Kitces & Carl Ep 124: When Clients Evolve Out Of Your Niche Specialization Should You Stay Or Go (Or Not)

***Editor's Note: Can't get enough of Kitces & Carl? Neither can we, which is why we've released it as a podcast as well! Check it out on all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, and Stitcher.

Show Notes

• Complexity Elegant Simplicity Sketch
• The Advisor’s Guide To Annuities by John L. Olsen
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit Of Less By Greg McKeown

Kitces & Carl Podcast Transcript

Michael: Well, greetings, Carl.

Carl: Hello, Michael Kitces. What's happening?

Michael: Not much. I'm pleased to say that since our last episode, I have not yet received the negative feedback from the Venn diagram police that you cautioned me about. I'm still expecting it. It's coming. Really like, I'm no joke. I welcome the education. Teach me. Be kind of reasonable. I was not deliberately offending the Venn diagram police, but you have so piqued my curiosity now about what I'm not interpreting properly about the usage of Venn diagrams.

Carl: I used to get these long 3 or 4-page emails about why, and I used to engage in that debate. And then I finally decided, I have a template email that says, "Thanks so much. You're right. It's not a Venn diagram, it's a circle sketch". I just renamed it. So it was like, it's fine, it's fine. But this brings up an interesting point. You know who was actually really helpful over and over with me using graphs incorrectly was Bill Winterberg. I was thinking about early names that we were talking about in our last episode. Bill Winterberg used to send me notes like, "Hey, you got the X- and the Y-axis wrong, the dependent and independent variable." And I was like, "Oh my gosh. Don't tell anybody. I didn't even know there was such a thing". And so then he taught me this...

Michael: You know how you solve that? Just take the drawing, turn it 90 degrees.

Carl: Pay the bill, sorry.

Michael: Like "Oh, no, no, no, no. No, I had them right. You hung the pair...you hung the art the wrong way. Just turn it 90 degrees. And now the axes are right."

Carl: It's so interesting. He taught me the if this, then that rule, and it really saved my bacon a number of times. And a couple of those made it through "The New York Times" editorial process multiple times. I had the axis…

Michael: If this, then that. So, if this on the X-axis, then that on the Y-axis?

Carl: Yeah. So yeah, if more good information, then better quality decision, right? And so that was super helpful. I think I've thanked Bill a couple of times for that, but I think the moral of that story is let's just do some work and you'll figure out what's wrong with it. Put it in the world, people will tell you. It'll get better. It gets better and it gets better.

In fact, today...this is crazy. Today I got an email about this, those of you who are not watching, but one of my favorite sketches is the simplicity complexity sketch. It looks like you're starting off with a line...if you can imagine a line going across a piece of paper. And it's sort of meant to be like, "I'm going to open an investment account". And then like, that's simple, right? And then you get in there and you're like, how am I going to invest it? What is it? Is it qualified? Is it non-qualified? It looks like a giant ball of yarn. And that giant ball of yarn is labeled complexity. And then you come out the other end. After all that complexity you say, "Oh, this is what matters. I'll open an account, whatever. This is what matters." And that coming out the other end is labeled "elegant simplicity".

Just today I've been thinking there's been a problem with that sketch. I've been feeling there's a problem with that sketch forever, it's like 15 years old. Just today somebody emailed me and said, "You know what would make this so much easier to understand is if there was just an arrow", so you knew you were moving that direction from simplistic through complexity into elegant simplicity. My point being, do the work you care about, imperfectly, poorly, crappy. The key to writing something good is write a bunch of bad crap, right? Let it interact with the world. Don't be scared. Get out there and do the work. I don't know how we got on that subject.

Does Every Client Have To Fit Within An Advisor's Niche? [3:48]

Michael: Well, indirectly, I think that's sort of the nature of evolving what we do and learning as we go, to me is actually very apropos for what I want to talk about today. We talked a little bit on last episode around niches, right? And this question, does every client have to fit a niche? Does every client fit a niche? What do we do if there are people who don't fit a niche? And sort of the implications for that. So, I wanted to actually take, I guess, the other side of this discussion, which is, what happens when you do pick a niche and your clients leave it? And your clients grow out of it, right? I work with recent divorcees. What happens after a couple of years when they're not a recent divorcee anymore? They're just a person living their life who got divorced in the past. Or recent widows. Or I work with tech employees at companies pre-IPO. Cool. So are they still your clients after the IPO when they FIREd [Financial Independence, Early Retirement] off rich and don't work anymore? Because your specialization was pre-IPO tech employees.

