Niches for Riches? Tackling the Tricky Small Firm Specialization Question

Christine Salvatore didn’t go looking for her accounting niche, but it ended up finding her anyway.

She’d only earned her accounting degree as a fallback—something to lean on in case a career in the entertainment industry didn’t pan out. Back then, she had no idea production accounting was even a thing.

Turns out, it was—and she was good at it, first as a W-2 employee logging long days on set and later as a remote staffer after the pandemic put in-person work on pause. But she’d always thought about going into business for herself, and once she did, it took off—fast. And that was largely because she’d fallen into a niche she didn’t realize existed.

“I started getting feedback from [clients] saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I have always been looking for someone who could understand this for my CPA and this for my unit production manager,’” Salvatore says.

She quickly discovered this combined skillset—the ability to speak fluently to both accountants and entertainment professionals—was almost impossible to find.

If you’ve spent any time perusing business advice for small bookkeeping and accounting firms, then you’ve likely encountered the ubiquitous “niche down or die” advice at one point or another. Growth gurus love telling ambitious founders to pick a lane, find their ideal client, and become the obvious choice for one specific kind of business. And the logic makes sense: narrower criteria for who you serve means less competition and more targeted messaging to clients who are the best fit for you—which, in theory, seems like the fastest way to build a successful bookkeeping or accounting firm.

But based on 13 real conversations with real firm owners, the reality is a whole lot messier than the standard advice would have you believe. While some founders niched on purpose, others—like Salvatore—fell into their specialty by accident.

There are also plenty of successful firm owners who:

• Specialized internally while looking like generalists from the outside,
• Organized their entire practice around a certain kind of client or person rather than a certain kind of business, or
• Built perfectly healthy firms with no niche at all.

Clearly, the conventional wisdom around niching down isn’t a universal rule. So, let’s dig into what specialization looks like in real life (not in some course a consultant is trying to sell you).

The intentional accounting niche

Anne-Marie Kaden built her firm around one specific industry from day one. For her, staying laser-focused on pet care businesses made total sense, because she’d spent years building one herself.

Kaden worked in animal care for most of her career—earning an animal science degree, moving into the equestrian and veterinary medicine spaces, and then running her own pet care operation for several years. When she pivoted to bookkeeping, her niche was a no-brainer. From the very beginning, she knew she wanted to build her firm, Tiny Paws Bookkeeping, for the people she already knew and understood—people like her.

She’d experienced the gap in pet-care-specific bookkeeping support firsthand as a business owner. Good financial help usually meant hiring someone outside of the industry and then pouring tons of time and energy into bringing them up to speed on the intricacies of pet care.

Thanks to that inside knowledge, Kaden had no trouble drumming up business immediately after hanging out her shingle. She was already in all the popular Facebook groups, already trusted, and already fluent in the language of pet care. She started by simply letting her existing community know what she was up to. By the end of her first full year running Tiny Paws, she had about 30 clients; a year later, she’d grown to 60. And today, she has more than 100.

Niching also paved the way for one of her most effective marketing channels: industry events. Kaden spent three years speaking at the major pet sitting conferences, and the payoff is tough to ignore.

“One 45-minute conversation gets you in front of all of those people in the easiest way,” she says. “It’s the biggest thing that I’ve been able to do for our business growth—to be in that space and talking directly to people.”

Kaden’s experience building Tiny Paws Bookkeeping is a textbook niche story: know an industry, build for it, become its expert, and establish yourself as the go-to.

But most firm owners don’t start out with a built-in industry in their back pocket like Kaden. For many, finding and defining their niche comes later.

The niche that finds you

Salvatore’s production accounting niche may have found her, but turning it into a business wasn’t easy by any means. In the early days, searching for clients was a very tedious, very manual process. She’d scroll through film credits, write down the names of every production company she came across, search for their contact info, and cold-intro herself to anyone she could.

But those five clients were active producers who were out in the field every day, talking to other people who needed exactly what she offered. The niche that started as an accident slowly morphed into a referral engine. These days, she barely markets her firm, In Line Management, at all. Most of her business comes through word-of-mouth.

Dave Kersting’s construction niche found him too, but he took a detour through restaurants and bars first. When he started Capovario, he was a generalist, taking any business that came his way (like many new firm owners). Eventually, he realized his team gravitated toward the construction work—home builders, concrete companies, and the like.

“We really liked doing construction and construction adjacent,” Kersting says. “We understood it.” 

Today, his firm is about 70% construction. But the most interesting part of Kersting’s story is that his construction “niche” actually includes a variety of other industries that run like construction companies, though you’d never guess that from the outside. Summer camps are a prime example. Kersting discovered that different camp offerings function similarly to different “jobs” for construction businesses.

“So, the archery is the job,” Kersting explained. “How much are we getting in income for that particular piece?”

Kersting views his niche more as a lens for analyzing a client’s business, rather than a fence meant to keep certain industries out. The expertise his team built in one space turned into a way of seeing and serving others—a very different approach than the narrow, “do-one-thing” specialization advice typically seen in accounting.

The niche that comes later

Tyler Otto is happy to tell newer firm owners to find their niche and chase their ideal client. He’s also the first to admit how easy it is to sling that advice from where he’s sitting now—and how little it resembles his personal journey as a firm owner.

Otto took over a tiny bookkeeping business from his wife at the start of the pandemic and grew it into a 16-person operation. He knew his target industry going in: hospitality and hotels (the world he spent the majority of his career in). But knowing your ideal client and working exclusively with your ideal client are two very different things—especially when you have a mortgage to pay.

Otto isn’t against specializing—he specialized as much as survival allowed. But he’s realistic about the feasibility of niching down when you’re just starting out. To get your business off the ground when pipeline is scanty, sometimes any paying client is the right one. The niche can come later.

