The same conversation, every single time
I’ve been running my Nail Your Niche challenge for about five years now, at least three times a year, and every single time, the coaches who show up are in exactly the same position at the start. They say the same things: “But I can coach anyone. Why would I narrow my focus? What about all the people I’ll be turning away?”
The fear of missing out is the single biggest reason coaches avoid choosing a niche. We look at the broad world of potential clients and think about all the people we could help if only we kept our options open. Choosing a specific group feels like slamming doors shut on opportunities that might otherwise come our way.
If those opportunities existed, they’d already be here
But here’s what I’ve observed after nearly nine years of working with coaches on this – the opportunities we’re frightened of missing out on are theoretical. If those opportunities actually existed, we’d already have them, but they’re not. The coaches who come to us with this fear typically have few or very few private clients who are paying a professional rate. They’re certainly not turning clients away because they’re too busy. They’re hoping people will somehow find them, and nobody is finding them because their marketing doesn’t speak to anyone in particular.
What’s actually happening is that coaches are protecting theoretical opportunities at the expense of real ones. Every day spent avoiding the niche decision is another day of vague marketing that doesn’t work. Every week of “I help people going through change” is another week of being indistinguishable from thousands of other coaches saying exactly the same thing.
Specificity creates opportunity
The specificity that feels restrictive is what actually creates opportunities. When you say something specific about a specific group of people facing a specific challenge, that group pays attention. When you say something vague about everyone, nobody does. We don’t need to appeal to everyone. We need to appeal strongly to the right people, and the right people can only recognise themselves in our marketing if our marketing is specific enough for them to see themselves in it.
Now, there are coaches who build successful businesses without apparently niching. They tend to be the ones who already had extensive networks from stellar careers, networks full of people who know what coaching is and who hold budgets to commission it. These coaches think they don’t need a niche, but they already have one – it’s their existing network. If that’s not you, and for most coaches it isn’t, then you need a different route to finding clients, and that route starts with getting specific.
A niche isn’t a cage
The fact is that choosing a niche doesn’t mean we can never coach anyone outside it. It means we don’t market to anyone outside it. If someone outside our niche asks us to coach them, we’re free to say yes. But our marketing, our content, our positioning all speak to one specific group of people, because that’s what makes us visible and findable and relevant to the people we can actually reach.
I’ve written a book about exactly this process. The Intersection is available in paperback or Kindle. It won’t choose your niche for you, but it will get you past the resistance and into the work.