To niche or not to niche - defining your ideal clients (Back to Basics Month!)

Hello. So here at the Business of Executive Coaching podcast, We are in April 2025 and this month our theme is Back to Basics. This month is all about foundations and specifically we're going to dive into the all the fundamentals, or some of the fundamentals I should say, that you need to have in place that is going to make everything in your business go more smoothly. They are some of this part of it is things you need to think about and decide. Some of are tools you need to have in place or assets, but all of them are really crucial building blocks that you need for other parts of your business. Like always, we're going to be super practical with this series. I want every episode this month to give you some tips that will make your business better, your life easier, and your impact greater. So what we're going to cover is.

Identifying your ideal clients, defining your offers.

Building your coach bio, and creating your sales pipeline. So while we can't go into detail on exactly how to do those things, I'm going to give you high levels, some thoughts, things you need to consider, and things that you should put in place in order to really support a flourishing business. I encourage you to keep coming back this month for all of the episodes or go back to prior episodes if you've missed some, because all of these foundations build on each other, so they all matter and they all flow somewhat sequentially. So who is this series for? This series is for you if you are just starting out in your coaching business. And it is for you if you have been in business for a while.

But you have a sense that there.

Are some steps along the way that you might have missed and you feel like there could be some merit in spending a bit of time going back to the basics. I want to be clear when I say basics that I don't mean oversimplifying business growth with a trite five steps to success kind of plan. Absolutely not. I mean, let's take a look at some of the foundations and then, then you can apply those in the context of your business, which is where a lot of the complexity comes in. I would also like to make an invitation and an offer to you today.

If you're in a place where you.

Want to set up your business foundations with structure and support so you can do it quicker and without reinventing the wheel. Or if you want my eyes on your business, your assets, and to give you practical advice on your specific context, I want to invite you to join the Corporate to Coach accelerator, which is the only way that I currently work hands on with coaches. So the accelerator is a 12 month right? So we're going to get to know.

Each other really well.

A 12 month program that helps you to build a plan to get to your next 10 corporate clients with less than 5 hours of marketing per week within an incredible community of coaches. The accelerator is the place to come if you want a regular place to get coached on your business needs, wherever you're at in your business growth cycle. And we have weekly group coaching calls at three different time zones so you can always have a chance to ask questions. It's also the place to come if you want a structure to put in place to help you with business fundamentals, business setup and business growth, specifically in the corporate or leadership or executive coaching space. So we have three standalone courses so pieces of curriculum that help us with all of this. So we have the Corporate to Coach Blueprint which is a 36 lesson 8 module digital course. We have the 90 day quick start Challenge where you set up all of the foundations of your business in 90 days and you can get feedback on all of your assets as you develop them. And we also have the Business Development Accelerator where we put in place the processes and disciplines to get your next 10 corporate clients. It's also the place to come if you want to check that what you are doing is best practice so you can benchmark with other members. I offer video reviews and feedback on all of your assets, things like your bio, your website, your LinkedIn profile, your offers and so much more. The Accelerator is also the place to come to be part of a group of people who are in the same place and who have the same ambitions as you. So business ownership can be really lonely and having a weekly connection point with peers is really incredible. There is so much more inside the Accelerator thing. Tools, templates, masterclasses, guest interviews. We even have a private podcast feed with all of our group coaching calls social media, so you don't miss any gems that happen on the calls that you don't attend. So my invitation is to join us inside the Accelerator in April and my offer to help make this an absolute no brainer is to start with a no commitment one on one coaching call with me where we can identify one of your business foundations so I can give you some live feedback on it. Or we can identify the foundations of your business growth plan so we'll make sure that no matter what where you're at in this call with me, we'll.

Make it valuable and we'll make sure.

You walk away with some really practical and tangible advice we can also discuss whether the accelerator would be a good fit for you. In my experience, most people that I speak to are a good fit. There aren't a lot of people listening to such a specific podcast that aren't.

In the right category, and many who.

