#35: The problem with having a niche.
It's a bit niche, isn't it?
This post is both for my free and paid subscribers!
Over the last 13 and a half months, you’ve received missives that have gone through all manner of career and life tips, guidance, and ideas.
I’ve covered what to put in your CV to make it stand out - and what not to include, how to prepare for and nail interviews, mental health stories and how to reframe negativity, ambition, how to make the next big step… and all sorts more. Quite a lot of variety.
Not very niche, but, they’re problems and challenges that you’ll more than likely face at some point so hopefully the right article will find you at the right time.
This edition is about niching, and is mostly designed for people who work for themselves, who are considering working for themselves, or who think they want to make themselves invaluable by being the niche expert at work.
You see, all the gurus would have you believe that niching down (and down, and down) is where the real fruits of your labour can be found.
The riches. And if you’re American, that rhymes with niches.
I had some great opportunities these last couple of years to niche down much further but decided to hold my horses and pause. And I’ve expanded and contracted and expanded again, but feel settled for the time being.
Before my CV writing business even got going (I’m talking about week two, with about three clients in the bag) I decided I was going to start marketing a second service—arguably the opposite(ish) of CV writing—job description writing.
I did the same amount of LinkedIn promo, I created an offer in PeoplePerHour.com and waited. And in all the months on end that I had that offer open, I had one single solitary client. They received the best service imaginable.
Writing JDs was one of my special skills when I was employed, you see.
But the product line bombed. Perhaps it was too cheap.
Selling B2B was a completely different animal to B2C.
I opened up an interview coaching service. Now, that took off.
Obviously complementing CV writing, many clients took the CV service, found me great to work with *beats chest in celebration* and then wanted to work with me some more.
Time rolled by and I realised there were lots of potential niches I could follow. I could work exclusively with Supply Chain people, as I’d worked with lots of those. Automotive sector people. Process Improvement people. Operations Directors. Sales Directors. COOs. CTOs. Yaddy yaddy yaddy.
But I paused.
And I remembered one of the reasons I started doing this work.
Variety.
If I was only working with Operations Directors and COOs every day, I’d get bored. Bored of writing about business transformations, change projects, M&A….
And besides I could write about that with MDs, IT consultants, and more, anyway. There’s a lot of cross over.
So I decided NOT to niche down any further. But what I could do was build a followership on LinkedIn made up of those groups—and then write a mix of posts that were aimed at everyone and others aimed directly at those groups.
Speaking their language, demonstrating authority in their niche… etc.
Not being all things to all people, a Jack of all trades. But a specialist in my niche sorting out their niche problems.
And that’s what makes it super interesting, as I have been able to build up a ton of case studies from all sectors, and all roles, where I’ve picked up knowledge and ideas and points of view that I can then share with new clients.
And here’s the second key thing I wanted to achieve when I started working for myself.
Learning.
It’s so enriching to develop knowledge and experience in other people’s worlds, AND have the ability to ask the dumb questions simply because I don’t know that world intimately. And that can be incredibly powerful.
And asking the questions other people do not ask means the person it’s aimed at is forced to think and see things from a new, different perspective.
And that makes them come up with new answers, options, and opportunties.
Win-win.
And that enables me to serve people better. Help them in ways neither of us had considered before.
Helping people.
Helping people was the third thing I wanted out of working for myself. Part of my reason to be. And that sense only continues to grow, and it isn’t dependent on whether that person is in operations leadership or in the automotive sector.
Because actually the niche problems they all face are… the same. That’s the niche.
They all feel undervalued, unfulfilled, overworked, underpaid.
They all feel there’s more out there, and take it from me, there really is.
There were other things I wanted to get out of working for myself, like being able to exercise creativity, have more control over my work, more freedom, more time… but I can talk about those another time.
So when you start to think about niching, take a step back and consider the problems you solve at different levels of abstraction as well as why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first place.
These should be the stars you follow.
Not some guru who tells you to niche.
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See you next time,
Phil
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