My 10-year-old son is a sports fanatic. And it’s not just about playing every sport; it’s also about watching sports. In fact, I think he is watching a replay of the 2015 Men’s Curling World Championship as I write this.

His first love is baseball, but he has played organized soccer, paddle tennis, basketball, flag football and lacrosse, and he just wrapped up his first swim season.

But it’s become increasingly popular to specialize in a sport. Even at 10 years old.

He’s on a baseball team that plays 10 months out of the year. He’s been asked to join the year-round local swim team. And he’s also contemplated joining the traveling soccer team that plays nearly 12 months a year.

In my opinion, it’s way too early to specialize in anything, in part because I think it’s way too early in a kid’s life to decide what sport you love and want to spend all of your waking hours committed to.

(It’s kind of like asking 18-year-olds what they want to major in at college and spend the rest of their lives doing … but I digress.)

But I also think that it’s a detriment to a child’s growth not to be able to explore other things.

My personal beliefs are backed by science too. Sports specialization can have “significant negative consequences on the development of an athlete over time.”

What in the world does this have to do with private investigators?

I have often said, on this blog and elsewhere, that becoming a specialist in one thing is critical for private investigators. Being awesome at one thing is much easier to sell than being mediocre at a bunch of stuff.

But that’s not the whole story, and there are some lessons from youth sports that private investigators could learn.

Don’t Specialize Too Early

Kids who specialize too early are more frequently injured and account for 50% of overuse injuries, which lead to a higher rate of physical inactivity and account for a higher burnout rate.

Investigators don’t need to worry about getting injured so much, but if you end up specializing too early in your career, you could become too one-dimensional, less effective and, more importantly, less marketable.

Surveillance, which was the bread and butter of just about any investigative firm as recently as 10 years ago, has become a dying art. And there is a tremendously high burnout rate for surveillance investigators. It’s hard to blame them; sitting in a car for 12 hours a day and going to the bathroom in a bottle can do that to you.

I can’t tell you how many calls I have received over the past few years from surveillance investigators who are suffering from burnout but have no other marketable skills to speak of.

Better Overall Skills

Research shows that early participation in multiple sports leads to better overall motor and athletic development and an increased ability to transfer sports skills to other sports. It also leads to longer playing careers.

The simple fact of the matter is that no two cases that I have ever done are exactly alike. While having some experience in a particular area is helpful, having a broad base of knowledge of a variety of topics is an invaluable tool that can not only make you more valuable but also can lengthen your career.

Many Paths to Success

Early specialization is not the only path to stardom in sports. For every story of child prodigies like Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters, the reality is that the majority of childhood prodigies never fulfill their early promise.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers infamized the “10,000-Hour Rule,” claiming that the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill is a matter of practicing the correct way for a total of around 10,000 hours.

While it’s critical for any great investigator to put in the time, there is no direct path to success. In fact, one could argue that there are hundreds of paths to success.

Some of the best investigators I have ever come across are former district attorneys, federal prosecutors, in-house legal investigators, journalists and many investigators who have spent their whole lives in the private sector.

I’m not a perfect parent, and I’m not even close to the best investigator that I can be.

In fact, I am far from it.

But I’ve learned quite a few lessons from my kids, and I hope that they have picked up a few lessons from me too.

It’s pretty safe to say that the private investigator of the future is going to be doing business much differently than the ones who are working today. While I may not own a crystal ball, current trends point to a future that looks very different.

Here are some of my predictions.

Consolidation/Strategic Partnerships

There are a lot of lone wolves, or small investigative firms, out there. I don’t have the numbers to back this theory; this is just based on my personal experiences.

An industry dotted with solo operators can take you only so far. If this business is going to grow and thrive, there must be some consolidation.

We have already seen this in the works. In 2015, Westview Capital Partners invested in the James Mintz Group. There are some rumors swirling that there may soon be other consolidations and investments as well.

While we may not have a “Walmart of private investigations,” we may see more strategic partnerships where firms with specific skill sets can complement each other and operate independently yet cohesively to offer a wide variety of services.

More White Collar

Since Jules Kroll, founder of Kroll and the father of the modern corporate investigations industry, the private investigation business has gained more of a white-collar reputation. That trend continues today.

Why does this trend continue? In part because that is where the money is. Multinational corporations and international law firms have deep pockets and wealthy clients. Where there is money, there is opportunity.

Things such as internal investigations, strategic intelligence gathering, white-collar criminal defense, corporate criminal defense, anticorruption investigations, monitorships, corporate litigation support and reputational due diligence will continue to replace the old gumshoe work focused on cheating spouses, disability insurance claims, surveillance, workers’ compensation investigations and child custody cases.

Increased Privacy Restrictions

From the government monitoring the emails of ordinary citizens to Google tracking your every move to the legality of using drones, privacy has become a hot-button issue. If you ever have a conversation at a cocktail party about the information an investigator can obtain, you will hear equal amounts of surprise and outrage.

But as technology has become more advanced, the laws and regulations surrounding it have barely changed. My bet is that there will be federal laws drafted on the use of GPS devices to track individuals. And drone usage for things like surveillance will be illegal (don’t laugh — a Long Island, New York, private investigator and a California private investigator are already touting them).

It wouldn’t surprise me if the information that investigators can access readily (e.g., Social Security numbers, dates of birth and address histories) disappears as well.

Less Gumshoe

The stealthy quick-witted old gumshoe is a dying breed. It’s not because the information that can be obtained from “boots on the ground” isn’t valuable — it’s just not a particularly effective method of gathering information when you consider the other ways of doing things.

