Don't Niche Down

Okay. This video is about a belief I have that is a little controversial. Uh, it's a theory more than a belief, I guess, because it's something that I'm willing to be proven wrong with. Um, but it's something that has been sitting with me for a really, really long time now. This concept of not niching down because everybody online is always telling you niche down, niche down. You gotta find a niche and the more I've sat and reflected on it after being in business for about 7 years, the more I've gone, fuck that. Like, there's no way that niching down is actually ultimately the long-term play. Now I'll explain. There's a few caveats of this to this, and there's— again, this is a theory. This is a belief of mine. That I have, and I'm willing to be proven wrong. I think over the next 10, 20, 30 years, I'll probably be proven wrong plenty of times. But I think this concept applies. I think it's really important. I think it's something to consider and think about if you're working online, if you're working at any sort of company, to be honest, and doing any profession or building a business of any kind. So I think it applies to everyone. Anyway, since the last video, had some, had some comments telling me to fix my audio, so I've got got the mic settings good to go. I got a frickin ring light and all of the, all of the angles and all of that good shit set up. So let me dive straight in. The way that I landed on coming up with this concept of not niching down is by looking at myself throughout my life and figuring out how I get better at things. And one of the ways that I get better at something is by focusing on it. A lot, right? Like if I want to get, if I want to get better at tennis, going and playing a lot of tennis helps me improve tennis. But what I found is that there's lots of other things that help you get good at tennis. So for instance, being stronger in the gym is not playing tennis, but I end up getting better at tennis as a result. Now, playing tennis also helps me in some weird ways get better at the gym. Because through playing tennis, and through learning about how my body works, and understanding what muscles are tight in my shoulders and my arms and my hips, allow me to train better when I'm in the gym. And they allow me to stand up straighter when I'm walking around, they allow me to, to, to focus more on the the mind-muscle connection. That's a really terrible example. Now, I know my examples are not going to be very good in this video, but it's something that I strongly believe. So I'll probably talk about it a lot more in the future. Now, you've probably— you might have heard the concept of being T-shaped, where you should be really, really good at one thing and then good at lots of other things. And another problem that I've had is, is as I've sat down, as I've thought about this more and more and more, I've tried to figure out what makes— I've been trying to figure out what makes really, really good team members, what makes the ultimate employee, let's call them, or partner in the business or whatever you want to call somebody that works at a company. And I landed on, well, technically an entrepreneur is the best type, right? Because an entrepreneur is somebody that understands all facets of the business. So not only do they understand sales, they also understand accounting finance and legal and they understand hiring and they understand management and all of these things. And the more and more I've reflected on it, the more I've realized that I actually want people at the company that have lots and lots and lots of skills. If you're familiar with Sam Ovens, he built Consulting.com to $30 million a year. He, he's made some really excellent content. If you go and check out his YouTube, he doesn't post a lot, but but he's made some excellent content. And one of the videos that he, he has posted on Spotify and on YouTube is called Hire Full Stack People. And he explains the concept of one of you wanting to actually hire people that, that have multiple skills. You don't want to just hire somebody that is really good at sales and not good at anything else because they actually can't be as good at sales if they don't have concept, the context of how the rest of the business works. So one of the challenges that I'm facing right now in my business to help us unlock a new level of growth is helping everybody at the company understand what everyone else is doing better. And not only that, but also encouraging people to get involved in those facets of the business. Because I look at myself and I go, why am I learning quickly? And why am I— in most cases, do I seem— do I appear— and again, biased, but do I appear to be learning faster than a decent amount of people at the company? And I go, well, shit, it's probably because I have all of this context. I have all of this information. I see everything happening at the company every single day. So I can see a problem in, let's say, our sales process or with a member of our sales team. And I can then go and look at our service delivery team and see a similar problem in a different, in a different form. So, so the solution to the problem that I have with the person in the sales team is often the solution that I have or I need to put in place to solve the problem with the person in the service delivery team. Now, as I, as I, as I start seeing this and start seeing that there's, there's all of this, this context that is really helpful to have, I'm essentially not good at just one thing. Like I am getting good at lots and lots of things. And I think as you're building a business, as you're an entrepreneur, you have to learn how to get really, really good at lots and lots of different things. So it actually kind of means that you're not really good at anything. You're good, you're good at everything. Sorry, you're not really great at anything. And when I say great, the whole concept of be an expert and just do one thing, it's like, well, actually I do lots of things and that's what makes me great. If I want to call myself great, let's call myself good. That's what makes me okay. So I've learned it through this kind of process, this thought process as I've been building Flax over the last few years. I've always questioned the concept of niching down. Because, because there's 100% a ton of benefits with niching down, right? It allows