Tag: niche

The women of Camp Hansen were not attractive, but they were courted as if they were supermodels.  I spent a year in Hansen as part of my service in the Marines.  There were 6,000 or so Marines and maybe ten of them were female.  

In the news recently: airlines are offering pilots three times their normal pay for taking on extra shifts.

When I started working in web development in 2007, businesses still asked each other for web design referrals.  A couple of years later, suddenly everyone was looking for mobile developers.

Years ago, I shared an Uber with another agency president from the airport to a business conference. It was a random interaction, just a coincidence that we were on the same flight to the same place.

A year or two after that, I ran across a sales executive from his team at an evening mixer for the local biotech industry. I was there doing research on positioning for my agency and the sales exec was there looking for clients. This was odd because I didn’t realize the agency specialized in biotech and also because most agencies don’t have salespeople out at evening mixers.

I joined the Rotary Club in Portland last month and was, again, surprised to discover the agency president as a member of their leadership board.

Yesterday, I was doing research on PPC competitors and did a quick lookup on the agency and found that they advertised heavily in the Shopify market.

This morning I looked at their website and found no mention of biotech or Shopify.

What is going on with their customer acquisition strategy?

There’s a common belief among entrepreneurs that serving a niche is better than being a generalist. Lots of smart people recommend this specialist approach.

Which is why I was surprised to see several research studies on the agency industry that showed that generalist agencies were more profitable than specialist ones.

Are all those smart people wrong? Not exactly. But there is nuance to specialization that few people understand or explain.