One of the ways you can minimise the time you spend on business development is to focus on developing a niche for yourself. In yesterday’s post we answered the question whether having a niche would mean you would have to turn business away. (no!) In today’s post, we will look at possibly the next biggest reason why junior professionals resist having a niche – they are worried that they will get bored and miss out on the variety being a jack-of-all-trades means. The argument I’ve heard goes like this:
If I niche I will only get one type of clients or one type of work and that means I will miss out on variety and probably get bored.
My first thought is that this is a very real fear, professionals probably fear boredom as much as they fear having no work. There is nothing worse than having a large pile of work on your desk which bores you rigid. But then think a bit more. I have to admit liking variety myself and if I thought I would only ever deal with one type of problem, I’d soon go mad (der?). [sc name=NicheWorksheet] A niche is about marketing. It’s about focus and allowing you to have marketing that is very attractive, versus marketing that doesn’t really speak to anybody. It’s about being an obvious choice for people in that niche. That leads to more of them coming to you (wouldn’t it be good to be the “go-to” expert so that qualified leads come to you). The weird thing is that having a marketing niche often leads to others outside that niche wanting you too! If you talk to many professionals who focus on marketing to a niche, they will probably profess to having under 50% of their clients in that niche. But, that’s OK – they are not in the process of turning work away… just marketing to a specific part of the marketplace in order to spend less time on business development and more time with their clients.
Multiple niches?
Having mastered one, who’s to say you don’t start another one or two niches? Suddenly life has gone from being possibly in black and white to being in colour. OK, you need to manage the marketing message and the website, and it may mean you’re less efficient, but would you prefer it? [sc name=NicheWorksheet]
