Helping everyone sounds great, right?
And I’m pretty sure that that special thing you do would help lots of different people.
How could you possibly choose a niche and narrow down?
So here are three big reasons to niche:
1. Helping everyone means that you cannot say no to anybody’s problem. It makes you potentially responsible for EVERYTHING.
How’s that for a good night’s sleep?
I don’t know about you, but one of the things that helps me sleep is knowing that I got things done and that I don’t have a long long list of things that still need doing.
If you try to help everyone, then your to-do lists will become endless. There is always something more that you could or should be doing for someone out there who deserves help.
Do you see how that list could get really long?
When you niche, you decide: I help this group and if a different group comes a-knockin’ I can refer them to another professional who is specialised in helping them.
It doesn’t mean you have to be a meany, slam the door in someone’s face and yell “boo-hoo!”.
2. You don’t build expertise if you don’t focus.
Yes, I get that what you are doing is an expertise in and of itself, yet, it will become even more of an expertise when it’s what you do for a very specific group of people or a very specific kind of sub-problem (or both).
When you niche, you will no longer give people generic advice that works “in general”. Instead, you’ll become intimately acquainted with the very specific struggles and hang-ups of your very specific group of clients. Over time, you will stand out more and more in the sea of practioners who are doing what you used to do once: help everyone.
The good news? Literally the only thing you need to do to become an expert is choose (and stick with your choice). As you work with more and more clients on a very specific issue, you will become an expert on that specific issue. Nothing beats experience, and if you niche, you’ll have a LOT of experience in a few short years.
To become an expert, all you need to do is choose what to focus on and stick with it.
Click to tweet3. A clear focus (niche) helps you to organise your business.
You’ll be able to create all kinds of very handy templates / cheat sheets / exercises / payment solutions and what have you not that make sense for those people that you help.
This means: less overwhelm. It means you can do your work a few different ways, instead of a million different ways depending on who comes a-knocking.
P.S. Are you struggling to get specific and say no to some people that you could in theory help?
The good news is, when people outside your chosen niche come a-knockin’, you don’t have to turn them away.
If you run a cat salon, you may still choose to wash and dry the occasional poodle. You just won’t have any doggie snacks, because you run a cat salon, and you won’t invest in doggie snacks, because you are not aiming to get more dogs into your salon. See the difference?
When you promote yourself as welcoming all animals, then your salon needs to be big enough for giraffes, the floor sturdy enough for elephants, you need a machine for cleaning bird poo, and on and on.
If you just work with cats, you only need to be set up for cats. If the occasional giraffe doesn’t mind squeezing into a tiny bath because they love your tender love and care… that’s absolutely fine.
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