The Riches Are in the Niches

I'm not sure if you heard the phrase, the riches are in the niches, but that concept with business is very accurate. So that was coined originally by entrepreneur Pat Flynn, and I've heard it several times from Vern Harnish, who wrote Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, who used that same phrase from Pat. What's interesting about that is that if you look at all the companies that I coach, and I think in one year I had the record number of clients that were on the Inc. 5000 list and the coaching organization I was a part of, those clients all had a hyper niche focus.

And what I mean by that is they had a very specific problem they solved for a very specific customer in a very specific market. And then they found even ways to get more specific once they were inside of that market. So let me give you a couple of examples of what this looks like. So years ago, I coached as part of my round table company that was focused on helping law firms market more effectively.

So Intermediate to large law firms market effectively. So think about that just for a second. So that was focused on one, a very, you know, it's focused on a tight industry law. It's a big industry, but still focused on lawyers.

And it's tight because it's not just everyone. It's, hey, we're only going to focus on, you know, these law firms that are almost intermediate, high intermediate to large size law firms that have a marketing department. Because they were really targeting the head of marketing inside of a law firm. Now think about that for just for a second.

Not only is it law, not only is it a big law firm, but it's also someone that is in the marketing function. And what this software did is it helped them be able to work with and use the social accounts of all the attorneys on their team to be able to send out and create a social brand for the law firm. It might be a little bit nebulous, but you get my point, meaning that that hyper niche focus resulted in a very valuable and rapid growing organization that CEO and founder exited, or he exited not too long after it was formed because it was such a valuable entity. Another client that I had, all they did was, they did software, they did Windows deployment software.

And think about that, not only are you just doing a very, very sort of laser niche focus. All we're gonna do is deployment. I did it with basically two products. By the way, weirdly enough, even though that's a niche, they were basically competing against Microsoft, but doing it in such a way and competing in such a way where it was different in a way that created massive value for their end customer.

Very specific person inside of IT they were targeting with that product or service. And again, the more specific they got, the more profit it created, the more focus it created on how to make the product and service unique to serve that customer's needs. So if you're looking at your business, sometimes the biggest mistake we make is to go, hey, how can I make this appeal to the broadest subsection of people possible? When instead it's, what is the problem we truly solve?

What is the customer that we can hyper focus on? And maybe it's a smaller sub segment of our market. It might not be the entire market, might be just, you know, what's this small group of profitable customers we want to focus on? And is there an even more defined thing we can do with the product or service to make it more appealing to that group.

And over time, what we start to see is that we can scale dramatically if we get those things dialed in. And it's counterintuitive because we think, well, it's got to be bigger and bigger and broader to scale the business. Look, you're going to have to get to. There's always a way to find a market for anything in the modern era, meaning software.

Has given us the ability, software and technology has given us the ability to look at serving problems in ways we were never able to do before. So if you have a problem that you know can serve a very specific niche of people, that is a way to really grow your businesses. Start it with laser focusing around that. And if you have a business right now that maybe you're struggling with profitability because you're too broad, you have too many products, too many services, you serve too many people, start to pull that niche down to where you're focused on again, a smaller group of highly profitable customers in the most important industries you serve or industry you serve, get it down to one, it's even better.

And within that is there even more customization you can make to the product or service to make it even more valuable. So again, think about your niche focus. A great book to read is Niche Down by Christopher Lochhead. I think there's another author in there as well, but that's a great book to read.

And it really gets your mind flowing around what that means. Also, Play Bigger by Christopher Lochhead, so you get Niche Down and Play Bigger. Both of those get at the heart of what does it mean to not only have a hyper niche focus but also be different instead of better. Feel free to leave your comments what you think of the niche focus and again if you're looking to grow your business, there's a free growth assessment.

You can just click on the link in my bio and fill it out and I'll be happy to have a follow-up call with you.