Finding Your Ideal Client—and What It Means to Your Success

Professional services providers can enjoy significant benefits by narrowing their business model to focus on serving a select group of clients—a niche or target market that puts them “in the line of money.”

A niche-based approach can help you draw in qualified prospective clients more easily and be able to serve those clients much more cost-effectively. Perhaps most important, your clients will receive the top-shelf expertise and world-class service they are looking for.

Often, entrepreneurs and senior executives are attractive niches for service providers who want to serve the affluent. These niches tend to have the types of tax, legal and other needs that require high-level expertise and guidance. Consider some examples:

• Nearly 60% of private client lawyers in a survey by AES Nation said that successful business owners are their preferred client niche.
• What’s more, nearly 98% of the lawyers earning $1 million or more annually picked successful business owners as their preferred client type.
• Successful business owners were identified as top ideal clients by about seven out of ten—71.3%—of the accountants surveyed by AES Nation.

That said, numerous niches exist that can be highly profitable. But there’s an important step to take beyond identifying a niche market you’d like to serve—one that can make a big impact on your practice. It involves creating one or more major filters to help you work with only the most enjoyable and high-profit clients within your niche.

This will be your ideal client profile—a detailed description of the clients within your market niche who will be the foundation of your future success.

Why an ideal client profile?

An ideal client profile is used by many elite-level professionals in two main ways:

1. To accept only ideal clients. Prospects should match an ideal client profile extremely closely for them to become new clients. Adhering to a profile is often a crucial step for simplifying a practice, optimizing its profitability and enjoyment, and maximizing owners’ or partners’ chances of reaching their goals.
2. To help assess existing clients. In some firms, clients are segmented based on their profitability or potential profitability (or other factors). Having an ideal client profile helps show how to segment current clients and determine which ones to work with moving forward—and which ones might be better served by another professional. This is often an important step not only in working with the right clients but also in working with the right number of clients.

Key elements of a total client profile

To help craft your ideal client profile, consider each of the following characteristics of the clients in your target niche:

1. General description. Who are the ideal clients that you want to target within your market niche? Describe these clients in terms of their stage of life—whether working or retired—their industry and occupation, and their specific company and job. Include their marital status and education level as well as age range and any other relevant demographic characteristics.
2. Geographic location. Where will your ideal clients be located? Some professionals spread themselves too thin by pursuing too many different types of opportunities, and they make it worse by spreading their limited resources over multiple locations. The good news is that services such as Zoom can help you extend your reach virtually—potentially allowing you to serve ideal clients located in multiple geographic areas. That said, successful professionals (in our experience) tend to stay focused on one particular geographic location market per principal.
3. Financial challenges. Determine the specific financial challenges your ideal clients have that you (or your strategic partners) can effectively address. Examples of such financial challenges might include (depending on the niche and your areas of expertise) preparing a business for sale, transferring wealth to heirs with certain safeguards set up and tax mitigation planning involving illiquid overseas investments. To allow you to add the greatest value, make sure the challenges demand a high level of expertise.
4. Source of acquisition. What would be the optimal way to acquire your ideal clients? Various approaches include referrals, strategic alliances, credibility marketing and group presentations.
5. Revenue (or other financial) potential. Consider the potential revenue that certain types of clients could bring annually. This doesn’t strictly mean immediate transactions but could encompass the lifetime value of these clients. Or consider an often-overlooked financial characteristic: a client’s potential to generate referrals. Clients who actively refer others have the potential to be much more valuable than their direct financial contribution.
6. High-net-worth personality. What is the high-net-worth personality of your ideal clients? (See more on that below.) Many advisors find they work better with one particular high-net-worth personality over others. Just as important, they find that they should avoid certain other personality types.
7. Personal enjoyment. Will you enjoy working with your ideal clients? The answer here should be a resounding yes. While this would seem obvious, professional service providers often overlook the simple fact that they should enjoy the people they are working with. An important part of your ability to provide your clients with world-class service will be your skill in building close personal relationships with each client. If you don’t enjoy your clients as people, this probably won’t happen.

We recommend that you document your ideal answers for all characteristics on a single page. This will become your framework for making future decisions about which clients to serve—and when it’s in your best interest and the other person’s to just say no. Armed with this framework of whom you want to work with (and should be working with), you’ll find that pursuing only the best clients will come naturally.

Important: Over time, you may find that some elements of the profile shift as you move upmarket, as economic conditions change, as new opportunities arise or as your personal interests evolve. As they do, be sure to update your documented profile.

A closer look at HNW personalities

As noted, one way to identify an ideal client is via their high-net-worth personality. Specifically, you should understand a prospect’s personality type as well as your own type so you can determine whether you’re likely to be compatible. The following is an overview of the nine high-net-worth personalities and some of their key attributes.

Family Stewards

• Want to use their wealth to take care of their families.
• Want to relieve their family members of financial worries.
• Want to fulfill their familial obligations.

Independents

• See attention to financial and legal issues as a necessary evil.
• Want personal freedom.
• Want to have a safety net if they want to or need to bail out .

Phobics

• Hate being involved in complex decisions.
• Not at all knowledgeable about financial or legal strategies.
• Dislike discussing technical issues.

Anonymous

• Confidentiality concerning legal matters is key.
• Secretive about their financial and legal arrangements.
• Extreme privacy is essential for personal comfort.

Moguls

• Worldly success is a way of keeping score and winning.
• Desire considerable power and control over their affairs.
• Seek personal influence.

VIPs

• Success is a way to achieve high status.
• Want to be well-known and respected.
• Seek prestige.

Accumulators

• Top goal is asset accumulation.
• Want to retain wealth and add to it.
• Sole objective is to make money.

Gamblers

• Treat dealing with financial and legal matters somewhat as a hobby.
• Derive pleasure from complexity and machinations.
• Relish the problem-solving process.

Innovators

• Perceive financial and legal matters to be an intellectual challenge.
• Want to be on the cutting edge of tax planning.
• Want to employ state-of-the-art wealth management strategies and products.

You, too, have one of the personalities—and knowing your own profile can help you provide better advice to clients. Top professional service providers focus predominantly on working with those wealthy clients with whom they “click”—those with whom they share high-net-worth personalities. There is a natural affinity between providers and clients who share the same fundamental financial motivations.

Caveat: You do not necessarily need to have a particular high-net-worth personality yourself in order to serve that personality capably and profitably. A prime example of this is found with the Phobic personality. Given that you’ve chosen a career in a field that deals with financial concerns, you’re unlikely to have this personality yourself. Likewise, Moguls and VIPs often share enough in common to click.

Conclusion

As all of us take our businesses to higher levels, we are faced with decisions at every turn—decisions about how to best attract prospective clients, how best to serve them and how best to keep them for the long run.

When you do not have a clear picture of your ideal client, it’s far too easy to hesitate at every decision—wasting time, money and effort in the process. But when you know your ideal client inside and out, you are more likely to make much better decisions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This report was published by the VFO Inner Circle, a global financial concierge group working with affluent individuals and families, and is distributed with its permission. Copyright 2025 by AES Nation, LLC.