Niche Hacks that NEVER work

Hello and good evening. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, here with you tonight on the Facebooks, on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter to talk about something very important. If you are starting a business and this is your niche, people, okay. This is a foundational part of your business and it's a part that is understood, misunderstood more often than not. So I'm going to be talking about the fears that people have when they're going to decide on niche and the hacks that they try to use to try to overcome those fears. Going to tell you why these hacks don't work. Okay, here's the thing. Like, we can build businesses based on shortcuts and they usually do not work. Or we can build businesses that are solid and have an incredible audience and have people who need your service or your product and are willing to pay for it. You can't have both. What's that? That trifecta? You can have it fast, you can have it cheap or you can have it a good quality. Right? You can't have both. All right? Or you can't have all three. I'm sorry, I'm both. All three things. It's been a long day. So you can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have it good quality. Okay? You have to pick two of those three. Anyway, just so you know, I love for this to be interactive. So those of you who are joining me, welcome. If you have any questions as I'm going through, then please pop them in the comments. I am going live to five different places. So sometimes the technology just doesn't work with us. So if you comment and I don't answer your question or call you out, it is not you. It is just sometimes the technology, okay? So let's dive into the top fears that people have and where they really come from. So the number one fear that I hear from new business owners is they're just worried that they're going to pick the wrong niche, okay? They're worried that they're going to pick the wrong niche and it's just not going to work. All right? Now, this comes from a whole lifetime of going to school. School and doing homework and doing tests and doing quizzes and only succeeding if you do well if you got the right answer, okay? That is not how life works, okay? Life doesn't work that way. You don't start. I mean, for some people, you do. You start dating one person and that ends up being the right life partner for you. For most of Us, however, we have to kiss some frogs. We have to find out the people that we should not be partnered with. We have to get them out of the way before we find the person we're meant to be with. It's the same in your business, okay? So know that you're probably going to pick the wrong niche, okay? It's probably not going to work the first time, and that is absolutely okay. And just to share a little bit about my story, if you, if you haven't heard this and you're new around here, you know, grab a seat, get comfortable. When I started my business, I started off as a dating coach for men. All right? I was a dating coach for men. I went out and I marketed and I networked and I announced to the entire ass world that I was dating coach for men. That didn't work. I got one dude as a client and I got something like eight women as clients from my dating coaching. And how this would work is I'd be at like a networking event or a happy hour, and I'd say, yes, I'm a dating coach for men. I work with men to help them, you know, find a relationship. And these women in the circle that I was talking to would put their hands on their hips and they get like, kind of mad and they'd be like, well, what about me? I want a dating coach. And I was new and I wanted clients. I'd be like, oh, well, sure, I'll, I'll coach you. And then I, you know, filled up my, my part time practice with that, realized through that work that obviously the dating coaching for men was not a thing that was going to work for me, so switched it to dating coaching for women. But then I found out, I figured out through working with my clients that most of them needed executive leadership coaching because how they were at work and how they were bad at setting boundaries around their time was directly getting in the way of how they could be in a relationship. Okay. So then I got trained as a leadership coach and started doing leadership coaching with them. Built out my leadership coaching business. Then my, my coaching friends who I'd gone to school with started asking me, wait, how did you do that? And I didn't realize that I had taken my, like, decade of working in sales and marketing, and I just kind of like created this very simple system to build my own business. And so I started showing them how I had built my business and helped them kind of tweak it and customize it to their own needs. And they started telling me that I needed to charge for it because it was so useful. Because here's the thing about a lot of coaching programs. They don't teach you how to get clients. Their advice in getting clients is so bad. They just tell you to go out and talk to anyone and offer free sessions. And that does not work. Okay? So I really stumbled, tripped, and fell into my niche that I have right now. And if you're doing the same, if you're in the same kind of like bouncing around, this is working. That's not working. That is fine, too. All right? So if you're worried that it's not going to work, don't be. It's normal. Everyone has that fear. Sometimes you have to get through the things that don't work to get to the thing that does work. And I'll talk a little bit about what people try to do instead to overcome this. That just does not work. I'll talk about that in a little bit. You know, the next one is, well, what if I change my mind? This is a fear that a lot of people have. Don't want to pick a niche, because what if I get really tired of it, bored of it, whatever, and I just change my mind and I want to