I meet go on to join the accelerator. And specifically, if you're curious, about 85% of the people that I meet with decide that joining the accelerator would be a great move for them. So if you do decide to join, after booking a call with me during April, I have a special offer for.

All my podcast listeners, which is one.

Month free on your membership, which means that you would join for 12 months, but you get full access to coaching, reviews, everything for 13 months rather than 12. So if you think this sounds like it'd be interesting to you, please head to the Show Notes and book a call directly. Or head over to LinkedIn, tell me you came from the podcast and we.

Can book it in directly there.

I really look forward to meeting you soon and talking about my very favorite thing, which is, and I'm not sure this is surprising given how much I talk on this podcast, but my favorite thing is talking about you and your businesses. So let's dive in now.

So my take on niching, and I say that in inverted commas or identifying your ideal clients, which is how I prefer to refer to it, is, is.

Probably a little different to what you've.

Heard out there from many business coaches. And it is not because I want to be controversial or different, although sometimes I do want to be those things. But this is not a time when I am, but because I think they are talking about something very different to what we are doing as executive coaches serving corporate clients. But I'll elaborate on that in a minute. So a lot of business coaches will say that you need to have a very specific niche, right? The more specific the better. Or they might tell you that you need an ideal client avatar. So one individual that you build everything for and you only speak to that ideal person. And so I get it. And to be honest, in my business, that is quite useful for me to have those things in place. And I think the reasoning behind having them is great. Because, you know, the theory is that if we try and speak to everyone, then we speak to no one. And I agree with that. And there's also this theory that by being very focused, like really focused on this individual, we can be deeply connected to the challenges and the experiences of those people, which means our messaging is going to be more accurate. And also we can become Known as the person who does this thing for this group of people. So it definitely helps in many ways. But in my experience, while this works, or it might work for coaches who work with individuals and, you know, coaches being a little bit broader than what.

I talk about, which is sort of.

Evidence based executive coaching, working with people in organizational contexts, I don't think this narrow niching works if you are a coach who wants to work or does work primarily with corporate clients. When we want to work with corporate clients, I think we actually need to balance this extreme focus with flexibility. And so what we're actually aiming for with when we define our ideal clients is we want focus and clarity and we want strategy and we want the ability to be flexible when needed and to respond to the circumstances. We find ourselves in a much bigger way than when we're marketing to individuals. So I think of this, and this has recently evolved is the way I think about this. I think of it as a polarity, right? So imagine a polarity, and at one end we have extreme clarity. And that is about really real focus being very narrow, very defined, having one ideal client, right? So that's one end. And at the other end of our polarity is ultimate flexibility, right? So being able to respond to the market, not defining anything, you know, responding to connections and referrals that come to us and to follow wherever our whims or interests take us. And clearly if we're selling to corporate clients, if we overdo either the extreme clarity or the ultimate flexibility, we, we have a problem. Too much clarity and focus and we are overly limited and we won't be able to take advantage of opportunities that come up. Too much flexibility. And if you're anything like me, you can spiral into a bit of a chaos of wanting to be everything to everyone, following the shiny object and diluting our energy and focus too much. So I think if we're selling to individuals, there's a lot more value in leaning into the narrow focus side. But when we want to focus, when we want to work with corporate clients, we really need to sit in the middle, or actually not in the middle. We need to sit with both. And we need enough focus that we are clear that our messaging is targeted and that we have a sense of clear boundaries on the things that we do or are willing to do. And we can adapt to the circumstances that we find ourselves in. So our flexibility allows us to do that. It allows us to take the referral opportunities that might come our way without feeling like, oh no, it's not in my niche I can't do that. So how can we get the clarity and match it with the flexibility? For my accelerator members, I have them work through a pretty simple process and I'm going to share just a few principles that are in that that I want you to keep in mind. So firstly, I think it is good for every coach who wants to work with corporate clients to have a set of three ideal clients. And that really means three industries, sectors, sub industries or sub sectors. If you have sort of one clear industry focus or you know, focus groups within those organizations and it might be, for example, you know, finance teams in types of organizations, get clear on about 3 of those that your ideal client categories and when you want to come up with what those are, I think you need to start by brainstorming two things. The first one is who do you actually want to work with? What sort of sectors or organizations are you called to work with? Why? Who do you really not want to work with? I think that gives us a lot of insight as well, although I've got a note on that that I'll share in a moment. The second thing I want you to brainstorm is what are the sectors, industries or functions where you have a disproportionate advantage or disproportionate credibility because of your professional background? The reason I want you to focus on that is because when we are building our businesses, we often have more credibility. And I'm talking about outwardly perceived credibility. So we have more of that based on our professional experience than we do based on our coaching experience. Right. So it's a little bit of a.