And I think it's an interesting discussion of, so what are you supposed...is this a problem that we should be planning for prospectively as business owners if you pick a specialization that people can outgrow or age out of? A lot of us have landed on retirement. That one is at least a little easier. Usually lasts several decades for most people. And I think in part, maybe we haven't talked about this as much because so many of advisors pick retirees as their niche and they don't really experience this problem terribly often. But the more other specializations that are getting picked, the more I'm seeing versions of this question bubble up. So, I think the crux of it is when they start outgrowing the niche, are you allowed to go where they go? Or are you supposed to get rid of them and keep getting new ones in your niche? So, that, at least to me, is kind of how the question frames. But I'm curious just how you even think about this when the question is asked. Am I even framing it appropriately?

Carl: No, I love this. And it's so funny how quickly my head just goes to why. Oh, that's such an interesting question. Why? Because it feels to me...and again, I did this last time and I want to be so careful, deep, empathetic hug. But I love it when we spend...a lot of times, we're worrying about...where you see this often is worrying about scale before you've got a single client. This is kind of like, what a great...that would be an amazing problem to have.

Michael: What happens when I pick a niche and they all outgrow it? And like, well, have you picked one, and have any of them outgrown it?

Carl: Yeah, yeah. So, that caveat aside, which is just a natural human thing, I always have to remind myself and anybody that I do work with, I've got a couple of private coaching advisors that I help, and the idea of, we always have to catch ourselves like, hey, let's have that problem. A great problem to have.

Michael: I do know there are advisors who are having this problem.

Carl: I totally agree.

Michael: They have picked specialized ones and they're like, "Yeah, I've been doing this for 3, 5, 7 years. It's working great." But the clients I got in the first year or two, I'm 3-5 years out, they don't really have the original problem they came to me with if I picked a particularly specialized point in time kind of thing.

Carl: Right. And I think to me, I always find it useful to frame these discussions in, okay, let's play the game with that complexity sketch. If we think about all the nuance, now we're trying to get to the other side, what's the thing that matters? So to me, it's the underlying principles of this idea of niche is... let's hold those as we try and talk about this. So, to me, it's an efficiency issue where I get to do a lot of pattern matching, and it could help me grow my business really fast because the pattern matching can show up in the form of all the marketing that I do. I know where the people hang out, I know what they read, all the things we've talked about ad nauseam.

And then we've talked before about, well, what happens if I have a really specific niche and somebody else shows up? Well, there's nothing in the world that says you can't accept them from a marketing perspective, except you might now start having some problems efficiency-wise in terms of running the practice, right? So, it's the same question to me, which is, I have a choice. If it feels like, oh, I'm just evolving into a new niche, which is people at tech companies who now have had an IPO and have exited. Interesting, right? If it's still, I love working with these people, there's nothing that says, yeah, my niche started there, I got 100 clients that are that, and now they're all growing into these slightly different things.

There's nothing wrong with any of those things. What's interesting to me though is to think about like, well, could you just...I guess where it becomes an issue if we hold the principles in mind is like... let's use a dramatic example. And I know somebody who did this, right? They were an ER doctor, owned their own LLC, S corp, contracted with no plant equipment, part of the niche. They left that profession to go become, of all things, a financial planner. And...

Michael: Great decision.

Carl: Yeah, great decision, right? And so now, if I keep them, if I'm the advisor and I keep them as a client, I'm now opening that Pandora's box of inefficiency inside the practice. And I have a decision to make, do I want to or do I not? That's how I would think about it. What else would you add to that?

Why Clients Who Have Evolved From A Niche Are Unlikely To Leave Their Advisor [9:48]

Michael: So there's so much stuff that runs through my head hearing this. So, the first question really that comes to mind just out of the gate is why do we care? And I'm assuming for a moment we're not doing the, I'm fearing a thing 5 to 10 years from now. That's not a problem I have. I'm assuming you are in the moment, you've got some clients that don't fit your niche, and this divergence thing is happening. What's the actual problem? Because I hear a few that sometimes come up.

