When I tell coaches that the tighter their focus, the louder their voice becomes, they nod politely but don’t really understand what I mean. When they do finally grasp the concept, they don’t believe it will work because they’re convinced that narrowing their focus means disappearing without trace. The irony is that without focus, the only people who actually see them are other coaches.
Your Logic Is Working Against You
You’re clever and you believe in logic, which is exactly why this principle is so hard to accept. Your logical brain insists that fishing in the biggest pond makes sense because more people must equal more opportunities. But this is counterintuitive, which is why intelligent coaches struggle with it so much. Your logic tells you that excluding people means losing opportunities, when reality consistently shows the opposite to be true.
From Invisible Generalist to Visible Specialist
I worked with a nurse who wanted to be a parenting coach, and she couldn’t see any connection whatsoever between her nursing career and her coaching. She wanted to help all parents, and couldn’t understand why that wasn’t enough of a focus.
By day four of Nail Your Niche, the penny finally dropped. She realised she understood challenges that nurse-parents face that other parents simply don’t experience. Shift work that destroys family routines, the mental load of making life-and-death decisions at work followed by reading bedtime stories at home, and the unique challenge of speaking “nurse” whilst navigating parenthood. She stopped being yet another parenting coach and became THE parenting coach for parents who are nurses.
What Actually Changes When You Focus
When you stop trying to speak to all parents and start speaking specifically to parents who are nurses, your entire language transforms. You can give specific examples that resonate deeply, you can demonstrate genuine understanding of career-specific challenges, and you speak their language because it’s your language too.
You separate yourself from the pack instantly because you know what to say (and you’ll never run out of relevant content), you know where to be (because you know where nurses gather), and you know how to connect through shared experiences. Your confidence increases exponentially because you’re not guessing anymore about what your audience needs to hear.
The Specialist Premium
Here’s what coaches consistently miss about positioning themselves in the market: specialists earn more than generalists, and they always have. When you become the go-to coach for a specific group, you’re not just another coach competing in an oversaturated market. You’re THEIR coach, the one who gets it, the one who speaks their language, and the one worth paying professional fees to work with.
General coaches compete on price because they’re interchangeable. Specialists compete on value because they’re irreplaceable.
The Fear Versus The Reality
Coaches think that when they focus tightly, they’ll lose opportunities, exclude potential clients, limit their business growth and become invisible. What actually happens is that inbound enquiries start arriving from people who understand immediately what you do and why it matters to them. These potential clients expect to pay professional fees, and all that uncomfortable “ick” of sales conversations disappears completely.
This happens because when someone finds THE coach for their specific situation, they don’t need convincing about the value of working with you. They just need your diary link.
The Paradox That Changes Everything
By excluding most people, you become magnetic to the right people, and this is the paradox coaches find so hard to accept.
A nurse-parent scrolling LinkedIn doesn’t stop for “parenting coach who helps overwhelmed parents” because they’ve seen fifty of those today and none of them feel relevant. But when they see “parenting coach who gets the unique challenges of nurse-parents,” they stop scrolling immediately. They read every word you’ve written. They recognise themselves in your content.
Your voice isn’t louder because you’re shouting into the void. It’s louder because you’re speaking directly to them whilst everyone else is broadcasting to nobody in particular.
When The Penny Finally Drops
Coaches describe the moment they truly understand this principle as the moment everything changes. Suddenly they never run out of content ideas, they know exactly where to show up online and offline, they can articulate their value clearly without stumbling over their words, and their ideal clients actually find them.
They stop being invisible to everyone whilst desperately trying to be visible to everyone.
The Truth Nobody Wants To Hear
Without focus, you’re not actually marketing at all. You’re just hoping that someone, somewhere, will somehow understand that you’re the right coach for them. Without focus, you’re not speaking to everyone like you think you are. You’re speaking to no one because your message is so generic it slides past everyone without landing anywhere.
Without focus, you’re not keeping your options open like you believe. You’re guaranteeing your own invisibility.
The tighter your focus becomes, the louder your voice becomes to exactly the people who need to hear it. Everyone else was never going to hire you anyway, no matter how broadly you tried to appeal to them.
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