Business is different these days.

Brilliant experts are being overlooked. Veterans are reworking their entire business models. Smaller entrepreneurs are trying to figure out how to stay afloat. And when things stop working the way they used to, everyone has an opinion on how to fix it.

Just last week, the same tiring conversation was happening in three different places at once.

A business coach told an expert to niche down and sent her straight into paralysis.

A brand strategist posed the question in her newsletter: “What do you want to be known for?”

A sales expert was preaching the opposite: “Stay broad. Don’t niche yourself into a box.”

No wonder experts are confused.

None of this advice is completely wrong. All three viewpoints have something valid in them. But they’re also leaving something important out. And that gap is exactly where most experts get stuck.

So what if there’s a different way to approach this whole positioning conversation?

The struggle is real and it’s specific

Most experts have real depth, layered experience, and often, multiple passions pulling in different directions. No wonder we stay stuck longer than we need to.

When I work with clients on planting their stake in the ground, we’re almost always dismantling several fears at the same time.

Fear #1: Fear of throwing away earned experience. It doesn’t matter if your background is corporate, entrepreneurial, or somewhere in between. You’ve built real skills across years of real work. All of it has value. The issue is that we can’t lead with everything we know at once. The depth we’ve earned becomes the foundation of the lane we choose to own, not the casualty of it.

Fear #2: Fear that we don’t have enough experience. The comparison trap is vicious for experts. There is always someone out there with more credentials, more years, more operating experience. So we stack certifications, enroll in more training, and stay stuck waiting until we feel ready. Meanwhile, we’re overlooking the natural gifts and lived experience that make us immediately qualified right now.

Fear #3: Fear that the box will be too small. “I don’t want to be boxed in.” “What if I choose a lane and the wrong people show up?” It feels safer to market to an ocean than to a lake. But niching is far more nuanced than picking an audience category and calling it done.

Fear #4: Fear of looking scattered if we pivot again. I know this one personally. Multiple pivots feel exposing, like the whole world is watching and keeping score. Most aren’t. Yes, pivoting can be expensive. Yes, it can feel terrifying. But what if it’s just your next evolution?

The difference most experts never stop to make

Here’s where I want to slow down. This is the part that changes everything.

Niching down is a targeting decision. It’s about getting specific enough about who you serve that your ideal client can recognize themselves in your work. It makes your marketing more focused. It helps people self-select. That part is solid.

Positioning up is an authority decision. It’s about getting sharp and specific about your unique expertise so you get chosen. So you become recognizable, memorable, and easy to refer. So when someone needs what you do, your name is the one that comes up.

Both matter. Most experts struggle with both. And they solve completely different problems, which is exactly why treating them as the same conversation creates so much confusion.

The eighteen months I stayed stuck

Let me take you back to mid-2023.

I could feel the business climate shifting. ChatGPT had entered the scene in late 2022 and by 2023 the ripple effects were everywhere. Entrepreneurs were flooding online. The space was getting loud and crowded in ways it hadn’t been before.

I had been in business since 2016. Being a marketing generalist had worked well, until it didn’t. I was leveraging my team’s strengths, running all the plays, managing all the moving pieces. And then I started noticing something that scared me. Income was declining. I was losing work to specialists. My hands were in too many offers trying to serve too many different needs. Underneath all of it was a tension I couldn’t name but could absolutely feel.

My intuition was screaming at me for eighteen months. I stayed stuck anyway. Mostly because I didn’t know what else to do, and honestly, because letting go of what I’d built felt like too much to face.

In December 2024, my spouse sat in the teal green chair across from my desk and said four words.

“Something needs to change.”

The dam broke. What followed wasn’t a moment of clarity. It was a week of tears.

But that release is what created the space for clarity to come in.

When I finally came up for air, I asked the question I should have been asking for eighteen months: who am I and what is my unique magic?

