3 Choices That'll Make Your Firm Unforgettable in 2026

You sound exactly like your competitors, and you probably don’t realize it.

Your website talks about your service and your experience and your quality…and so does theirs.

Your proposal talks about your team and your process…and so does theirs.

To a prospect considering three different options, you all look and sound exactly the same.

And when everything seems exactly the same, they just go with the cheapest one.

You don’t have an advertising problem. You don’t have a promotional problem. You have a market positioning problem.

Your customers don’t know what makes your firm different or why they should care.

After three decades of fixing this for companies like yours, I can tell you exactly why this is happening and how to fix it.

I’m going to show you three choices that make the difference between a firm that’s competing on price and a firm that’s the only choice for their ideal clients.

When prospects can’t see a difference, three things happen.

First, you get shopped on price. Every deal becomes a spreadsheet comparison. Your expertise just becomes a line item. And the lowest bidder is the one that gets the project.

Second, you attract the wrong clients. The ones that don’t really value what you do. The ones that call on the weekends and question every invoice. They drain your time and energy and kill your margins.

Third, your business hits a ceiling. Your revenue plateaus. You’re working harder than ever to make the same revenue you did a couple years ago. And your growth stalls because you’re competing with even more companies now to win the same generic projects.

But you already know your marketing is generic, don’t you? You’ve probably known for years.

So what’s stopping you from fixing it?

It’s fear. Not a business fear. It’s something deeper than that. Something hardwired.

We don’t want to be weird. We don’t want to stick out. It’s a survival instinct.

If you blend in, you’re safe. Nobody criticizes your choices. Nobody wonders why you’re doing what you’re doing. You don’t have to answer to anyone. You just blend in.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, there’s a voice whispering that if you do something weird, if you do something different, if you don’t do the same thing that the other people in your industry are doing, it might all fall apart.

And there’s a good chance that voice sounds like your parents, but that’s between you and your therapist.

So we play it safe. We do the same things everyone around us is doing. We look like them. We sound like them. We cast a wide net. We keep our options open so we don’t miss any opportunities.

And we stay stuck.

And we wonder why our close rate is dropping even though we’re working harder than ever.

But you know who succeeds? You know who builds something that lasts? You know who builds the big companies?

It’s not the people who played it safe. It’s the people who did something different, who broke the mold.

The firms that take a chance, the firms that stand out, make three key decisions that separate them from everyone else.

Choice number one: who exactly you serve.

Right now, you’re probably serving anyone who can write a check. But the iconic firms? That’s not what they’re doing.

Choice number two: what exact problem you solve for them.

Right now, you’re probably spread thin offering a whole bunch of services that people have asked you for over the years. You do whatever they want, not what’s best for your business.

Choice number three: what exactly you do differently.

This isn’t about service or experience or quality—because in marketing, those have almost no value. Those are the same things everyone says. This needs to be about what your firm does that others don’t or won’t or can’t do.

Most firms never make these choices clearly because they’re afraid.

They try to be everything to everyone and in the process wind up being nothing to anyone.

One of my clients recently told me that he went to a party and when people asked him what he did, he gave the same generic answer that he always did.

At some point he realized, “Oh, we just went through all this strategic messaging work. I should try out some of the new messaging.”

Next time someone asked him, he used the new language that describes exactly what he does and who he does it for.

Heads literally turned and someone said, “Wait, what did you say?”

And suddenly everyone was interested.

That’s the difference between blending in and standing out. Same person, same company, different words, completely different response.

Now let’s dive into these three choices.

Who exactly do you serve?

Small business isn’t a target market. Companies that need IT support isn’t a target market. People who need financial planning isn’t a target market. People who want to build a custom home isn’t a target market.

Those categories are so broad that your messaging has to stay super generic. And generic messaging does not work.

When you get that specific, something magical changes.

Your ideal clients feel like you’re reading their minds. Every word you write seems like it was written just for them. And they don’t worry about the price that much because you’re so obviously the perfect fit that whatever the price is must be the right price.

But you’re terrified to narrow your target market.

What if you miss an opportunity? What about that lead from a different industry? What if there’s a project that pays well even if it’s not a great fit?

The work that you’re afraid to lose by specializing is the work that’s keeping you stuck right now.

Those deals pay less. They take more work. They take more time. They place more burden on your team. They come with clients who don’t really value or even understand what you do.

Casting a wide net isn’t the opportunity you think it is. It’s a trap.

Most business owners never do the math. They’re operating out of emotion. They’re operating out of fear.

You don’t need a million prospects to grow your business. You need probably 20 to 50 clients. That’s it.

