Why I've Never Niched Down (And Why I Finally Did)

"What's your niche?"

I've been asked this question at networking events, in discovery calls, by well-meaning business coaches who wanted me to pick a lane and stay in it.

For years, my answer made people's eyes glaze over.

"I've worked with a 12-person team and a 12,000-person healthcare system. A marketing agency of 200, a publicly traded green tech company of 2,500, and a commercial fishing operation with 500 crew rotating across international waters. Biotech during rapid growth. An e-auction company that had no HR infrastructure at all."

This is the point in the conversation where the other person smiles politely and changes the subject. Because that's not a niche. That's a mess.

Except it isn't.

Here's what nobody tells you about working across industries: the problems are the same. They just wear different costumes.

Let me show you what I mean.

I spent two years embedded with a commercial fishing company, redesigning their talent operations and organizational culture. COVID had gutted their pipeline. The industry was heavily regulated, which added layers of complexity. And their hiring process was stuck in another decade: in-person interviews only, paper applications, no way to reach candidates where they actually were.

The solution wasn't industry-specific. It was operational.

We implemented a new applicant tracking system. Rebuilt the entire hiring workflow. Moved interviews online. Created automated candidate engagement systems. And here's the part that came from paying attention to the humans, not just the process: we created short YouTube videos showing candidates what to expect at each stage of hiring, and we sent them via text. Because that's how these applicants communicated. Not email. Not phone calls. Text.

Domestic applicant interest increased 344%. New hire onboarding increased 292% year over year. Retention started climbing because people knew what they were walking into before they ever set foot on a vessel.

Was that a "fishing industry" solution? No. It was a communication and workflow solution that happened to be applied to fishing.

Different industry. Different problem. Same pattern.

An e-auction company brought me in because they had no talent acquisition infrastructure at all. Nothing centralized. No real recruiting process. No system for tracking candidates or measuring performance.

We built it from the ground up. Architected centralized recruiting processes. Created performance management frameworks. Turned "we wing it every time" into "here's how we do this, and here's how we know it's working."

The specifics were e-commerce. The underlying problem, lack of foundational infrastructure, is something I've seen in every industry I've ever touched.

At a publicly traded biotech company during an accelerated growth phase, I redesigned talent operations across multiple departments. Built scalable processes for internal mobility, contingent staffing, strategic sourcing. Supported global hiring when they needed to move fast without breaking things.

The challenge there wasn't building from scratch. It was building for scale. Making sure the systems could hold as the organization doubled and tripled in size.

Different problem than the fishing company. Different problem than the e-auction startup. But the same underlying discipline: see the whole picture, design for where you're going, build infrastructure that holds.

And then I became an Executive Director.

Eight months in 2025. A small community nonprofit. And everything I thought I knew about operations got pressure-tested in real time.

I walked into an organization still running on physical servers. A consultant came in regularly to back them up, entering the building alone, with a key, on days when no programming was happening. The risk was enormous and invisible. Nobody had stopped to question it because "that's just how we've always done it."

The computers were so old they couldn't run the current version of Microsoft 365. Which meant the team couldn't use Teams for chat or video meetings. Which meant communication was fragmented and inefficient. Which meant I was solving the same problems over and over because information wasn't flowing.

So we fixed it. Found a new IT provider. Moved to cloud-based systems. Sourced low-cost laptops that could actually run modern software. Saved nearly $600 a month and eliminated a security risk that had been quietly sitting there for years.

Then we tackled training. Staff needed to learn new tools, but nobody had time for hour-long sessions. So I started building a library of tiny trainings. Two-minute videos made with Clipchamp, which is free through Microsoft, sent directly to the team. Bite-sized, searchable, rewatchable.

Was that a "nonprofit" solution? Partly. But the pattern, outdated infrastructure creating invisible risk, showing up as communication problems and inefficiency, that pattern exists everywhere.

The fishing company and the biotech and the e-auction startup and the nonprofit had almost nothing in common on the surface. Different industries, different sizes, different challenges.

But underneath:

All of them had outgrown their current systems without realizing it. All of them had normalized workarounds that were costing them time, money, or risk. All of them needed someone to look at the whole picture and say, "Here's what's actually broken, and here's a path forward that fits your budget and your reality."

That's what cross-industry experience gives you. Not a template you copy and paste. A pattern library. The ability to see that a retention problem on a fishing vessel and a communication problem at a nonprofit might have the same root cause, just wearing different clothes.

But I did niche down. Eventually.

Not because the business coaches finally got to me. Because I found the sector where my particular combination of skills creates the most value. Nonprofits.

Specifically, small to mid-sized nonprofits with budgets between $300K and $5M, led by Executive Directors who are holding everything together through sheer force of will.

Here's why this is my niche now:

Nonprofits are underserved by operations consultants. The big firms chase bigger budgets. The solo consultants often lack the cross-functional expertise to see the whole picture. And the EDs themselves are so busy doing the work that they can't step back and architect the systems that would make the work sustainable.

I've sat in the ED chair. I've felt the weight of being the person everyone looks to. I've dealt with the physical servers and the outdated hardware and the "we've always done it this way" resistance. I've made the case to a board for investments that don't look sexy but save the organization.

So when I work with EDs now, I'm not observing from the outside. I've been there. And that changes everything about how I listen, how I diagnose, and what I recommend.

But here's the thing about nonprofits: there's no such thing as "the nonprofit industry."

There's human services, arts and education, environment and healthcare, housing and advocacy, animal welfare, youth development, food security, and a hundred other sectors. Each with their own funding models, their own regulatory environments, their own cultural norms.

A food bank operates differently than a theater company. A domestic violence shelter has different constraints than an environmental advocacy org. A community health center and a youth mentorship program might both be 501(c)(3)s, but that's about where the similarities end.

So when people ask if I've worked with "nonprofits like theirs," I tell them the truth: probably not exactly. I probably haven't worked with another org that does precisely what you do, structured precisely how you're structured.

But I've seen the patterns underneath. And those patterns don't care what sector you're in.

The ED who can't delegate because they don't trust the systems to hold? I've seen that everywhere. The organization that grew faster than its infrastructure could support? Every sector.

The technology that was chosen in a panic and never properly implemented? Universal.

My job isn't to know your specific sector better than you do. You already know your sector. My job is to see the structural problems you're too close to see, and to bring solutions from outside your world that you'd never think to look for.

If you're an ED reading this and wondering whether I'll "get" your organization because I haven't worked with another one exactly like yours, here's what I'd ask you:

How well has sector-specific advice worked so far?

If you've been to the conferences and read the books and talked to the consultants who specialize in your exact type of nonprofit, and things still feel chaotic, maybe the answer isn't more specialized knowledge.

Maybe it's a different lens entirely.

Someone who can look at your communication breakdown and see a fishing boat that needed to meet candidates where they were. Someone who can look at your "we've always done it this way" and see a server room that was quietly putting the whole organization at risk. Someone who can look at your rapid growth and see a biotech company that needed systems to scale before the cracks started showing.

The patterns are the same. Once you see that, everything changes.

That's what the Clarity Diagnostic is built to do.

You fill out a detailed questionnaire about how your organization actually runs. I look at it with 20 years of cross-industry pattern recognition and tell you what I see: where your infrastructure is holding, where it's quietly breaking down, and what to do about it.

No jargon. No generic recommendations. Just a clear picture of what's underneath, from someone who's seen these patterns in industries you'd never think to look at.

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