The Truth About Niching Down in Business - Why I built My Practice

The business coaches, online articles, “how to succeed in business” books, colleagues, clients, and family all told me that in order to grow, I had to zoom in, or niche. I don’t like to niche, I embrace doing all the things I like to do and none of the things I don’t. If I’m being honest, and I always try to at least be honest if I can’t be anything else, what I was doing wasn’t really working.

I was helping a lot of people (for free)

I was getting paid to do things, but not the things I liked. Most of all I was overwhelmed with being endlessly busy.

My career path hasn’t been straightforward, my husband and I got married while we were still in medical school and law school respectively. Health issues pushed us into parenthood before I passed the bar and practicing law with first one, then a second little one, was an uphill battle, especially with a spouse in residency. When the girls were a little older I went back to work, started a tax LL.M. that I had deferred for years, and started making a dent in all that debt. About three years into my full time practice of law our accountant called with a request. He needed me to go into my husband’s medical practice and help pull information for our tax returns. There were no systems in place and my husband’s growing practice needed help. Once I got into the books I started finding both dollars and misappropriation of his hard earned money by other people in the complex revenue cycle. I took my laptop on our family vacation and started calculating. I found over $15,000 that was misallocated and I was hooked.

I spoke with my firm and we determined that what made the most sense for my family was for me to remain with the firm on an Of Counsel basis and focus on what was essentially our family business. I spent twelve years doing this. Within the first four years I was able to implement processes to streamline billing and collections, hire and fire in the best interest of the practice, and build a team of professionals to fill in the gaps in my own knowledge. We built a seven figure practice with a solo physician.

Through the years we added ancillaries like gastric weight loss balloons, PillCam studies, and our most ambitious project: a joint venture clinical research trial site. I don’t have an MBA so I tried to learn as much as I could as I went along. One of the best things I did was enroll in a Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma program and become a Black Belt. It has been one of my most valuable certifications. I’ve hired coaches and joined training programs — some have been great, others make me cringe when I remember them, but I learned something from each of them.

Working for my husband’s practice put me in an interesting position. I hated the presumption that I was the doctor’s wife and that was the reason I was in this role. It took me years to realize that this is actually absolutely true and not disparaging at all. Most small medical practices couldn’t afford to have me in their office on a regular basis.

I also appreciated that we worked together and definitely spent more time together than we would have on completely different career trajectories. What I really loved was the flexibility it afforded me to raise my girls. They grew up working with us, for better or worse, and they know how hard I worked to balance all of the different areas of my work life.

While I practiced law full time, I rarely brought in clients. Associates don’t really have a lot of time to network or build those relationships.

In the years that I worked with my husband all I did was network. I was the business end of the practice and met financial advisors, lenders, community leaders, physicians, and more.

Others began asking for my consultation services, starting with a client of my law firm. This was in February 2020 and we all know what happened within a month of that. That client lost their funding but I was already in business, so I took the time I had during the pandemic and applied for my SBA certifications, MBE/SBE/DBE. I also spent four months of 2020 in Morocco completing the adoption of our then 10 year old son.

My first year in business grossed a big fat zero in income.

Once my son adjusted and I was back in the office, I went back out to promote my consulting business and something interesting happened, I started getting referrals for legal work and my practice started to grow. The more I networked for consulting, the more clients I brought into my law practice. And it went both ways. Law firm clients sometimes asked me for services that are not technically legal work, particularly nonprofit clients, so that was growing simultaneously. How was I supposed to “niche down” when I was finally getting to do all the things I wanted to do? I started saying no. I went back to listening to women who were where I wanted to be and reading and developing the skills I needed to move forward quickly. I let myself dream, plan, grow beyond what my subconscious told me my upper limit was.

In the last few months I have had some small, and some not so small milestones.

• I have enough of my own clients seeking legal services and a clear vision of the practice areas I want to work in as well as how I want every aspect of that service to look now that I’ve launched my own practice

• I received an offer to teach two cohorts of a health care business course

• I’ve been invited to speak at an event on International Women’s Day that has been on my list of stages I’d like to be on someday. That someday is going to be in 2025!

The biggest milestone, however, was more personal. It was three separate requests from women I know, and who know me, to create a community for women who want to learn how to grow, pivot, develop, and build a legacy for themselves and their families.

I’ve shared perhaps more than you want to know about me, in the hopes that something resonates. The plan is to offer information and resources in my four practice areas: estate planning, estate administration, business law, and nonprofit law in an anecdotal way that is not legal advice and with a generous amount of not legal content thrown in, because sometimes you need so much more as you navigate your own path to becoming the Stellar Woman you were meant to be.