How narrow should your positioning be?

Narrow enough that one specific person hears what you do and thinks, "that is exactly my problem." Wide enough that the people who fit can fund the practice you want to run.

That is the answer, and on its own it gives you nothing to measure.

Width is usually discussed as one dial, set somewhere between the whole market and one person. It works more like five dials, and which ones you turn matters more than how far.

You narrow on axes, and you choose which ones

Hinge Research studies professional services firms every year. Its 2025 High Growth Study asked the fastest-growing firms how specialized they were. They rated five kinds of focus: service, problem type, role, industry, and location.

Read those again as five separate choices, because that is the practical point. You can be narrow in one and broad in the others.

An estate attorney who takes any client in the state is narrow on service and wide everywhere else. An estate attorney who works with family-owned farms is narrow on service and industry. Add a region and there are three.

Hinge's own observation is that one axis alone often leaves you in a crowd. Many of the high-growth firms in the study narrowed on more than one.

Two combined axes usually buy more recognition than pushing one axis to an extreme. They also cost you fewer prospects.

So the question changes shape. Which two or three things should a stranger be able to say about you?

The test is the referrer's sentence

Your positioning does not live on your website. It lives in someone else's mouth, in the moment they say your name.

Seth Godin's advice is to stake out the smallest market that can sustain you. He means the smallest one you can adequately serve.

That sets the direction. What it does not give you is a way to check the setting you picked.

Here is one. When someone says "you should talk to her," what is the next sentence out of their mouth? Call that the referrer's sentence.

If the referrer's sentence is "she's a consultant," or "he does marketing," the positioning failed. Those sentences carry almost nothing, so the listener has no reason to act and nothing to remember.

If the answer is "she does succession planning for family manufacturers," the positioning worked. It is repeatable, it is specific, and the listener now knows whether it is for them.

You cannot control that sentence directly. You can make it easy or hard to say.

Most positioning is hard to say, because it was written to keep options open.

Then check the arithmetic

A position that a referrer can repeat still has to feed you, so count.

Start with what the practice needs. Picture a consultant selling a $40,000 engagement, nine times a year.

She needs a few hundred qualified people to know she exists. That is a small number, and it is why narrowing frightens people more than it should.

Then look at the pool your position leaves. Count the organizations or individuals who fit, at the size and price you work at.

Suppose the realistic buyers number in the hundreds or thousands. If each one can hire you at your price, the position can carry a practice.

Two cautions belong here.

A niche with no visible competitors is worth a second look. An empty field sometimes means there are no buyers in it.

A niche dominated by a well-known specialist is a hard place to start. You would be asking buyers to leave a name they already trust.

Most people set it too wide

Practitioners who help firms choose a focus report the same pattern. The common error runs toward too broad, and a position that is too narrow is rare.

The payoff shows up in the numbers where it has been measured. Kitces Research found that advisors serving a niche earned more than 50% more than generalists. They also charged higher fees and spent more time with clients.

That number describes one profession, and it comes from advisor surveys. Michael Kitces also co-founded a network built around niche practices. Read it as a strong signal rather than a law.

What makes the signal credible is that it matches the mechanism. A narrow position lets you say something specific, and a buyer can check a specific claim before calling you.

Too narrow tends to fix itself. Your clients change jobs and industries and take you with them.

A position that starts at one company becomes a position in that company's sector. The widening happens because you earned the narrow version first.

Where narrowing does not help

Narrowing sharpens demand. It does not create demand.

Suppose the people you chose do not buy this kind of work, or buy it once a decade. A sharper description of them changes nothing. Check that the buying happens before you check anything else.

Narrowing also fails when the axis you picked is one your buyer does not care about. A firm can specialize in a methodology it loves while its buyers shop by industry experience.

The axes that count are the ones your buyers use to sort providers. You can hear them in the first ten minutes of a sales conversation.

A narrow position also asks something of you afterward. Everything you publish has to sit inside it, or the position blurs back out.

Advice that tells you to publish more, on more channels, pulls in the other direction.

Where the width should land

Draw your position on the two or three axes your buyers sort by. Keep enough room in it to fund the practice you want. Then hand it to the world and listen to how it comes back.

This week, ask three people who send you work to describe what you do. Do not prompt them, and do not correct them.

The referrer's sentence is your positioning, whatever your website says. If you do not like the one you hear, you know which words have to change.