Niche mates, not competitors -- we can all have enough clients!

How do you feel about the word competition? Do you think of others in your industry as competitors? Maybe you avoid that word. I know that I do. And I know that many of my clients don't like to use that word because it tends to bring some anxiety. Being competitive tends to make us less cooperative because we've grown up with a lot of times in school systems where you can only have a certain number of people get the highest grades, or in a work situation where only one person gets promoted because not everyone can get promoted, there's not enough slots. But when it comes to the world of self employment, which is where a lot of us are in, it doesn't work like that. We can actually make the pie bigger for everybody rather than saying, well, if you get a bigger piece of the pie, that means I get a smaller piece. So instead of the word competitor, I like for us to consider using the word niche mate or niche mate, however you like to say it. Niche is just easier for me to say. So I say niche mate. But you can say niche mate if you want to be fancier. So basically, here's the bottom line here. Every single one of us can have enough ideal clients, more than enough clients, if only we collaborated more. That's it. That's the premise of this entire video. And that's what I'm hoping to inspire you to do after this. Because here's the thing. We, each of us knows a lot of people. You might say, well, George, my audience isn't as big as yours. No, it's okay. But you still know probably 150 people on a first name basis. I mean, look at your Facebook friends. I mean, you're not best friends with everybody there, but you know them and you would feel comfortable reaching out to them. If you had somebody that you really wanted to recommend, you could reach out to one of your Facebook friends or one of your LinkedIn contacts, or somebody you've emailed, or somebody you've texted, or somebody you message on Instagram. However you connect with people, we can all have enough business if we all help each other solve the problems in our own lives and in the lives of our friends. Right? Like you have, let's say you have 10 friends, 20 friends, whatever. In each of those friends lives, they have 25 problems each or, or 15 yearnings. And you can only help with, you know, three of their 40 problems and yearnings. What about the other 37 problems and yearnings? Well, if you don't provide a service to help your friend with that, you probably know somebody who does and if you simply collaborated more with other service providers, you could actually help your friends solve all the problems that they have and fill all the yearnings that they have. You see what I mean? So let's think in terms of problems and yearnings. There are billions and billions of problems and yearnings right now in the world that are looking for a solution. They're looking for a service provider, a self employed person to raise their hand and say, oh, I can help with that. So the problem that so many of us self employed people are starving is because we're like in our own little bubble, we don't collaborate with each other, we don't reach out to each other often enough. Why? Because, well, there's the word competitor. There's just not even thinking about the fact that every problem and yearning in the world, in the lives of your friends and family can be solved by somebody. Not, not every problem yearning, I mean, just say, but some of the problems, yearnings in the lives of your friends and family, let's say there you have, you know, 50 family and friends and combined they have a total of 500 problems and yearnings. Not all of them have a self employed service provider solution. But maybe out of the 500, there are 50, 50 problems and yearnings that can be solved by some person that, you know, it's just that you don't make that connection, you know, you don't, you know, you don't think about what are, what are some of the things my, my friends are going through or what are some of the services that my friends provide that I know somebody who can help. We need to collaborate more with one another and that's why I urge you to start thinking about nichemate. So let me describe what a niche mate is. A niche mate is somebody who occupies the same industry space as you do. Okay. And so they have the similar audience that they want to reach. Maybe they provide a similar service. So, so I just been talking for the last few minutes about collaborating in general, but now let me get, get, get to the part of collaborating that is actually maybe the scariest but also the most valuable if you can think in a creative way. So let me explain. You're, let me explain. So when you want to look, you know, you, let's say you want to improve your appearance, right? You want to make sure that you, you are wearing the right outfit or that your hair is doing okay or whatever, you can't do it if you just, you know, your hair. That's a good example. You can't fix your hair if you're just trying to fix your hair, but if you look in the mirror, then it's easy to fix your hair. Right? So the same thing is with your niche mate. Your niche mates are your mirrors for your business. It's. So have you noticed how hard it is to notice what's working and not working in your marketing? Like, how do you know? Like, you know, many of us, myself included, often get surprised when we put something out there and it doesn't do well. Like, I thought this was so brilliant. How come nobody wants it, right? Or something you put out there that was so obvious, but it just goes wild, right? Your niche mates are a shortcut to that. You can look at your niche mates, right? There's a bit of an emotional charge there because originally you thought of them as competitors. Ooh, they provide the same service I do. Ooh, they have the same audience I do. Right. So they might be trying to grow their audience and therefore I have less people. Right. Or whatever. The default way of thinking about a competitor. But if you think of a niche mate as, oh, they're a mirror, meaning if I look at my niche mate and notice their marketing and study and go, wow, I really like what they're doing here. Gosh, you know what? Then you can emulate the things that you like about them. You're not copying their words, you're not copying their images, but you are at least saying, I like that. The way that they're approaching this, the tone of this or the strategy of how they're approaching this, I really like that. I'm going to emulate that idea in my own voice, in my own style. So a niche mate is mirror and same thing. You look at a niche mate and the way they're doing their marketing, some aspect of it is turning you off. I can't believe they use this kind of aggressive sales funnel, for example. Yeah, I don't. I don't like that. Well, gosh, if you don't like that, that means you need to make sure you don't do it yourself. The golden rule in marketing, right? Do unto others as you want done as you enjoy having done unto you, and don't do unto others as you don't enjoy having done to you. So your niche mates are the best mirrors for you. You can't critique. It's hard to critique your own marketing. You have to look at a niche mate, critique their marketing and therefore thereby learn from it. And you have multiple niche mates you can do this with to make your own marketing better. So. Got it. Your niche mates are your mirrors. That's number one. Number two is that your niche mates are actually your best partners, your best collaborators, if you are willing to get