...solve thorny business challenges in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea
What if your ideal customers already want to buy from you - even before YOU know THEIR name?
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This report will help you build a version of your business where the right customers find YOU, rather than you doing the grunt work of finding THEM.
You know this is working when a high-value prospective customer says: ‘I need to speak to you – because people in my industry tell me you really understand a business like mine.’
This requires you to position your business in the hearts and minds of your prospects and customers as that of an indispensable expert.
Positioning is a skill available to every business willing to make a definitive positioning decision. Most businesses are afraid, reluctant, or unclear about how to make this happen.
And most businesses don’t make a positioning commitment – even though it could be profoundly valuable to their customers, to their team, and to the long-term success of the business.
The financial payoff
There is clear evidence that specialist businesses generate higher revenue per full-time employee (FTE) than those that are generalist. A business generating £140k per FTE looks and feels very different from one generating less than £100k per FTE.
Salaries will likely be higher in a specialist business, of course – but not all salaries. And the revenue per FTE differences result in a lot of wiggle room for paying your team members more.
But first you must achieve expert positioning.
What specialist positioning might suit your business?
Being a sector niche specialist is one way...
Fold one specialism into another, and you become an expert that earns greater trust and value – a niche within a niche is powerful.
These are just examples – the principle applies to any business, in any sector. The question isn't whether a specialism exists for you – it's whether you're willing to claim one.
...but staying a generalist is easier and can feel safer!
The hard costs of avoiding expert positioning are real. And this cost accumulates quietly and consistently, eroding margin and your future prosperity.
COST A. Every new business conversation is an uncomfortable sales pitch.
Without expert positioning, you must earn credibility from scratch in every prospect meeting. You’re pushing to attain credibility. A well-positioned business walks into a meeting already trusted and respected. Experts are pulled into working rather than having to push/sell their services.
COST B. Referrals are random.
A generalist business gets referred to anyone needing what they offer. An expert or specialist gets referred to people in their specialism by customers and introducers who recognise the value of their expertise. Reputation builds faster and more powerfully for a specialist; not so for a generalist.
COST C. Generalists work harder.
A generalist’s knowledge is diluted in comparison to that of a specialist. A generalist always starts fresh. A specialist’s knowledge is compounded as more customers are served in a specific sector – the more patterns you see, the better your advice becomes, and the more trustworthy and valuable you are seen to be. All of this will add to your confidence.
COST D. The fee glass ceiling.
Generalists have hundreds of competitors and so they are often compared on price. Specialists are compared on outcomes and on value. Expert positioning breaks through the pricing and profitability glass ceiling.
The payoff is obvious...
The specialist expert is typically more in demand, commands higher prices, and converts new customers more easily and faster than the generalist.
The specialist can say no, or not yet, when it suits them, and prospective customers will wait for them.
Specialist businesses consistently command a significant premium over generalists, because customers perceive them as lower risk. They’ve done the work before.
They’ve earned their stripes. They know things the generalist doesn’t. The specialist wins on trust, wins on referrals, wins on price, and wins on cross sales as well. Higher profitability follows naturally.
So, what positioning should you choose?
It’s not simply ‘which niche should I pick?’ The real decision is: am I willing to be remarkable to a few, rather than just adequate to many?
This decision is a strategic commitment you should actively consider. You can dismiss it if it’s not what you want. But please don’t sleepwalk through the next 2-5 years, accidentally growing a generalist business.
Blair Enns, on how to build expert positioning:
“...positioning is not a discovery. You don’t wait for a niche to emerge organically over the years. You choose one. Deliberately. And then you go and build it.”
Blair Enns, The Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Expert positioning is valuable and profitable. But even if you decide to position your business as an expert, there are more hurdles to overcome:
1. THE SERVICES TRAP
Most businesses describe what they do, their product range, service list, or delivery process. That’s a capability menu, not a position. It tells a prospect what you’re capable of. It says nothing about why you are the only logical choice for them. You sound just like every other (potentially cheaper) competitor when you have a service focus.
2. THE WRONG KIND OF BUSY
Without clear positioning for your business, you take whoever comes along. You are reluctant to say no, even if it’s to the wrong type of customer. You fill your capacity with any customer you can win but rarely achieve pricing and profitability that reflects your capabilities. Being a busy generalist means hidden costs that are hard to measure (or to see!).
