This past Father’s Day illustrated several costly assumptions professionals (hopefully not you) can make in their business.
It all started with the submarine, USS Cobia.
Is it me? Or is the right Father’s Day gift getting harder to find each year?
In my case, my dad has been gifted more tools than Craftsman produces, and enough cologne to douse every nightclubber in the county,
Usually when I call him, he’s watching something on YouTube about WWII or submarines. So when we discovered the USS Cobia is a historical marker docked less than two hours from his house, I knew getting him there was the right call.
What I didn’t expect were business principles tucked inside a 312-foot steel submarine armed with twenty-four, 3,000-pound torpedoes.
What principles?
1. Assuming your service carries the same value to all clients
My dad’s a Green Bay Packer fan. In the past, I assumed a tour of the Packer Hall of Fame would make a good Father’s Day outing.
Turns out he had little interest. I filed that one under “well-meaning and completely wrong,” which has its own shelf in my filing system.
But a chance to tour the 1,680-ton USS Cobia? A WWII submarine built in 1942?
That lit him up like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
For a guy who finds grocery shopping fatiguing, he spent half a day on his feet touring the submarine and the Manitowoc Maritime Museum without a single complaint.
I, on the other hand, was quietly negotiating with my flat feet two hours in.
Here’s what struck me about your clients while touring the submarine.
Those 80 submariners who lived and worked aboard the Cobia during WWII. They didn’t just know the submarine. They knew every valve, every hatch, every sound that meant something had changed.
They operated in tight quarters, hundreds of feet below the surface, relying entirely on what they knew with precision.
That’s more than being “generally familiar with submarines.”
And that’s exactly the difference between a generalist and a specialist when a client is sitting across from you in a moment that actually matters to them.
Here’s the assumption worth examining
If you’re offering a wide net of services and assuming each one carries equal weight with every client, you’re likely missing real opportunity.
As we always should, let’s look at it from a potential client’s perspective.
Let’s say someone was just left an inheritance. Real estate. IRAs. Vehicles. A stock portfolio. Maybe a business interest thrown in for good measure.
For most people, this is a once-in-a-lifetime situation. They’ve got no experience navigating it. They’re making decisions while processing grief. And a number of those decisions, if made wrong, can’t be undone.
The wrong move could dishonor the benefactor’s intent.
Now here’s the costly assumption
A generalist financial advisor assumes a client values their services the same way they’d value any other financial advisor.
But compare that to someone who’s built a niche specifically around financially guiding clients through inheritances.
Someone who understands the grief. The quietly changing laws. The emotional weight sitting behind every decision that has to be made anyway.
That’s something entirely different.
Clients with inheritances aren’t shopping for a financial advisor the way we shop for windshield wipers. They’re looking for someone who knows the inside of this situation the way those 80 submariners knew every inch of the Cobia after two months under the ocean.
Not because they memorized a manual. Because they lived it.
That level of familiarity is what a grieving client is really hiring. And it’s what separates a specialist from someone who’s generally good at financial advising.
The USS Cobia wasn’t called into service when the Navy needed mail ferried between ports. She was summoned when the mission required stealth, precision, and someone trained for exactly that kind of mission. Seven war patrols.
She wasn’t the biggest ship in the fleet.
She was the right one for the job.
That’s the difference your niche makes when a client’s situation actually has weight to it.
When your service fits the specific weight of a client’s situation, the value of what you offer rises dramatically. And so does what clients are willing to invest in it.
Rightly so. Because you’re carrying insights and experience that a professional serving a general client base simply doesn’t have.
The USS Cobia tour wasn’t about just any boat. It was the exact right thing for my dad for Father’s Day. And that made all the difference.
My flat feet remain unconvinced, but that’s a separate issue
2. Assuming niches eliminate a huge base of potential clients
This one stops a lot of independent professionals before they ever start.
The logic sounds reasonable enough. If I narrow my focus, I’ll eliminate most of the market. Fewer potential clients. Smaller pond.
