The Hidden Niche Inside the Niche

We’re almost at the finish line of 2025, and it feels like the right moment to pause, zoom out, and give you a real update on what’s happening behind the curtain.

First, a personal milestone I’m genuinely excited about.

A few weeks ago, I accepted the role of Chair of the Ottawa Chapter of Advocis.

I didn’t take it for the résumé line. I took it because, whether I like it or not, I’ve found myself right in the centre of a generational shift happening in our industry. There’s a wave of advisors in that 30–50 age bracket who want to do real planning, build real businesses, and actually think. And if we want this industry to thrive, someone needs to take leadership roles with the ability to speak to that group in a way that actually resonates.

So I stepped up.

Over the next couple years, this gives me a massive platform to bring more real conversations, real education, and real thought leadership directly to advisors, not watered-down corporate messaging, not surface-level CE credits, but real strategic insights about how the business is actually changing

(And believe me, it’s changing way faster than most people think.)

Now, update number two, our year at PPI has been insane.

This has been one of the most explosive growth years I’ve ever seen. Most of you have felt it. Some of you created it. We’re attracting unbelievable advisors. We’re winning bigger, more complex cases. We’re building more momentum in every direction. And honestly, I’m proud, not in the “rah rah corporate speech” sense, but proud in the “I’ve watched this community grow from the inside and we’re finally hitting escape velocity” sense.

And then there was Thursday night.

We held a private wine-tasting dinner at Gezellig, and it was one of those events that reminds you why community matters.

A three-course meal, a flight of curated wines, a room full of incredible advisors, our partners from Sun Life, Canada Life, Empire, and this beautiful moment where business and real life blended in the best possible way.

But the real highlight wasn’t the wine.

It was the people running the event, my neighbours and close friends, Pieter and Lauren. Peter runs operations at Gezellig. Lauren runs her own wine business and is Chair of our school’s Parent Council (and the glue that holds that whole thing together).

Watching them deliver an incredible experience… and being able to support them, not just as vendors but as neighbours, parents, friends, that mattered to me.

There’s something special about being able to lift up people in your own community.

Something special about saying, “Hey, my world and your world collide tonight, and look how beautifully it works.”

And in a weird way, that theme, community, specialization, really knowing people, perfectly tees up the real idea I want to explore today:

The Hidden Niche Inside the Niche

Everyone in financial services has heard the same recycled advice for 20 years:

“Pick a niche.”

And most advisors think they have.

“I work with business owners.”

“I work with doctors.”

“I work with families with young kids.”

No… you don’t.

At least not in the way that actually moves the needle.

Because the truth is:

Most advisors aren’t niching, they’re labeling.

They’ve picked a category, not a community.

They’ve picked a job title, not a subculture.

They’ve picked a demographic, not a world.

Real power, the kind that leads to inbound referrals, celebrity positioning, and total domination, comes from the niche inside the niche.

And almost nobody does it.

Let me give you the perfect example.

There’s an advisor I know, she specializes in rheumatologists.

Not “doctors.”

Not “MDs.”

Not “healthcare professionals.”

Rheumatologists.

A tiny sliver inside a sliver inside a sliver of the medical community.

But here’s the thing:

She knows everything about them.

And when I say everything, I mean everything:

The software rheumatologists use in their practice

The patient-flow challenges they deal with

The specific billing codes that frustrate them

The exact conferences they attend each year

The continuing-education topics that matter to them

Who the keynote speakers are

The pharma reps who call on them

The politics and hierarchy inside their specialty

The shifts in how their research is funded

How the new grad rheumatologists think vs. the retiring ones

The unspoken norms they all follow

The frustrations they never say out loud but all silently agree on

She lives inside their world.

She knows them better than some of them know themselves.

And here’s what happened:

She was giving a presentation at a medical conference, and during her session, one rheumatologist turned to another and said:

“She knows us better than we know us.”

Then that doctor went up after, grabbed the deck, and literally presented it to other rheumatologists, on her behalf, because it was so good, so tailored, so precisely aligned with their experience.

That’s not an advisor.

That’s an embedded expert.

That’s someone who didn’t just pick a niche, she picked the hidden niche inside it and became the insider expert everyone trusts.

And that is the point.

The real niche isn’t the category.

The real niche is the subculture.**

This is the part advisors never think about.

They think niching is about:

 • what the client earns

 • what degrees they have

 • what business they own

 • what their family status is

But the real leverage is in:

 • who they trust

 • who they listen to

 • who sells to them

 • who influences them

 • what they complain about

 • what tools they use

 • what systems their world requires

 • who their helpers are

 • what the unwritten rules are

 • what keeps the whole ecosystem functioning

If you want to dominate a niche, you have to know not just the client…but the world around the client.

Let’s say you work with plumbers.

A “normal” advisor thinks:

 • Okay, they’re self-employed.

 • They have trucks, tools, and payroll.

 • They need buy-sell, group benefits, and planning.