3. BUT SAYING NO IS HARD
It can be very difficult to turn away what appear to be good generalist customers. But when you say yes to everyone, you become the specialist for no one.
Expert positioning is a deliberate choice to be the only logical answer to a specific question, for a specific kind of customer.
Position your business clearly and build your expertise credibly, and the right customers will find you – the wrong ones will self-select out – and you’ll never compete on price again. It takes commitment, action, and time to work.
Step 1: Decide. Expert positioning is a choice, not a discovery.
Most businesses wait. They think their niche will reveal itself in time. Maybe it will, but, by then, ten years might have passed, and your competitors will have built the reputation you were waiting to discover.
Blair Enns’ first proclamation in his book, The Win Without Pitching Manifest, is stark:
‘We will specialise.’ Not ‘we will discover our specialism in time.’ A decision. Made today.
A good-enough positioning decision made clearly and acted on consistently will outperform a perfect one that’s never made. The business world rewards conviction. It ignores ambiguity.
In practice: Write this sentence: ‘We are the only business that [specific thing] for [specific customer].’ If you can’t write it cleanly, you haven’t made the decision yet. The sentence that makes you slightly nervous is usually the right one.
Step 2: Choose your axis, using the five ways to position your business.
Enns identifies the axes on which businesses can position themselves:
1. By sector or vertical
You serve a specific industry, for example, hospitality businesses, independent retailers, or creative studios. You know the pressures, the seasonality, the language. The owner reads your positioning and thinks: ‘Finally! Someone who understands us already.’
2. By the problem you solve
You specialise in a specific transformation, helping businesses scale without losing quality, turning enquiries into loyal repeat customers, or streamlining operations to free up owner time. This is powerful because customers search, not just for suppliers, but for solutions to problems.
3. By customer type or stage
Start-ups in their first three years. Family businesses navigating succession. Businesses with between £1m and £10m in turnover. Each stage brings specific, repeatable challenges, and the specialist who knows them commands immediate trust.
4. By geography
A filter, not a position. Useful when combined with one of the above; weak on its own.
5. By combination
The most powerful position of all: ‘We are the specialists for high-growth food and drink brands in their first five years.’ Sector + Problem + Stage. Very few businesses can claim this. If you can, you’re not competing with anyone.
Most businesses position themselves by service: ‘We offer X, Y, Z.’ Every other business in your area says the same thing.
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Step 3: Claim your position, then build it.
You don’t have to earn the right to call yourself a specialist before you announce it. You choose the position, and you make the claim. Then you build the expertise and reputation to back it up.
For example, you don’t become the leading business for independent hospitality operators by waiting until you have thirty hospitality customers. You become it by deciding that’s who you serve, then you behave like the expert:
- talk about the challenges facing your chosen sector with specificity
- show up where those businesses gather
- go way beyond ‘the extra mile’ and do excellent work for the first five specialist customers who trust you; the first five becomes ten, then ten becomes twenty
Step 4: Demonstrate expertise where your customers already look.
An expert position isn’t just claimed, it’s demonstrated. Here are four specific ways to build it:
Publishing
Write about the specific challenges your target customers face. Not just generic tips, but specific, opinionated content about the pressures your ideal customers are navigating right now. One article that a business owner reads and thinks ‘they really get us’ is worth a thousand generic promotional posts.
Speaking
Find the events where your target customers gather. Show up. Share a perspective, not a sales pitch. The business owner speaking at the local industry association breakfast isn’t selling. They’re demonstrating expertise in the room where their best customers already sit.
Research
Run a survey, compile benchmarks, produce a report on the state of businesses in your niche – data is authority. The business that owns the data becomes the business others reference and eventually call.
A point of view
What do you believe that most competitors in your market don’t? That belief, when stated clearly and argued well, is rarer and more valuable than any credential.
In practice: Pick one of the four. Write 500 words on the sector-specific topic you know best. Publish it. That’s the first brick.
One small step every week
Imagine investing just 30 minutes every week, without fail, on building your credibility where you want to be expertly positioned. You’ll then achieve a 1%, 2%, or 3% shift every week. In 12 months, you’ll have expertly positioned yourself and your business.
