Katie McManus tried four different niches before landing on business strategy coaching. She started with dating coaching for men, then women, then executive coaching, before finding her fit teaching sales and marketing. Her point: you don't need to get it right the first time.
Questions this video answers
Four times.
About 30 minutes.
Chapters
I know that there's a lot of pressure to pick a niche when you first start a business, and I just love sharing the fact that I got my niche wrong four times before I figured out what I actually wanted to do in my business. When I first started, I was convinced because I was a single woman in San Francisco, and I had gone on a lot of dates with a lot of, let's just say, men who needed help on the dating front. I was convinced that I was going to be a dating coach for men because I wanted to fix them. Now there's a whole conversation to be had about coaching and how coaching is not meant to go out there and, like, fix the social problem. Right? And, yeah, I'm aware. However, the universe did not let me do that. The universe instead gave me pretty much all female clients, and all the women that I worked with ultimately didn't want dating coaching. They wanted executive coaching. They wanted leadership coaching. So I went from being a dating coach for men to being a dating coach for women, then realizing I wasn't doing any dating coaching to doing executive coaching, which led me down a path to do a lot of, like, leadership development training so that I could really develop my clients into the leaders that they wanted to be. So I ended up also doing a lot of leadership development trainings for my clients. And in the background, every single time I did this, you know, I changed my niche. I would still get clients, even though it wasn't the right niche for me. And so in the background, all my friends that I'd gone to coach training with were watching me and thinking crap like, how is she doing this? Right? Because they were following the bad advice that our coach training program had given us, saying, just go out and give free sessions and ask people to be your client at the end. And we all tried it. It did not work. And I took for granted that I came from a whole background in sales and marketing and that I knew better. And so I very quickly realized, okay, that strategy does not work. Let me go back to everything that I know works for my whole career, selling a whole bunch of different stuff. Stuff, and see if any of that can be applied here. And it can be. It did, and it worked, and it worked for me. So all of my friends from coaching school started asking me, like, hey, Katie, how did you do that? How did you go out there and get clients? How. How are you charging this much money for what you're doing? And I started showing them. I started teaching them a little bit about what I was doing for marketing and for networking and how I was running my enrollment calls or sales calls, whatever you want to call them, and what my onboarding process was like. And I didn't even realize that this could be a service that I could offer until some of these friends turned around and started referring clients to me for that service. So I love sharing this story because I know how much stress it is when you're first starting a business to, like, figure out all the things and also on top of it all, figure out what your niche is and get it right on the first time. And I just love sharing that. You do not need to. You don't need to get it right. Okay. Sometimes picking a niche is kind of like a dance of the universe. Like, if you want to find the right partner on the dance floor, you can't just sit on the sidelines and just kind of wait for the right person to come up to you. No, no. You have to get up, and you have to just start dancing. Okay? You have to start dancing with one partner. And if they're not the right partner for you, then you got to switch. And if they're not the right partner for you, then you got to switch again. It's the same with your niche. Right? So I wouldn't have known that I wanted to do executive coaching, leadership coaching, if I hadn't already figured out I don't want to do dating coaching, or if the universe hadn't already decided for me that dating coaching was not going to be my thing. Right. I also never would have realized that I could teach sales and marketing and be a business coach for my clients and a business strategist. If I hadn't, like, created all these little businesses and then kept shifting and had all my friends say, oh, my God, she's doing this. How does she do this? Right? So let yourself off the hook, okay? Don't hold yourself to this standard that, I don't know, gets sold to you, that you're gonna have to figure this out and be perfect on the first try. Okay? You don't. All right? And let me tell you, there's a big fear that, like, you'll get it wrong, and then you have to announce to the whole world that you got it wrong and, like, you failed, and now you have to do this thing. No, like, the beautiful thing about starting a business and being in those early stages is that, honestly, like, no one's paying attention. That's also the really hard thing. No one's paying attention. So you have to, like, really, really post and put yourself out there. A lot so that people learn who you are and who you're helpful to. But honestly, like barely anyone remembers that. I did dating coaching. Some people remember I did executive coaching. Most people know that I do business strategy now. So anyway, if you're in the early stages of your business and you're trying to figure out your niche, you know, stick to it, you're going to figure it out. And if you need any help, and that is what I help my clients with and if you're curious about that, then, and if you want help with any of this and just go to the schlink in my NIO and book a generate income strategy call. What we'll do is we'll hop on for about 30 minutes, talk about your business, what your goals are, what obstacles are getting in the way of you doing on your own, and if it's a fit for both of us then, then we can talk about different ways to work together. Oh, and hi, I'm Katie, your practical business coach. And I help new business owners leave their corporate 9 to 5, replace their 6 figure salary by selling their expertise like and follow if you want more content like this.