a little bit creative here. So instead of, oh, my niche mate got a new client, which means that person could have worked with me, but now they're working with them. Oh, you know, I feel bad now. Or the way the more they grow, the less there is for me. No, no, no, hold on. If your niche mates are successful and you are friends with your niche mates, they can give you overflow clients. Have you ever thought of that? Like, I am now giving overflow clients to my niche mates, you know, and actually, most of the time they're people and they're also clients of mine. I kind of start with them, you know, clients of mine who are niche mates. I give them overflow clients. But then sometimes, you know, it's better to give it to one of my colleagues who's not my client because of certain skill sets they have or certain personalities they have that's a better match for this person that I can't help. So befriend your niche mates, because as they become more successful, who are they going to refer? Overflow clients? You, obviously. Okay, but the other thing is this. Some of the people that approach her, even the niche mates, aren't successful yet. They're going to get approached by people that just are not the right fit for them. Maybe the client wants to do some work, but that. Nichmates. Yeah, I don't really do that kind of work. But what about my friend Sally? What about my friend Bob? You know what I mean? Like. Like there is a, you know, there is always you. You're not doing the exact same thing as your niche mates for the exact same people. I mean, because your personality is a little bit different at least, and your skill set is at least a little bit different. And so as you get to know your niche mates, you're going to find that, okay, there are some subtle differences between what we do. Maybe it's, you know, I like serving this type of, you know, maybe I like serving men or women more. Maybe you like serving, you know, people who are retirees, and I like serving people who are, you know, millennials. Whatever, whatever. There's always some subtle difference or big difference in what you provide and to whom you provide it compared to your niche mates. So if you become friends with them and you. And you find out what those. What those differences are, and then you go, oh, okay, so next time I have somebody who struggling with this issue, it's not something that I really specialize in. I will direct them to you and vice versa. If you have someone you know that, that I can really serve, direct them to me. And so the more of these niche mate partners you have, the more referral sources you have because they're doing something similar enough where they get similar enough inquiries where they can now think of you. So your niche mates are your best partners. So let's collaborate more. That's really, I urge you starting today to even make it a weekly kind of checklist item for yourself. It's like this week, have I thought about one niche mate? That's it. If you just think about one niche mate per week that you can study as a mirror, but even better to find a way to partner or collaborate with them, meaning to connect with them and says, hey, it's been a year since we've chatted. Would you like to connect again and talk about how we might be able to support each other's businesses? And if they, by the way, not everyone will respond because not everyone has a collaborative mindset that you do. Now I hope that if you feel inspired to, you can share this video with your niche mates and they can then also have a, they can maybe open their mind or open their heart or remind them that yes, they actually would like to collaborate. And if we, if we just drop the fear, we drop the, you know, drop the fear of each other. Let's just find a more open hearted way to relate to each other. Now I'm not saying that you don't have boundaries and you don't, you give everybody your time. No, I'm not saying that. But I am saying that be thoughtful and intentional each week about connecting with one niche mate. If you can start there, just connect with one per week and then once you are in that rhythm of connecting with one per week, then maybe you have, you'll carve out some more time to connect with two niche mates per week. But imagine if you were connecting with two niche mates per week and let's say you work, you know, 45 weeks in a year, that's connecting with 90 niche mates a year. You have more niche mates than 90. I'm pretty sure about that. There's more than 90 people in the world who do the kind of work that you do or who serve a similar kind of audience that you do. That's, that's for sure. So if you, if you connect with 90 good niche mates a year, meaning people and you may have to reach out by the way to three people each week to get one person to respond, yes, I'm open to connecting with you and seeing how we can support each other's businesses. Right, so reach out to three people. So reach out to 270 people a year. There are more than 270 niche mates that you have. So reach out to 270 people A year and connect with 90 of them per year. And my goodness, can you imagine 90 people if even a third of them referred you one client per year. You've got 30 referrals a year, right? 30 referrals a year. It's probably going to be even more than that because your niche mates, like I said, have a similar audience that you do. So as they grow their audience, they're going to have more potential referrals, referrals for you. Now, one last thing I'll say is that, you know, speaking of boundaries, right, don't expect to reach out to somebody with a much larger audience than you and say, oh, sure, let's support each other's businesses. So somebody who is, you know, just starting out and they have, you know, they have like 20 YouTube subscribers and, you know, 100 Facebook fans. Reaching out to me is not fair to me because I have boundaries and I have a limited time. Of course, I want to connect with other people who have several thousand Facebook fans and several thousand YouTube subscribers, several thousand Instagram and a similar audience. Reach out. Thankfully for social media, you can do a little bit of research on their social media following before you reach out to them. So if you have 50 Facebook fans right now, okay, if you have 20 YouTube subscribers right now, right, reach out to somebody else who has somewhere around 50 to 100, it's okay to reach out to slightly larger. It's okay, like you have 50, they have a hundred. It's close enough. It's close enough. They probably will be okay with that, right? There's. They're just starting out too. If you have 500 reach out to somebody with, you know, up to 750, let's say, right, 750, then it's like, okay, it's close enough. Where it's like you have a similar size on. So do your research about their social media profiles. Do you have a similar sized following a similar enough type of audience, then by all means, reach out. Can we collaborate again? If you want to send my blog post or this video to them to kind of open their minds to, hey, I'm thinking about you as a niche mate because I think that we can actually grow together possibly if we find a way to collaborate. If it feels good to you, let's connect and find a way. I hope this is helpful. I'm George Kao, Authentic Business Coach. I love finding ways to build an authentic business. A business that's authentically from the heart, that is authentically good for your spiritual growth as well. I hope this was helpful. I'm always open to your comments and your questions below and I will see you in the next video. Take care.