Jeffrey Pawlow, of The GrowthPartnership in St. Louis; Jennifer Wilson, of Omaha’s ConvergenceCoaching; and Joel Sinkin, Accounting Transition Advisors, New York and Kansas City, Missouri, spoke at the AICPA Practitioners Symposium. Following are highlights of their discussions on niches:

• Firms are seeking niches where there is less competition. They are staying away from the fashionable niches, choosing instead those niches that are compatible with firms’ strengths.
• Asking clients what they want is an important part of niche development.
• The least successful niches are financial services and technology.
• Successful niches have devoted leaders.
• Clients want advice on strategy, financing, and buying or selling their companies.
• Small practices are seeing the need for specializing in business processes, performance metrics, CFO services, manufacturing tax, cost segregation, nonattest services for small public companies, and write-ups.
• Firms are increasingly developing specialties through alliances. In addition to enhancing the value of the service, it helps firms develop expertise in the niche(s). When entering into an alliance, be sure to have a contract, which among other things includes noncompetition provisions.
• Having too many niches may cause your level of expertise to suffer.
• It may take three years to attain optimal service levels in new niches.
• Cross-selling continues to be a challenge. Cross-selling of niches will succeed if there is a high level champion for the cause. Create a cross-selling matrix where rows are clients and column headings are service areas.
• www.zapdata.com provides access to information on 14 million companies on the Dun & Bradstreet data base. It will help you build data bases of prospects and identify your competitors.

From Accounting Office Management & Administration Report, August 2006, p. 1. For subscription information contact Institute of Management & Administration, Inc., 3 Park Avenue, 30th Floor, New York, NY 10016-5902. One-year subscription $349. 212-244-0360, [email protected]. For the complete article, click here.