Choosing means losing. Or does it?

A web designer from Kortrijk put it well at a recent networking evening. When he started out, his website said he made "everything for everyone": websites, logos, print, social media. Three years later he had narrowed his offering to one thing (web shops for food producers) and was earning more from fewer clients. "I thought choosing would cost me customers," he said. "The opposite turned out to be true."

His experience is not an anecdotal exception but a pattern the economic literature has described for decades. Yet the broad approach remains stubbornly popular among Belgian founders. Anyone browsing CBE registrations sees a striking number of businesses with a fan of NACE codes: consultancy and web design and coaching and rental. The reasoning is understandable, since more activities appear to mean more opportunities, but economically it is usually a mistake.

The invisible cost of not choosing

The heart of the problem is opportunity cost: every euro and every hour spent on activity A cannot go to activity B. For a self-employed person, whose main means of production is their own time, that cost weighs heavier than for a large company. Anyone offering five services builds real depth in none of them. The learning curve, the mechanism by which you become faster and better with each assignment, gets cut five times over.

On top of that comes the Pareto principle. In virtually every service portfolio it turns out afterwards that a minority of activities generates the bulk of the profit, while the rest mainly absorbs time. The problem: as long as you do not measure, you do not see it. Many self-employed people know their revenue per client but not their margin per activity, and therefore keep loss-making services alive for years because they "still bring in revenue".

What Porter and Kim have to say

Michael Porter summed it up in 1996 in a sentence that has appeared in every strategy textbook since: the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. His argument is not moral but mechanical. A company that does everything cannot possibly excel operationally at everything, and therefore ends up competing purely on price. A company that picks a clear position (the cheapest, the fastest, the most specialised) builds activities that reinforce one another and that competitors find hard to copy.

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne added a second dimension with their Blue Ocean Strategy: the best positioning is sometimes not a better spot in the existing market, but a place where no market exists yet. For Belgian SMEs that sounds abstract, but it happens constantly on a small scale. The accountant who serves only podcast makers. The joiner who does nothing but heritage renovations. The dietitian for shift workers. Every time the same mechanism applies: a niche so specific that you become the obvious choice, instead of one option among a hundred.

Behaviourally, something is also at play on the customer's side. Barry Schwartz described in The Paradox of Choice how an abundance of options leads not to better decisions but to postponed ones. A provider who does "everything" forces the client to work out for themselves whether he is the right fit. A specialist removes that doubt.

The Belgian reality: small country, crowded markets

According to the RSVZ, Belgium now counts more than 1.3 million self-employed people, and 2025 added 129,414 new starters, a record. The most popular starter activities have been the same for years: consultant, trainer, renovation specialist, software developer. Anyone starting today as a "general consultant" is stepping into one of the most densely populated markets in the country.

That is precisely why positioning is not a luxury for a Belgian founder but a survival condition. The home market is small; broad players quickly run into large established names. A niche, by contrast, can work surprisingly well in a small country, because a handful of loyal clients already makes for a viable practice, and because word of mouth travels fast in dense networks like the Flemish SME world.

Common mistakes

The first mistake is postponing the choice "until there are enough clients". In practice that moment never arrives, because a broad offering never builds the reputation that attracts clients. The second is choosing a niche based on personal preference rather than willingness to pay: an audience you find likeable but that has no budget is not a niche, it is a hobby. The third is confusing focus with rigidity. Choosing does not mean never adjusting again; it means testing deliberately, measuring, and only then shifting, rather than doing everything half well at once.

What to do concretely

Start with a simple exercise: list your activities over the past year and estimate the hours spent and margin realised for each. The result is almost always sobering. Then choose one customer segment for which you demonstrably add value, and formulate your offering in one sentence that segment recognises. Test that positioning for three to six months before making it permanent, and during that period dare to decline or refer on assignments outside the focus, the hardest but most instructive step.

Anyone drawing up a financial plan does well to place scenarios side by side: what does focusing mean for revenue, margin and workload in year one and year three? Tools such as Finny let you run those scenarios without building a spreadsheet yourself, so the choice rests on figures rather than gut feeling.

Choosing means losing, the saying goes, and in the short term that is accurate. You lose the illusion that every client is a potential client. But the economic logic, from opportunity cost to Porter, points in the same direction: those who do not choose are chosen by the market, usually for the assignments nobody else wants. The question for every founder is therefore not whether you will specialise, but whether you will do it deliberately or under duress, after years of fragmentation. The web designer from Kortrijk needed three years. It can be done faster.

Sources: RSVZ annual figures 2025; Xerius starter analysis 2025; M. Porter, "What Is Strategy?" (HBR, 1996); W.C. Kim & R. Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy; B. Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice.