we combat this perception? We do it by niching down. And that's what we're talking about in this video. So niching down, it allows us to go above and beyond to prove to our potential clients that we really deeply understand their business. Right? So firm number one that says we help real estate investors save money on taxes, well, they appeal to exactly 0% of the market in a specific way, right? There's no reason for me to go with this firm over any other firm that's saying basically the same thing. But firm number two, that says we help short term rental investors build wealth tax free so they can change their family tree, well, this may only appeal to 10% of the market, but guess what? That's 10% more than this firm is appealing to. Right? Because by appealing to everybody, you actually are appealing to nobody. By speaking to everybody, you resonate specifically with nobody. By speaking to a narrow subset of people, you actually become the top choice for that narrow subset of people. And guess what? There's plenty of short term rental investors out there, okay? One of the firms that I work with that specializes in short term rental investors, they do over $5 million a year and they're continuing to grow at an exponential growth rate. They've doubled or close to doubled every single year since I started working with them. Think about that. You could double or close to double and this, this, it just continues to go like I don't know where it ends, right? They do over $5 million a year now. They're set for at least probably eight this year, maybe up to 10. There's enough short term rental investors out there, certainly for an eight figure firm. And I know many of you watching probably never even want to get to that size. You're not that ambitious and that's totally fine. But this is the one belief I want you to take away from this video. You can niche down and build as big a firm as you could possibly imagine. Both things can be true, and by niching down, you will actually get there faster, most likely. So let's talk about how to niche down. Okay, so I've helped all three of these firms make their first million dollars a year or more. Okay. Now I've worked with dozens of firms around the country, but these three specifically were under a million a year before I started working with them. And through the work that we did together, we helped them cross their first million dollars a year in revenue. And so instead of giving you like a generic framework to follow to figure out your niche and to niche down your firm, what I'd rather do is I'd rather just give you three specific examples of people I've helped do this so that you can see what worked for them. So number one is a guy named Ryan Bakey, cpa. Now he scaled to five and a half million dollars a year in the last four years because he stayed in his lane. Okay, so this is him. You can see he's, you know, we've been able to build him a pretty sizable brand on Instagram and on a few other social media platforms. He's really well known in the short term rental space at this point. Now why did Ryan choose short term rentals as his niche though? Well, number one, he's from a middle class background. So his dad was an electrician, his mom was a nurse. He knew he wanted to be the first in his family to build real generational wealth. And where are people doing that? Where are middle class people going right now to, you know, start building real generational wealth? Well, a lot of them are doing that in the short term rental space. In fact, that's like the majority of short term rental investors at this point, by the way. If you want a deeper look into what it takes to make your first or your next million dollars a year in account, Ryan and I put together this free scaling fundamentals course. So I go in depth on all the fundamentals of marketing. Ryan goes through the fundamentals of systems ops, hiring, and our friend Brian goes through the fundamentals of offer creation and the sales skills. You'll need. It's totally free. You can get access by joining our school community at the link in the description. But anyway, let's get back into it now. To add to that, here's his credentials in the background. Right? So he worked in the real estate wing at Deloitte. He bought his first rental property when he was like 23. And today he owns over $7 million of real estate. So what we're talking about here is kind of the golden combination of having personal buy in, like knowing that this is the right move for you to accomplish this generational wealth outcome and this professional experience that gives you kind of the professional credibility and credentials to be able to say, I help short term rental investors build wealth tax free. Right now, here are the steps he took. Okay. Number one, we had to understand what his niche wanted. They want to build generational wealth. They want to change their family tree. They don't come from money, but they want their kids to come from money. Okay, then we need to build an offer that can help them achieve this. And that's just Simply his tax strategy365 offer. It's an annual tax planning offer. You come in, we help you save 10 to $50,000 on taxes and ideally roll that money into your next rental property so you can like snowball this wealth building thing that you've gotten started. And then we need to sell our service based on the fact that this is the vehicle that's going to get you to your dream goal. So it stands to reason as a short term rental investor, if you're paying less in taxes, then you'll be able to buy more properties and you'll be able to buy them faster. Right, Makes sense. And so this is how we're selling. We're not selling just purely based on, hey, we're going to help you lower your tax bill. Because that sounds good, but that doesn't sound like sexy and amazing. But we're selling based on the thing they want. They want to buy more properties faster. They want to achieve that generational wealth outcome that we talked about. Right. And so we're relating what we do or just making it the vehicle that gets them to their dream goal. Their dream is not to save money on taxes. Their dream is to build generational wealth and saving money on taxes is part of the strategy to build wealth. So that's Ryan. Now I want to show you Brock. So Brock Hartzler owns a bookkeeping firm called Promover Accounting. He and he was able to scale from $30,000 a month to $92,000 a month in less than a year. And this all started with me and my team running ads for him, but really it started before that with him getting clear on his niche and him building a product for that niche that's insanely well built out