Lao Tzu

Lao Tzu

Mark Twain

Lao Tzu

Mark Twain

•    You’re a self-starter? Check.
•    You’ve got marketable skills? Check.
•    You’ve got all your equipment, resources and contacts? Check.

So you’re ready to go, right? Nope! Where’s your niche?

“Niche” you ask… ‘neesh’ or ‘nitch’ … what’s that?

A niche is the intersection between you and your market: the skills and experience you have that make you a credible and reliable problem solver, plus the specific customers who want your solution.

You can make naming your niche easy or tough on yourself. Let me show you why:

The Easy Niche – An inch wide and a mile deep

Several professions lend themselves to immediate niches: accounting, law, insurance – each of these have specializations that allow you as a professional to declare your specific services. Now all you need to do is name a particular type of client you serve.

As soon as you name your target customer, all your marketing activity can be pulled into sharp focus.

You can write articles that relate to your customer’s key business issues, and network with other professionals that serve that same client base.

As you build your relationship with this customer base, you can continue to deepen your offerings by adding on new services and products to that same group of customers – all building on your expertise.

Neat, right?

On the other hand other folks take the tougher path:

The Challenge Niche – A mile wide and an inch (or a mile) deep

We make it through our educational system being told we need to know as much as possible about many different things. This doesn’t always help when it comes time to focusing ourselves professionally.

Work at a lot of different things and your selling point sounds a lot like “I’ve done a lot, I’m adaptable” rather than “Here is the specific solution I can provide to your greatest challenge.”

Your customers want solutions.

So here’s my recommendation: Set aside everything you’ve worked to learn, and select one solution that people are seeking. Make that your selling point for your first 100 clients and then you can broaden you offerings.

If you want your home based business to thrive, take the easy path – select a niche that will allow you to stay sharply focused.

Technorati Tags: Small Business, small business marketing

Mark Twain

Re-Position Yourself

Professionals are among the most resistant entrepreneurs you’ll find. They take their technical expertise, go out to ‘go it alone’ or build a small professional firm, and clog up the works by diving into the depths of their work.

Your value as a technical expert is only one aspect of your value to your clients. Of greater value than billing hours to solve some matter for them, you need to become the ‘manager’ who makes solutions happen.

That means shifting to being a business builder who steps in to refine the work being done by other resources.

Really.

Keep that in mind and don’t let yourself be pulled off course and into the depths of ‘doing the work.’

Re-Purpose Your Know How

Your magical opportunity is to take your technical know how and experience and find new outlets for it. It’s not about gaining new know how – it’s about taking your know how and re-shaping how it’s offered in as many ways as possible to hungry audiences who are waiting for it.

Here’s an example. A recognized economist is a frequent expert witness. That’s a highly paid use of his know how.

But wait, it gets even better. He’s created a series of free white papers he’s posted on his web site. And hes’ turned them into articles distributed through the internet. Not a revenue producer you say?

Well, it is. Because he has paying newsletter subscribers. They get his analyses of the impacts of each related case and of actions by the government, describing the potential effects on the very types of cases he’s used for. Instead of use one case at a time, he now has paying subscribers across the country paying for his insights as they work up their own cases.

His subscribers may come to him for expert testimony, this year or sometime in the future. Either way, he’s got a steady stream of revenue using his expertise in ways other than one-on-one problem solving one customer at a time.

Lao Tzu

I have found there are basically 3 types of teachers in business and only one type is always worth following:

Type 1 – Trainers who have been handed  information, a script and exercises to coach you through so that you get some experience with a hypothetical example. They have seldom faced the actual challenges you want to solve. I recommend my UAGOS filter here: “Use a grain of salt!”

Type 2 – Teachers who has succeeded at facing the business challenges you have in front of you and is no longer doing it. Use caution with this type. Be sure you check out testimonials from others they have worked with to be sure their know how is relevant for the results you are trying to achieve.

Type 3 – Teachers who mentor. These are folks who have been in your shoes and can provide practical, actionable input. For the issues they see you need solving, they can bring you others with the expertise you need, to short cut your needing to go fish among strangers for your solutions.

This is the kind of teacher with whom I spend my time and money. Great examples are experienced consultant who have run companies, and technical experts who have done the business building strategies I want to implement in my own business.

My recommendation: Learn from mentors and coaches who have done it, and who have a roster of examples of teaching it to others who created success with it as well.

This is why I created the Business Accelerator club to train you how to build your business further, faster and easier. The focus is on stabilizing your business by managing it with ease and growing it by leveraging your experience to create low cost highly profitable new streams of income. I’ve done it. I’m teaching it, and I continue to do it everyday.