The false choice at the heart of most positioning conversations

There is a conversation that happens in almost every firm when leadership turns its attention to positioning. It goes something like this.

Someone argues for greater focus — a clearer sense of what the firm stands for, a more deliberate answer to why here rather than elsewhere. And almost immediately, the resistance arrives. We can’t afford to be that narrow. We have too many practices. Our clients need the full range. Focus means shrinking.

It is a reasonable instinct. And it is almost always wrong.

The assumption buried inside it is that focus and scale are in tension — that a firm which stands for something specific must, by definition, be a smaller or more limited firm. That the price of clarity is opportunity.

The most successful professional services firms in the world have resolved this tension. Not by ignoring it, and not by making dramatic strategic pivots that most partnership structures could not sustain. But by finding a position that is focused enough to be genuinely distinctive and large enough to support ambitious growth. It is a concept I have come to call a mass-niche position — and it is the difference between a firm that the market can get hold of and one that it cannot.

What mass-niche actually means

The concept is easier to grasp outside professional services first, where the examples are less freighted with familiarity.

Apple does not compete across the full range of consumer electronics. It competes only at the very high end of the markets it enters — the niche part. But those markets are enormous and growing, driven by global prosperity and the expansion of the middle class worldwide — the mass part. The result is a firm with roughly 25% of the smartphone market by volume, around 50% of revenues, and the overwhelming majority of profits. That is what a well-chosen mass-niche position produces: disproportionate returns from a deliberately bounded territory.

BMW does not make cars for every driver. It makes cars for drivers who want to feel something — who will pay a significant premium for performance they will rarely use and capability they do not strictly need. The market for that feeling turns out to be very large indeed.

These are not stories about luck or heritage. They are stories about a specific kind of strategic discipline: the willingness to define the territory you intend to own, and then to own it completely.

The professional services version

In professional services, the same logic applies — but the territory is defined differently. It is rarely a sector or a practice area in isolation. It is something more like a concept: a framework that already exists in the client’s mind, that the right firm can fill and make its own.

This distinction matters enormously. You cannot simply decide that your firm stands for something and will it into being. The position has to resonate with something the market already senses — a category of need, a way of thinking about a problem, a kind of value that clients already recognise, even if they have not yet organised it around a single name.

Consider how this works in practice:

The idea of the built environment resonates immediately — it is specific enough to imply genuine expertise, broad enough to encompass architecture, engineering, infrastructure, and the spaces people inhabit. Arup has filled that territory with extraordinary discipline over decades.

Premium litigation resonates — clients facing high-stakes disputes understand instinctively what it means to want the most aggressive, most prepared, most uncompromising firm in the room. Quinn Emanuel has filled that territory.

Ingenuity — the idea that some problems require genuine invention rather than the application of established frameworks — resonates in a market where clients are increasingly aware that standard consulting approaches have limits. PA Consulting has filled that territory.

In each case, the concept came before the claim. The market had a space. The firm chose to occupy it — deliberately, consistently, and with the discipline to say no to the things that would dilute it.

Cooley understood that technology was not simply a sector but a way of thinking about law — that the firms shaping the next economy needed advisers who understood their world from the inside. Where innovation meets the law is not a service description. It is a claim about a kind of firm. ARM looked at the semiconductor industry and saw that the real value lay not in manufacturing — capital-intensive, commoditising, brutal — but in the intellectual architecture that everything else depended on. It described itself as the R&D department of the entire semiconductor industry. That is a mass-niche position: impossibly specific, vast in its implications.

The bridge most firms are missing

The reason this matters for most professional services leaders is not that they lack ambition or talent. It is that they have inherited firms shaped by years of accumulation — practices added, sectors entered, capabilities acquired — without the organising principle that would make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

They know they cannot rip things up. They know a dramatic pivot is neither politically feasible nor commercially wise. And so the positioning conversation stalls between two unsatisfying options: the vague and encompassing claim that means nothing to anyone, or the narrow and specific claim that feels like it leaves too much on the table.

Mass-niche is the bridge between those two positions. It says: you do not need to be small to be focused. You do not need to abandon your breadth to have a clear identity. What you need is a concept — already latent in the market’s mind — that is large enough to accommodate your ambition and specific enough to make your firm unmistakably the right choice for the clients who matter most.

Finding that concept is not straightforward. It requires a sophisticated reading of the market — understanding not just what clients buy but how they think about what they need. It requires honesty about where the firm is genuinely distinctive, as opposed to merely competent. And it requires the kind of leadership resolve that is willing to emphasise some things and de-emphasise others, not by shutting practices down, but by deciding what the firm is fundamentally about.

In my experience, the moment a leadership team finds its mass-niche concept — the formulation that is already there in the market’s mind, waiting to be filled — the effect is immediate. It does not feel like a constraint. It feels like permission. Permission to be something specific. Permission to compete on different terms. Permission, finally, to have a clear answer to the question every sophisticated buyer eventually asks.

That is the false choice resolved. Not by choosing between focus and scale — but by finding the territory where they are the same thing.