By: Halden Reed – interviewer & journalist covering business, entrepreneurship, and finance
Conventional wisdom in professional services favours specialisation. Royston G King has advised more than 1,000 clients across over 100 industries. Here he explains what that breadth revealed, and where he thinks the generalist position genuinely costs him.
Royston G King did not set out to build a generalist practice. He has said the breadth arrived because the problems he works on appear everywhere, and demand followed.
King began working in digital marketing while studying business administration at the University of Southern California, and founded his own firm in 2018. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Monaco list and works with clients across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Australia. The exposure, he argues, produced a kind of knowledge sector specialists cannot easily acquire.
“A specialist sees their industry’s version of a problem a thousand times and gets very good at it,” said Royston G King. “What they cannot see is which parts of that problem are about their industry and which parts are just how businesses work. You only find that out by watching the same thing happen in a hundred places that have nothing to do with each other.”
He has given a specific example. The sequence by which a growing company begins to deteriorate is, in his account, remarkably consistent across sectors even though the surface details differ completely. A restaurant, a medical practice, and a software company follow the same path, involving a period of growth that outpaces the systems supporting it, then a decline in consistency, then customers noticing. The industry determines what the symptoms look like. It does not determine the sequence.
“Once you have seen that arc enough times, you stop being surprised by the specifics,” said Royston G King. “Somebody describes a situation that feels unique to them, and it is the fourth version of it I have seen that quarter, in four unrelated businesses. That is not cynicism. It is genuinely useful, because it means the response is already partly known.”
“You only find that out by watching the same thing happen in a hundred places that have nothing to do with each other.” Royston G King
King has been direct about the costs of the position. A practice without sector concentration cannot rely on referral networks inside an industry, which are among the cheapest sources of new business available. It cannot claim the narrow expertise some buyers require before they will engage. And it has to resist applying a single method uniformly, which is the failure that gives generalists their poor reputation.
His answer to the last point is a distinction between diagnosis and treatment.
“Generalize the diagnosis, specialize the response,” said Royston G King. “That gets you most of both positions. It also takes more discipline than picking one, because the lazy version is to notice the pattern and then assume the fix is identical too. It usually is not. The platforms are different, the regulations are different, the buyers behave differently.”
He has said breadth has become more valuable as visibility has shifted from search engine optimization toward AI-driven discovery. The transition is affecting every sector but at different speeds, and watching it unfold across a hundred industries at once gives an earlier read on where it is heading than observing it in one.
King has also applied his own methods to his own channels, which he reports at more than 15 million followers with over a billion views and over a billion views, describing that as a testing ground that produces unfiltered feedback in a way client work cannot, since there is nobody to negotiate about the interpretation of a result.
Asked about the Forbes 30 Under 30 Monaco recognition, King has tended to redirect toward the operating systems underneath his work, which he considers the more substantial part of the story. His position on specialization follows similar reasoning. The standard argument treats depth and breadth as a straightforward trade, when in his experience they produce different kinds of knowledge that answer different questions, and a founder should be clear about which question they are asking before deciding which one they need.
