I’ve watched hundreds of coaches attempt to find their niche over the past eight years. Most get it spectacularly wrong, and they don’t even realise it.
For example, last week, a coach told me her niche was women in transition. She’d spent months creating content for this audience and couldn’t understand why no one was enquiring about her services. When I asked her what ‘women in transition’ meant, she told me that she was interested in coaching women who were navigating any type of transition – career, personal etc. When I asked her who these women are, she looked blank.
Another coach proudly announced he’d found his sweet spot helping leaders with communication challenges. He’d been networking for a year, attending every leadership event he could find, and was baffled by his lack of traction.
Both coaches thought they’d done the niche work but both were invisible in the real world. Other coaches understood what they meant, ordinary people (i.e. non-coaches) had no idea.
Mistake 1: Confusing Demographics with Markets
Women in transition isn’t a niche, it’s a demographic experiencing a vague life phase. What I mean by that is that, for example, you can’t search LinkedIn for these people. Also, they don’t gather anywhere specific and they don’t read the same publications or face the same daily challenges. The reason that this matters, is that we can’t market to the whole world, because quite simply, they can’t hear us. Let me explain…
A teacher going through divorce faces completely different pressures than a solicitor returning from maternity leave. Grouping them together because they’re both women in transition isn’t helpful. Both of these women could benefit from coaching, but they would need to hear completely different things to understand why.
Yet coaches lump these different groups together constantly. They pick age ranges, gender categories, or life stages and wonder why their marketing doesn’t work. The problem they have is that demographics don’t buy coaching, people with urgent, expensive problems buy coaching.
Mistake 2: Choosing Problems Without Professional Context
Communication challenges sounds like a solid coaching niche until you realise it means nothing without context. How a newly promoted engineering manager struggles with communication is completely different from how a creative director struggles with it.
The engineering manager needs to translate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders while establishing authority with former peers. The creative director needs to present ideas to budget-conscious clients while managing creative team expectations.
Although it appears to be the same problem category, in different contexts they are entirely different challenges requiring different understanding and different solutions. Both the engineering manager and the creative director could benefit from coaching (I believe everyone could benefit from coaching), but they would need to hear something completely different to understand why they might want coaching.
Mistake 3: Thinking Casting Your Net Wide Is Better
Many (most?) coaches resist getting specific because they think casting one’s net wide means more opportunities. We’d rather appeal to anyone who wants confidence than newly promoted clinical leads struggling with staff performance conversations, because the former appears to present more opportunities than the latter.
This thinking is backwards. The broader our target, the less compelling our message becomes. When we try to speak to everyone, we speak to no one effectively.
Meanwhile, the coach who focuses on clinical leads knows exactly where to find these people, what language they use, what keeps them awake at night, and what publications they read. Specificity creates findability – or to put it plainly, when you know WHO they are, you know WHERE they are.
What Actually Works
The most successful coaches I work with follow a deceptively simple framework. They identify the intersection where specific professional groups meet specific challenges.
- Not just lawyers, but newly qualified solicitors in mid-tier commercial firms struggling with client relationship management after promotion from trainee level.
- Not just managers, but retail store managers in multi-site chains dealing with head office pressure while managing front-line staff performance.
- Not just women, but female police officers approaching retirement who need to rebuild personal identity outside the force.
Each intersection represents people you can find, language you can speak, and problems urgent enough to justify coaching investment.
The ‘Shame Factor’
Potential clients won’t publicly engage with content about their struggles. The newly promoted manager won’t comment this is exactly my problem! on your LinkedIn post about leadership challenges.
However they’ll save your content privately, view your profile, and eventually send a direct message saying they’ve been following your work and would like to talk. The shame element attached to coaching challenges means success looks different than you expect.
Why Most Coaches Never Commit
Even coaches who understand niching intellectually still resist committing. They hedge with phrases like “I specialise in” or “I focus mainly on” instead of clearly stating “I work with.”
They worry about missing opportunities, but they’re not getting opportunities anyway. They fear being wrong about their niche choice, but being specifically wrong is more useful than being vaguely right.
The coaches who build successful practices aren’t the ones with perfect niches. They’re the ones who commit to testing specific intersections long enough to build recognition and trust.
The Real Work Starts Here
Finding your profitable niche isn’t about following your passion or thinking about who you’d like to help. It’s systematic work that requires understanding your credible audiences, identifying commercially viable problems, and creating intersections specific enough to market effectively.
My new book “The Intersection” walks through this complete process with frameworks, examples, and reflection questions designed to move you from analysis to action. It’s not theory about why niching matters, but practical methodology for how to actually do it.
Because the difference between coaches who struggle and coaches who thrive isn’t talent or qualifications. It’s the willingness to get uncomfortably specific about who they serve and what problem they solve.
And then stay specific long enough to build something real.