I marketed myself to recent divorcees. I got some people who are recent divorcees. I've helped them over the past couple of years. They're not really recent divorcees and they don't have recent divorcee problems. If they see I'm still focused on recent divorcees, are they going to fire me because they think I'm no longer relevant because I'm not in their bucket anymore? For which is, what I would say in practice having watched this play out over and over and over again with advisors, your clients don't care about who your next new client is. The only thing they care about is that you serve them.

And so we get into this realm, if they know I'm still going up to recent divorcees, are they going to fire me? And like, no. If they know you aren't going up to recent divorcees, they're afraid that you are going to fire them, they're not going to fire you. They're afraid you're going to kick them aside because they're leaving your original basket, your original nest. And so, if your concern is just, I don't want them to leave when they've outgrown my niche, just tell them, "I'm happy to continue serving you. I value the relationship that we have. And I just want to let you know that while new clients typically come to us with this particular recent divorcee problem, I just want you to know we've been in a relationship for many years and you do have my commitment. I'm going to continue to serve you."

It's like, just say it. Address their concerns so they don't preemptively fire you because they thought you were going to fire them even though you weren't going to fire them, and then you get that weird breakup pattern. And so, have the conversation, but if your fear is, I'm worried they're going to leave me, then just tell them they don't need to. And you don't have to evolve the niche and do other things. Now, there's some other stuff around that I want to come back to, but so I want to recognize, if that's the fear, just the reality is they don't care where your next 1, 3, 5, 10 new clients are coming from. They work with you and they want to know you're going to serve them. So, if your plan is to serve them, just tell them that. And if you're serving them well, then they like the service they're getting and they're going to stay.

Carl: Yeah, it's so interesting to me how much of this...and again, just a natural human tendency, how much of this is just stories in our heads. You don't even have to tell them, you just keep serving them. Nobody's going to run away. And if there's ever a concern like, "Hey, I noticed that you're writing a lot now about tech entrepreneurs." "Yeah, yeah, totally. It's an interesting problem I like to solve, and so are yours, and it's no problem. It's no problem." So much of it in our heads. I just think it's the whole argument around niching is an argument around efficiencies and impact and "scale". And that if you decide that you want to do something, you're allowed to accept. Just like you're allowed to accept a client from outside of your niche if you think it makes strategic sense for you for a million different reasons. Your marketing is aimed at a niche. Client acquisitions who come in with their hands raised, there's no rules. And just like that, you're also allowed to continue to serve people who age out or change out or circumstance out of the niche as well.

Changing A Firm's Niche To Evolve With Its Clients [13:46]

Michael: Now, the second thing that comes to mind to me in this thread is if I made a certain thing my niche, am I allowed to change it, right? I worked with pre-IPO tech employees, and now all of them had their IPO and now they've all FIREd off in early retirement. Am I allowed to make my niche early retirees because that's what they all are now since they started in the same place and they kind of landed in the same place? To which I would just say, yes, you're totally allowed to have the niche move and evolve either because you just decide you don't like serving the old thing anymore and you make a new thing, or because the people you're serving go there and you follow them, right?

If you look at the overwhelming majority of large advisory firms today that specialize in retirees and do all the Baby Boomer retiree rollover million-dollar things, none of them started with that specialization 30 years ago when they got started. They got started in the 1990s as advisors in their 30s and 40s, working with clients in their 30s and 40s who had $50,000 to $100,000 because that was a sweet client 30 years ago. It was advisors in their 30s and 40s working with their peers with whatever money they had. And as those clients aged over 20 or 30 years and built wealth and retired, the firms morphed themselves into retiree firms because they absolutely went with where their clients were. So that is a very common and reasonable and normal path to pursue. You're allowed to evolve it. You can and do. I live a personal version of this. I still get asked this question a lot of...with all the stuff in the writing we do on the blog, I get this question a lot like, am I ever going to write a book?

