As a new agent, I was perplexed every time I heard speakers at a meeting talk about how they “loved their careers.” I was so jealous. I wanted to love my career! This seemed like an impossible goal. Heck, when I first started, I didn’t even “like” my career, so loving it was entirely out of the question. Then one day I realized we can choose with whom we work, we can choose what products we sell, and we can choose what types of planning we do, and, maybe, if I made different choices, I would love my career too. I narrowed my focus and stopped trying to be everything to everybody. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the first step in finding my niche.

I have three objectives today. First and foremost, let’s have fun. Second, we will work on finding the right niche for all of us. And last, we will create a blueprint that will be immediately actionable. We will leave this session being able to implement specific ideas to make our careers more fun and more profitable. In addition, the blueprint will help us to “listen” to other sessions with a specific focus on how to apply the other session’s material to the strategies we will cover today.

In 2016, I gave a Focus Session titled “Building a Practice You Love.” It’s an in-depth look at why we should have a niche. Today’s session is focused on “what your niche should be and how to get there,” but if you want more of the “why,” you can listen to a copy of the 2016 presentation or read the manuscript in the Resource Zone on mdrt.org for free!

But before I just flat out tell you why we all need to find our own niche, let’s review the benefits of having a niche:

• It’s more fun. Why? Because if we find a niche we enjoy and only do work we enjoy, then life is more fun.
• It’s more efficient. Why? Because if we do a lot of the same thing, we get good at it and are more efficient.
• It’s more profitable. Why? The efficiency allows us to earn more in the same amount of time.
• It’s less risky. Why? A narrow focus makes us an expert. Experts have lower liability. Dabblers often give incorrect advice, accidentally hurt their clients and get sued.
• It’s easier to get referrals. Why? People like to refer to specialists and experts.
• It’s good for our ego. Why? Being the best at something feels better than being average at a lot of things or mediocre at everything.
• It’s easier to brand. Why? It’s much easier to brand a specialization because the single focus makes us an expert and more credible.

In our practice, we figured out that if we could narrow our expertise and focus and restrict our activities to doing the things we loved with the people we loved, we would have a practice that we loved.

Having said that, it also meant that inevitably we would need to learn how to implement change, because what we loved to do, and with whom we loved to do it, changed over time in response to opportunities and challenges in the marketplace. Stated differently, we have needed to change our niche about every five to seven years.

Where do we begin?

Most of us start out as generalists. I started as a generalist. We learn a little bit about a lot of things. This gives us the best chance of survival. From my perspective, this is a necessary stage in any new financial representative’s development. How many of us list more than five areas of expertise on our website? How many of us claim to be an expert in every product we are licensed to sell? The more areas we claim to be an expert in, the less credible we become, and the harder it is to brand our niche.

This is a session on niche marketing, and although some practices are easier to “brand” than others, we can still brand a general practice as a “niche.”

Just for fun, how would we specialize in being a generalist? We would start with the benefits to a client about knowing a little bit about a lot of things in our profession.

We could brand a generalist’s practice as being more convenient. “Work with us because you won’t need to hassle with multiple advisors. We can provide a more coordinated approach because we have expertise in multiple disciplines and areas relevant to you, the client. Let us be your advocate, and we will work with the other advisors as needed for you.”

Creating a brand is about communicating why a client should work with us and articulating our value proposition. So, if you want to be a generalist, that’s great — build your brand around being the most unique generalist out there!

Even though it’s possible to specialize as a generalist, the top end of the market generally prefers to work with specialists, and people want to refer to specialists. Where do you take your Mercedes? To the “all car” service center? To the German car service center? Or to the Mercedes-only service center?

We all understand the previous example, but let’s see what this looks like in a financial services practice. Our clients appreciate convenience to a point, but mostly they care about getting expert advice. The person claiming to be an expert in everything ends up an expert in nothing. Claiming too many specialties dilutes our brand; it does not increase the chances of a sale. Sometimes people have more than one specialization, and that is OK, but brand and market them separately.

