Andrew Wilkinson is right. Your niche is in your last 20 jobs

Andrew Wilkinson has run more than seventy businesses, and he tells Lenny’s Podcast that the smartest thing you can do is walk off into the forest and find a small fishing hole with lots of fish and almost no competition. Competition, he says, equals lower margin. He is right, and every owner who has ever quoted against four other trucks knows it.

Here is what he skips. You cannot move ponds. You are a plumber in one town, with one van and a phone number people already have. The niche you can actually reach is not somewhere else. It is inside the work you already do. So go and find it on paper. Pull the last twenty jobs. Mark the five you would take again tomorrow, the ones that paid well and nobody argued. Write down what those five have in common. That is your fishing hole, and it has been in your calendar the whole time. Then say that thing first when the phone rings, and price it like the specialty it is.

The price comes from the buyer’s math

He tells a story about a man doing marketing for restaurants. Pivot it slightly, he says. Do it for realtors or wealth managers instead, people with a real budget, where it only has to work a little to make a lot. Those people you can charge five thousand a month.

He is right. Your price does not come from your effort, it comes from the buyer’s math. What he skips is that you cannot just declare a new customer, because your proof belongs to the old one. Your website, your photos, your references, the way you answer the phone, all of it is aimed at the people you already serve. So do the arithmetic before you touch the price. What is one job worth to that buyer, in their money, over a year? Then rewrite one case study in their language, with their numbers in it. New price, new proof, in that order, or the price does not hold.

The number no model can give you

Entrepreneurs today are lucky, he says. You can ask an AI to break down the numbers on a business before you start one. What is hard about it, what payroll looks like, whether it is any good. He started a lot of stupid businesses because he never had that.

He is right, and it is the cheapest due diligence in history. Here is what he skips. You already own a business, and the model cannot see your numbers, and yours are the only ones that decide anything. So run the same questions on the company you have, then answer the one no model can answer for you. What does a customer cost you to get? Take the last ninety days. Count the new customers. Divide everything you spent to get them. Put that next to what the average first job is worth. If those two numbers are close, nothing else you fix this year will matter as much.

You cannot be teflon for a job that only exists in your head

He calls it lazy leadership. How do I get away from the things I hate as fast as humanly possible? How do I become teflon for tasks? The opposite, he says, is the work ethic that has you doing everything yourself.

He is right, and that work ethic is exactly what keeps an owner in the van. What he skips is that you cannot be teflon for a task that only exists in your head. Nothing slides off. It comes back on Tuesday with a question attached, and you end up doing it twice. So pick the job you hate most and do it one final time, out loud. Talk through every choice you make while you make it. That recording becomes one page. Then hand over the page and name the one number that says it went well. Rebooked jobs. Same day replies. Invoices out by Friday. You are not checking the work any more. You are reading one number, once a week, and that is what makes the handover stick.

The hammer shows up in three weeks, not nine months

He describes interviewing a man who keeps coming back to enterprise sales. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. They hire him to do the organic marketing, and of course he goes off and does enterprise sales anyway.

He is right, and every owner has hired that person at least once. What he skips is that the interview was never going to catch it. People do what they are good at, especially when they are new and want a win. So stop trying to screen for it and set it up instead. Write down the one number this role owns before you make the offer. Then twenty minutes a week on that number, and nothing else. If they drift back to the hammer, the number says so in three weeks instead of nine months.

You can change three things without leaving the pond

Wilkinson is right that the pond you fish in decides your margin. What owners forget is that you can change what you sell, who you sell it to, and who does the work, without ever leaving the pond you are already in.

So, this week. Mark the five jobs you would take again. Do the buyer’s math before you raise a price. Work out what a customer costs you. Write the page for the job you hate. And give your newest hire one number.