But the advisor who dominates the plumbing niche knows:

 • which wholesalers plumbers rely on

 • which suppliers they hate working with

 • where they get their specialty parts

 • whether they price work per job or per hour

 • which CRM or scheduling system they all complain about

 • where the shortages are in their labour pipeline

 • which unions like them and which don’t

 • which contractors feed them the most business

 • whether they buy copper or PEX and why

 • what their slow season actually looks like

 • how their cash flow behaves in real life

 • the cultural difference between commercial and residential plumbers

 • what their apprentices actually think and how much they earn

 • what a “bad month” really means for them

 • what job-site issues consistently put them behind

 • the exact jargon they use on-site

If you can talk that language…

If you can reference their software, their suppliers, their frustrations…

If you know the rhythm of their year…

If you know the companies that orbit them…

Then when a plumber meets you, they don’t think:

“Oh, another advisor.”

They think:

“Finally, one of us.”

That is the niche inside the niche.

Why this matters more in 2026 than at any time before

The market is fragmenting.

Clients are overwhelmed.

Information is infinite.

Products are identical.

Trust is harder to acquire.

Generic advisors are invisible.

And the advisors who are winning, consistently, quietly, aggressively, are the ones who go deep, not broad.

Depth beats width.

Understanding beats marketing.

Vocabulary beats volume.

Subculture beats category.

If you understand a client’s internal world better than any other advisor they’ve ever met, two things happen:

1. They trust you immediately.

Trust isn’t built slowly anymore.

It’s built instantly, if you can demonstrate insider understanding.

If a dentist says:

“Our clinic runs on Dentrix,” and you say:

“Right, and I know Dentrix requires all the assistants to do twice the admin work during new-patient weeks, so cash flow is always weird the week after,”

…boom.

Instant trust.

No product conversation required.

2. Their helpers start referring you.

This is the hidden lever nobody uses.

Every profession has a circle of people who serve that profession:

 • consultants

 • software vendors

 • suppliers

 • brokers

 • recruiters

 • industry reps

 • specialists

 • organizers

 • support-service providers

If you embed yourself in that circle, if you know all of them, help all of them, understand all of them, then you stop being “an advisor.”

You become the default advisor for that ecosystem.

The helpers start sending you business because you’re the only advisor who understands the whole picture.

This is how empires get built quietly.

This is the game nobody is playing.

This is how you become “The Name.”

The advisor I mentioned earlier?

She doesn’t introduce herself as:

“Hi, I’m ________, I work with doctors.”

No.

She gets introduced as:

“She’s the rheumatologist advisor.”

There is enormous power in that sentence, more power than 50,000 generic impressions on social media.

Because names circulate inside small worlds far faster than they ever will in the outside world.

A small niche talks.

A small niche trusts.

A small niche refers.

A small niche rallies around the person who understands them.

This is how you become the “celebrity” inside a niche.

Not Kim Kardashian celebrity.

Industry-specific celebrity.

The kind that actually moves dollars.

This is the future of advice.

And it’s why I brought up the story of last night’s event.

Because specialization doesn’t happen by accident.

It happens when you embed yourself in real communities, real relationships, real ecosystems.

The reason our wine night worked wasn’t because it was “a nice event.”

It worked because:

 • it was local

 • it was personal

 • it was rooted in real connections

 • it gave advisors a chance to connect in a niche environment

 • and it was run by people who live and breathe their craft

That’s what niche domination looks like.

Being so embedded in a community, whether it’s rheumatologists or plumbers or your own neighbourhood, that people trust you before you even open your mouth.

If 2026 is going to be your breakout year, this is where it’s going to come from:

Not doing more.

Not shouting louder.

Not cold-calling harder.

But going deeper.

Into the niche inside the niche.

Into the world inside the world.

Into the subculture nobody else bothered to learn.

So here’s my challenge for you this week:

Pick your niche.

Then ask yourself:

What is the hidden niche inside that niche?

What is the ecosystem around it?

Who are the helpers?

What software do they use?

Where do they gather?

What do they complain about?

What are the unwritten rules?

What do they wish outsiders understood about them?

What does “being one of them” actually mean?

Then pick one of those sub-questions and go deeper.

Learn something no other advisor in your area knows.

Then learn something else.

Then learn everything.

If you do that for twelve months…

If you truly embed…

If you truly understand…

If you start speaking the language they speak behind closed doors…

Your entire business will change.

Because when you know someone’s world, you don’t have to sell them anything.

They choose you.

Final note — December 15

I’m running a session on December 15 on what I think is one of the most misunderstood, unexplored, and transformative opportunities in the advisor space right now: the discretionary portfolio manager model.

If you want to understand how this fits into your niche, how to use it to acquire assets you can’t touch today, and how it becomes another lever inside the niche-within-the-niche strategy…

Make sure you’re on that call.

Send me an email and I’ll send you a link to join the call.

If this email resonated, forward it to a colleague.

Someone out there is stuck in the “generalist” trap and needs this today.

More coming soon.

Andrew