for moving company owners. So if you want to watch the full interview, walking through his exact, his whole path from 30,000amonth to 92,000amonth, they have interviews on my channel. You can just see right here, this is our text message conversation from last fall where he actually shared what his run rate was at 92k a month. And let's walk through how he niched down his firm. Okay, so number one, he partnered up with a moving company owner. Okay, so he saw that there was a need in the moving company space, but he didn't know anything about local moving companies. And so he partnered up with a guy he knew, I think from church or something to build pro mover accounting and to be like, hey, I want to build the best bookkeeping service for moving company owners and if you will help me build that because you have the industry expertise, I have the accounting expertise, let's partner up and build this thing, right? So he used his partner's industry expertise to understand exactly how to set up the product. And guys, I kid you not, when this is set up in such a way where every moving company owner who sees what he delivers is like, this is exactly what I need. It's like a mind blowing level of customization to them. And it's just because he knows the industry really well now from his partner and from working with, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of these firms over the past few years. So they have a dashboard system that they've built that shows industry specific KPIs for moving company owners. So like one of those, for example, is their fuel costs as a percent of revenue right now for any business outside of the moving industry. This doesn't make any sense, right? Like I own an agency. Why would I care about fuel costs as a percent of revenue? My fuel costs aren't even a business expense for me. But in a moving company setting, this is actually a really important KPI because it shows you how to efficient your trucks and your routes are. And so if your fuel costs as a percent of revenue are creeping up, then that means you've either got some inefficiencies in the routes you guys are taking or maybe you need to be charging more per mile or something like that, right? And because they do this for almost 100 movers around the US they can actually score you on these different KPIs against everyone else. So you know how you're doing. So a moving company owner can look at this and it's going to be marked, you know, red, yellow, green, red being you're doing bad, green being you're doing really good. And so they can see what are the couple of things that we need to work on this month to improve the business. So here are the steps that Brock took. So number one, again, he understood what his niche wants. So they want to invest more into marketing to grow the business. They want to buy a new truck, they want to expand to multiple locations. And he built an offer that can help them achieve this. Right, Bookkeeping. So you can quote, unquote, know your numbers. And the way he set it up, they can actually know their numbers without having any sort of financial expertise. Right. And step three, we need to sell based on your service being the vehicle that gets them to their dream goal. Right. So when you know your numbers, you can spend and you can invest back into the business very confidently because you know exactly what the numbers need to look like. And so if you have extra budget, then you know, you have the license to spend that, to take it home or to invest it into, you know, some sort of asset to grow the business. Now, the third example I want to give you here is Daniel. So Daniel went from somewhere around 50k a month to having his first $400,000 month. And I've got a full length interview on my YouTube channel with him. You can check that out. But he just messaged me in Slack. He had a $400,000 month in December. And previously, this is a guy who had never cracked a million dollars a year before. So $400,000 in December, by the way. He did this without having like a large audience on Instagram or a big brand online or anything like that. But the reason this worked so well is because he has a highly specific niche. So Daniel works with W2, like tech workers who are like high earning, but it's all W2. And so there's a lot of limits on what tax strategies they can implement. And so Daniel's background, he actually used to work at Netflix. So he's got big tech experience. He knows what it's like working in these, these companies. And it turns out most CPAs actually avoid working with these W2 earners because they think there's not that many tax opportunities for them. Now, what Daniel's been able to figure out is there are some tax opportunities available and you know, he's figured out a system for getting these set up for these high earning W2 guys in tech. And so he's got that golden combination we talked about with Ryan where he's got the personal buy in and, and the professional experience. Right. So Daniel knows exactly what a high earning tech employee needs, what they struggle with, and how they end up getting treated by most tax strategy firms. Because these tax strategy firms don't see a lot of opportunities available. And so they either take these people on and take their money anyway, even though they don't really know what to do with them, or, or they just say, hey, sorry, we can't help you. And they boot him and tell him to kick rocks. Basically, he found a way to solve all of these and it's all based on his own personal experience in that space. So my team runs his ads. He did about 120k in sales his first 90 days and things kept snowballing basically. And a few months later, he was able to close 2025 out with a $400,000 sales month. By the way, like, this is a guy who did like 6 or $700,000 all of 2024, right? This is not a guy who's used to doing $400,000 in sales. But this is because he's so niche, right? We were able to get him in front of people and they were hungry to hear what he had to say. He's clearly set apart from every other CPA who offers tax strategy because none of those other CPAs want to touch this market. They don't want anything to do with these high earning W2s. And so the only logical choice for these people is they hear Daniel's got something interesting to say. Nobody else wants to work with me, so. So obviously I'm going to have to sign up and work with Daniel. That's kind of my only option here. And by the way, if you're interested in Daniel's story and you want a more in depth breakdown of how we helped him make almost half a million dollars in one month, you definitely need to watch this video next. I'll see you over there.