work with someone else? Great, then do that. When that happens, go ahead and do that. This is your life. This is your life. This is your business. You get to decide whatever the hell you want. And if you start a business and it's successful and you get a few years in and you're like, this is just kind of boring, I don't really want to do it anymore, you have full permission to change it. That's absolutely okay. The next one is, well, what if I pick a niche that can't afford me? What if they have absolutely no money? The way people try to hack this one is so funny. And I'll dive into that in a little bit. Now, if you have the right niche. And by niche, I don't mean like a demographic of people. I mean a set of problems that those people all have in common. And if you're. If you're not sure what I mean by that, then I want you to go into the link of this description and I want you to sign up for my weenie workshop. What the niche. And it's happening on December 29th at 2pm Eastern Time. I'm going to be diving into how you identify this set of problems and get away from this whole demographic model that everyone seems to be wanting to push at you because it's just not helpful. Okay? And it doesn't help your clients really feel like, oh, my God, this person is so perfect for me to work with. All right? So if you're worried that your people can't afford to work with you, I guarantee you you're not giving them a good reason to spend the money on it. I guarantee you, the way you're talking about how you help them, you're not presenting. Here's the pain you're in right now, and I help you get out of it. And you're also not presenting. Here's the outcome my clients get. Do you want that? And making that sound super appealing to them. Okay, now, the last one that I want to touch on is, one that I hear a lot, is I just don't feel qualified enough to do this work, to work with these types of clients. I. What's ironic about this is I often hear I'm not qualified enough from the people who have multiple certifications, from people who have PhDs in a topic or. Or, you know, an area. And what it really is is that they're just not feeling confident enough to do it. Knowing your niche and being crystal clear on who it is you help and who you're useful to often helps you overcome this. All right? So don't overthink it. Don't worry about being qualified enough. Gen, like, if you. If you want to be a. A cartoon animator and you have no idea how to do that, like, yes, you have to go and get some training, but oftentimes you really just have to be three or four steps ahead of your ideal client. Okay? You don't have to have everything figured out. You don't have to have a perfect life. You don't have to do things perfectly. You just have to know a little better than they do. All right, so let's go into the common pitfalls that people fall into when they're trying to hack this system, when they're trying to kind of bypass doing the niche work. Okay? Now, number one is they avoid picking a niche altogether. They say, you know what? Like, picking a niche is going to limit me. It's going to limit me. Like, I can work with everyone and anyone. I'm so good. And. Of course you are. I'm not. I'm not saying that you're not. But I want to tell you, like, if I'm. If I'm a life coach and I say yes, I help people be better at life. I help them be their best selves, I want to just ask you, how many people did you just think of in your brain right now. How many people actually came to mind, like Jennifer? Jennifer could be her best self if she just hired Katie? Probably not many. However, I'm going to use the dating coaching, because why not? If I came to you and I said, you know what? I'm a dating coach, and I only work with lesbians who have just gotten divorced and have kids. So dating for them has to be very intentional. You know, they're. They're hoping to find their next partner. They're hoping this partner will help co parent with their former partner and everyone will get along. They also want someone who's going to be really good for their kids and someone that they can really seek growing old with. Do you know one to three people who fit that description? Now, you may not know someone right off the bat, but I guarantee you, the next friend that you have who happens to be a lesbian who's going through a divorce and has kids, you're gonna be like, oh, oh, my God, I have it. I have a coach for you, Someone who works specifically with that. And I just, I love that example because there are these coaches out there, and you get to be that specific. Okay? You get to be so narrowed down into, here are the problems that my clients face, and here's what they really want. And my. My niche is very specific. Now, I want to point out that as I'm describing that niche, I'll probably describe some of the things that people want and what they struggle with. It's going to be similar for straight couples. And so I guarantee you're still going to get people pop through and be like, hey, I know you won't work with me, you know, typically because I don't fit your normal demographic. But, you know, I love what you have to say. Would you ever consider it? And at that point, if you like the person, you can absolutely accept them as a client. Okay? There's no harm there. So you have to pick something. Okay? Remember what I said before? Like, it's okay if you pick something and it doesn't work out. You can always bounce off that and change it. People have very short memory spans. I think only one or two people in the world even remember that I was a dating coach for men at some point. Okay? They, like everyone else, has gotten retrained every single time I've changed my niche, all right? And it's going to be the same for you. So. And the next way that people try to hack the whole niche thing is they pick a niche, but they pick a niche that is so vague that it really doesn't