Five Tests to Run Before You Position Your ORM Practice covers the decision itself: which niche, which problem, which audience. That decision is not the end of the work. Baker's advice is to live with a positioning choice for eighteen to twenty-four months and then look back honestly at what it actually produced, before the sunk cost of years makes that honesty harder to come by.
David C. Baker, in The Business of Expertise, lays out four back-tests for this checkpoint. They ask a different kind of question than the pre-tests do. The pre-tests ask whether positioning could work. The back-tests ask whether it did, and if it did not, whether the problem was insufficient data or insufficient nerve.
Test One: How Smart Are You Getting
There is a difference between getting smarter and getting smarter quickly, and the distinction matters more than it sounds. A practitioner who bounces between a plumbing franchise, a solo dentist, and a mid-size SaaS company is getting smarter the slow way, relearning the basics of each new client's world before any of the reputation work can start. A practitioner who has spent two years exclusively on healthcare executives is stacking pattern on pattern. The fifth hospital-system crisis looks like the first, second, and third, and that recognition is worth more than any generic reputation tactic could be.
Baker borrows an image from Blair Enns here: pour the same amount of water into a wide, shallow pan and it barely covers the bottom; pour it into a narrow glass and it rises fast. Vertical or horizontal, the mechanism is the same. Working repeatedly within one industry builds pattern recognition about that industry's reputation problems. Working repeatedly on one type of problem, crisis response, say, builds pattern recognition about that problem wherever it shows up. Either can work. Neither works if every engagement starts from zero.
Test Two: Is It Yielding a Price Premium
Being busy proves nothing. Baker is blunt about this, and the bluntness is earned: it is not that hard to stay busy. The real question is whether the positioning is earning a premium over what a generalist ORM shop charges for comparable work.
Baker sketches three stages. Pricing high school is underpricing and over-servicing, the phase where a practitioner is quietly surprised that anyone pays what they do. Pricing college is getting paid fairly for every hour, a comfortable and honest living that never quite becomes wealth. Pricing grad school is where hours stop being the unit of value, where a healthcare-focused ORM practice can name a package price for a physician review-response program because the process has been run often enough to be genuinely efficient, and the client is paying for outcome and expertise rather than time logged. Most practitioners are stuck in the first two stages, not because their work is weak, but because their positioning has not done enough to justify the third.
Test Three: Do You Direct the Client Relationship
A specific, well-positioned expert sets the terms of engagement rather than absorbing whatever a client wants to throw at them. Does the practice have real policies, and does it hold to them? Is scope creep something that gets pushed back on, or something that gets quietly absorbed to keep a client happy?
Baker's comparison is a physician. A doctor takes a short history, then directs the exam from there; the patient does not get to diagnose their own condition or decide which tests are relevant. Applied to ORM, a practice with real positioning tells a panicked executive what the actual reputation problem is, not just what they showed up asking for, and says no to engagements that do not fit. A practice still taking any client with a checkbook, doing whatever that client asks, however far it strays from the practice's actual expertise, has not yet turned its positioning into authority. It is still taking orders.
Test Four: Is the Positioning Defendable
The last test asks whether a positioning has held up over time. Some tightening is normal and even healthy as a market shifts or as expertise deepens. What is worth watching for is a positioning that looks unconvincing on a second look, two years in, not because the market moved but because the original commitment was thin: a shotgun aimed at a broad market rather than a rifle aimed at a specific one.
A defendable positioning survives new entrants nibbling at the edges, because the depth behind it cannot be replicated by a website refresh. A weak one erodes the moment a cheaper, faster-talking competitor shows up making similar claims. If a two-year-old positioning statement no longer feels compelling, the honest diagnosis is usually one of two things: the expertise underneath was never as deep as the pitch suggested, or the practitioner never had the nerve to commit to it fully.
PRACTITIONER CHECKLIST
Are you building pattern recognition faster with each new client, or relearning the basics every time? Has your positioning earned a price premium over generalist ORM rates, or are you still trading hours for dollars? Do you set scope and terms with clients, or absorb whatever gets asked of you to keep the engagement? Looking back two years, does the positioning still feel sharp, or does it read as a shotgun aimed at a broad market?
Back-Test Before You Rebuild
Positioning is not a decision made once and then forgotten. Those who back-test honestly, on a real eighteen-to-twenty-four-month schedule, catch drift while it is still cheap to correct. Those who wait for a slow year to force the question usually find the answer has been sitting there for a while, unexamined.
Run the five pre-tests before committing to a niche. Run these four back-tests once the positioning has had time to meet the market. Between the two, a practice knows not just what it claims to be, but whether that claim is actually true.