Only 50% of professionals on the partnership track say they are known as the Go-To Expert for a specialism, both inside and outside their firm. This episode is about what it takes to get into that half, and why this will help you progress to partner quicker.
This episode walks through the three steps to Go-To Expert status: choosing and committing to a niche, researching and packaging your brand, and building your profile in your chosen market and firm.
In this episode you will learn:
- Why trying to appeal to everyone is the most reliable way to be chosen by no one, and what a real niche actually looks like compared to the vague specialisms most professionals claim
- The three criteria your niche needs to meet, passion, credibility and fit, and why all three have to be present
- How understanding your ideal client’s buying journey changes what content you create and when
- Why building an external profile accelerates how you are perceived inside your own firm
- How Sara went from never winning her own work to making partner within 18 months of choosing the right niche
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Free to complete, 15–20 minutes, and gives you a personalised report across all 12 key indicators, including exactly where to focus your first ONE BIG FOCUS. Take the assessment here.
Buy Poised for Partnership
To buy a copy of Poised for Partnership, click here.
What help is out there for you to progress your career in the professions?
The Progress to Partner Academy is curated by key indicator. If Go-To Expert is where you need to focus, you’ll find everything in one place:
Inside the Go-To Expert indicator, you’ll find practical support to help you become known for the work you want more of, build a clearer niche, and turn your expertise into future opportunities.
You’ll find courses to help you sharpen your positioning and build your profile, including:
- How to Choose Your Niche
- How to Become Known as the Go-To Expert
Plus, you’ll get access to a Video Hub packed with practical advice, including:
- How to Find and Monetise Your Niche
- How to Choose Your Niche
- Why You Should Stick to Your Niche
- How to Generate a Lead and Get Prospects Over the Line
- How to Win Work in 30 Minutes, Without Leaving the House
- How to Earn the Right to Have a Conversation
- How to Develop Work from Existing Clients
Everything is brought together in one place, so you can focus on becoming more visible, more memorable, and more credible in the area you want to be known for.
Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership. Click here to join.
Books mentioned
Poised for Partnership by Heather Townsend – https://amzn.to/3ETEYk3
How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life by Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie – https://amzn.to/4iLxugM
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
Sara had never won a single piece of her own work. Not one client. She was talented, well-liked, technically excellent. And completely invisible in the market.
Then she chose a niche. A very specific one. Older Americans who winter in Florida — the so-called snowbirds — and the private client legal issues that came with that lifestyle. Within twelve months, she had been featured on podcasts, quoted in the Forbes and Washington Post. She had won over $50,000 of her own work. Eighteen months after that, she made partner. She believes choosing that niche accelerated her career by three to five years.
That is not a coincidence. That is what becoming the Go-To Expert actually does.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life. This is episode six in our series on the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness. Today we are talking about Go-To Expert status — what it is, why it matters, and how to build it.
New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss one.
Let’s be honest
Gone are the days when being a brilliant technician was enough to make partner. Your partners are not looking for someone who is good at the work they are given. They can pay a senior associate less for that. What they are looking for is someone who can walk in the door with their own clients. Someone who, ideally, work comes to directly.
And here is the stat that makes the scale of this challenge very clear. Only 50% of professionals who complete our Partnership Readiness Assessment say they are genuinely known as the Go-To Expert for a technical or sector specialism, both inside and outside the firm. Only half. Which means the other half are competing for the same clients, in the same way, as every other capable senior professional at their level.
If clients cannot see why they would come to you rather than your colleague, they won’t. It is as blunt as that.
So how do you build Go-To Expert status? There are three steps, and the first one is where most people stall.
Step one is choosing and committing to a niche.
I know what you are thinking. “If I narrow my focus, I’ll lose opportunities.” That feels completely logical. And it is completely wrong.
Here is what a well-chosen niche actually does. It means referrals come to you directly rather than to the partners in your practice. It means sources of work send matters your way because you are now the safest pair of hands for that type of client. It means your marketing decisions become simpler and more effective. And it means you spend less time on business development to achieve better results, because every conversation, every piece of content, every event you attend is doing targeted work.
Without a niche, you are one of many. With the right niche, you become the obvious choice.
The trap is that people claim a niche which is not really a niche at all. “Owner-managed businesses.” “High-net-worth individuals.” “SMEs.” Everyone says that. A true niche digs at least one or two layers deeper than what everyone else is claiming. Think of Nigel, an accountant who served owner-managed businesses, but specifically targeted manufacturing companies with two to four directors and between twenty and two hundred employees. That precision is what made his marketing cut through.