you to capture a certain market faster. And I'll give you an example. Like if you're, if you're only working with people that do vacuum installation or sorry, let's call it air conditioning installation in apartments and you only work with companies that do air conditioning installation, you'll understand their problems a lot faster and you'll be able to solve their problems and expand within that niche very, very quickly. So it's actually a great business play in lots of ways in the short term to grow. If you want to capture a niche, go after a small problem that nobody's really experiencing and, and only sell to a select few people. But if you look at the biggest companies in the world, Google and Tesla and Apple and I forget the Saudi Aramco. It's one of the biggest companies that they sell oil and gas and fuel to everybody. They don't niche down like you don't have to be apart from being able to afford to buy a Tesla. You don't have to work in a certain industry. You don't have to have a certain set of qualifications or skills or a certain type of business in order to buy a Tesla. They just went after a bigger problem that more people had and they solved it for everybody. And I think the whole concept of niching down is excellent. If you want to capture a niche really quickly, you want to scale up and you're only in it for short-term money, short-term cash. But if you're in the game of business and you want to play long, long term, and again, I might be proven wrong on this, but this is what our strategy at Flax is going to be for the next 10, 20, 30 years. And I'm curious to see how it plays out because I think we might be onto something. And if you speak to several other people at Flax, that have been around for a while, they also hold the same belief. And it's because we found that working with lots of different brands in different niches, we do work with e-commerce brands, which is, is a broader niche. But by working with lots and lots of different brands, we get lots of context from different industries that we can apply to each other, where there's some things that apparel brands in the apparel space do really, really, really well. But people in the pet supplement space never apply. And it's because those— most of the time everybody is working in their niche, so they stop talking to each other. It's like, it's like a sales team that, that doesn't understand how the service or the product that they're selling works. And as a result, they can't sell as well because they don't have the context as to why the product solves all of their customers' problems. They might understand the customer really, really well, but they don't exactly know how their problems are being solved. So they need that context. And actually, in order to be a really great person on a team at a company as well, you need as much context on a business as possible. So it kind of led me and has led me over the years to the belief that you shouldn't actually niche down if you want to build something really, really big. Now, if you're starting out, it might make sense to niche down to a certain extent. And I'm not saying go after everybody and try to start Tesla and sell a product to everybody from day one. But that is something that you could do. Gmail and lots of Google's products like Google Search is not something that's specific to one person. They made a product for everybody. And I think if you want to build one of the— like if you want to build one of the biggest companies in the world, you need to make your products solve more people's problems, not less people's problems. So again, if it's something— if you're looking for short-term cash, if you're looking for a way to make a, make a bunch of money, if you need a load of money for whatever reason, then yes, it makes sense to niche down to an extent. But understand that there's also extremities with everything and people will say niche down, niche down, niche down, niche down. And if you niche down and you only focus on one niche and you only focus on one service, that's freaking great. If you're building an agency and you're only doing one thing and selling one product to a certain select few group of people. But one of the fastest ways that we've made our services better at Flax is by making more than one service. And everybody will tell you it's a terrible idea. But we have a software development team and I can sell people software development if they would like it, even though we're mostly working with e-commerce businesses on ads and content and websites. But because I built that software development team, I have a shit ton of context on how software development works now. And we have our own software that runs a ton of automation and a ton of data analysis for clients that we're running ads on. And that means that it's way harder for other ad agencies to compete with Flax over the long term because our software capabilities are getting better and better and better and better and better. So I think that you shouldn't niche down. It's just an opinion. A bunch of people might hate me for this, but I genuinely think that everybody in the space is just repeating everything else that they're seeing online. They're saying, oh well, Hormozy told me not to niche down, so I— Hormozy told me to niche down, so I'm going to niche down. And in reality, I don't know. Like, if you look at the biggest companies, they're not doing it. So I'd rather listen to the biggest companies than some of the not as big companies that are essentially people with a lot of influence on social media in the business community. Now, these people are excellent. They are high level, they're killers. They know a shit ton more than me. But in 30 years from now, I'm going to play a slightly different game and I'm curious to see how it plays out. So welcome to— you're welcome to follow along. And hopefully this is the last video of like low production quality. We brought a head of content onto the team, so we've been shooting a bunch of video content already and I'm expecting things to get hopefully a little more engaging and entertaining. So instead of me just ranting and speaking off the top of my head, we'll actually be making some structured videos, which should also maybe get the word out about what we're doing out there a little more with a few more views. So looking forward to it. Cheers, guys.