If you are a person who has just started up or is thinking of starting up your own business, one thing that will probably strike you very quickly is just how many other people are doing exactly the same.

Never has the trend for owning your business been more in the spotlight.

Never before have so many people, en masse, decided that corporate life or working for someone else is just not where they want to be anymore.

If you are part of this growing trend you will need to know how to flourish in a competitive environment.

You will need to know how to add value and contribute something different in order to make yourself stand out from the crowd. The good news is that there is a tried and tested way that all the most successful businesses in the world having been using as their number one power tool for decades.

Niching

Niching is where it’s at as far as successfully marking your business is concerned. Take a look at the Fiona Harrold site these days and you’ll see that all of the coaches specialise in one or two particular areas.

Mine is Divorce and Relationship and Time Management/Business Training.I have two niches, which work well for me. Any more would require extra admin skills that I just don’t have time for.

The point is that niching has grown my business exponentially and instead of the other coaches on the site becoming my competition, they are actually my allies. (More on that in next week’s newsletter).

Defining your niche, your unique selling point, is not just important it is absolutely vital. Without a defined niche, you will be wearing too many hats as you try to satisfy all of the people all of the time. You will burn out, become disillusioned and lose your focus.

Define your niche

You will begin to forget the reason you went into your business in the first place and you will slowly but surely grind to a halt. What you want to be to be doing is satisfying some of the people all of the time. Defining your niche is the simply the best way to do this.

Many people tell me that they don’t believe in niches because that they are limiting.

Surely if you focus on just one group of people, you are waving the possibility of so many others customers goodbye? Interesting point, but one I believe which is based on the enemy of all good business ideas, fear.

The fear is that there is not enough to go around, or you may miss out on something. Fear is what keeps people out there floundering while others are focused.The fact is that once you have defined your market you are much more able to focus on satisfying the needs of a specific group of people.

For example, lets imagine that you have worked in the corporate world for most of your career managing teams of people in one guise or another. You train as a coach and a reiki therapist and start coaching and reiki-ing anyone who seems willing. You do ok, but there are a thousand other coach/therapists doing the same.

Then you remember the reason you left the corporate world. You were stressed, with little time for your family and friends and your body hurt physically and mentally. Think about it. Guess who your best clients would be? People just like you!

Contacts

And, as you were part of the corporate world for so long, guess who will have the contacts and the understanding of this world that other coaches and therapists don’t have? You.

These people are in pain for the same reason you were. There are so many companies with budgets for the health of their workforce just waiting to be spent.

Why would they spend it on you? Because they want a mentally and physically healthy workforce. The top reason for attrition in companies is stress. How valuable would your services be?

You don’t have to put all the skills you have accomplished over the years to one side. The smartest thing you can do is to combine all you know with your new knowledge and create a niche for yourself that allows you to focus on a specific group of people who need you. This applies to every new business I can think of.

Soul-Searching

Knowing what your niche is however, takes a little bit of soul searching.

Fundamentally there are three things you need to know.

• The first thing you must do is to discover your Outcome. What do you want to achieve? What would be the ultimate result of all your endeavours? What do you want to achieve as a result of your outcome?
• The second place to look is to discover your purpose. What purpose does running this business honour? Ultimately will this business provide you and your customers with that will fill a need in their lives and yours?
• And finally you need to know the right actions to take that will move you towards your goal and be sustainable for the future.

As well as all of the above, any niche you choose must align with your own personal values and have in place personal boundaries that will work for you. You may be changing careers and building a business because your personal boundaries were trodden on in the past.

Discipline

Working for yourself can be an almost round the clock exercise unless you are disciplined in your approach. You don’t want to find yourself back in a painful situation of your own making. The Know Your Niche Workshop draws on the best in personal management to show you how to stop this happening.

My suggestion to any of you out there in the process of starting or building your business is to decide who your clients are going to be.  When Marks and Spencer’s ran their unsuccessful marketing campaign “Exclusively for everybody”, sales when down.

Why, because nothing is exclusively for everybody except the air we breathe. Making sure your marketing clearly attracts the clients you want is a skill that must be learned in order for your services or products to sell to the right people.