A managing partner told me recently that she’d counted the service lines promoted on her firm’s website. There were twenty-four. But around ninety per cent of the firm’s profitability has its roots in just one of them.

She wasn’t describing a failure. All twenty-four are real. The firm does all of them, does them competently, and has partners who care about each one. The website’s an accurate description of what the firm sells.

It’s just not an accurate description of what it’s known for.

Later in the same conversation, when we started to talk about brand and positioning, she said the thing many firm leaders say at this point. “We don’t want to be pigeonholed. Our ambition is to grow. We need to build our reputation in the other twenty-three.”

It’s a reasonable plan. It’s also the plan every one of her competitors is following.

The alternative hadn’t occurred to her, and it’s the obvious one. Focus the firm’s reputation around the specialism that everything else grows out of.

Say that in a partners’ meeting and somebody will use the word ’boutique’. They won’t mean it kindly.

What specialism really means

To some, the word summons a picture of a firm cutting things: practices closed, partners let go, a smaller business with a tidier story.

That’s not what’s being proposed here, and it’s worth saying so before going further. The work stays. The twenty-four practices carry on doing what they do and billing what they bill.

This is how the arithmetic actually works. Clients arrive because of the thing the firm’s known for, and then buy the other things once they’re in the building. Kirkland & Ellis lists private equity alongside ninety-two other practices, but a great many of those practices exist to serve private equity clients who came for private equity. The breadth is real, and it’s downstream of the focus.

What changes is what the firm focuses on, what it’s prepared to be known for, chosen because it’s already true, already excellent, and usually already where the profit is.

Then it has to be named, and named well. Sometimes an established industry term does the job, because the market already understands it and there’s no sense in making a buyer learn new vocabulary. Sometimes that term flattens exactly what’s distinctive about the firm, and you have to find language of your own.

Choosing and naming. That’s the whole of it. The rest of this is about why so few firms manage either.

Clients arrive because of the thing the firm is known for, and then buy the other things once they’re in the building.

The challenger models that don’t travel

The challenger brand idea has been in the marketing lexicon for more than twenty-five years, most usefully mapped by Adam Morgan and the people around him. The argument is straightforward: a brand with ambitions beyond its resources can compete by changing the terms of the fight rather than by outspending the incumbent.

Most people picture one of two versions of this. There’s the feisty maverick, the outsider who comes in loudly and tells the market its established players have gone soft. Virgin, historically. BrewDog, more recently. And there’s the passionate missionary, the brand that wears its purpose openly and asks you to buy into it. Patagonia. Tony’s Chocolonely.

Both are energising to discuss in a leadership session. Both are almost always wrong for a professional services firm.

To do either of them properly, you have to stand outside your own market and kick against it. That works when the audience is a consumer who enjoys watching an incumbent take a hit. It doesn’t work when the audience is a general counsel or a chief executive who has to justify the appointment internally, and who isn’t in the market for an insurgent. And the halfway house is worse than nothing. A firm that’s a little bit feisty, or a little bit missionary, has taken on the risk of the position without acquiring any of its energy.

There’s a third model, and it’s the one that works in the professional services world.

The enthusiastic specialist

In the consumer world this is Mini, Sonos, Rapha (cycling not tennis). Brands that aren’t the biggest in their category and have no plans to become so, and whose strength comes from doubling down on a specialism: celebrating it, owning it, and looking and sounding as though they mean it. They’re usually premium. That’s not a coincidence. It’s close to a requirement.

I’ve come to call this the enthusiastic specialist, because the visible characteristic is always the same. These brands are conspicuously keen on the thing they do, in a way that a broader competitor couldn’t risk being.

The enthusiasm is a symptom. What it signals is permission: these firms have arranged themselves so that obsession costs them nothing, and the keenness you can see is what that arrangement looks like from outside.

Sonos is a fraction of the size of Sony, and yet it’s entirely credible that its sound engineers are among the best in the world at what they do, because sound is what they do and all they do. Sony has extraordinary engineers too. What Sony can’t do is organise its entire brand around them, because most of its business would then be standing in the wrong place.

That’s the mechanism, and it transfers to professional services almost without modification. Your generalist competitors aren’t prevented from matching your depth by a lack of talent. They’re prevented by their own breadth. They can’t obsess publicly about your specialism, because obsession would alienate most of their clients and most of their own partners. You can. That asymmetry is the whole of the advantage, and no amount of spending closes it.

They’re commercial strategy geeks, and proud of it.

The pigeonhole objection, and why it rests on an assumption

So why is this model so rare in professional services, when the conditions for it are so good?