So stop trying to appeal to millions of people who are going to be a terrible fit for your business and find the smallest group of people who really understand and value what you do.

The people that you can solve their real problem better than anyone else. Find ones who really value the specific way that you do things. Find the clients that can afford you and then focus everything on that audience.

But knowing exactly who you serve isn’t enough. You also need to know what’s keeping them up at night.

And most firms get this completely wrong.

Your clients have a hundred problems, but they’ll only pay to solve three or four of them. The rest are just annoyances they’ve learned to deal with.

Your job isn’t to convince them that they have problems that they don’t already know about. Your job is to solve the problem that’s already haunting them and that they will pay to solve.

Imagine an IT firm that thinks they’re selling security: firewalls and monitoring and compliance checks and penetration testing.

But if they actually interviewed their best clients, they would pretty quickly realize that the problem they’re solving isn’t, “I need to find someone to sell me a security product.”

They’re buying the ability to stop worrying. They’re buying the ability to not wonder if they’re going to get hacked or deal with ransomware.

They’re buying sleep at night.

Completely different conversation, completely different way to sell the same service.

If your marketing is trying to convince your potential clients that they have a problem, you’re already losing.

The best clients come to you with an active wound that you can fix. They come to you starving and you can feed them.

Call five of your best clients and ask them what was the real problem that they were trying to solve when they hired you.

You might have to dig a little bit and try to find the problem behind the problem, but when you find out what the real driving cause was, you’re going to find out it wasn’t that they needed someone to fulfill a service.

There was some underlying problem that they were trying to solve.

And once you finally understand what they’re really buying, everything about the way you talk about your business changes.

Now, once you know exactly who you serve and what the exact problem you’re solving for them is, there’s still one more choice that you have to make.

And most companies never do it, and that’s why they stay stuck forever.

What exactly do you do differently?

Being 10% better than your competitors gets you nowhere. However, being 25% better than your competitors also gets you nowhere.

Your clients can’t tell the difference between good and slightly better. They can only tell the difference between same and different.

Try to finish this sentence: “We are the only firm that…”

If you can’t finish that sentence, or 10 other firms might say the exact same thing, you have a problem.

But if you can finish that with something that’s true and provable and that your ideal clients care about, you have a weapon.

If everyone else does custom financial plans, but your firm has a 90-day process that’s worked for dozens of companies like theirs, they’re going to hire you.

If every other construction company talks about the dozen other industries that they serve, but your firm specializes in medical offices and you know all the compliance requirements, they’re going to hire you.

If every other managed service provider offers a generic list of IT services, but you guarantee zero compliance issues for law firms, they’re going to hire you.

The goal isn’t to do everything. The goal isn’t even to be the best at everything.

The goal is to be the only one who does what you do the way that you do it for the people you do it for.

One of my clients, a company in the $5 to $10 million range, recently told me about a pitch that they landed with a Fortune 500 company.

It’s the kind of company that spends a hundred million a year on exactly the kind of business this client does.

On the surface, they probably had no business being in that room. There are national competitors many times their size who are already deeply embedded with this company.

But when an opportunity like that comes along, you take it. So they traveled to go do this pitch.

Fortunately, we had just built out their Northstar strategy. So they knew exactly who their clients were, what problem they solved for them, and how they did it differently.

The founder said that every time they’d done those kinds of meetings before, the delivery was always kind of scattered and haphazard. They had lots of good things to say, but there wasn’t a clear thread, a clear story, a clear message.

He said, “When they started using the language and ideas that I gave them, everything in that room changed.”

The executives leaned in and wanted to know more. They said, “You’re talking about our exact pain points, and we want to work with a company like yours.”

When they started talking about getting into the vendor approval process, one of the executives said, “No, we’re going to skip ahead. We want to work with you.”

That’s not a one-off story. I hear this stuff all the time.

I just talked to another client whose company was just acquired by one of the largest players in our industry for a very handsome sum, and he said that the strategic work we did for them years ago was a key piece of what made them so valuable that this acquisition even happened.

This stuff compounds. When most businesses are stuck, this is what makes a business take off.

If you want to see where your business stands right now, go to my website at jamesarcher.co and take a look at my sales and marketing diagnostic service.

In the beginning, I told you that you sound exactly like your competitors. Now you know why…and you know exactly how to fix it.

Get really specific about who you serve. If your answer could apply to 100 different companies, get narrower. Uncomfortably narrow.

Identify the real problem that’s keeping them up at night. Not the thing that you sell—the thing that they’re desperate to fix.

And then find your “only.” The thing that you do differently. The thing others don’t or won’t or can’t.

You’ve been blending in for long enough. It’s time to make some choices.