Horizontal vs Vertical Positioning

The argument about specialisation has two vocal camps, and both of them are working from an incomplete picture.

The first camp, broadly associated with the Hormozi school of thought, says riches are in niches. Go specific, own a category, become the obvious choice for a defined audience. The second camp, represented by people like Steve Chandler, takes a more sceptical view - that niche rhymes with quiche and both should stay in France. The debate generates a lot of content and not much resolution, largely because neither side accounts for the arithmetic that actually governs how markets behave.

At any given moment, somewhere between one and three percent of your addressable market is genuinely in cycle. They have the problem, the budget, the urgency, and the internal mandate to act right now. Everyone else is at a different stage - aware of the problem but not yet prioritising it, not yet funded, not yet politically able to move. This is not a marketing failure. It is simply how demand is distributed across time, and it applies to every market regardless of what you sell.

The implications for positioning are significant and largely ignored. If you have defined your offer around a very specific vertical - operational restructuring for family-owned manufacturing businesses in the Ozarks, for instance - you have compressed the pool of people who are in cycle at any given moment down to a number that may not sustain a practice. A hundred outreach messages into that market might produce one genuinely active conversation. Building from there requires either an unusually long runway, significant paid acquisition, or the kind of patience that most people discover they don't have once they're living it.

The opposite failure is equally common and perhaps more visible. Position too broadly, claim relevance to everyone, and you become an odd-job man - easily overlooked in favour of whoever appears most specifically relevant to the buyer's situation. Vague positioning is not safe positioning. It is simply a slower version of the same problem.

The more durable starting point for most expertise-led businesses is what I think of as horizontal expertise. A genuinely deep and differentiated capability - something that addresses a critical, high-consequence problem - applied across a wide range of verticals rather than anchored to one. The depth of the skill is the differentiator. The breadth of the application is what keeps the pipeline alive while you accumulate enough real market data to understand where demand is consistently strongest.

The brain surgeon analogy holds up well here. A brain surgeon has a commanding position. A brain surgeon who exclusively treats ex-NBA players with head trauma has a commanding position inside a very small room. The first builds a practice. The second waits for the right patient.

Vertical specialisation is worth considering eventually, and for some businesses it is clearly the right answer, but only once you have enough evidence to know which vertical is pulling hardest and why. Moving to a vertical before that data exists is not strategic focus, it’s just an expensive guess.