I had been so focused on my team and my clients that I had stopped asking what I specifically brought to the table. So I asked my copywriter Drashti. “When you look at me, what do you think I’m actually good at?”

Her answer confused me at first. She said: “You have such a gift for seeing the strengths in people and drawing them out.”

My internal response was something like: okay, great. So what?

But within a couple of days, the wave hit. It felt like something beyond strategy stepped in and made it obvious. Offer and positioning strategy.

You might read that and wonder what seeing people’s strengths has to do with offer strategy. The answer is everything. This work is identity work. It’s about pulling out a client’s unique magic and lived experience, and packaging that brilliance into offers that position them to stand out. The lane I chose wasn’t just strategically smart. It was the truest expression of what I had always been doing.

The framework: three moves

Before I help any client design an offer, we do the strategy and positioning work first. Every time. Because the offer can only be as strong as the foundation it sits on.

In that foundational work, I’m trying to answer three questions. They sound simple. They are rarely easy.

→ What is the specific problem you are most passionate about solving?

→ What is the transformation you want to be known for, so clearly and so fully that you can feel it in your body when you talk about it?

→ What is the unique specialty and methodology you bring to this work that nobody else can replicate exactly the way you do?

This process is messy. It pushes up against every identity issue that’s been sitting quietly in the background. It surfaces every fear I described above. It moves beyond practical strategy into the deeper question of what impact we actually want to make and whether we believe we’re the ones to make it.

The method that works, for me and for the clients I work with, is this:

Lead with a narrowed specialty. One specific problem. One clear transformation.

Target a broader audience. You don’t have to micro-niche your way into a corner.

Build a holistic, integrative framework underneath. Everything you know becomes the depth of your delivery, not the clutter of your positioning.

There’s a model in career development called the T-shaped professional, originally described by IDEO CEO Tim Brown. It describes someone with deep expertise in one vertical and broad knowledge across related areas. Your positioning works the same way. One lane, owned fully. Everything else you know becomes the wide base that makes you better at that one thing than anyone who came to it more directly.

One narrow entry door. A much bigger room behind it.

The piece that makes or breaks all of it

Most business experts take a purely practical approach to positioning. Find the gap, claim the lane, lead with the transformation. That’s a solid start.

But there’s a piece that will make or break everything else, and almost nobody talks about it.

The lane you choose has to be filled with genuine passion.

Audiences today are more discerning than ever. They’ve been sold the dream by people who had the right positioning and none of the depth behind it. They know what performed authenticity feels like, even when they can’t name it. What they’re drawn to is someone who has genuinely lived the transformation they offer. Someone whose energy on the subject is contagious because it’s real.

If you are not living, breathing, and passionately embodying the work you do, people feel it. Before the sales call. Before they finish reading your website. Before they can put words to why something feels slightly off.

For me, my work connects directly to one of the deepest experiences of my life: feeling unseen. I spent years shying away from owning my own brilliance. Through the identity and healing work I’ve done, I know I am here to take up space. And that is exactly what I want for every expert I work with. I will not let them play small. I will not let them hand their power over to imposter syndrome. I talk that because I’ve walked it. And that’s what makes it resonate.

The lane you choose has to be fully yours. Profitable and authentic. Strategic and embodied. Smart and lit up.

When those things align, the business stops feeling like a performance. It starts feeling like an expression of who you actually are.

When I see this pattern in someone else

I’m currently working with a consultant who has deep experience in the nonprofit sector. She’s worked with large organizations and smaller foundations across a range of consultancy roles. She took time to travel the world. She took contractor work on the side. And when she came to me, she had no idea how to turn any of it into sharp positioning or a clear gateway offer.

The comparison trap was running her. She could find someone with more operating experience, someone with more years in a specific role, someone with a more straightforward path at every turn. Every difference between her background and theirs felt like a deficit rather than a distinction.

What she hadn’t asked herself was this: what am I actually passionate about? And where does that passion intersect with a real problem this sector is actively trying to solve and willing to invest in?