give anyone anything to work with. And if they change it, and here's the mentality behind it, it's like, okay, well, I'll pick something that's super vague, so if I want to it, no one will really notice. Right. And for one, again, like, my whole example of I'm a life coach, I help people be better at life super big, all right, Versus getting very, very specific about a core client that you work with. What. What ultimately happens here is people just get so frustrated because they're being vague. They're naming who they work with, and they're naming who they work with, and they're putting a lot of stuff out there. And they usually get no clients. They get no clients because it's so hard for someone to hear. I help people be. Live their best lives and think, oh, that's me, that's me. I need to live my best life. Right? Most of the time, people hear that and they go, oh, cool, good for you. And then they move on. It's just. It's not very useful to them. Okay. So you have to get specific. All right? You can't bypass that. The next one is kind of funny. And I've actually had some clients who started off really wanting to do this, and I had to work them out of it, and it worked out for the best. Don't worry. Some people want to pick a niche that they think is already affluent and has access to money, because they assume that if they pick a niche that already has disposable income, that they will easily get clients because people have the money to burn right now. Here's where I've seen this kind of thing work is like, if you're a former lawyer. If you're a former lawyer, you know, you got out of the rat race, you just couldn't do it anymore. And you turn around and you coach other former lawyers or lawyers who are still in. In law, you know, through. Through burnout or through changing their career or whatever. Yes, you're working with a specifically, like, high, highly paid group of people. But just because you've chosen a group of people that typically makes a lot of money does not mean that they're going to hear what you do and hear what you're up to and think, yeah, I need that. It's just not how it goes. And oftentimes, if you're specific like that, you kind of have to have some street cred in that area. Okay? So working with wealth managers, they want, like, if you're going to be specific about Working with wealth managers. I hope you are a wealth manager as well. Okay. Because if you're that specific about that, then, like, why. Why would you be called to do that? It's kind of obvious. It's kind of an obvious money grab. So don't do that. And it just doesn't work. Like, you can do it if you want, but it just doesn't work. And lastly, the most common thing that happens ultimately with business owners who are just starting out is that they are so afraid of picking a niche. They're so afraid of declaring to the world. I work with these people who struggle with this thing and who really want this more than anything. They're so afraid of putting that out there and letting people from all over their life, you know, see that and interact with it and kind of be reintroduced to who they are that they put off starting their business. They. They literally just put off starting their business. If they're. If they're freaking out about not being qualified enough, then they may, like, start becoming certification hoarders, where they just continue to get certification after certification after certification. And ultimately, what will. What will happen is they'll either leave their job hoping to start the business, freak out, start getting more certifications, start getting more certifications, realize that they're kind of eating through their savings and not bringing in a whole lot of money, and then they'll have to go back and get a job because they can't afford to keep eating through their savings, getting all these certificates, certifications. And a couple years down the line, they'll be left, you know, just wondering, like, what do I have to show for all this? Nothing. You have nothing to show for it because you didn't actually stop the certification, the learning, and start the business. Okay? This is the part that just takes a little bravery, okay? It takes bravery to stick a flag in something and say, you know what? This is mine. This is what I do. And I just want to give you. If you're watching this and you're thinking like, yep, this is me, I just. I just want to tell you, it's so normal where you are, okay? Having this fear is part of building the business. It's normal to be afraid. And also, we don't let our. The weeny parts of our brain, the scared parts, you know, the parts that are just, like, completely wimpy. We don't let them run our businesses. We let our brave selves take over for that. Okay? So if you. If you're struggling to figure out what your niche is, what you should be doing here? These are some things that you shouldn't do. I'm doing a workshop on this on December 29th at 2:00pm Eastern Time. It's gonna be training and Q and A. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna train you on how to design your own niche. I'm going to take you through absolutely everything you need to know, and then we're going to do some serious Q and A at the end. And I'm more than happy to let the time go over if people have a lot more questions. But we're going to be going through this, and if you show up and if you do the work in that workshop, you're going to walk away with a niche. There's a link to buy tickets in the caption of this live, so go ahead and snag that. And if you have any questions that you want me to address in that workshop, then please DM them to me. Otherwise, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. I hope you have an amazing Wednesday night, and I can't wait to be going live with you tomorrow. All right, have a good night, everyone, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.