Let’s get back to finding our niche. Thirty-three years ago, I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. Go Bears! I had a graduation trip to Europe planned, and before I left on my trip, my dad, a long-time MDRT member, gave me a little paperback book written by a man named Joe Gandolfo. There was a line from the book that stayed with me: “Anything will work if you do.” I interpret this as: All ideas work as long as they are implemented properly.

But here’s the catch: Not everyone can implement every idea. We might not have the background, skills, education or even desire to implement every great idea. This is totally OK. The key is picking the right idea for you specifically and building from there. While we are attending the meeting this week, I would suggest that we look for ideas that are great for each of us as individuals, not just great ideas.

This meeting can be a tough meeting for new advisors because there are so many great ideas, and, just like Mr. Gandolfo said, they all work! Many of us are attracted to Focus Sessions with seductive titles. Once I went to a Focus Session at an Annual Meeting titled “How to Make Millions Each Year and Work Just 50 Days.” I was totally psyched. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t want to earn $1 million working three months per year? However, when I was in the session, I found out the speaker had $1 billion of investments under management and nine employees. I have no assets under management and three employees. It was a great speech and the speaker was fantastic, but it wasn’t relevant to me because I couldn’t get there from where I was at the time.

A better session for me might have been “How to Create a Financial Planning Practice.” Or, if I was already in the investment business, “How to Grow Your Existing Investment Practice to $1 Billion.” Or if I already had $1 billion under management but was working 12 months per year, “How to Utilize Your Staff Members Effectively to Work Three Months Per Year.”

What I really needed was “What Do I Want to Specialize in, and Why, and Once I Figure That Out, How Do I Build a Business Around It?” That’s a long title, and MDRT allots us eight words for a speech title, but if we could use 23 words, the title of this speech today would have been “What Do We Want to Specialize in, and Why, and Once We Figure That Out, How Do We Build a Business Around It?”

I am not here to tell you what you should specialize in. Today, we are going to focus on how we figure out what the best options are for each of us as individuals. Once we figure out what we want to specialize in, then we will figure out how to build a practice around our own personal interests, using all the amazing resources available from your MDRT membership. Bottom line? Be strategic! Don’t just specialize in something because it “sounds like a great idea”; specialize in something for a reason that is relevant to you. And, remember, anything will work if you do!

Like everyone in this room, I started my career as a generalist. For the first six months, I knew nothing about everything. After a year, I knew a little bit about a few things. A couple of years later, I knew a little bit about a lot of things. Then, a couple of years after that, I knew a lot about a few things. The only configuration I have not mentioned is what? Knowing a lot about a lot of things. I hope neither my words nor my actions ever suggest that I think I do.

What do we say about someone who claims to know a lot about a lot of things? There is an expression in the English language for someone who claims to know it all — a “know-it-all.” Are know-it-alls highly revered in our culture? No, on the contrary — they are mocked. I don’t want to be cruel here, but what does your website make you look like? We will come back to this.

After six years in the business, I knew a little bit about a lot of things and a lot about one thing. My first niche was disability insurance.

At 22, I couldn’t really relate to being married, having kids and having lots of responsibilities, but I was an athlete in high school and college, and I could relate to being injured. I became an expert on disability insurance. This expertise was further enhanced at age 25 when I shattered both bones in my lower right leg playing soccer. It took three surgeries, a ton of hardware and nearly a year to recover.

The year following that accident, I qualified for MDRT for the first time, and I did it on disability insurance sales alone. I also had a very compelling story because I learned something about being disabled that most people don’t understand. Being disabled isn’t about being inconvenienced. It is a lot more complicated than people think. It is about subtle things. It’s about how well we work when we are in pain, drugged up with pain killers or sleep deprived. I didn’t need my leg as part of my job; I wasn’t a professional soccer player. But I did need to be coherent, upbeat and rested, and I was none of those things for almost a year.