When you are genuinely positioned as the expert, the customers call you. They come having already decided they want to work with you, not just to ‘explore their options.’ The conversation isn’t ‘tell me about your services’ – it’s ‘how do we start?’
That’s what Enns means when he says the expert is the prize, not the contestant. The prize doesn’t audition; the prize is sought. The ability to say no – to the wrong customer, the wrong scope, the wrong fee – follows directly from a clear expert position.
The Virtuous Cycle: Serve a niche, learn more, become better at serving it, attract more customers, charge more. Each customer makes the next one easier to win. Each year, the compound interest of deep sector expertise increases your advantage over every generalist in the market.
What's holding you back?
Fear of turning customers away
Positioning doesn’t mean turning away every existing customer tomorrow. Stop marketing broadly; start marketing specifically. Let the current base stabilise while you build the positioned pipeline alongside it.
The conviction that your best work isn’t niche-specific
Without a position, that value is invisible to the customers who most need it. Positioning doesn’t diminish what you do – it makes it findable.
Not knowing which niche to choose
Look at where your best customers already are. Which sector do you most enjoy? Where have you already accumulated real insight, perhaps without realising it? The right niche is often already visible in your existing customer list.
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STOP : thinking that being a generalist is the safest and easiest option
START : positioning yourself as an expert
4 helping hands to get you started…
1
Audit your current customer base
Group customers by sector, type, and work. Where do you already have three, five, eight, in the same space? That cluster is the beginning of your position.
2
Write your expert intention sentence
‘We are the only business that [specific thing] for [specific customer].’ Write five versions. The one that makes you slightly nervous is usually the right one.
3
Choose one publishing outlet
Find the sector journal, LinkedIn group, or association newsletter where your target customers gather. Write one piece about their most pressing challenge.
4
Attend one sector event
Find the conference or networking forum where your ideal customers meet. Attend and listen – don’t pitch. The relationships that result are worth more than any advert.
Don’t keep it to yourself
Have the positioning conversation with your team. They need to understand and believe the position before customers will. The team member who can’t explain the specialism of the business to a prospect is the business’s biggest positioning problem.
The ultimate question: What would you call yourself, if you weren’t afraid to be specific?
TIME TO DISAGREE
“Our customers come from every sector. We’d be turning away too much good work.”
You wouldn’t. You’d be turning away work that takes you away from your chosen positioning.
Every customer you take from outside your specialism reinforces your generalism and prevents the compounding of sector expertise. You don’t have to exit overnight. But you do have to start.
“We already have a strong local reputation. That’s our position.”
Local reputation is about reach, not differentiation. When a customer in your area needs what you offer, ‘well known locally’ competes with every other well-known local business – on price. ‘Specialises in [your niche]’ ends the conversation. Geography is a filter, not a position.
“I don’t have enough expertise in any one area to claim to be a specialist.”
You likely have more than you think. The business owner who has served fifteen customers in the same sector over twelve years knows the seasonal pressures, the common pain points, the language of that world, and the pitfalls others fall into.
They just haven’t named it yet. Expert positioning isn’t about having a PhD. It’s about knowing more than the next business about a specific world and being willing to claim it.
ULTIMATE ARGUMENT:
“How do I know expert positioning will work for my business?”
Look at the businesses in any market that compete on expertise rather than on price. They are almost always the ones that positioned deliberately.
The specialist who serves thirty customers in the same niche doesn’t compete with the generalist down the road. They don’t pitch. They don’t discount. They charge more, work with better customers, and have a waiting list – because in their corner of the market, there is no better alternative. The expert is the prize!
The discomfort of the decision is real. The cost of not making that decision is also real – it just accumulates slowly and quietly, year after year, in the gap between what your business earns and what it could.
What would you call yourself if you weren’t afraid to be specific?
Want to know more?
The Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Blair Enns
This book is the source for the positioning insights in this report. Twelve proclamations. No filler. Read it in a morning. It will challenge assumptions you’ve held for years and give you the vocabulary to have the conversations your business needs – about what you stand for, who you serve, and why that matters. The book is available at winwithoutpitching.com.
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