Ep127: Four Lessons From Pivoting My Niche (After Spending $6K To Get My First Client)

Alrighty, episode 127. Welcome back to the show. It's Matt from the Leveraged CEO podcast. So let's get stuck in. So today's title is What 3 Months of Pivoting My Niche Taught Me. So it's been no, no secret that I have moved away from business coaching for personal trainers and I've steered more towards higher-level business owners. Generally, people doing over $250K a year to about $2M is the general people that I'm working with at the moment. So I'm going to go through the 4 lessons that I've got from making the switch. I've covered this a little bit before, but the reason why I decided to make that switch is because I wanted to work with people on a very, a lot higher scale. With the personal training guys that I'm working with or that I've inquired with me, a lot of them are quite new to business, which nothing wrong with it. I still really enjoy coaching and that side of it, but I just wanted to solve bigger, bigger problems. So people that got like a big team, you know, people that are turning over millions of dollars per year, they've got bigger, bigger problems. And I wanted to— I wanted a bit more of a challenge, um, but I also— the stuff that I'm interested in right now, um, my current clients, uh, don't really have those similar interests, or not yet. They're not at that stage of business where, um, they need to worry about it. Like, like AI, for example, a lot of— a lot of the PTs don't need to worry about AI right now. Like they could, but it's not a requirement. Like, they probably need to be doing like, you know, $20,000-$30,000 a month to really get a massive amount of value in time reduction from AI. So anyway, let's go through the 4 lessons that I had from pivoting my niche. So the first one is a big one, which was a bit of blind faith. So a little story here. I spent, I actually spent about $6,000 on ads before I got my first client on my, on my other business, which is the Leverage CEO. So not many people would spend that much to get a client, but I, I really wanted to work with some high-level people. And the reason why it took so long is because it was like, it was like a brand new niche, something that my, my, my Meta Pixel was used to targeting personal trainers. So I had to make a brand new Pixel. And when you make a brand new Pixel, it takes a bit of time for for them to figure out who you actually want to attract. So a lot of testing for ads, obviously a lot of money spent and a lot of time, but I finally got there. So after that first $6K, I think I spent another $4K and got like 5 clients or 4 or 5 clients from there. So it worked out to be a pretty good return on investment overall. But I think the moral of the story here, most people would quit or they would think that it doesn't work, but I had some blind faith that I just needed to figure it out. I needed to figure it out because I didn't want to keep working with, um, people on the, on the lower end. So for those that are still listening that, um, are interested in PT Mastery, I still will take on new clients, um, but you need to be like a very specific, um, person, as in I don't really want to work with like brand new PTs. Anymore. You need to be like somewhat established if you want to work with me from now on. So, um, yeah, I think a lot of people tend to not have that faith that it will eventually work and they, they give up. Um, prime example, PTs— 80% of them quit within the first 6 months. Um, but that's the other thing as well, like the people that I'm working with now, they are— they've been around for years so that like there's faith that the, the business works. Um, but it's about like, you know, getting people's time back. So I knew people needed my help as well. I knew that people were working, you know, 50, 60 hours a week. So I knew people wanted my offer. It was just about making an offer that was like a no-brainer because obviously it was a brand new thing, right? So I didn't have the social proof yet apart from my own businesses that I had. So I had to and the price point, like for example, was super, super cheap for the first like 5 people. So that's number 1. Number 2 was know my numbers, do my KPIs. So the current mentor that I've got is very big on doing the KPIs every single week. So that was really good for me to kind of give that reminder. I knew I should have been doing it, but I wasn't necessarily doing it every single week. So it was good, good in that sense. It was a good accountability piece in terms of knowing the numbers, what I should be focusing on. But also when you know your numbers, you make very good decisions and they're based on logic, which is what you need to do in business. And it just makes, it gives you less stress when you know the numbers. Like literally yesterday I was planning for the next 12 months with my 2 businesses now. But I knew the numbers. I've got the data now that I know the numbers. Like, it's gonna cost $500 to book a call. 80% of them are gonna show up. 30% are gonna close. It's gonna cost me about $2K to get a new client. So I can just predict what's gonna happen over the