Disability became my focus. How often have we heard clients say, “It would take a lot to disable me”? My response: “That’s so funny. I used to think that too.” Then I proceed to tell them my story: “Some years ago, I broke a leg playing soccer. And although I didn’t need my leg as part of the job, I discovered some interesting things. It was a pretty bad break, a nonunion fracture, both bones in my right leg. Remember Joe Theismann getting rag-dolled by Lawrence Taylor in 1985?” If you are not old enough, or aren’t a football fan, the next slide is of my X-ray. [visual] This is not for the squeamish. I continue with the client: “Every time I tried to roll over in bed, the bones shifted. It felt like someone was using a welding torch on my leg. I didn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time, and a couple hours per night total, for almost a year. I was completely exhausted. Have you ever gone to work after a bad night’s sleep? Can you imagine not sleeping for a week or a month? Would you be effective with your clients if you were totally sleep deprived?” Then I shut up and wait for the response.

Usually people can relate at that point. If not, then I start talking about the pain and pain killers: “Aside from being massively sleep deprived, I was in terrible pain all the time. Being in pain is also exhausting. I tried pain killers, but they put me in a terrible fog. I couldn’t do my job in the fog. Mr. Prospect, have you ever tried working drugged up? I couldn’t do it. I don’t think my errors and omissions insurance would cover me practicing under the influence. So I just suffered through the pain.”

And if they still aren’t there: “Mr. Prospect, if you have a horrible flu, do you stay home? Can you imagine working if you had the flu every day for a week? A month? Two months? Three months?”

Am I passionate about disability insurance? Yes! It was my first niche.

What is a better niche for you, a niche where you can make $1 million working three months per year or a niche where you are passionate about the work? And, to be fair, they aren’t mutually exclusive. If I had to guess, the man working three months per year making $1 million didn’t set out to do that. My guess is, he was passionate about something, and the result was he ended up that way.

Give serious consideration to making a claim story your niche. It happens that the disability claim story I used was my own claim, but it didn’t have to be about me. We all have claim stories, or we can borrow someone else’s. You all have a friend who broke his leg playing soccer if you need a claim story and don’t have one yet. I have lots of claim stories that involve my clients that I can also share to make a point. I even have stories where clients wanted to wait till Tuesday to start the paperwork rather than doing it on the Friday when we were discussing the insurance. I sat in the back of a church, tears silently rolling down my face, as a mother and three little kids buried their 36-year-old husband and father. I have also had husbands tell me after their wives died that they couldn’t go back to work right away and, in one case, not at the same level as before. We put additional life insurance on nonworking spouses to allow the wage earners to spend time with their children if their spouses die, that is, a couple of years of the wage earner’s salary.

Briefly write your most moving or favorite claim story. Just enough so you will remember it. What products did it involve? Why is it your favorite?

I sold a lot of disability as a young agent. I worked with the residents at Stanford. It was a great group of folks, but not a lot of money (yet) and not a lot of time to meet with me. Also, after about five years of doing this work, I realized that not many of them stayed in the Bay Area because of the high cost of living.

So I shifted my focus from disability for doctors to disability for business owners. I also added life insurance for business owners. I learned about buy-sell funding from Marv Feldman and other great MDRT speakers. Do you want to learn about something? Go to the MDRT Resource Zone, and search for what you want. The best of the best tell you exactly what you need to know.

Make a list of your three favorite products to work with. What are your favorite professions for each? Example: “I like to work with life insurance for estate planning with business owners” or “I like to work with disability insurance for physicians.” If you have a claim story about one on the list you just created, put a star by it. Are you specializing in that product and that market you just identified? Are you doing most of your work in that area? Are you known to that market as an expert? Are you known to the centers of influence who can refer you in that market as an expert? Are you having an aha moment right now?

I liked my product niche, disability, but I didn’t love my market niche, medical residents, so I kept my product niche but changed my market niche. I really enjoyed working with business owners — daytime appointments, more referrals. I had more in common with them, and there were more sales opportunities.

I learned a little about health insurance and did joint work with our agency specialist. It was 1996, and Silicon Valley was heating up. In the late 1990s to early 2000s, we had dozens of well-known clients. As Silicon Valley exploded, we changed our market niche to dot-com startups. Man, those were fun days. Like, money grew on trees. Again, I kept the product niche but shifted the market niche.

But before we knew it, 2001 arrived, and my book of business and my income tracked the Nasdaq down about 80 percent. Not fun! We really liked health insurance and working with businesses, but we realized the risk of working for startups.