Your niche needs three things to be the right one. Passion — you will be committing to this for the next few years at least, and clients can tell the difference between someone who is genuinely enthusiastic and someone who is going through the motions. Credibility — you need a track record, however nascent, of working with this type of client or in this space, so you have something to build on. And fit — you need to find it easy to be in this world, to care about what these clients care about, and ideally your niche needs to sit comfortably within your firm’s strategy, not work against it.
Julia spent nearly a year agonising over her niche. She loved working with coaches, trainers and consultants, but was not passionate about the compliance work they mainly needed. It was only when she went deeper — actually sat down with those clients, really understood their world — that she realised what they genuinely needed was a part-time Finance Director. From that point, everything clicked. She had her niche. She had her energy back. And she had clients who were prepared to pay properly for the value she was delivering.
Step two is researching your niche and packaging your brand.
This is the step people most often skip, because it feels like a delay. You want to get on with winning work. But if you skip this, you end up creating content no one reads, offering services no one is actively looking for, and wondering why nothing is landing.
What you need to understand is your ideal client’s buying journey. Not when they have already decided they need help. Before that. When they are dimly aware of a problem. When they are trying to understand their options. The professionals who position themselves at that early stage — who are already being useful before the client is in buying mode — are the ones who get the call when the client is ready.
Phil, an accountant in a UK mid-tier firm, set out to become the Go-To Expert for independent retail businesses. Before he wrote a single piece of content, he went and talked to his target clients. What were the top three challenges they were actually working on? What would need to happen for them to bring in external help? What did they wish someone had told them two years ago? That research formed the basis of his success at winning work going forward. Twelve months later, a significant proportion of his new clients came to him directly because of the retailer-focused content he had been creating and sharing.
You also need to be visible online. Prospective clients will look you up. Before they agree to a meeting, before they respond to an introduction, they will check your LinkedIn profile, your firm’s website, possibly your name in Google. What they find needs to answer the questions they are already asking: do you understand my world? Can you prove it? What results have you helped people like me achieve?
The content you create does not have to be complicated. Blog posts. A podcast. Contributions to sector press. Webinars for your target audience. Presentations at industry events. The point is that it is consistent, it is targeted, and it genuinely helps the people you want to work with. Content that is aimed at everyone reaches no one.
Step three is building your profile — inside your firm as well as outside it.
This one tends to surprise people. Your partners need to know what you are doing. They need to see you as someone who is developing their own presence in a particular market, not just billing well against targets. Some of the fastest career progressions I have seen have happened when a professional built enough external visibility in their niche that their partners sat up and paid attention to what was already happening. Being known outside the firm accelerates how you are perceived inside it.
Michael had spent ten years in retail and HR before retraining as a lawyer. His background led him naturally into employment law for retailers, which made him the obvious expert for his firm’s retail sector team. That deep, specific expertise is what got him to partner. Not a broader skill set — but focusing on a very specific target market.
The routes to building your profile are many: networking, speaking, writing, PR, running your own webinars and events. The next chapter in Poised for Partnership goes deep on referral networks, which we will be covering in episode seven. But the principle is the same. Pick the channels where your target clients and referrers actually spend their time, show up consistently, and make yourself genuinely useful.
Your action for this week. If you do not have a clearly defined niche — one that would make your ideal client say “that’s exactly what I need” — write down the two or three options you are genuinely considering. Apply the three tests: passion, credibility, fit. Pick the one that passes all three and start thinking about what your first research conversation would look like.
If you want to understand how you score on Go-To Expert status — and all 11 other key indicators — the Partnership Readiness Assessment is the place to begin. It takes 10–15 minutes and gives you a personalised report. The link is in the show notes.
Inside our Progress to Partner Academy, the resources are curated by key indicator. If Go-To Expert is where you need to focus, everything relevant is in one place. The on demand courses ‘how to become known as the go-to expert’, and how to choose your niche will help you with this skills behind this key indicator.
Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership: https://www.howtomakepartner.com/get-progress-to-partner/
If you have enjoyed this episode please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. It helps us reach more people who need this. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode, where we will be covering key indicator seven: Referral Network.
Thanks for listening!
Links
Complete my FREE Partnership Readiness Assessment – to see where you have gaps in your own development – you’ll get a personalised report with actions for what progress your career forward
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Join Progress To Partner Academy and use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off 12 months of premium annual membership.
Buy your hard copy of Poised for Partnership or buy the Ebook here
Buy your copy of How To Make Partner And Still Have A Life
Buy your copy of The Go To Expert
Buy your copy of The Financial Times Guide To Business Networking
Join my Progress To Partner Academy and access all my courses and use the code PODCASTBP10 to get 10% off 12 months of premium annual membership.
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