Why generalist positioning fails

#The claim itself is the problem, not the marketing around it

"I help businesses grow" or "I consult on strategy" fails for a reason that has nothing to do with how it's phrased or designed. Go back to the mechanism: a buyer facing a credence good resolves their inability to verify quality directly by looking for costly, hard-to-fake signals instead — credentials, referrals, a track record they can check. A generalist claim is specifically the kind of claim that cannot be checked. "I help businesses grow" describes an outcome so broad that no track record could ever disconfirm it — which means it also can't confirm it. There's no falsification test a skeptical buyer can apply, and a buyer in a market full of unverifiable claims rationally treats an unfalsifiable one as if it were the worst case, not the best — this is Akerlof's lemons mechanism again, applied to your own positioning statement rather than to the market as a whole. [Established mechanism, generalized from Akerlof 1970 and Dulleck & Kerschbamer 2006 — see the mechanism lesson for the underlying citations]

A specific claim — "I help Series A SaaS companies cut CAC by rebuilding their onboarding funnel," or "I run interim-CFO engagements for manufacturing companies going through a private-equity carve-out" — is a falsifiable claim. A buyer can ask three past clients in that exact situation whether it worked. A referral from someone in that specific world means something, because the referrer is vouching for something concrete enough to have actually observed. This is the entire mechanism: narrow positioning isn't "better marketing," it's a claim structured so that the signals a buyer actually relies on (referrals, case studies, checkable track record) can attach to it at all.

#Why "I might lose clients outside my niche" is the wrong fear

The instinctive objection to narrowing is real and worth naming directly: narrowing feels like turning away business. It's the single most common reason experienced independent consultants stay generalist longer than the mechanism above would justify — and it's a fear about the wrong variable. The relevant comparison isn't "narrow claim, fewer potential clients" versus "broad claim, more potential clients." It's conversion rate within each pool, not pool size. A broad claim reaches more people and converts a smaller fraction of them, because most of that audience has no way to distinguish you from every other generalist making the same unfalsifiable claim. A narrow claim reaches fewer people and converts a much larger fraction of them, because the people who see it recognize their own specific situation described back to them — and, per the mechanism above, can actually check whether the claim is true. This is a real trade-off with a real cost (a genuinely smaller total addressable pool at any given moment), and this course states that cost honestly rather than pretending niching is free — but the fear of "turning away business" usually overweights pool size and underweights conversion rate, and the mechanism argument above is specifically about why that underweighting happens: an unverifiable broad claim looks like it should convert better than it actually does, because the buyer's verification problem is invisible to you as the seller.

#What this doesn't mean

It does not mean you must have narrow capability — plenty of genuinely broad generalists exist and are genuinely good at a wide range of problems. It means your claim — the specific sentence a prospect or referrer repeats to describe what you do — has to be narrow enough to be checkable, even if your actual skill set underneath it is broader. How to niche the right way covers the practical mechanics of choosing that sentence, including how to do it without permanently locking yourself into one narrow lane forever.