Is It Better to Be a Generalist or a Specialist?

The world is full of truly unique people, each with their own areas in which they can become a specialist for the benefit of others around them. 

However, when you’re starting out in business and have what you’d consider to be a great idea, is it best to remain a specialist in your chosen area, or to attempt to branch out and, therefore, give yourself the opportunity to generate more revenue? 

We live in an age where we have unlimited access to pretty much everything imaginable, and as entrepreneurs it can be highly tempting to want to learn all of the things and become an expert in all of them in order to benefit the success of your business.  

It might be that you feel as though becoming an expert in many fields will be of benefit to you and your career. In some ways, it’s not wrong to think that having some knowledge of several areas will likely set you aside from the crowd, as well you having that added gratification of having learned something new. 

However, there are several reasons why it’s often good, and not self-limiting to become a hyper specialist in your field. Here are some of them.

You get to become an expert in your field or sample from around the globe 

The more you invest in your knowledge the better, so when it comes down to you focusing your attention on learning, and continuing to develop knowledge about a specific area or two, you soon become an expert. 

Let’s take the restaurant industry as an example, here. On the high street, there are going to be several restaurants that offer the same cuisine according to what is most popular around that time. For example, Thai, Chinese, Italian, Turkish. There may be one of each locally to you where yourself, your friends, and family may dine in depending on whom you are with at the time. You are the customers who have sought a specific type of food at a particular time, and you can attend, expecting to be able to eat a meal and be satisfied with the taste and the level of service. This is their specialism. 

However, two doors down from your small, locally owned Chinese restaurant is a world foods buffet offering the ‘all you can eat’ model. You go to different stations, carefully selecting samples of dishes from around the globe onto your plate, and your ‘challenge accepted’ mentality sneaks in and you may find yourself taking a little more of something according to your liking. The food quality may not match up to your local Chinese restaurant, but they have a greater chance of catering to a larger group of people with a range of tastes–all of whom are likely to find something they enjoy eating. 

But being a generalist isn’t all bad. Let’s move onto another business model: Marketing. Small business owners, unless they are specifically skilled in that area, are going to need to work alongside companies who specialise in marketing. As anybody who works in marketing knows–you can be both a specialist and a generalist in the world of marketing, too. 

Some people will work specifically in web design, leaving filling their designs with content to others. In the same way, another company may specialise in writing engaging content for business websites that will help to drive web traffic towards their website.

You can be both specialist and generalist in both of these areas. Say, for example, that you’re a web designer who only designs websites for e-commerce sites, or you’re a copywriter whose portfolio only includes product descriptions for the same ecommerce sites selling niche items like inflatable globes for big venues. 

Neither of these things are bad, but they are, however, somewhat limiting.
This is where diversifying your skillset will lead to the growth of your business. 

So as a copywriter, maybe you could learn how to write blog posts for bloggers, or use your SEO skills to help drive business towards a dental practice looking to register new patients. 

Your web design skills could be used to build a website for the dental practice to make it easy to navigate and for potential patients to gather all of the information they need before registering. 

Diversity, but don’t disintegrate

The key to deciding whether it is better to be a generalist or a specialist is to look carefully at what you have to offer. 

Looking back at the example of the copywriter who writes product descriptions. While their descriptions may help companies lead potential customers to make a purchase, there is only so much scope for growth to do the same thing over and over again all the time. 

In the same way for the web designer’s e-commerce specialism. If their customer base is small, they’re only going to be able to sell once or twice to the same customer. On both counts, this is why it is important to diversify what it is you do. 

For the Chinese restaurant owners, that may involve offering ‘limited time only’ menu items from a different cuisine to branch out a little. Maybe the buffets could attract a customer base on different nights by offering different types of cuisine on different evenings to that they attract a different crowd.

When diversifying, it is possible to lose your specialist focus and disintegrating into ‘jack of all trades’ territory. It’s important to try not to do that, because as well as finding yourself spread too thin, you also have to compete with a number of other businesses who may offer similar services as yours. 

When thinking about becoming a generalist, you must first consider the quality aspect of what you offer to potential customers. Make sure that what you offer makes sense. For example- a web designer with added copywriting service, as opposed to the copywriter who will also walk your dog for half an hour every day. 

You want to build up a loyal customer base and find out where else they’re going for the additional things they need doing before branching out too far, or losing customers because you don’t offer enough.