Stop Swimming With Sharks! Why Most Notaries Fight in the Red Ocean, and How to Escape It

Blood in the water...

In business terms, that's called a Red Ocean, a phrase that comes from the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

A Red Ocean is a crowded market where everyone offers the same thing, competition comes down to price, margins shrink, stress climbs, and people start complaining about oversaturation.

Sound familiar?

The Red Ocean in the Notary Industry

For notaries, the Red Ocean is obvious.

It's the signing companies, the national platforms, and the low-fee order aggregators, where the whole game is being first to click and competing on speed, price, and, if we're being straight about it, desperation.

It's the low-hanging fruit, and it feels easy.

There's no prospecting, no sales, no relationship building, and no positioning. You just wait for the pings & dings from orders that are broadcast to hundreds, if not thousands, of other notaries to come in.

And because it feels easy, everyone piles in, and when everyone piles in, the market gets crowded, fees drop, and people start screaming about oversaturation.

But oversaturation isn't the actual problem.

Uniformity is.

When ten thousand notaries offer the exact same service in the exact same way to the exact same middleman, the ocean turns red. We can't keep blaming the platforms and signing companies. They do what they do.

The problem is that everyone crowded into the same lane.

And I get why. Most new notaries were never taught sales, positioning, how to create demand, or how to build a relationship with a client. So they lean on the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance is always the most crowded one.

What a Blue Ocean Actually Means

In Blue Ocean Strategy, the authors talk about creating uncontested market space.

The idea isn't to compete better, it's to compete so differently that you make the competition irrelevant.

They walk through concepts like value innovation, eliminating and reducing the assumptions an industry takes for granted, and raising or creating new factors of value, all without driving your costs through the roof.

A Blue Ocean isn't about working harder. It's about changing the game you're playing. So what does that look like for a notary entrepreneur?

The Blue Ocean Notary

A Blue Ocean notary stops asking, "How do I get more signings?" and starts asking, "How do I become indispensable to a specific group of people?"

There are five ways I see that play out.

1. Build Direct Relationships

Blue Ocean notaries go direct to the people who need them, and that list is longer than most notaries think.

It includes estate planning attorneys, senior living facilities, hospitals, rehab centers, title companies you approach directly, business owners, financial advisors, HR departments, adoption agencies, and immigration attorneys.

Instead of waiting for orders to be blasted out, they cultivate relationships.

They stay top of mind, follow up consistently, share relevant content, send referrals, make introductions, and support the growth of the people they want to work with.

The fastest way to deepen a relationship is to help someone else hit their goals, and you do that by sending referrals, making strategic introductions, sharing their content, and promoting their wins.

When you become a value multiplier for someone, you stop being a commodity and you start being a partner.

That's Blue Ocean thinking.

2. Specialize Instead of Generalize

A generalist notary is easy to replace, and a specialist is not.

If your entire identity is "I do general notary work." or, even though it does happen to be a specialty, if all you do right now are loan signings, you're in the Red Ocean by default.

But when your positioning becomes something specific, everything changes. Think about how differently these land:

• Reverse mortgage signing professional

• Apostille strategist for international business

• Mobile notary for senior care facilities

• Trust & estate signing specialist

• Medical facility documentation specialist

• Corporate compliance documentation partner

Now you're not just a notary, you're the solution to a specific problem. Specialization raises your perceived value, narrows your competition, and clarifies your marketing all at once. When you specialize, you stop chasing work and you start attracting it.

3. Raise the Standard Instead of Racing to the Bottom

Red Ocean behavior is lowering your fees, accepting anything that comes your way, saying yes to everything, rushing the appointment, cutting corners, and staying invisible.

Blue Ocean behavior looks like elevating your professionalism, investing in training, building your certifications up, getting credentialed, documenting your systems, improving how you communicate, and showing up like the CEO of your business.

When you raise the standard in a low-bar industry, you separate yourself automatically, because most people never choose to differentiate at all.

And I hate to break it to you, but we're in a low-bar industry, y'all. And this is why we're having a crisis of customer service and professionalism standards. This is the cost of a Red Ocean domination.

4. Create Demand Through Visibility

Red Ocean notaries hide, and Blue Ocean notaries make themselves visible.

They share educational content, teach their niche, speak at local groups, build a LinkedIn presence, publish articles, host workshops, and create simple guides that make their referral partners' lives easier.

They understand that visibility isn't ego, it's positioning.

When people see you teaching the topic they care about, or writing or sharing relevant articles or posts, you become the authority in that lane, and authority dissolves price competition.

5. Play the Long Game

Red Ocean thinking is transactional, always asking what today's order is.

Blue Ocean thinking is relational, asking how to build a five-year referral pipeline in your relationships.

That takes consistency, follow-up systems, a way to track your relationships, patience, and enough emotional maturity to stay the course.

It's slower at the start, but it's far more stable over time.

The Real Pitfall of the Red Ocean

Red Ocean businesses train you to think small.

You become reactive, you measure success by how many notifications you get, and you grow dependent on somebody else's marketing machine. That isn't entrepreneurship, it's subcontracting with a side of volatility.

A Blue Ocean notary takes control back and builds direct client bases, recurring relationships, strategic positioning, and multiple income streams under the notary umbrella.

With a built-up infrastructure of systems and relationships like this, the competition becomes almost irrelevant, because nobody else is serving your niche the way you are.

The Industry-Level Shift

Imagine what happens if more notaries adopt this thinking.

We'd hear fewer complaints about oversaturation, see fewer fee wars, watch professionalism climb, build stronger public trust, and give more notaries real income stability.

The notary profession doesn't have a demand problem, it has a differentiation problem.

The ocean isn't too small, too many people are just swimming in the same shallow corner of it.

The Question

So here's the question I want you to ask yourself:

Are you fighting for scraps in the Red Ocean, or are you building your own uncontested space, your very own Blue Ocean?

You don't have to abandon the signing companies tomorrow.

But you do need to start forming your own waters, and that means going direct, specializing, staying visible, thinking strategically, and leading with relationships.

That's where the Blue Oceans are discovered, and it's where high-performance notaries thrive.

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