And so it's always a fun conversation to me when people ask, are you ever going to write a book? Because the answer is, I did. I published the first edition 18 years ago. It's "The Advisor's Guide to Annuities". Because the first specialization I formed early in my career, I was an annuities nerd back in the heyday of guaranteed living with benefit riders and guaranteed living with fall riders and the income riders back in the early 2000s. I co-authored an entire book. We just put out the 6th edition. We're still updating it. That was like 5 niches ago for me. I did annuities for several years, then I did AMT [Alternative Minimum Tax] planning. That was my whole thing for like 3 years. I did a 100-plus conferences over 3 years all on alternative [minimum] tax planning.

Carl: Stop it. Are you kidding?

Michael: It was glorious.

Carl: I cannot... I'd rather go to the dentist.

Michael: ...because that's too boring, just alternative minimum tax. Then I had years of doing retirement withdrawal research. I've had years of doing advisor tech work. We're doing a ton of practice management work now on the site. Reinvented 5 or 6 times. Now, I keep them in the same general area. It's all back into the advisor community because the more I live our world and practice in our world and interact with our world, to me, my knowledge of our space just keeps deepening.

So, it has been deliberate that I didn't do 3 years with advisors and then 3 years in a completely different profession and 3 years in another one. There is at least an incremental benefit if your niches rhyme or in some way are attached to some kind of continuity that allows you to have a central thing you're going deeper on even if you're adjusting around the edges. But yeah, as someone that's had approximately 6 niches in 18 years, yes, you can absolutely change and evolve these things over time, either going where your clients go or just going where you want to go because, at the end of the day, you get to make the business whatever you want it to be and serve whoever you want to serve.

So, to me, that's both an important note for people who are at this crossroads and even the ones who are thinking about it and afraid to pick a niche because they don't want to be stuck with a thing that they're going to hate in 15 or 20 years. You don't have to be doing it in 20 years, you don't even have to be doing it in 5. But not picking anything now doesn't help. Pick a thing, go do it. If you want to evolve it,you are allowed to evolve it. A, it's not a commitment for life. And B, going back to the earlier point, your clients don't care. So, if you want to evolve the thing in a couple of years and you're serving your clients well, they're not leaving you. So, it's not like you have to start over again if you pick a new one. You may start your marketing over again, but you don't have to start your clients and revenue over again. Unless you kick them out, they're not leaving. And that's actually what provides the foundation to say, where am I pivoting next? The...

Carl: Yeah. This is interesting, right? Most of the advisors who've been around a while and then decide to niche, well, how do they pick their niche? Will they look at their current business?

Michael: Yeah, they look at their current clients. They're like, these are the ones I like the most...

Carl: Oh, I've got 7 of these, and I really like these guys.

Michael: ...I enjoy working or most value my work. I'm just going to go after these ideal clients, in particular, and just try to replicate more of these ideal clients rather than do everything for everyone.

Carl: Yeah. And some of them say, okay, I've got 50 clients, 20 of them happen to be the niche. I will get rid of these 30. But often it's like, no, I'll continue to serve those 30, but all my public-facing work now, all my marketing, everything I'm doing, the operations of the business are built around being highly optimized for that group of people. And I can continue to serve these people. It's fine. You get to choose either way. It's not really a big deal.

The Trouble With Keeping An Old Niche And Serving A New One [19:39]

Michael: To me, there are sort of 2 caveats I would give, though, to this general, yes, you can totally evolve your specializations as your clients evolve. That's fine. I would even go so far as to say that's a common path of how this plays out. But there are a couple of caveats I would put to this. The first is, look, you can stay with the original one. You can evolve it into a new one, but doing both is worse than either. If you're going to evolve, evolve with them. If you want to stay where you are, stay where you are. If you want to do 2 things at once, you are naturally going to start splitting the efficiency of your business. You're going to start splitting the marketing of your business. You can very quickly undermine all the marketing things that made you successful to get you where you are in the first place, right? Even if you look at large professional service firms that have multiple specializations, or you take a big law firm, a big accounting firm that has a whole bunch of different specialized practice areas, each one still has individual lawyers or accountants who are 100% dedicated to that specialization. The firm might have multiple domains, but the practitioners do not.

