What is niching, and why is it helpful?

The hardest part about choosing to go all-in on one specific niche was the risk of losing it all on one bet. Beforehand, my practice was diverse, but I was stressed by too many and too varied commitments. I constantly feared new client meetings because they would throw all their problems at me at the same time. 

Now that I focus on traffic tickets, it can be difficult because I’m not doing a lot of ”legal research and writing” I thought I would be doing as a lawyer. It took a long time to feel comfortable admitting this is all I do.

I love this niche because I help people get back on the road. These are my favorite clients because they usually contact me because they want to change a big part of their life: being a passenger in life vs. being the driver of their own destiny. 

I also enjoy the repetition. I do the same thing over and over and achieve better results with each try.

I think it took a long time to build the critical mass of tickets necessary to get the results I needed to pay my bills and live the lifestyle I’m used to. 

Let me break it down: It took about 6 years of practice before I realized that I needed to focus on one or two niche areas. Once I went all-in, it took about 6 months with the new website to feel like commitment was paying off. It took about 2 years with my current marketer to turn things around and implement all of the niching strategies.

Niching my practice helped me realize the importance of developing automated intake. Despite my efforts to fully automate, people still contact me directly or engage me outside of my intake pipeline, so I have to manually add them. My business is still in the changing phase between disorganized and niche, so I’m still experiencing drops in business. But I trust the process will eliminate these waves or at least help to make them feel smaller. 

On another front, the growth of my business meant hiring employees. I’ve learned I’m a better manager/sales guy, but I can hire an associate to go to court for me.

I still get leads for other types of cases, including personal injury, expungements, DUIs, and criminal defense. Since I used to do a lot of things and the internet lasts forever, there is probably still content with great SEO out there about my former family law practice (even though I haven’t done a divorce in over 3 years). 

I enjoy being able to be extremely picky about the cases I take outside of my niche. Unfortunately, I’m getting to the point where I don’t have the energy to give a couple pieces of free advice to someone who I don’t want to represent or cases that are totally outside of my practice area. Instead, I’ve developed polite form emails using textexpander to let these leads off easy. 

Since choosing a niche, I’ve also noticed an increase in business around things that are close to traffic tickets: suspended licenses, DMV issues, and DUIs. All of these are great because they are within my niche but also high-value clients.

I feel like my biggest regret is not committing to a niche sooner. I used to talk about going all-in on my traffic ticket niche with lawyers who were about 10 years ahead of me. Some of them couldn’t believe it was possible. Others wanted to be part of it. A smaller portion were dazzled by my vision. 

Unfortunately, I lost sight of my vision and tried a lot of other marketing and practice areas before coming back to a niche focus. I tell people now that I want to be the Clarence Darrow of tickets. People understand that concept for car accidents. Now, they need to think about it for my niche. 

I also regret not taking advantage of technology early on in my practice. I have some really smart colleagues and even tech people who I could have gotten more involved with when they were just getting started. Instead, I’m now paying a premium for their advice and facing a learning curve.