Because at face value, defining a firm as a specialist looks like a ceiling rather than a runway. And that reading is reinforced by an assumption almost nobody examines: that a specialism must be drawn along the lines the firm already uses internally, which is to say practice groups, departments and industry sectors.

It doesn’t have to be. Some of the most powerful territories are entirely practice-agnostic. AlixPartners has built a global consulting business on a single idea, that they’re the firm you turn to when it really matters, which isn’t a service line or a sector but a moment. Urgent situations, high stakes, decisions where getting it right first time is the only acceptable outcome. Their own account of the difference is telling: it’s not what they do, it’s how they do it. In law, the equivalent is the bet-the-company matter, which is unmistakable to a buyer and cuts straight across the firm’s own org chart.

Other territories are defined by the client rather than the work: founder-led businesses, private-equity ownership, the company at a particular stage of its life. Others again are defined by an idea the firm has made its own. PA Consulting competes directly with firms many times its size on the strength of bringing ingenuity to life, which is innovation-flavoured without being a sector, and travels across everything the firm does.

And some conventional categories turn out not to be narrow at all. Simon-Kucher started as a pricing consultancy and refused to be anything else. It’s now more than two thousand people in over thirty countries, with revenue of €572m in 2024. That’s the pigeonhole objection answered in a single data point. They’ve widened the language over time, from pricing to commercial growth and pricing, and reasonable people can argue about whether that’s the specialism stretching or slipping. But nobody mistakes them for a generalist. They’re commercial strategy geeks, and proud of it.

The discipline is in the calibration, and in the work I do with firms across these sectors it’s usually where the real argument happens. The territory has to be tight enough to mean something specific in a buyer’s mind, and large enough to absorb everything the firm wants to become. Sometimes you lean into an established industry term, because the market already understands it. Sometimes you have to find your own language. What you can’t do is invent a category that doesn’t already exist in the buyer’s head and expect them to learn it. This is the mass niche question, and it’s worth resolving before anything else. Mass niche settles what the specialism is. The enthusiastic specialist model is about how you behave once you’ve chosen it.

What the permission buys

Once a firm has a defensible territory, things become available that were previously closed off.

It can put a level of investment into thought leadership aimed at one audience that would be indefensible for a broader competitor, because that competitor would have to explain to twenty-three other practices why they weren’t the ones being funded. It can build knowledge deep enough to become a genuine operational advantage for clients rather than a marketing claim. It can develop brand symbols finely tuned to a market it knows intimately. And it can recruit against a single idea, which over a decade compounds into something no competitor can buy.

It can also say things no one else can say. Quinn Emanuel tells the market that litigation is a zero-sum game, that there are winners and losers, and that they like winning. Only a pure litigation firm could publish that sentence. And even most of the firms that could, wouldn’t, because they’d shy away from the overt confrontational tone.

That’s what conviction sounds like when it reaches the surface, and it’s the part most firms skip. A specialism that exists only in the strategy document isn’t a position. It’s an intention.

That homepage isn’t a communication failure. It’s a treaty.

Who shouldn’t attempt this

The model isn’t for everyone, and the honest version of this argument has to say so.

It doesn’t work as a rescue. A firm already doing too many things and just about getting by will find that adopting an enthusiastic specialist approach requires either a burning platform or exceptionally strong leadership, and realistically both. The raw material has to be roughly seventy per cent there already. You’re giving a name to something the market can half-see, not manufacturing it.

And even at seventy per cent, leadership culture decides the outcome. A conservative, consensus-driven partnership will struggle, because the discipline is where this model is paid for. Focus in a partnership means telling colleagues that their work won’t be on the front page, that the firm will spend its attention unevenly, and that it’s going to say one thing loudly rather than twenty-four things equally.

The five-second test

There’s a way to check all this that takes no time at all.

Open the homepage of a firm that has chosen its enthusiastic specialist territory well. Erevena, the executive search firm, says it exists to empower the new icons of technology, and describes its work as the leadership hires made at the moments that decide a company’s future. Client type and situation, in a sentence, before you’ve scrolled. You know what the firm is for.

Now open the homepage of a firm with twenty-four service lines. It can’t say anything in five seconds, because the sentence that would say it has to be negotiated with everyone whose practice it excludes.

That second homepage isn’t a communication failure. It’s a treaty. And any leader who has sat through the negotiation will recognise it immediately.

The choice

The twenty-four service lines aren’t the problem. Most premium firms have lots of them, and they should. Clients need them, partners built them, and they earn their keep. None of them has to go.

That managing partner wasn’t really asking whether her firm should or could become a specialist. On the evidence it already is.

She was asking whether it could bring itself to say so with conviction.