Why We Chose Not to Be Niche
“What industry does PinPoint focus in?”
Oh, such a great question. One that we got asked just last week, and the week before, and probably once a week for many many weeks before that. So why not take this opportunity to answer it for all of you here!
And it’s such a good one – especially when PinPoint’s entire being is helping companies identify who they serve. But the answer to this question isn’t as straightforward as just ‘healthcare!’, or ‘the financial industry!’, or ‘hospitality!’ (even though, maybe, sometimes we wish it were that simple). But it’s because if we did have a niche in just one industry, we wouldn’t be doing our job.
In a past life, our co-founders worked squarely in sports & entertainment and what they found was, while yes they became extreme experts in the sports & entertainment experience, the truth is a ‘fan’ is also a banking customer, also a fast casual restaurant guest, also a caretaker of older relatives, and the list goes on. So when we isolate our work in a single industry, we miss out on understanding a ‘fan’ as a whole human.
When PinPoint was founded, we promised never to get to a point where 50% or more of our pipeline was devoted to a single industry. By design, we chose to be evangelists for the process instead of an extreme expert in any industry. We intentionally decided to focus on the human, rather than the business, so that we could most authentically solve for needs versus getting caught up in entrenched beliefs and organizational assumptions.
Most importantly, we chose not to live within a niche business so that our learnings could translate across industry lines, and ultimately across our clients. We knew true innovation didn’t happen by ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, it happens when a tidbit coming from an over the road trucker can impact the learning experience of a kiddo in a K-12 classroom.
So here we are, five years into that ‘experiment’, and more than ever proud to say ‘we’re not an expert in any industry’. It’s because we’re experts in humans… and also in becoming sponges quickly absorbing the ins and outs of many businesses we are thrown into. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Today, we work on 2-4 different projects at any given time. As we write this, our team members are having simultaneous conversations with research participants about selecting after school activities for their kids and defining what ‘disruption’ means for a convention center. And when those team members come together, without failure, there is always a shared learning that somehow, some way, impacts the other project for the better. This cross pollination of industry insights means we, as researchers, end up asking smarter questions, it means our clients have a better understanding of their customer’s entire livelihood, it means the business opportunities our team identifies become that much richer and relevant as PinPoint gets older.
So, the short of it is, don’t box yourself in. When you let those walls come down, that’s where the real innovation happens. Whether you’re looking to stop following the herd, you’re already on the ‘groundbreaking’ bandwagon, or just looking to chat about what it means to be human today – you know we’re always down for a coffee talk!