So, if you're the recent divorcees that wants to then work with people who were divorced a long time ago and are now living their lives, whatever you want to evolve it to, or you want to do the pre-IPO tech employees and now they're all early retirement FIRE folks and you want to have a FIRE specialization, you can stay with the tech employees. You can go after the fire specialization. But if you want to do tech employees and FIRE specialization, you need another advisor so that you can stick with one and they can do the other one. Because just from a pure practice management end, anything else, you're going to divide your energy, you're going to divide your service, you're going to divide your marketing efforts, and you're going to cut all your efficiency by worse than half because doing half each is not even half effective, it's a quarter effective because of all the attention switching, focus switching that happens when you do that. So, staying where you are is fine, and evolving is fine. But trying to market both at the same time is the thing that I find is most problematic for firms because you just over-shotgun the marketing efforts that ironically were so successful in getting you to the point where you have this problem because you were focused in the first place.

Carl: Yeah. It's so funny too, when we've talked ad nauseam...well, let's not go into it here. But the reason we do that, right, the reason we hold onto things, the reason underlying is this sense of if I...and I remember Seth Godin once told me that he used to accept...the way he made decisions on how to speak in an event was if someone asked. Because he thought if he ever said no, no one would ever ask again. And he was like, that's the worst way to make a decision.

Michael: Oh, I thought you meant there was some special...no, they didn't have to...they can't reach out in the form or something, they have to do a special ask. You just literally mean...

Carl: Literally...

Michael: The fact that anybody wants him to speak means of course he's saying yes because...

Carl: But it was mainly because he feared that if he ever said no, there would never be a request ever again, ever, ever. And this was after he was...it wasn't a problem. So, I just think we all struggle with this underlying fear that if we say no to something, we're somehow...sorry, if we say a big yes to a specific niche, we're somehow saying no to every other opportunity and we're going to live under a rock and die and no one will hear from us again. And I think that's important.

Michael: I do think it's a good way to frame this in the challenge though, because just in general, the fear...it is a funny thing. Anybody who's thinking about pursuing a niche I find is terrified of the idea of saying no to people who aren't in their niche. I'm so scarce, I need clients, I need revenue. Of course, I have to say yes to everyone. Whenever I talk to an advisor who's been extremely successful in a niche, they all say the easiest thing to ever do is to say no to people who don't fit my niche. Now that I've done it and been successful, it is so much more work for less money to do anyone that doesn't fit my niche. Why would I do that?

I just literally work harder to make less money because they don't fit my systems, they don't fit my process. They usually don't pay me what my fees are because they haggle more because my services are not specialized to them. So, of course, they're going to haggle, they don't see the premium value of what I do. And so, there is when I'm thinking about it, it's terrifying that I might say no. When I'm actually there, often we feel very differently. But there are a subset of us. It was so scarce for so long that even when we've established ourselves, and the truth is there is a reasonable flow of clients, they are going to keep streaming in. You have established yourself, you are known in your community, you are known, liked, and trusted in that framing. They still come with the scarcity mindset and they can't start saying no even when they're past the point of being able to have reasonable confidence that there are more opportunities coming.

And as I find overall, when advisors get to this kind of crossroads, do I follow my clients to the new one? Or do I stick to where I am originally and even let them go because they would stay, but they're still not as efficient as sticking into my original niche? I find almost always, there are sort of 2 competing forces to this. On the one end, I'm afraid that if I follow my new clients and I start saying no to the old ones, I won't get any more clients, right? And just, there's a fear of saying no even when you're really well established and it's probably not a realistic risk because it was so scarce for so long and so traumatic for a lot of us in the early years, it's hard to move past that.

And so the question I like to frame for this is if you could have an unlimited flow of clients to one of the things...either the one you've been doing or the one they're moving towards, if you could have an unlimited flow of clients to one of them, which one would you choose? And then usually the response is like, well, but I don't have an unlimited flow of clients to them. Well, okay. The second question is going to be once you pick one of them, how do you make a flow of clients? That's not an niching problem, that's a marketing problem. So, get good at the thing you're going to get good at and solve that problem and build your marketing funnel. Because building multiple funnels multiple directions isn't really a good solution for it. If what you're really dealing with is, I have a client scarcity fear, then let's talk about the client's scarcity fear. That's not a niching question. That's a… I'm so afraid because clients were so scarce for so long that I'm afraid to be decisive in the business. So, let's talk about that. Is that really still where your business is today?