Seesaw that as we get more coaching.

Experience, our coaching credibility grows. But until then, to sell coaching, we're going to have to leverage our professional experience. And while we all know that coaching is context agnostic, so I don't need to be a subject matter expert to coach someone. The selling of coaching services or facilitation or consulting is not context agnostic. And having an understandable professional background or experience or you know, a name brand organization that you can bring with you is a huge asset when it comes to business development. And incidentally, this is also why it's really important to capture our professional backgrounds in our coaching bio documents anyway, so you should choose ideal clients that meet both of those criteria. Right? So imagine a Venn diagram. We want the people that you want to work with and where you have disproportionate credibility due to your professional experience. And just to give you some examples of what that could look like in terms of the disproportionate credibility, it might be that you've had 20 years of corporate experience in the shipping industry, so having a conversation with anyone else in a maritime or shipping adjacent industry is going to be a much easier lift to get in the door and to build credibility. Or you might have worked in a tech company, right, that people would recognize. And it may not be that you want to sell into, you know, the fang tech companies or anything like that, but what you might find is that the next tier, the sort of the mid tier of tech organizations or tech startups, see that name on your resume or your bio and automatically go, wow, she's got insights, or understands context, that is valuable to us, right? So therefore you have this credibility that is purely because of your professional background and we need to leverage that.

So I don't think it's a bad.

Thing, I think it's a great thing. And when we're selling, we use it to our advantage. So in the accelerator we talk a lot about the nuances around these things. So I presented you with these as quite simple, complex, simple concepts. Of course it is more complex. And we talk in accelerator about, you know, diving into understanding those ideal clients, what their challenges are, how we can workshop some specific target organizations that we're going to then do some network analysis around. But just going through this first activity of asking yourself those two questions is going to help you a lot when it comes to defining your ideal clients. Now, whatever you come up with, I always say hold them lightly. And as coaches, we have to hold things lightly all the time, right? We want to hold mindsets, assumptions, beliefs lightly. And similarly, hold your ideal clients lightly. Not literally, just metaphorically, hold them lightly. So an example of that is when I stepped out of the legal world early in my coaching journey, I said to myself that I didn't want to work in a law firm context or with lawyers anymore ever again. I was very black and white with that belief. I think there was some mild trauma. I'm mostly joking about that, mostly. So fast forward 20 years and in my coaching business, in the end, the most rewarding, profitable and repeat clients that I worked with were in the legal industry. I worked with large global law firms, I worked with boutique law firms, I worked with in house legal teams, I worked with individual barristers, I worked with judicial bodies, I worked with law societies. And it ended up being really meaningful work, actually. And it ended up having, I hope, a great impact on the people and the organizations that I worked with. And if I'd stayed very fixed in that first. You know that almost that reaction that I had from stepping out of that industry, I would have done myself out of some incredible opportunities to have an impact. So I hope this helps with how you are thinking about your ideal clients. As I mentioned at the start of.

The episode, I'd love to set up.

A call with you to go through one of your business basics or to.

Answer any questions you have about your.

Coaching business strategy, and to talk also about whether the accelerator would be a.

Good fit for you.

So remember, when you book a call and I'll put the link in the show notes or you can drop me a line on LinkedIn, remember to mention.

That you have been listening to the.

Podcast and these episodes in particular, to access the April Bonus, which is a free month of membership when you join the accelerator. Have a great week and I look forward to seeing you soon.