next 6 to 12 months. Like, obviously it's not always gonna go exactly to plan, but I can just reverse engineer those numbers and I know exactly what I need to do. It gives me a lot of peace. That I know that it's just a numbers game. And it literally is just a numbers game. That's all it is. The third thing is document everything as you go. So in terms of systems and processes, especially if you have a team, a lot of the people that I'm working with right now, they've got a team and stuff, but there's no documentation on what they need to do. So the team just comes back to the founder or the manager or whoever. And they just get bombarded with questions all day, every day because there's no system or there's no, there's no SOP, for example. So one of the things that I'm building for a business right now is an AI chatbot that's trained on their system. So we're making like a big manual and we're just going to basically upload that to a chatbot and then the team's going to have access to the chatbot so they can get the answers that they need. And it's going to be like just a requirement that they need to go to the chatbot first, you know, if they still can't figure it out, then they come to the team. Yeah, so it's going to make the team more productive but also have more ownership, more responsibility for them to just figure it out, because they've got the tools, um, like the system is there, it's just not in a, in an SOP. So if you guys are making SOPs as you go, you need to doc— don't like, don't go out of your way to make SOPs, but all you need to do is just like document what you're already doing. So when you're setting out a marketing campaign, just go on Loom, record what you do, and then you can turn that into an SOP with AI. It's like, it's not rocket science. So don't be like, cool, I need to spend the whole day redoing all my systems and filming all the content. Just when you, when you do that task or when you, when you complete that, you know, I suppose task, when you complete that task, just film yourself recording it, screen record it, and just talk through what you're doing. I'm doing this because of this. This is, this is, this goes here because this happened. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. And the fourth one is I've actually niched by a problem, not, not industry. So for example, for business coaching for personal trainers, I only work with personal trainers. So that's a niche of an industry. Now a lot of people will have a niche of, you know, I'm going to work with tradies, I'm going to work with nurses, I'm going to work with people 40 plus, I'm going to work with dads. See, I decided not to go down that route. And originally I wasn't going to do this, but I had a really good conversation with my mentor and she was saying, well, you can niche into a specific problem and you can help any industry. So right now I'm helping any industry. I haven't narrowed down on the specific industry that I do want to help, which I will do in due course when I get a little bit more experience. I want to figure out, um, who exactly I want to help. But right now I'm focusing on the problem, which is the business owners or the founders that are working, you know, 40, 50, 60 hours a week. I'm helping them get back 20 hours a week. Of time. Once we do that, then I'm going to help them scale their business without them. I'm going to help that team find the right people and then help them scale the business that way so they can get back their time and then grow the revenue as well. The dream, right? Dream, right, for the business owners. So they're the 4 lessons that I have, that I've had over the last 3 months when I've been pivoting my niche. So recap, blind faith, I knew I just needed to figure it out. I knew that was the direction I wanted to go in and I just needed to keep trying things until I figured it out. Number 2 is know your numbers. Gives you a lot of peace and less stress if you know the numbers that you need to hit and what exactly you need to do. The third one is document everything as you go. So make SOPs as you go so you don't need to spend extra time making these SOPs. Just document them as you go. And the fourth one, niche by the problem, not the industry. Not for everyone, But that could be a thing that you could do. So for example, you might only work with people that are 40+ in any industry, as an example. Or you might only work with women with menopause. You might only work with soccer athletes. You might only work with cricket players. Okay, so that's, that's the— you can obviously go by industry, you can go by age, you You can go by gender, but the moral of the story is you just gotta pick, pick either a specific problem that you wanna solve, or maybe you wanna help people jump higher. The Jumping Guy, I used to work with someone called the Jumping Guy, and he helped people from all different sports just jump higher. Okay, so that's the problem that people had, that is they wanted to be able to jump higher. So that's the niche by problem, not by industry. Okay, so I hope that makes sense. Might leave it there. See you next week for another episode. Have an awesome day.