The challenger brand model that suits professional services firms, and the one word that stops most of them from using it.

There is a moment that recurs in conversations with firm leaders about positioning. It tends to arrive after the good part, once a room has more or less agreed on what the firm is genuinely better at than anyone else. Someone senior says, with a little more feeling than the rest of the discussion has carried: “But we’re not a boutique.”

It is offered as a correction. Sometimes as a warning.

What’s interesting is who says it. These are rarely small firms. They’re often substantial businesses, competing at the top of their market, winning work against names many times their size. They are almost never underweight in the things they do well. And yet the word arrives with real anxiety attached, usually because somewhere in a recent pitch they stood next to a much bigger competitor and felt the comparison.

These are rarely small firms. They win work against names many times their size. And yet the word arrives with real anxiety attached.

So the objection isn’t really about the word. It’s about a fear that defining the firm as a specialist is a decision to be smaller.

That fear is misplaced, and it is expensive. It keeps firms from playing up the one asset that would let them compete against much larger rivals on something other than price.

The challenger models that don’t travel

The challenger brand idea belongs to Adam Morgan and the eatbigfish group, and it has been in the marketing lexicon for more than twenty-five years. Ask anyone to picture a challenger brand and you’ll usually get one of two pictures.

The first is the feisty maverick: the outsider who does things differently and enjoys saying so. Virgin in its pomp. BrewDog. The second is the passionate missionary, the purpose-led brand pursuing a cause the category has been ignoring. Patagonia. Tony’s Chocolonely.

Both are energising to think about. Both are close to unusable in professional services.

To play either properly, you have to stand outside the market and kick at it. In professional services, the market is your buyer. The general counsel, the chief financial officer, the board chair and the investment committee are the establishment. Kicking at the establishment doesn’t read as brave to them. It reads as not understanding the room.

And the compromise version doesn’t work either. A little bit feisty is just impolite. A little bit missionary is a mission statement. These models only pay when they’re played at full volume, and full volume is precisely what a firm selling judgement to cautious buyers cannot afford.

A third model

There is a third version of the challenger idea, one I’ve come to call the enthusiastic specialist, and it behaves completely differently, because it never has to kick anything. It works with the grain of how professional buyers already think.

In consumer markets it is the Mini, Sonos and Rapha model. Premium, often ultra-premium. Competing against companies many times their size and winning on preference rather than price. Their strength comes from doubling down on one thing: celebrating it, owning it, and looking and sounding like they mean it.

The mechanism underneath is worth pausing on, because it is the part that transfers.

It is easy to believe that the sound engineers at Sonos are among the best in the world, because sound is all Sonos does. Sony has extraordinary sound engineers too, and vastly more of them. But Sony cannot build its brand around them, because if it did, most of its business would be standing in the wrong place.

That’s not unwillingness. It’s structure.

The same asymmetry is available to professional services firms, and it is the closest thing to a free gift the market offers. Your generalist competitors are not merely reluctant to obsess in public about your specialism. They are forbidden from it. If a broad-based firm organised its brand, its thought leadership and its senior visibility around the one thing you do best, it would be telling the majority of its clients and its own partners that they matter less. No leadership team can do that and survive.

Your generalist competitors are not merely reluctant to obsess in public about your specialism. They are forbidden from it.

You can. That, rather than attitude, is what makes a specialist a challenger.

Specialism is not smallness

Two assumptions turn “specialist” into “boutique” in the mind of a partners’ meeting. Both are optional.

The first is that a specialism has to be a service line or an industry sector. It doesn’t. AlixPartners has built an entire firm around a situation rather than a discipline: when it really matters. The fork in the road, the deal that cannot slip, the moment the board runs out of road. Simon-Kucher chose a discipline, pricing, and stayed in it. PA Consulting chose an idea, bringing ingenuity to life, which travels across every discipline the firm practises. In executive search, Erevena has taken a client type and a moment together: it says it exists to empower the new icons of tech, and describes its work as the leadership hires that decide a company’s future. You understand the firm before you scroll.

The second assumption is that a specialism must be small. Simon-Kucher began in pricing and declined to be anything else. It now has more than 2,000 people in over 30 countries. Nobody calls it a boutique.

The deeper answer, though, is Kirkland & Ellis. Its website lists 93 separate practices. One of them is private equity. A great many of the other 92 exist because private equity clients arrived for private equity and then needed everything else. The breadth is downstream of the focus. It is not an alternative to it.

Kirkland lists 93 separate practices. One of them is private equity. The breadth is downstream of the focus.

This is why the specialism has to be chosen carefully rather than timidly. You don’t want to plant your flag in something low-margin, declining and oversupplied. But almost every market has a premium segment that is considerably larger than it looks from inside the firm, and usually large enough to absorb a mid-sized firm’s most ambitious growth plan several times over.

What enthusiasm buys

Enthusiasm here isn’t a tone of voice. It’s permission.

A specialist can put a level of energy and investment into one area of thought leadership that would be indefensible for a broader competitor, because the broader competitor has eleven other audiences asking why they didn’t get the same. Bespoke Partners has built proprietary compensation and tenure data in software companies backed by private equity, which is a knowledge advantage no generalist would ever fund. Perrett Laver has run more than 400 vice-chancellor and president searches, including at seven of the world’s top twenty universities. Nobody accumulates a proof point like that, or bothers to publish it, unless the territory is the whole strategy.

And the conviction has to reach the surface. Quinn Emanuel does litigation and nothing else, and says out loud that litigation is a zero-sum game with winners and losers, and that it likes winning. Only a pure litigation firm could say that. Most firms that could, wouldn’t, because the confrontation is too overt for comfort. That discomfort is exactly the point. The market reads it as conviction, because that is what it is.

Is that degree of focus within your grasp?

Most mid-sized firms I meet already have the specialism. It is in the numbers, in the referral patterns, in the work the firm gets called about at seven in the morning. What’s missing is usually the language, and the willingness to say it out loud. Getting that language right is delicate work. Too narrow and you’ve built a cul-de-sac. Too bland and you’ve said nothing at all.

In the work I do with firms across law, consulting and search, almost none of these positions were accidents. They were chosen at a particular point in a firm’s evolution and then defended, for years, against perfectly reasonable arguments for widening them. Several were pivots towards something that had been in the building all along and had simply never been treated as the main event.

The model is not for everyone. It asks for strategic discipline and for leadership prepared to absorb the discomfort of saying no in public, which is harder in a partnership than anywhere else. Some firms are too broad, too dispersed or too federated to hold it. That is a legitimate answer, and there are other routes for these firms to follow.

But “we’re not a boutique” is an answer to a question about size. The market is asking a different question, and asks it of every firm on the list: “Are you the best firm to help us solve this particular problem?” The firms that can answer this specifically and without hedging tend to find that the size of the firm standing next to them matters less than they feared.