Carl: Yeah. And that's a real...we should just make a little note that we should talk about that sometimes just the role of... it's a real...

Michael: Oh, yeah.

Carl: That's more than just, where's your business today? That's hardwired grooving in the brain. I've spent so much time trying to understand this just because it's been such a huge problem for me.

Michael: It's not even just the hard wiring around just humans fearing scarcity. It's hammered into us. Because again, the early years are pretty awful for everyone.

Carl: Sure. No, I mean...

Michael: We live scarcity for a long time. It's hard to undo that.

Carl: Totally.

Choosing A Path And Maintaining Focus On Those Clients [27:23]

Michael: Now, the flip side of this, I find often that sort of the fear of choosing when the road diverges, right, when the fork comes in the road and you got a big path, right? Going straight, picking out a path usually doesn't go well.

Carl: The Cheshire Cat's right there at that spot.

Michael: On the one end is the fear of if I pursue one, the scarcity thing starts kicking in again. I'm going like, but if I start saying no to people, then I'll never have clients again and my business will shrink and die, even though every actual data point shows that that is not the realistic threat for your businesses now. The second challenge though is just a lot of it's like, we do this for the relationships. We like the relationships, we like the relationships with our clients. We're relationship-y people. And so, it just doesn't feel good to say, "We've gone on our journey together. You graduated. Best wishes to you in life because you've now moved on beyond my niche and I'm going to help someone else", right? Even if I had an unlimited supply of clients, more than I can ever serve in my original niche, some of us still struggle with this because we just don't want to have to terminate the relationship and go to a new one. We want to hold onto the relationships that we've got, and the clients are often willing to, so why would you terminate that?

And I would just say, if that's your driver, I just want to stick with the relationships, then fine. That, to me, is one of the defining characteristics of who chooses to pursue the new niche their clients are going towards instead of the one that they're departing from is if you want to follow your clients on the journey, you can follow your clients on the journey. Because the irony is if you've built up the practice to that point, often the reality is you don't actually need that many new clients anyways if you're there, right? If you're hiring multiple advisors and you're staffing up and you need to create growth tracks and career paths for all of them, that looks different. But for the overall majority of us, we're like, we just want to have enough clients to serve ourselves.

The ironic reality to all this is if you got to a critical mass of clients off of your original niche, it doesn't actually matter whether you pick the old one or new one or anyone because you really may not need very many more new clients. And the truth is just if you're serving your clients well, some flow of passive referrals is fairly inevitable. It might not be of very high rates to grow you, but it's almost always enough to at least replacement rate, natural client attrition. And so, if you're there...the other irony is who cares about which path you choose or any of them? If you've got enough clients to make the income you want, just serve the clients. It's cool.

Carl: Totally.

Michael: It's cool. But...

Carl: Totally.

Michael: If you're in growth mode, being successful by growing with 1 focus and then turning it into split focus is not a good thing to sustain the growth path, right? That's very Greg McKeown. The focus that brings us success then gives us so many choices that we undermine the original success by losing the focus that we had in the first place. That's what he's talking about. If you don't know it, go read Greg McKeown's "Essentialism" book, and he actually calls this the success paradox. The focus that makes us successful leads us to become unfocused and causes us to lose momentum on our success.

Carl: Yeah. What was that...? We used to say that all the time that, I did a thing at work so well that I stopped doing it.

Michael: Yeah.

Carl: Yeah. It's so good. Well, I think that's beautiful.

Michael: If you got enough clients, cool, you don't need to do the thing more, just serve the clients well. But if you're in growth mode, you can pick the old niche, you can go to the new one, but be careful about splitting focus because the being focused is what got you here in the first place.

Carl: That is a place to say amen.

Michael: Amen.

Carl: Amen.

Michael: Awesome. Thank you, Carl.

Carl: Thanks, Michael. So fun. Cheers.