You do not need to appeal to everyone to build a successful legal practice.
In fact, trying to appeal to everyone can make it much harder for people to understand what you do, who you help and why they should come to you.
Seth Godin talks about finding your smallest viable audience. In other words, you want to focus on the smallest market that is large enough to sustain your practice, but small enough for you to become known as a specialist within it.
So how do you actually find that audience?
I like to think of it as adjusting the aperture on a camera. You start with a wide view of the landscape, then gradually bring things into focus until you can see exactly where you want to concentrate.
Start with a wide view
First, look at all the clients you currently work for, or would love to work for.
Perhaps they are entrepreneurs, financial institutions or industrial companies. Perhaps they are based in a particular country or region. Or perhaps they are all trying to solve a similar problem.
At this stage, do not worry about being too specific. You are simply trying to understand the range of clients who might form part of your audience, and importantly, who you want to exclude.
This can be surprisingly useful. When we are immersed in the detail of our day to day work, our practices can feel quite disparate. But when we step back and look at them as a whole, we often discover that there is much more coherence than we realised.
Even lawyers who describe themselves as generalists are rarely generalists. They simply may not have defined exactly what they do.
Get more granular
Once you have identified your broad audience, start looking at individual clients.
What defines them? What problems are they trying to solve? What keeps them awake at night? What do they worry about? What do they love about working with lawyers, and what do they dislike?
Think about the problems you have solved for them, and how you solved those problems.
You can also think about what you enjoy about working with them. What matters to them? What are their values? What do you know about their interests and their lives outside work?
The more deeply you understand your clients, the easier it becomes to identify the common themes.
Look for the commonalities
Once you have thought about a number of existing or potential clients, start pulling out the similarities.
Perhaps they all belong to a particular community. Perhaps they are small business owners. Perhaps they are companies from one country doing business in another.
Whatever the commonality, start to bring those clients together into a more defined audience.
Then ask yourself two questions.
Is this audience small enough for me to become known as a specialist?
And is it large enough to provide me with enough work to sustain my practice?
If the answer to both is yes, you may have found your smallest viable audience.
How I found my own niche
When I launched my business in 2019, I started by coaching English and French speaking women.
As you can imagine, that was an enormous audience. It would have been very difficult for me to become known by all those women.
I gradually narrowed my focus. Because I had worked as a lawyer and in finance for thirty four years, many of my clients were women working in law or finance.
But even that was too broad.
I started thinking about the women I particularly enjoyed coaching, the problems I wanted to help them solve and the experience I wanted to bring to my work.
I realised that I loved working with women lawyers. I understood their world, and I had experienced some of the challenges of returning to a law firm myself after working in a bank.
I wanted to help other women lawyers have a better experience.
But I still needed to narrow my focus further. Some women lawyers wanted to leave the profession altogether, while others wanted to succeed in private practice.
I eventually decided to concentrate on the latter. And then I realised that one of the biggest challenges facing women lawyers who wanted to make partner was building their client base.
That is how I developed Business Development Accelerator, a group specifically designed to help women lawyers build their clients and develop their practices.
My audience had gone from millions of women to a much smaller, more clearly defined group. And that was exactly the point.
An exercise to help you find your niche
This exercise takes a little time, so I suggest setting aside a couple of hours to work through it properly.
First, define your widest possible audience. Look at the clients you work for or would like to work for. Who is included, and who is excluded?
Then choose a number of individual clients and ask yourself:
What problems are they trying to solve?
What keeps them awake at night?
What do they value?
What did I particularly enjoy about working with them?
What problems did I solve, and how?
Finally, look across your answers and identify the common themes.
Gradually narrow your focus until you have an audience that is small enough for you to become known as a specialist, but large enough to support your practice.
Sometimes your niche is blindingly obvious. Sometimes it takes several years to work it out. It certainly took me time to find mine.
And remember, this is just one way of thinking about your niche. The important thing is to keep exploring until you find the audience that is right for you.
You do not have to appeal to everyone to build a successful practice. You just need to find the right people.