Around the same time, I also had an opportunity to start my own benefits firm instead of doing joint work. It was easy to sell group health, so I made the highly inaccurate assumption that it would be easy to service.

Now I had to figure out how to build a benefits business from scratch.

I went to a session at MDRT on it, met one-on-one with the speakers and bought them drinks in the bar for three hours to get their advice. The best return I ever received was on an $80 investment in their bar tab. I talked extensively to Jen Borislow and Mark Gaunya and jumped into building my own benefits firm. After a couple of years, I also spoke to Andy Torelli, a Top of the Table member from Southern California. He suggested that I narrow my focus further from any business to high-end, closely held service businesses. They have low employee turnover, so they are easier to service than startups. They also have much higher budgets. They have a lot more cross-selling opportunities, and our contact at the company was more stable, so we weren’t as vulnerable to being replaced by another advisor. So we chose to work with CPA, law, and venture capital firms as our base.

So far, we have identified our favorite claim story, our favorite products, and our favorite professions to work with. With a little luck, all three align. If not, we will work on it.

Assuming at this point that we have a good idea which niche might be right for us, let’s shift gears and figure out what we need to do next.

Having a niche and branding a niche are not the same thing. We may know our niche, and that is important, but what really matters is this: Do our clients and prospects know our niche? Further, do they know why they should do business with us?

This takes us to the next concept — branding. We need to brand ourselves as the expert or advisor of choice in our niches. Our profession is full of examples of how credibility is lost if we claim expertise in too many things.

So how do we brand ourselves as experts?

• Credentialing.
• Teaching others about our expertise, especially referral sources.
• Writing articles about our expertise for insurance trade journals, client-facing periodicals and referral source trades. Media relations is a great way to brand yourself as an expert. I love to write for our industry trade journals. Writing helps me clarify my thoughts on a subject. It is a win-win thing to do. But by writing for our trade magazines, we support the professionalism of our business, we help our colleagues, and when we get published, we are clearly branded as an expert. Everyone is a winner.

You may be thinking that being published in a trade magazine won’t help because your clients will never see it since they don’t subscribe to the magazine. There are a number of things that will mitigate that. The first is that you are going to tell them that you were published! We tell our clients every time we are quoted or write an article.

We use our website to keep track of our media exposure in our “in the news” section; we will put a reference to a recent publication in our email signature; we put the articles on display in our office waiting room; and we post on LinkedIn three or four times per year telling people where we are published.

Again, we are not sending out copies of the article. You can if you would like (with reprint permission), but that’s unnecessary. Your average client doesn’t want to read a technical article anyway, but he or she does like knowing that you are such an expert that the industry seeks and publishes your advice.

I call this the “New England Journal of Medicine” effect. Think about the last time you were in your doctor’s office. Let’s say that the doctor is an orthopedic surgeon. On his wall is an article he wrote about a specific procedure. The article is published in the very official-sounding “Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery.” How many of you subscribe to the “Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery”? It looks official, doesn’t it? If you were in your surgeon’s office, and you read this article, you would think what? You would think, My surgeon is the guy training other surgeons how to do surgery. I want the guy who invented the procedure; I don’t want one of his students! What is the “Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery” in the insurance business? It’s “Advisor Today,” “InsuranceNewsNet,” “Insurance Selling,” “Agent’s Sales Journal,” “Financial Planning” and many more. Although some of our magazines are read by more financial professionals than others, none of them are read by our clients, so they will not know the circulation of one versus another, and they all will brand you as an expert.

Just to reiterate, media relations and branding aren’t about selling a product; they are about selling you, giving you credibility. By sharing what we do and how we do it with our fellow professionals, we are helping improve the professionalism in our business, and we are branding ourselves as experts. If we use our publications properly, it can give us the same lift as if we were quoted in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times.

Branding is the public validation of our expertise. Who gets the referrals? The experts do. Who are the experts? People who are branded as experts! If you are an expert at something, and the media has validated your expertise, and you find regular ways to stay in touch with your referral sources, they will refer business to you.

