Open your inbox right now and look at the last brief you were sent.
Read how it was addressed. "Hi, hope you're well, we've got a role we're working on and wanted to see if you could help." Now look closer. That exact message went to four other agencies the same morning. You know it did. You've sent the cheerful reply, dropped everything, started sourcing, and somewhere underneath it you already know you're number three on a list of five, racing four other people to the same finish line for a fee that only one of you will collect.
That is what being a commodity feels like. Not dramatic. Just the quiet, daily understanding that you are interchangeable. The client doesn't want you. They want a candidate, and you are one of several vending machines they're shaking to see what falls out.
You tell yourself you're different because you work harder, or you're faster, or you "really get" the sector. None of that survives contact with the buyer's behaviour. They still sent the brief to four agencies. To them, you are the same as the other four.
The structural reason this keeps happening
You are a commodity because you let the market define your category, and the category the market put you in is "recruitment agency." That category has hundreds of members in any given city, and the buyer's only way to choose between identical-looking options is price and speed. So you compete on price and speed, and you lose margin every year, and you call it a tough market.
It is not a tough market. It is a category problem. When the buyer cannot tell you apart from the next firm, they will always commoditise you, because that is the rational thing to do with interchangeable suppliers. The fault is not theirs. The fault is that you never gave them a reason to see you as a category of one.
Where you want to be
There is another position, and I call it being a market of one to the client. It means that in the specific category you have defined, there is no second option. The client is not comparing you to four other firms because there are no four other firms doing what you do, for who you do it, the way you do it. You are not the best of several. You are the only.
I worked with a member inside Boardroom who used to describe himself as "a generalist with a tech lean." Eighteen months later he owned one narrow category so completely that when a relevant search came up anywhere in his market, his name was the first and often the only one mentioned. Same recruiter. He simply stopped being one of many and became the one.
That is the move. From commodity supplier, interchangeable, to market of one, irreplaceable. And here is the uncomfortable part: almost nobody makes it, and the reason they don't is not lack of skill.
Why breadth feels safer than depth
You stay broad because broad feels safe. If you cover three sectors and four functions, you tell yourself you've spread your risk. More markets, more briefs, more shots on goal. Narrowing to one feels like switching off most of your pipeline on purpose.
In my fifteen years working with executive search owners, this is the single belief I have to dismantle most often. Breadth does not spread your risk. It guarantees you stay a commodity in every market you touch, because you are never deep enough in any one of them to become the obvious choice. You are slightly known everywhere and essential nowhere.
Depth feels dangerous and is actually the safest thing you can do. When you own one niche, your risk is not "what if this market slows down." Your risk is removed entirely from the price war, because the buyer in your niche has no comparison to make. Of the hundreds of owners I've sat with, the ones who feel most secure are not the broadest. They are the narrowest.
What the move actually requires
It requires you to turn work away. To say no to the brief that is adjacent but not in your niche. To watch a fee walk past and let it go, because chasing it would dilute the position you are building. That is the price, and it is why most refuse to pay it.
It requires patience. A market of one is not built in a quarter. It is built over the twelve to eighteen months it takes for a defined market to start associating a category with your name. The work we do inside Boardroom is largely about holding owners steady through that period, because the temptation to broaden again the moment a slow month arrives is enormous, and broadening again resets the clock to zero.
And it requires you to decide, properly, which one market you are going to own. Not your speciality. Your category. The narrower, the better. If you are not sure how to pick it without resenting the choice later, that is its own piece of work, and worth getting right before you commit, which is exactly why some owners apply to talk it through before they narrow.
Where to start
You're here: a commodity, sent the same brief as four others, competing on price you cannot afford to keep cutting.
You want to be here: a market of one, called first, compared to no one.
Here's how it begins. Look again at that brief in your inbox. The one that went to four other agencies. Ask yourself a single question: in what specific, narrow market could I make sure that brief only ever comes to me?
Answer that honestly and you have found the edge of the work. Refuse to answer it, and next week there will be another cheerful message in your inbox, addressed to you and four other people, and you will start sourcing again, and you will already know where you stand.