The invisible practice problem: generic positioning is killing your growth

Most financial advice practices are building their brand the same way. A professional website. A LinkedIn page updated sporadically. A tagline that sounds like every other firm on the street.  

Finding an advice niche and owning it is what separates the practices that grow from the ones that stay invisible. And then they wonder why growth is slow. 

Drew Meredith, partner at Wattle Partners, has lived through that trap and come out the other side. His message to advisers is direct: trying to be all things to all people is not a strategy. It is a way of being forgettable. 

“A lot of groups have taken the historical and traditional view that they should be all things to all people,” Meredith says. “Casting the net as wide as possible has been a typical and standard approach.” 

The problem is that a wide net catches nothing distinctive. In a market where Australians are actively searching for advice and the pool of licensed advisers is shrinking, the practices that win are the ones that stand for something specific.  

That means isolating a niche, getting clear on the message and being consistent enough that the right clients find you rather than the other way around. 

Own your niche or own nothing 

Niching is not just good philosophy. It is smart business. When a practice defines its ideal client clearly, every piece of content, every referral conversation and every first meeting become more efficient. The marketing funnel stops being a leaky bucket and starts working as it should. 

Meredith’s own journey at Wattle Partners reflects this. Rather than positioning as a generalist wealth firm, the practice has been deliberate about who it serves and how it communicates that to the market. The result is a clearer brand, stronger referral quality and a client base that genuinely resonates with the firm’s culture and approach. 

There are so many Australians looking for advice and there is a shrinking pool of advisers to give it. The opportunity is real. The question is whether a practice is positioned to capture it. 

Start before you are ready 

Meredith is direct about execution. Too many practices spend months perfecting their brand strategy before they publish anything, post anything or put themselves out there in any meaningful way. 

“People spend too much time trying to look at the whole marketing funnel and go, we’ve got to perfect everything before we start,” he says. “But then you’ve wasted three months just sitting in the boardroom going through your ideas.” 

His advice is to start at 80 per cent. A presence that is mostly right and actively publishing is worth more than a perfect strategy that never launches. Brands are built through consistency and repetition, not through a single polished campaign. Get something out there, own one channel completely and evolve from there. 

“It’s better to absolutely own one channel and do it really well than to half-heartedly do five different ones,” he says. 

For advisers, that one channel might be LinkedIn, a regular email newsletter, a short video series or a podcast. The medium matters less than the commitment. Showing up consistently in a defined space builds recognition faster than spreading effort thin across every platform. 

What AI means for advice brands 

No conversation about marketing today is complete without addressing artificial intelligence, and Meredith does not shy away from it. 

His view is that AI is not replacing brand. It is making brand more important. As AI-generated content floods every channel, the practices that cut through will be the ones with a clear, authentic voice that cannot be replicated by a language model. 

“Brand and positioning are your anchor point on everything. We’re going to have a world where the AI-generated component provides frequency, but the authentic, real, personal content is what builds trust.” 

The implication for advisers is that filming yourself, writing in your own voice and sharing genuine perspectives on the market and on client situations is not just nice to have. It is a competitive advantage.  

Raw and honest outperforms polished and generic when the audience is deciding who to trust with their financial life. 

Meredith sees the stretch between authentic human content and AI-assisted scale as the defining creative challenge for advice practices right now. The answer is not to choose one or the other. It is to use AI for frequency and reach while keeping the human, personal content at the centre of the brand. 

The advice practices that grow are not the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They are the ones that know who they are, say it clearly and show up consistently.