Making a Top 100 ProAdvisor - 'How Special is Your Niche?'

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This article is the fourth and final part of our series on ‘Making a Top 100 ProAdvisor’, developed cooperatively with ADP, one of the sponsors of Insightful Accountant's 2021 Top 100 and ProAdvisor of the Year Award Program. ADP will be hosting a webinar titled, Secrets to Becoming a Top 100 ProAdvisor this Thursday, February 4th at 1:00 pm Eastern that serves as a companion to these articles. 

How Special is Your Niche?

‘Niche’, how you pronounce it isn’t important, what’s important is if you as ProAdvisor have one. In other words, “do you specialize in your ProAdvisor practice?” Insightful Accountant considers such specialization an important aspect of our Top 100/ProAdvisor of the Year Awards, so much so that we recognize a Top Niche Practice ProAdvisor recipient within our annual categorical awards.  With all the diversity of specializations that are present in ProAdvisor practices you might wonder how we can identify the one unique individual who exemplifies the best of this category when the awards are distributed? The answer boils down to ‘the standard’, just as I have been discussing in each of the other parts of this series.

Perhaps in this one category my ‘dog show’ example is more applicable than anywhere else because the concept of our process is so closely aligned with the concepts used in those time-honored events. Let’s look at a just one of the American Kennel Club Groups, in this case the ‘Working Group’. Within that Group you will find, among other dog breeds, the Akita, the Bernese Mountain Dog, the Boxer, the Doberman Pinscher, the Great Dane, the Mastiff, the Rottweiler, the Saint Bernard, the Siberian Husky and the Standard Schnauzer.    

Each one of these great dogs are truly unique, you wouldn’t think of comparing one dog to another… as a true dog lover you love the breed and each dog for its uniqueness, the qualities that make it ‘a Boxer’ rather than ‘a Siberian Husky’. And when these dogs are judged at a dog show they are judged not against each other they are judged against ‘the Standard’ for each breed to determine which dog best exemplifies the breed based on that standard.

Even when the best of each breed in the Working Group enters the arena to be judged for Best in the Working Group, they are not judged against each other, they are still being judged as to which dog truly best reflects the standard and that one dog is then Best in Group. 

Insightful Accountant's categorical awards process is based on a very similar mechanism. For every niche that any applicant represents we look for the one applicant, based on their application credentials, that best represents that niche based upon 'the standards' for our category. We may have twenty or more niche specializations and sub-specializations identified by virtue of the questions we pose in our formal application, but the ranking system is always based on how the applicant performs relative to the standards set-forth for the category, and never against their fellow applicants. 

Not even when it’s time to rank the niche finalists for purposes of determining the categorical winner, just as when the judge scores 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. within the dog show arena, our rankings remain based on the applicant’s evaluation based on ‘the standard’. So, the applicant that best reflects the categorical standard overall will be the Niche categorical award recipient.

Evaluating the Standard

As with our other award categories, the tool whereby each categories' standards are evaluated is our formal application. The application generates a series of numerical scores that relate to every category, so really the ability of the applicant to focus on key questions for their best category or categories is always a valuable tip when it comes to completing the application.

In regard to ‘the niche’ category, there are a variety of questions you answer within our formal application that analyze your specialization. First, we come right out and ask you about your ‘niche practice’ (as seen in the questions below). We ask you to tell us about the nature of your practice in the first of these two questions, and then if you answer the question shown in the red block with an answer of 3 or higher, we ask you to define your niche or specialization in the very next question (shown in the green block).

But there are several other areas of the application related to niche practice. We also ask you to tell us even more specifically about the percentage of your practice that is devoted to this singular ‘niche’ or specialization.

One question that many ProAdvisors fail to consider as it relates to niche is the question regarding ‘Industry categories’ in which we ask you about the number of clients you have in different business types (I’m not going to illustrate this question because it is simply too long). Obviously if your ‘niche’ is in Manufacturing, we would expect to see a majority of your responses related to the one or more of those client categories. The same would apply to Retail, or Construction, or essentially any specialization. On the other hand, a generalist will typically have a relatively limited number of clients in many different industry categories.

Another area that contributes to your niche score is related to the tech stack you use. As we discussed in our last article, the software and apps you support play an important role in your ProAdvisor practice. Obviously if your niche is ‘law firms’ we would expect to see your tech stack based around the Apps that typically are used by law firms, the same applies to a niche that would support ‘engineering or architectural practices’, we would expect to see your tech stack reflect apps that reflect that niche.

While the specifics of a niche may vary, the principles remain the same, and can easily be assessed by ‘the standard’ that has been developed for the category. The extent to which you accurately report your niche in your formal application will be a reflection of your specialization. You stand apart based upon your own credentials, and those credentials are always evaluated against ‘the standard’ that has been established, never against your fellow ProAdvisors.

Be certain to join me tomorrow February 4th at 1 PM Eastern when ADP will host a webinar in which a prestigious panel of three ProAdvisors will discuss exactly what it takes to become a Top 100 ProAdvisor. I am honored to moderate this great group of ProAdvisors.

The webinar titled, Secrets to Becoming a Top 100 ProAdvisor, will feature the perspective of Dawn Brolin, CPA, CFE, and CEO of Powerful Accounting, Dawn just happens to be Insightful Accountant's 2020 Top Niche Practice ProAdvisor for her specialization in Forensics.

The webinar will also feature Caleb L. Jenkins, EA, CQP, who is the Leader of Client Accounting Services at RLJ Financial Services. Caleb was Insightful Accountant's 2016 Top Up-N-Comer ProAdvisor.

The third panelist at the webinar is Matt Fulton, Co-Founder, and CTO of Parkway Business Solutions who joined the ranks of Insightful Accountant's Top 100 QuickBooks ProAdvisors for the first time in 2020.

You really won't want to miss this... Register for the Webinar