When I ask coaches what they think a niche is, the answers tend to cluster around two things:
- the type of coaching they do
- the topic they want to coach around.
They may tell me that their niche is life coaching, career coaching or executive coaching – I could go on… These are job titles – none of them is a niche, and that confusion is where most of the difficulty begins.
One of the responses I hear most often when the ‘niching penny’ drops is some variation of this: I had no idea it was this logical.
Job Titles Don’t Work As Niches
When we define our niche by our kind of coaching, we end up with something that describes us rather than something that helps potential clients find us. “Wellness coaching” tells a potential client what you do, but it doesn’t tell them whether you’re the right coach for their specific situation, in their specific world, with their specific pressures. It also doesn’t give you any indication of where to find potential clients, what to say to them, or how to make them feel understood. A job title-based niche may feel like a niche, but does not offer the benefits of a real niche at all.
The same is true of coaching modality. Being trained in a particular approach is relevant to how you coach, not to who you coach or what problem you help them resolve. Potential clients are not browsing LinkedIn looking for a particular methodology. They are, if they’re looking at all, trying to find someone who understands their situation well enough to help them with it.
The Niche Formula
The framework we use in the Nail Your Niche challenge reduces niche definition to two elements: the WHO and the WHAT. The WHO is a specific, searchable professional group – people who exist in a particular sector, at a particular level, in a particular kind of role. The WHAT is the specific problem that you want to coach around, described in the language the WHO would use themselves rather than in coaching terminology. Put those two things together with enough precision, and you have a niche that is functional rather than decorative – one that tells you where to show up, what to say, and who you’re talking to.
What makes this feel like a formula rather than a guess is that both elements can be tested. The WHO either exists as a findable group or it doesn’t. The WHAT either resonates with people in that group or it doesn’t. There’s a logic to it that job title-based approaches simply don’t have, and that logic is what makes it possible to reach a real decision rather than an approximate one.
It’s A Relief!
One of the participants in a challenge I did around niching was amazed that: identifying a niche isn’t a guessing game, it’s almost a theory. Another described my (trademarked) niche grid as a light bulb moment – not because the information was entirely new, but because it gave her a way of organising what she already knew into something she could act on. That’s what a good framework does. It doesn’t replace your thinking; it gives your thinking somewhere productive to go.
If you’ve been circling the question of your niche for months or years, producing answers that feel meaningful but don’t seem to translate into anything useful, the problem almost certainly isn’t with your thinking. It’s with the starting point. Niching isn’t an art form, it’s a logic exercise, and logic exercises have answers.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about where your niche might be, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
We run it several times a year; it is our free four-day challenge and features a lot of robust conversations about niches and how they help you find clients.