There is an odd little farm near our office (you Boulder folks would know this as the SE corner of 75th and Arapahoe Road) with an old, ramshackle, gray barn. In the barnyard is a horse, a pony, a burro and a chicken. One of each.
Driving by it as frequently as we do, my wife Debby and I have affectionately named it the “One-of-Each Farm.” Apparently the farmer is not too interested in raising a significant herd of any one species. Rather a mere sampling—half a Noah’s Ark worth—seems to suffice.
That little farm reminds me of some companies. In the effort to capture all potential revenue, they fail to exploit any kind of niche, attempting instead to be everything to everybody.
I suppose that works for 7-11 and a few other businesses. But for most companies, specialization is the key to notoriety and success. In fact, a company is often defined by the kind of work it turns down more than the work it takes on.
Doing a quick inventory of our clients, I realized most of them are specialists, not generalists.
One of them, NationAir, is an aviation insurance specialist. They go up against major insurers who insure all types of assets and are thus many times larger than NationAir. But in head-to-head competition with those behemoths, NationAir wins!
That’s because they’ve dedicated every conceivable resource to being great at just one thing—aviation insurance. In fact, all their sales reps are licensed pilots!
Customers reward NationAir’s laser-like focus and specialization by choosing them over much larger companies. These customers feel more comfortable entrusting a $40 million Gulfstream to a company that, while it may be smaller, is more talented, focused and committed to specialized expertise in that field.
NationAir’s president, Jeff Bauer put it perfectly when he said, “We have to be the best at aviation insurance…because that’s all we do.”
Even folks in our field of marketing and PR have to figure this one out. When looking to define our niche, it occurred to us that we are at our best when working with founders, owners and CEO’s of companies with a penchant for creativity and committed to growth.
That’s our niche. It’s not industry-specific. It’s leadership-specific.
That doesn’t mean we don’t play nicely with marketing directors of corporations—some of our best clients are marketing directors It’s just to say that we have built our company around the dreams, passions and exit strategies of entrepreneurs.
So we all have to find our niche, whether as individuals on a team, or as companies that really want to make a difference in the world. As hard as it is, that sometimes means turning down business or walking away from opportunities that don’t fit our sweet spot—the “hedgehog concept” as Jim Collins would call it in Good to Great.
So if you’ve been feeling scattered lately…and we all do from time to time…perhaps it’s a sign to put on the brakes and discover your niche.
If you need a place to get away to think about all this, I know a nice little farm where you can sit and ponder that one…