How Narrow Is Too Narrow for Your Coaching Niche?

Have you ever wondered how narrow is too narrow for your coaching niche? You know, you want to be specific around who you serve and what you help them with, but you don't want to be so specific that there aren't enough clients to actually pay you and to create a sustainable coaching business. Well, that's what we're going to talk about in this video. I'm Greg Faxson and I'm going through the process of starting a new fitness coaching business. And I'm documenting all of the my decisions, all of my failures, all of my wins along the way. And so this is the first official week of building this business. And what's kind of fun is that I'm going through my own course called Coaching Business Boot Camp, which is a 60 day program to help you get clear on who you serve, to help you attract your ideal clients, and to get your first or next batch of coaching clients. This is week one. And week one of the course is all about clarity. It's about getting clear on who you serve, what you help them accomplish, and how you do it. And so I'm making some decisions around this new fitness coaching business and, and how I want to set it up. The first thing that you do in the course and what I did this morning is I printed out this 60 day game plan. Okay. And so it's basically a course blueprint. It takes you through all of the different decisions you make. It has you check off, you know, each action. As I went through it this morning, I'm pretty clear, I think, on the decisions that I'm going to make. But I want to let you in on the process because there's one or two things that I'm still going to need to clarify as I start this business. The first thing is talking about the who. Who am I going to serve in this new fitness coaching business? And this is something that I already have a pretty good sense of because I know that I want to help successful entrepreneurs. Whenever you're thinking about who you want to serve in your coaching business, it helps to ask yourself the question, who do I want to be a hero to? And I just think entrepreneurs are awesome. Obviously, I'm an entrepreneur myself and we're wired in sort of a different way. I think entrepreneurs are the, the people who really go out and create new value and build things from scratch. And I have a lot of respect for that. I know that in my fitness journey, you know, I was very active growing up in high school, in college, I wrestled competitively. And then building my first coaching Business. For the first couple years, I was so focused on building the coaching business, and I was dealing with some chronic injuries. I lost a lot of muscle during that time. And what was interesting was only when I went to lunch with my grandmother during the holidays one year, and this was about two years in to building my fitness coaching business, and she said, your neck is looking so small, Greg. Do I need to contribute to the facts and fund? Like, basically she was saying, do I need to pay you to buy more groceries? And I was like, no, we're good financially. But, you know, it was honestly just my grandmother being a grandmother. But that kind of got into my head and made me a little bit insecure. I'm like, you know what? You have gotten a lot smaller since you were wrestling. It's time to get back in shape a little bit. And so I built a home gym in our basement. I started lifting, and I gained about 15 pounds of muscle in about six months. And so anyway, that brings me to this idea that entrepreneurs in the first couple years of their business, when they're building and getting to that first. For example, that first milestone is six figures. And sometimes they have to sacrifice their health or fitness or they end up sacrificing their health or fitness to get there. And then they look around and they say, you know, I've gained some fat that I don't want to have, or I've lost some muscle and I want to have a body that I'm proud of. I want a body that's just as impressive as the business that I've built. So in terms of who I want to serve, it's successful entrepreneurs. My feeling is that they're going to have to be at six figures in revenue in their business or beyond. Because before that point, you're sort of bootstrapping. You're really focused on the business. And at that point where your business is sustainable, it's making good money, those people are going to be able and willing to pay for a fitness coach to get back in shape. The second thing is, what. What am I going to help these people with? Obviously, fitness coaching, but there's a lot of sub niches that I can help them with within that category. So one sub niche is weight loss, right? People who just want to lose weight. The other subcategory is gaining muscle. Now, sometimes people want to do, but those are kind of two distinct groups. The person who wants to get big versus the person who wants to get lean. One of the things that I've been battling with this morning, one of the decisions is, do I want to cater to one specific sub niche to start in my own journey? Obviously, it was about gaining more muscle. I stayed pretty lean throughout the process of building my business. For a lot of people, though, it's going to be about losing weight. And so I know because of actually different clients that I've helped with their fitness coaching business that people, people definitely pay for weight loss. My suspicion is that people are going to be less likely to pay for gaining muscle because the people who want to get bigger and who are already committed to fitness might try to do it on their own to a certain extent, but I'm not 100% sure. And so this is a place where you have to ask yourself how specific is too specific. And because I've gotten specific about the who, successful entrepreneurs, six figures or above, and, and the what is relatively specific. It's, you know, physique. It's basically building a body that you're proud of. My feeling now is that I shouldn't go to just weight loss or just gaining muscle. Down the road, I may do that. And if I were more specific about gaining muscle or losing weight, I would obviously be able to develop marketing that was more resonant with those people, because I could speak specifically to that. But I'm going to start a little bit broader on the what. And as I have conversations with potential clients, as I work with people, then we might narrow down from there. So if you're trying to figure out your coaching niche and you're wondering how specific is too specific, what I would suggest is there's this who you serve, and then there's the what you help them with. Try to get specific on at least one of those. I'm pretty specific about the who successful entrepreneurs. I could be even more specific. I could say men or women, and then I'm pretty specific about the what in terms of building a body that you're proud of. And now the ideal would be if I could say, you know, I help successful male entrepreneurs gain muscle, that would be super specific. But I don't have the data yet to make that type of decision. So as long as you're talking about a general area of someone's life, so health or fitness, career and business or dating and relationships, as long as you've narrowed it down to one of those three areas and you're specific about who you want to work with, you have a specific type of demographic or psychographic label for those people, that's a good place to start. Given that I haven't worked with Any fitness coaching clients on a paid basis at this point. So the third thing to get clear on is my pricing and packaging. And typically what I recommend for people in the course is to start at $500 a month for a three month period. And that feels about right for where I'm at, for my level of expertise, for the work that I've done with people just casually in this niche. That's where I'm going to start. $500 for three months and then I'm going to offer a Pay in full, 1250. So $1250 if you pay up front for the 3 months or $500 per month. I also need to get clear on the packaging in terms of what we're gonna work on. And so I've kind of developed this idea of the FIT system. Fit and so F stands for food, right? Diet, nutrition. I stands for inner game. A lot of people's issues with their body and with weight loss or gaining muscle are emotional and it's about motivation or it's about their relationship with food. So I stands for inner game. And then T is for training workouts that they're doing. And so those are sort of the three areas people are going to need to get handled if they want to craft a body that they're really proud of. So fit. That's the categories of things I'm be helping people with and then how often we're going to meet something two to three times a month with texting in between. I feel like texting will be helpful because especially with something like fitness, it's really about those daily decisions. And so I'm willing to do that as we start off. So a one on one offering, it's going to be online two to three times a month, working on food, inner game and training. So I've gotten clear on all those things. Again, I'll narrow down as I go and as I learn, but I'm feeling like this is the right amount of specificity to start with. And then we'll figure out based on who pays, who gets the best results, who has the greatest, you know, testimonials, who refers people to me. We'll start to figure out the ideal client from there. I also have people come up with a curiosity hook after week one, which is basically how do you describe what you do? And so to start, based on the information I have, my curiosity hook is that I'm a fitness coach and I help successful entrepreneurs build bodies they're proud of so that they can be as confident in their bodies as they are with their businesses. Hope that was helpful. If you're thinking about how narrow to get with your niche, that's sort of the level that you want to start with. And then you can obviously get narrower and narrower as you figure out your sweet spot. Have a great week and thanks for watching. Hey, I hope you liked that video. If you want more content like it, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. There's a big red button says subscribe on it and if you click that, then you'll get notified when I upload new videos. I'm going to be documenting my whole journey of building this coaching business, and I'd love you to follow along.