Your Niche may be limiting You

How you identify yourself is the lens through which you will make decisions, dream, and interact with others.

In my experience, how I see myself has been the biggest driver of my successes (confidence) and the largest cause of falling short of a goal (throwing the game).

As part of onboarding the talented Hayley of @afterwordsstudio into Your Big Shift this week, I went down a thought rabbit hole around the connection between your niche as a business owner and your identity.

For example, imagine you meet a new person, and they ask you, “What do you do?” My bet is your answer will be some version of:

“I am a ______ who does _______ for _________”.

May I present to you my triangle framework for niches:

A good niche depends on what phase your business is at. When you’re just starting out, a descriptor for 1-2 of the 3 is enough to give you flexibility while figuring out “what you want to be when you grow up”.

As you get more specific, move up the expert curve, and build your authority/reputation you’ll focus further on a niche by adding a 2nd/3rd qualifier from the triangle. Because the more specific you are the more you can charge (sorry I don’t make the rules 🤷‍♂️).

But why does this matter?

Choosing the wrong niche can make your life harder rather than easier…

Let’s go back to Hayley - she’s loosely labeled herself as a designer for years. And one of the big questions she had when she approached us about coaching was feeling lost with content. And digging a little deeper we heard statements like:

• “designers post ____ content, and that drains me to create”

• “I don’t know any designers that do ____”

She’d outgrown a niche that originally was helpful. Over time it had turned into a limiter for her as her business had evolved.

Okay, so what are the options for a niche?

If we go back to the “what do you do” question each blank corresponds to a type of niche:

• “I am a ______” = A functional niche

  • What you do, or general category of skills

  • Ex: photographer, bookkeeper, designer, etc

  • This is good when you’re starting out or if you love doing one specific thing

• “Who does ______” = A process niche

  • What’s the area or processes that you help clients with

  • Ex: Sales, marketing, offer development, automations, etc

  • Allows you to bundle multiple different skills together to solve specific problems

• “For ______” = A customer niche

  • Who are the people that relate most to what you do that need your help

  • Ex: female online service providers, new moms coming back to work, brick & mortar businesses with no online presence, etc.

  • This is truly powerful when in combination to one of the other two niches. The more specific the more relatable you can be to those customers.

As we’ve grown and evolved in our own business we’ve changed our label of niche a couple of times. Each time it felt scary & freeing at the same time, but looking back it was worth it to get to a place where we’re able to show up as ourselves and make the most impact for our clients.

What do you do for work? Hit reply I’d love to know you answer that question when you introduce yourself.

Lyndon

PS If you’re interested in support going through a big shift or creating new offers, we have 1 spot left in this round of Your Big Shift ⚡️

Lyndon’s thoughts on something in the news

Yesterday this broke and these were the excerpts I sent to Jo that I found most interesting:

This is fascinating to me, because LVMH tried something with the Olympics this summer - doing a massive sponsorship 150 million euros to feature many of the 75 luxury brands they own heavily at the Olympics.

Clearly it worked amazingly well, they took their insights, created a playbook (made it repeatable) and now they’re running a very similar playbook with a $1 billion+ sponsorship over 10 years.

Something Jo & I have been talking about for over a year now when it comes to offers is this trend that customers (aka the F1) are becoming more interested in fewer, bigger offers that solve multiple things at once. From the customer (F1) point of view they could either sign 10-20 individual sponsorship deals…or just one big mega deal that makes their lives easier.

Some of our customers are the same way; they’d rather pay 1 service provider (much) more money to do more rather than piecing together multiple smaller service providers to solve their problems.

Which raises the question: what would your “bigger” offer look like if you doubled the number of problems you were solving for your clients?

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