Almost every coach I speak to resists niching for the same reason – they’re afraid of missing out on clients who don’t fit their chosen focus.
We look at the vast pool of people we could help and can’t bring ourselves to narrow it down, because narrowing feels like loss. It feels like closing doors when we should be opening them. The fear is understandable but the logic is completely wrong.
Theoretical Opportunities
Let’s think for a moment about what’s actually happening in our lives right now, while we’re casting our nets wide. The idea is that every potential client in the world has access to us. Nothing is stopping the career-pivoters, the newly promoted leaders, the people navigating redundancy or burnout or a difficult team from finding us and getting in touch. The door is wide open. So where are they then? Why aren’t they packing out your diary?
The opportunities we’re so carefully protecting aren’t opportunities at all. They’re possibilities, and a possibility only becomes an opportunity when someone finds us, understands what we do, feels that it speaks directly to their situation, and trusts us enough to pay. Without a specific message, none of those conditions can be met. A message written for everyone is seen by no one, because if it’s generic, it doesn’t trigger our reticular activating system and so we literally don’t see it.
The theoretical clients we’re protecting ourselves for won’t com when we are vague. The evidence is already in isn’t it? You’re living it.
Broad Equals Invisible
I spoke to a coach recently who told me her niche was first time managers. When I asked which sector these managers worked in, she put her head in her hands and groaned. She knew, in that moment, that she needed to do more work. First time managers isn’t a niche, it’s a starting point she stopped at because going further felt too frightening.
She stopped because of fear. The fear that somewhere out there, a first time manager in financial services, or healthcare, or manufacturing, won’t find her because she got too specific. I see this all the time, and I do understand that staying broad feels safe but it’s keeping her (and you?) invisible.
The Tighter The Focus, The Louder Your Voice Is
The coaches we work with find, almost without exception, that committing fully to a specific audience doesn’t shrink their reach, it amplifies it. For someone to think she’s talking about me, we do have to actually be talking about someone specific. One of our coaches put it perfectly, she said “I thought I had a niche. Turns out it was a chasm.”
The clients who will pay you are real, specific people with real, specific problems, and they are far more likely to find you when you speak their language precisely than when you speak a language designed to speak to everyone but resonate with no one. Every month we spend marketing to everyone is another month of being found by no one, while we reassure ourselves that at least we haven’t closed any doors.
The hard truth is that those doors are already closed, it’s just difficult to see that from the inside.
The Cost Of Discomfort
The discomfort of committing is temporary, but the cost of staying vague is not.
Every month without a clear, specific niche is another month of marketing that nobody reads, another month of few (if any) enquiries, and another month of wondering if you can make this coaching gig work. The discomfort of choosing a focus fades quickly once we start hearing from people who feel genuinely understood by our message. The invisibility that comes from staying broad just compounds.
If you’re reading this and it’s resonating, that’s because I practice what we teach. All our mentors do, because we’ve built wonderful businesses by being very specific indeed. If you’d like some help becoming specific yourself and choosing the right niche for you, let’s talk, we can help.
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