His firm’s name is actually the product of this exact mindset. Back when his wife was first launching the business, she couldn’t figure out what to specialize in. “She’s like, ‘Everyone says you should have a niche, but I don’t even know what I want to niche in,’” Otto recalls. “I’m like, ‘Just pick a name that makes it sound like you have a niche.’”

So, she went with Specialty Bookkeepers. When Otto took over and expanded into tax, he rebranded to Specialized Accounting. “A company without a niche trying to sound like it had a niche was the name,” he says, laughing.

The real lesson in Otto’s story isn’t that he eventually niched, or that he didn’t. It’s the sequence of steps he took. He focused on what he knew first—hotels—even when people told him chasing hotels during a pandemic was foolish. “Many people told me it was rather dumb to go after hotels during the pandemic,” he says. “The good news is, no one has money, so they’re trying to cut in-house staff and outsource things.”

So, he leaned into the one industry he understood, while still taking on other client types to keep the lights on. Eventually, the specialization deepened as the firm got stronger. In essence, the niche didn’t come before the business; it came as the business could afford it.

The unadvertised niche

On the surface, Crema Bookkeeping—Cathryn Vidal’s British Columbia-based firm—doesn’t appear to focus on any particular type of client.

“We don’t really have a niche at this point,” says Vidal. “Some of our bigger clients are in the dental industry, and we have quite a few in the construction industry, but there’s a little bit of everything.”

Despite not having a market-facing niche, the firm is doing just fine. They have a team of six, a steady stream of referrals, and a reputation for excellence that they work hard to maintain. But even in firms like Crema that choose not to niche—at least not officially—it can still make sense to organize internal operations around clients with similar businesses. Once you have a handful of clients in the same line of work—like dental practices or construction companies, in Vidal’s case—you may want to group them and let certain team members specialize in serving each cluster. It’s less of a branding move and more of an efficiency play.

Sarah Queale, who runs Synergy Tax & Business Solutions in London, Ontario, takes this exact approach. Her firm isn’t industry-specific: “It’s really a mixed pot of everything,” she says. But internally, the work is organized by client type.

There’s an operational payoff to this method, too. “The more you know these [industries], you can spot issues before they actually snowball or balloon into something that’s a problem,” Queale says. 

From the outside, Queale’s firm looks like a generalist. On the inside, however, it runs on the same specialization logic as any niche firm—just organized around staff expertise rather than a market position. For a lot of small firms, this is what “niching” looks like in practice: simply a smarter way to assign the work.

The non-industry niche

At face value, Lynn James-Young doesn’t have a niche. She’ll work with pretty much anyone who walks through her door.

“I feel like whoever God puts in my path, I’m there to help them,” says James-Young, owner of Bring It Bookkeeping. She has clients across five states—a doctor in Virginia, a globe-trotting DJ based out of Tahoe, investors, and realtors. From an industry standpoint, she’s all over the map, and she likes it that way.

But spend a little more time with her, and a niche starts coming into focus. She gravitates toward investors and real estate professionals because she’s an investor herself, with commercial and residential properties and a construction company on the side. And even underneath that, she describes a deeper organizing principle.

“My niche is ministry,” she says. “The bookkeeping company is like my vehicle, and it helps me to touch people. You think it’s about finances, but it’s not. It’s more than that.” In that sense, James-Young’s niche is a certain type of client relationship, not a kind of business.

Angela Jenkins, owner of Mindfull Money Matters, organizes her firm the same way—around people rather than industries.

“I work with people I like,” Jenkins says. “If I get a good vibe from you, I’ll want to work with you.” Her client list runs from solo realtors to a candle maker to an attorney to a handful of nonprofits. But there is one unifying pattern to the clients she takes on: nearly all of them are women- and minority-owned businesses, a focus that is deeply intentional.

Filtering by identity and purpose can actually be one of the most defensible niches there is. Jenkins, for example, isn’t forced to compete on price with every other bookkeeper out there, because what she offers can’t be found just anywhere. She didn’t arrive at this focus as a positioning strategy, but rather because she discovered who she wanted to spend her days helping.

The accounting niche built on values

Melissa Miller Furgeson’s niche is a variation on the people-first approach. While she does market her firm—Chicago-based Bookkeeping for Good—specifically to nonprofits and churches, the client filter she cares about most has nothing to do with industry.

Every prospective client fills out an intake form. Alongside the standard questions about their business structure and their software is a much less common one: an explicit affirmation of LGBTQIA and BIPOC rights.

Sometimes the form goes out and never comes back, which means the filter has done its job. For Miller Furgeson, niching is as much about who she’s willing to be in a room with as it is about what those clients do. But it took her a while to fine-tune the criteria around who she wanted to take on.

“I didn’t start out doing everything perfect and niching,” she says. Like many firm owners, Miller Furgeson’s specialization wasn’t a decision she made on day one. It was something she grew into, refined, and eventually built into her firm’s front door.

Found, built, or left alone

When it comes to niching, conventional business advice tends to be fairly cut-and-dried: pick your specialty, commit, and reap the rewards. But most successful firm owners tell a more complicated story.

Salvatore found her niche before she knew it existed. Kaden built hers based on personal experience. Kersting fell into one niche, then turned it into a way of expanding into others. Vidal and Queale specialize internally. James-Young and Jenkins niched on people, Miller Furgeson on values. And Otto took pretty much any paying client until the firm was strong enough to be selective.

It’s tempting to treat specialization as a rule to obey, but these firm owners—and countless others—have proven that the better strategy often is letting your niche (or lack thereof) emerge from what you know, what you like, who you want to help, and what your business needs to stay afloat.

After all, in business and in life, rules are made to be broken.