But here’s what that assumption overlooks.
The USS Cobia wasn’t built to do everything. It wasn’t a cargo ship, a passenger vessel, or a floating hotel. It was purpose-built for a specific mission.
And that’s precisely why it was effective.
A submarine trying to be all things to all sailors doesn’t work.
When the Navy needed to move troops, they called an attack transport. When they needed to move cargo, they called a cargo ship. Nobody called the Cobia for either of those jobs, and the Cobia didn’t lose a single mission because of it.
The assignments that weren’t hers were never hers to begin with.
The same is true for your niche.
When you’re serving everyone, you’re competing with everyone. And in a crowded market full of professionals with similar credentials, similar services, and similar websites that all seem to use the same stock photo of a handshake, you become interchangeable.
Clients have no compelling reason to choose you over anyone else.
But a niche changes that equation entirely. It positions you as the professional who specifically understands a particular kind of client, problem, or situation.
And when the right person’s looking for help, you stop being one option among many and become the obvious answer.
All those other assignments aren’t a loss, because they aren’t in your wheelhouse anyway.
There’s another layer worth considering.
When clients find a professional who truly understands their specific situation, they don’t shop around. The decision feels less like a transaction and more like relief they’ve found the person they’ve been looking for and understands them.
That tends to reduce price sensitivity, too.
The people who were never a fit for your niche weren’t going to become your best clients anyway. Letting them sort themselves out saves you time, energy, and the slow drain of serving clients who’d never feel like the right match.
The pond isn’t any smaller when you specialize. It’s just better stocked.
3. Assuming there are fewer referral opportunities through a niche
This is a close cousin to the “fewer clients” assumption.
The thinking goes like this.
If I narrow my focus, I’ll shrink my referral network. Fewer clients mean fewer people to send me new business.
But the opposite is true.
Think about the crew of the USS Cobia for a second. Eighty men. But they didn’t all have the same job. They specialized. A captain, secretary, torpedo loader, cook, periscope operator, and more.
I’d learned in their off-time they studied.
You might wonder, study what?
These men were all volunteers, and they had a strategy.
They knew at some point one or some of them may pay the ultimate cost in a mission. Thankfully, only one in the USS Cobia’s history ever paid it.
But they knew someone needed to take over that person’s job.
When one crew member recommended something to another crew member, it carried weight. It was specific. It was trusted. It came from someone who understood exactly what that person was dealing with.
In fact, the success of the mission depended on it.
That’s what a niche-powered referral looks like.
When they refer someone to you, it’s not a generic “you should call my advisor.” It’s a mission dependent, targeted one.
“You need to talk to this person. They specifically work with situations like yours.”
That kind of referral arrives with context, credibility, and a warm level of trust.
You’re not starting from zero. You’re starting from a great place.
When you serve the right clients exceptionally well, they become vocal advocates. And they send you the right people, not just anyone.
The big picture
We’ve got three assumptions. All of them feel logical on the surface.
And all of them come at a cost.
Your niche isn’t a limitation, it’s a vantage point.
It’s a filter that keeps the right clients coming in and the wrong ones from draining your time, energy, and enthusiasm.
The USS Cobia was built for a specific mission, designed for a specific purpose, and it’s still remembered for exactly that decades later. Not because it tried to be everything. Because it was very good at one thing.
Your niche works the same way.
When you’re clear about who you serve and why you’re the right fit for them, clients feel it. They talk about it. And they send you people who need exactly what you offer.
That’s not eliminating client potential, it’s not even just differentiating you from the competition. It’s aligning you up to serve your ideal client with their ideal solution.
So here’s the question worth sitting with this week.
When a potential client lands on your LinkedIn profile or website, will they immediately know you’re the right fit for their specific situation? Or would they see a generalist professional in a crowded room full of other generalist professionals?
If the answer’s closer to the second one, that’s worth our having a conversation.