Like mining Facebook and Twitter for witnesses to an accident instead of spending days knocking on doors.

Or going door-to-door to conduct face-to-face interviews when you can interview someone on the phone from halfway across the country.

Or gathering details of a person’s activities by monitoring social media instead of conducting days of surveillance.

What that means is that being the “local” investigator doesn’t matter all that much.

I don’t think the old gumshoe methods of face-to-face interviews, going door-to-door looking for witnesses or conducting all-night stakeouts will ever disappear, but these methods are certainly becoming more of an afterthought rather than a go-to method of gathering information.

Technology-driven

Less gumshoe work means more technology. These days, you can find more information about a person in 10 minutes behind a computer than in days or weeks of investigation using the standard methods of as little as 15 years ago.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of data points that one can use to gather information from public records, open source intelligence and social media. As it stands today, there are a lot of manual processes that need to happen. And try finding patterns in these various data points without the help of a supercomputer.

But what if you had tools that can spit out patterns and connections from varying data sets? Like Google on steroids. That is already in the works. Memex, which was developed by the government, is effectively a search engine on steroids, which can search for things like the latitude/ longitude coordinates, embedded in photos and spot relationships

Commoditization

Every service industry has had to fight the battle of a highly specialized skill of a professional turning into another commodity. For example, web sites such as LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer have made many simple legal services like wills, trusts and contracts accessible to nearly everyone. In our industry, competition for surveillance services is based primarily on price. Background checks have become a commodity too.

Some may argue that commoditizing a professional service is doomed for failure, but that won’t stop anyone from trying to disrupt an industry. FlimFlam is a startup that just raised $1 million for an app providing on-demand private detective services.

Will the services of a private investigator turn into just another commodity? Probably not completely, but my guess is that it will likely remain a force for the foreseeable future.

The Crystal Ball

So there you have it. Six ways I think the business will change in the coming years.

What does your crystal ball tell you?

I want to give a special thanks to Renee A. Cervo of Fact Quest who asked for me to contribute a piece to the California Association of Licensed Investigators Newly Licensed Investigator Training and Education class on the “The Future of Private Investigation.”

A few weeks back, I gave an intensive two-day training course for private investigators at a New York City-based investigative firm. The course was called Gathering, Analyzing and Interpreting Internet Intelligence – Master Class (I totally stole the “Master Class” from my friend Eli Rosenblatt). It was an exhaustive look into how to gather and interpret information from open sources and public records (if you want to learn more about that, email me).

Teaching and learning are things I love to do. And I have come to learn over the years that I have a unique set of knowledge and a unique viewpoint, having worked with some of the best investigative firms in the world.

So here are a few lessons I came away with.

Education Is a Lifelong Commitment

While many states have requirements for obtaining a private investigator license (although a few states don’t have any licensing requirements), there is no standard “course” to become educated in conducting investigations, especially when it comes to searching open sources and public records, which happen to be some of the most critical sources of information for investigators these days. And very few states have any continuing education requirements.

While many private investigators are former law enforcement officers, they may not have training in gathering information without access to their old law enforcement tools. Other private investigators who enter the field come from all walks of life, with varied backgrounds and no formal training in anything.

This produces a diverse group of people with a varying knowledge base. For the end client, it creates a confusing set of standards, ethics and knowledge regarding investigative firms. Why does this background check cost $100 at one firm and $5,000 at another? Why does one firm say they can get bank records, while the other says that is not legal?

Investigators with a lack of any formal training and limited (good) resources learn through a varied system of “work by doing” and learning from colleagues, and a system of institutional knowledge is created and rarely shared. It’s a shame.

In order to stay current and relevant, you need to educate yourself.

[You can start by taking Eli Rosenblatt’s new course, Social Media & Background Investigation Master Class 2015.]

Tricks Are for Kids

There is an infectious disease in the investigative community called IANGSAS, or more commonly known as I Am Not Going to Share Any Secrets. It’s pervasive, but easily treatable.

In all seriousness, investigators like to hold things close to the vest. Sharing their “tricks” or “secrets” is akin to providing keys to the vault. While sharing investigative techniques may be more common with your own small group of colleagues, it is rarely done widely. The truth is that most tricks have been used by many investigators and are not tricks at all; they have probably been used by hundreds before you.

Tricks also get old. I was reminded of this while preparing for the training course. I had learned some “secrets” on how to hack Facebook a few months back while working on a case, only to find that Facebook had inexplicably removed those features and the secrets were completely useless.

However, a funny thing happens when you start sharing your secrets – people might share a secret or two with you. Or do you a favor when you need it most. Sharing is caring.

Understanding the Nuts and Bolts Is Critical

The nuts and bolts of conducting investigations through open sources are absolutely critical. Understanding what information you can obtain (or, more important, can’t obtain), how to get the information and where the information comes from provide a foundation for all investigators. Most investigators know how to run a name through a database, but they don’t actually know what they are searching, how the information is obtained or whether or not it’s complete or accurate.

The Science and the Art

I can teach everything I know about how I go about my investigations (the science), but the mindset of an investigator is something that is much harder to develop (the art). You can provide just about anyone with a checklist of things to do, and they will do it. But understanding and interpreting that information takes practice.

One person may look at a UCC filing with crossed eyes, while an experienced investigator may see it as a source for hidden assets (hint: check the collateral), bank relationships or possibly real estate ownership (shares in a cooperative apartment).

The collision of the art and the science is where all the magic happens.

It just takes some time, experience and training to get there.