This isn’t a session on branding, so we just touched on it. But where can we find good resources on branding? The Resource Zone and mdrt.org!

So far, we have figured out our niche, and we know about branding our expertise in our niche, but how do we find prospects in our niche? I am not an expert on LinkedIn or other social media from which you could mine prospects, but I can borrow all the expertise I need from MDRT members!

This takes us to our last niche.

As many of you know, I am the father of a developmentally disabled young man named Spencer. Spencer and my wife, Julia, were the subject of my 2013 Main Platform speech. I spend a lot of time volunteering in the special-needs community, creating programs for kids with special needs, and I am passionate about this community.

Although I had always been available to help families like mine when it came to insurance and financial planning, it was more of an informal subset of our practice than a branded specialization. After the 2013 speech, many MDRT members, reacting to my passion, asked why we had not built a business around special-needs planning. It got me thinking that this was something I should do, so I founded Special Needs Life Insurance Solutions, LLC.

I leaned on MDRT member and internet marketing expert Ryan Pinney to help me build a website dedicated to this company. I built a unique calculator on the site that helped families determine how much money they needed to fund their special-needs trust. The calculator also compared the alternatives for “creating the money,” including saving annually and leaving an inheritance. The system then compared the other options to using life insurance to fund the trust.

Whenever I was asked to write an article for one of our industry magazines, I suggested a topic related to special needs so that it would brand me as an expert in this area. I used LinkedIn to find centers of influence who could refer me business. I rebranded my brochures showing “Why us?” And I started taking courses to receive my Chartered Special Needs Consultant (ChSNC) designation from The American College. I formed a special-needs study group with a lawyer, a trust officer and a financial planner and have been a panelist at estate planning meetings many times. This is all in addition to the time I volunteer in the special-needs community, which also brands me as credible.

I launched this business while running my benefits practice. We invested a lot of time and money into the website but didn’t get the response we were hoping for, so I suspended the site and took a step back knowing that I would come back to it in the future.

What became clear to me as I was writing this speech is that the future is now. My 15-year run in employee benefits has been great, but it is time for a change. It is time for a new niche. Something I am passionate about. Something I am an expert in. Something where my unique skills are clearly definable and brand-able. And something I can tell personal stories about. Now is the time to make my niche about special needs, and, once again, I can thank MDRT for being the source of my professional inspiration (ironically the writing of this speech) and my resource on “how and what” to do next. MDRT helps me fill in the gaps in my knowledge by allowing me to borrow the expertise of other members and tap into MDRT’s great resource, the intellectual capital that is the collective knowledge of its members.

When I submitted the first draft of this speech, I stated that I was almost done with my ChSNC classes. This speech clarified for me that I needed to finish immediately. All this was going on last November, and, remember, I am an employee benefits specialist in the middle of open enrollment season. I was dying I was so busy. The final ChSNC course was essentially a review of all the prior courses — tax, legal, government benefits and financial planning for families with special needs. I joined the class with one week left before the final. I watched all the recorded class sessions and studied every waking moment. Serendipitously, I took the final at the adult education building where I took Spencer to his post-senior program for four years. As I took a deep breath and began my test, I could hear Spencer whisper, “You got this, Dad.” I passed the final and received my ChSNC designation just in time to relaunch the niche of my dreams.

Make a list of your favorite volunteer activities. Could you build a business around working with the other volunteers in the organization or the constituents the organization serves? It doesn’t work for all charitable causes, but it does work for most.

As a new agent, I was perplexed every time I heard speakers at a meeting talk about how they “loved their careers.” That was until I realized we can choose with whom we work, what products we sell and what types of planning we do. When I strategically narrowed my focus and stopped trying to be everything to everybody, I found my niche, and I have been finding it ever since.

Brad Elman, CLU, ChSNC, is a 27-year MDRT member with 16 Court of the Table qualifications and one Top of the Table honor. He is a seven-time MDRT Annual Meeting speaker, including on Main Platform in 2013, and a three-time MDRT Divisional Vice President. Elman is regularly sought out by the media for information on consumer finance and has been a regular guest on the NBC Bay Area News.