As a new agent, I was perplexed every time I heard a speaker 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. When I first started, I didn’t even “like” my career; 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. 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 strategic specialization was the first step in finding “my niche.”

Let’s review the benefits of having a strategic specialization:

• It’s more fun. If we find a niche we enjoy and only do work we enjoy, then life is more fun.
• It’s more efficient. If we do a lot of the same thing, we get good at it and are more efficient.
• It’s more profitable. The efficiency allows us to earn more in the same amount of time.
• It’s less risky. 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. People like to refer to specialists.
• It’s good for our ego. Being the best at something feels better than being average at a lot of things or mediocre at everything.
• It’s easier to brand. Much easier to brand a specialization because the single focus makes us an expert, and it makes us 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. 

My first niche

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. As fate would have it, a medical resident at Stanford University Hospital called me up and asked if he could purchase a disability policy. I learned all about his group benefits and his employer and I helped him. He referred me to all his colleagues, and it launched my first niche.

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 a client 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 my 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, nonunion fracture. Both bones in my right leg. 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 we shut up and wait for the response…

Usually people can relate at that point. If not, 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 had 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.

I sold a lot of disability as a young agent. I worked with the residents at Stanford. 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.  Notice that my niche was defined by the product and profession I helped purchase that product. I shifted my niche versus changing it.

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.