If your company's pitch starts with "we do networking, security, cloud, and unified communications," I have bad news. You don't have a specialty. You have a list. And nobody is buying a list anymore.

The generalist VAR model worked when technology was complicated enough that customers needed someone to make sense of the catalog. When picking a phone system required a site survey, a project manager, and a six-month implementation, the generalist who could do it all was valuable. They were the general contractor of IT.

That world is gone. Phone systems are SaaS. Security is platformized. Cloud migrations have playbooks. The complexity moved from "can you do this?" to "how well do you do this specific thing?" And generalists, by definition, don't do any specific thing particularly well.

The VARs growing right now are the ones who picked a lane and went deep. Security-only practices. Microsoft-only shops. Healthcare IT specialists who know HIPAA compliance cold. They don't compete on breadth. They compete on depth. And depth wins because the customer's alternative isn't another generalist — it's a vendor selling direct with an AI-powered sales motion that doesn't need a middleman.

Here's the math. A generalist VAR with $5M in revenue across four practice areas has roughly $1.25M per practice. That's not enough to attract top talent in any of them. Not enough to invest in the certifications that unlock the best vendor tiers. Not enough to build real IP or repeatable processes. You end up with a team of decent people who are okay at several things and excellent at nothing.

Meanwhile, the specialized competitor has $5M in one practice. They have the best engineers. They have the highest vendor tier. They have case studies that make their proposals close themselves. The customer calls them first because they're known for one thing, and that one thing is exactly what the customer needs.

I give the generalist VAR model 18 months. Not because every generalist will go under. Some will survive on relationships and inertia. But the market is moving toward specialization so aggressively that the generalist will become the channel's version of the department store — still open, technically, but not where anyone goes on purpose.

Pick your lane. Go deep. Let everything else go. It feels like you're shrinking. You're not. You're focusing. And focus is the only competitive advantage that scales.