You've got it written on your website right now. "We specialise in technology, life sciences, and financial services."

Read that back slowly. You've used the word specialise and then immediately listed three enormous markets. You know, somewhere behind the eyes, that this is not specialising. This is hedging, dressed up in the language of focus. You wrote three because picking one felt like locking a door, and you didn't want to lock any doors.

Here is the conversation you're avoiding having with yourself. You are not the obvious choice in technology. You are not the obvious choice in life sciences. You are not the obvious choice in financial services. You are a presence in all three and the answer in none, and every month that passes, someone narrower than you is quietly becoming the name in one of them.

The cope underneath three niches

Three niches is a cope. It lets you feel specialised while keeping all your options open, which is the emotional equivalent of ordering everything on the menu because you can't bear to choose.

The logic feels sound. Three markets means if one slows, the other two carry you. More surface area, more resilience. But that logic only works for commodity suppliers, and the whole point is to stop being one. Spreading across three markets does not make you resilient. It makes you forgettable in three places instead of unforgettable in one.

Every search firm owner I sit with who runs three niches has the same problem and cannot see it. They are working three times as hard to build authority and getting a third of the result in each market, because authority does not split cleanly. The market does not give you a third of a reputation in three places. It gives you near-zero in all three until you concentrate.

Where you want to be

You want to be the name. Singular. The person who, when a particular kind of search comes up in a particular market, is mentioned before anyone reaches for a shortlist of agencies. You want to walk into a sector event and have people already know what you do, because what you do is one thing, clearly, and you are known for it.

Twelve months ago I was on a call with an owner who had three "specialisms" and could not understand why none of them were taking off. We killed two of them on that call. Not paused. Killed. Within a year the remaining one had become the thing his market associated with his firm, and his billings from that single niche exceeded what all three had produced combined. The two he dropped were not failures. They were the dilution.

Why one wins and three lose

Authority compounds, and it only compounds when it is concentrated. Every piece of content, every conversation, every placement in one niche stacks on top of the last and builds something the market starts to recognise. Spread the same effort across three and nothing stacks. You are always starting again.

The pattern I see again and again inside Boardroom is that the owners terrified of picking one are the owners whose growth has stalled, and the moment they commit to a single market, the stall breaks. Not because the other markets were bad. Because attention is the scarce resource, and three niches is just a way of guaranteeing none of your markets ever get enough of it.

There is also the buyer's perception. A firm that does one thing reads as expert. A firm that lists three reads as a general agency that hasn't found its feet. You think the three niches make you look capable. To the buyer in any one of them, they make you look unfocused, and unfocused loses to specialist every time a serious search is on the line.

The discipline of picking

Picking one is not a marketing decision. It is a discipline, and it is hard precisely because it forces you to say no to real revenue from the other two while you build.

That fear is reasonable and you should not pretend it away. Narrowing does cost you something in the short term. But staying broad costs you the only thing that matters in the long term, which is ever becoming the obvious choice anywhere. If you are weighing that trade and want a clear-headed second opinion before you cut, owners often apply for a briefing precisely to make the call with someone who has watched it play out hundreds of times.

What concentration actually buys you

Concentration does not just make you better known. It makes you better, full stop. When all your attention sits in one market, you learn it faster, spot its shifts sooner, and build relationships deep enough that the market starts bringing you intelligence rather than the other way around. Three niches deny you all of that, because divided attention never reaches the depth where it compounds.

Of the hundreds of search firm owners I've sat with, almost none regret narrowing once they have done it. What they regret is the years they spent spread thin, telling themselves breadth was prudence. The owner who commits to one market is not taking a risk. They are removing the risk of being permanently average everywhere.

The pattern I see inside Boardroom is that the moment an owner kills the spare niches, their energy returns, because divided focus is exhausting in a way most people never name. If you are weighing which one to keep and which to drop, that is a decision worth making with someone who has watched it play out many times, and owners often apply for a briefing to make it cleanly.

Where to start

You're here: three niches, a presence in each, the answer in none.

You want to be here: one niche, owned completely, your name first.

Here's how. Take your three. Rank them by where you have the deepest track record and the warmest relationships, not where you wish you were strong. Pick the top one. Commit to it for twelve months without broadening, no matter how slow a single month feels.

You will spend that year fighting the urge to add the others back. Everyone does. But the owners who hold the line stop being a presence in three markets and become the name in one, and the name in one earns more, more predictably, with far less effort, than a presence in three ever will.