That’s the bridge. That’s where sharp positioning lives.

When we found it, it was sitting right inside the experience she had been ignoring. Because she had worked on both sides of the funding relationship, as someone who sought grants and as someone embedded in the systems that governed how they were given, she could see something most consultants in her space couldn’t. She understood the gap between what progressive foundations say they believe and how they actually operate internally. The human and operational design work required to close that gap is exactly what she is built to do.

She’s not competing on who has the most traditional experience anymore. She’s standing in the specific seam where her particular combination of background is the strongest hand in the room.

And when she found the lane, she felt it before she could argue for it strategically. That’s how you know.

What choosing my lane actually did

January 1, 2025. The flag went in.

I acknowledged my fears. I gave myself permission to look like I was starting over again. And I chose myself.

Within one month, six speaking engagements appeared. Content started flowing with an ease that had been completely absent before. I launched a brand new podcast that grew tenfold in its first year. My OfferMojo framework became the foundation of a full offer ecosystem. People started calling me the Offer Magician.

But what changed most wasn’t the results. It was how I felt doing the work. The passion. The fulfillment. The sense that I was finally in the lane I was always supposed to be in.

I didn’t niche down in the traditional sense. I’ve always worked with coaches and service-based experts. I positioned up. And when someone searches today for an expert who helps with positioning and offers, AI recommends me.

That’s what clarity does when it’s also true.

Is your positioning sharp? Be honest with yourself.

Sit with these questions. Really sit with them.

→ Are you leading with one specific problem you solve, even if the path to solving it is layered and holistic?

→ Is there one clear transformation you are known for, and does it feel completely yours?

→ Do you have a unique specialty and methodology that makes you genuinely different from others doing adjacent work?

→ If someone reads your website or your content for sixty seconds, is it immediately obvious what you do and who it’s for?

→ When you talk about your work, are you lit up? Or are you performing a version of yourself you haven’t fully grown into yet?

If you answered no to three or more, your positioning is probably broad or generic. That’s a starting point, not a verdict.

What staying broad is actually costing you

I want to be honest about this without making it a scare tactic.

When your positioning is broad, every sales conversation starts from scratch. You spend the first fifteen minutes explaining what you do, who it’s for, and why it’s worth the investment. Referrals are vague compliments instead of specific recommendations. Content is hard to create because you’re trying to stay relevant to too many people at once. Confidence quietly erodes because the business you’re running doesn’t fully reflect what you actually know.

And there’s a cost that never shows up on your P&L: the exhaustion of delivering work you’re good at but not genuinely lit up by. That’s a specific kind of depletion. Most experts don’t name it until they’ve reached burnout.

The market reality adds urgency to all of this. Generalists are increasingly being filtered out as AI handles the broader, more general layer of most service categories. Deep, specific, embodied expertise is what AI cannot replicate. The more distinct your lane and the more truly yours it is, the more protected and findable you become.

The stake you’re going to plant

The decision in front of you isn’t between niching and staying broad.

It’s between staying general enough that the right people can’t quite find you, and getting specific enough that they feel like you were already talking to them before they ever reached out.

That’s a personal decision as much as a strategic one. It asks you to stop measuring yourself against what everyone else has and start trusting what only you bring. It asks you to choose a lane that’s authentic and yours. Profitable and alive. Specific and true.

Stand in it fully enough that the people you’re here to serve can feel the difference before they even book the call.

This is identity work. It’s an act of self-trust. And it might be the most important business decision you make, even if you need to replant the stake as you evolve.

So what is the stake you’re going to plant?

If this is the conversation you’ve been needing, come find me on The OfferMojo Show. This is exactly the kind of work we dig into every week. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts, or at pod.link/1780382092

P.S. If this resonated and you’re sitting with it, I’d love to know: what’s the lane you keep circling but haven’t fully claimed yet? Drop it in the comments. Sometimes saying it out loud is the first act of choosing it.