Every ORM practitioner eventually faces the same fork. Keep taking whatever comes through the door, a plumbing franchise this month, a hospital system the next, a mid-level manager fighting a bad Glassdoor review after that, or draw a line around a specific kind of client and build real depth there. Most practitioners avoid the decision entirely, because it feels like turning away revenue. It is turning away revenue. That is the trade, and there is no version of positioning that does not involve saying no to work you could technically do.
David C. Baker, in The Business of Expertise, lays out five tests worth running before committing to a niche. He built them for consulting and creative firms generally. They translate cleanly to reputation work, where the pull toward staying generalist runs even deeper than most fields, because reputation problems show up everywhere and touch every kind of client, and it always feels safer to say yes to the next inbound lead than to define who you actually serve.
A note on scope before the tests. This article is about positioning the practice itself; for the separate topic of how a client's brand should be positioned, see Strategic Positioning and Reputation. If you are the one doing the hiring rather than the positioning, Specialist vs. Generalist: Who to Consult is written for you. The tests below also assume the decision to specialize is already made; if you are still weighing whether to focus on one pillar or offer several, start with Single-Pillar vs. Multi-Pillar Engagement Structure.
Test One: Count Your Prospects and Competitors
A workable niche needs a real market behind it, not a poetic description of one. Baker's rule of thumb is thousands of prospects, not dozens. Go too narrow, review dispute resolution for artisanal cheese shops, and you exhaust the market before you exhaust your ambition. Go too broad, reputation management, and you are one of hundreds of interchangeable options a buyer cannot tell apart.
The workable middle for ORM tends to sit at the intersection of an industry and a reputation problem that industry feels acutely: healthcare executives navigating physician review platforms and HIPAA-constrained response, franchise systems managing hundreds of location-level listings at once, financial advisors operating under FINRA's advertising rules, higher education institutions managing search results tied to Title IX proceedings. Each of those groups numbers in the thousands. Each faces a reputation problem specific enough that a generalist shop genuinely struggles with it.
Test Two: Drop and Give Me Twenty
Can you list twenty sharp, non-obvious insights about your chosen niche's reputation problems right now, without notice and without slides? Not twenty generic ORM tactics restated with an industry label attached. Twenty things a smart buyer in that niche would not have already thought of.
Say your niche is healthcare executives. Can you explain, on the spot, why HIPAA changes how a hospital system is allowed to respond to a one-star review that names a specific procedure? Why does RateMDs behave differently from Google's AI Overviews when a physician's name gets pulled into a malpractice search? Why do hospital reputation crises follow a slower, more litigation-shadowed arc than a consumer brand's Twitter (X) pile-on? If you stall out after five or six items, the niche is not as deep as the pitch deck claims. Baker's point holds exactly here: shallow expertise gets substituted the moment a cheaper option shows up.
Test Three: Can You Buy a List
If a niche is real, somebody has already gathered a list of its members for an unrelated reason: a licensing board, a trade association, a conference roster, a subscriber base. You do not need to buy it. You need it to exist.
For healthcare-focused ORM, that is the American Health Lawyers Association or a state hospital association directory. For franchise-focused ORM, the International Franchise Association's membership list. For financial advisor ORM, the CFP Board's registry. If no association, publication, or conference has ever bothered to organize the audience you are describing, the shared pain you are pointing to might not be sharp enough to build a practice on.
Test Four: Size of the Employee Universe
This test asks how interchangeable a new hire would be. Picture someone leaving a competing generalist reputation shop to join your healthcare-focused practice. Can they contribute on day one, or do they need months absorbing HIPAA-adjacent response rules, physician-platform quirks, and the specific shape of a hospital system crisis?
The harder that ramp, the more real your positioning. The easier it is, the more your firm's expertise is decoration sitting on top of generic ORM tactics anyone could apply to any client. Baker's version of this test comes from creative and consulting firms; in ORM it shows up just as clearly in who can walk in and add value versus who needs retraining before they are useful.
Test Five: Will Somebody Travel
Positioning that means something generates its own gravity. A client should be willing to seek you out across geography rather than settle for whoever happens to be nearby.
If your positioning is real, a hospital system in Seattle hires your Atlanta-based practice specifically because you are the healthcare-executive shop, not because you happened to come up in a local search. If instead every client you land is local and gets shopped against two or three nearby generalists on price, geography is still doing the selling. Positioning has not taken over yet.
PRACTITIONER CHECKLIST
Do at least a few thousand real prospects exist inside this niche, with a comparable pool of specialist competitors? Can you name twenty non-obvious insights about this niche's reputation problems without preparation? Does an association, publication, or conference already organize this audience for another reason? Would a new hire from a generalist ORM shop need real retraining before contributing here? Does anyone seek you out across geography, or does every client come from local search and get price-shopped locally?
Run the Tests Before You Commit
Positioning decisions in ORM carry the same weight Baker describes for any expert field. They shape who you can serve, what you can charge, and who you will need to hire to keep the promises you make. Those who run these five tests before signing a lease or rebuilding a website end up with a defensible practice. Those who skip straight to a tagline end up discovering the gaps the hard way, usually in front of a client.
Baker's companion framework, the four back-tests, picks up roughly eighteen months later. Four Signs Your ORM Practice's Positioning Isn't Working covers whether the positioning you chose actually held up once it met the market.