How to Niche Down Your Business
Episode 985: How to Niche Down Your Business, with Parker Stevenson
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How to niche down your business—Discover strategies for refining business focus and growth with our guide on how to niche down your business.
How to niche down your business? As we’ve discussed many times before on Onward Nation, taking steps to niche down your business and focus on a specific audience — rather than limiting your opportunities as you might expect — opens new doors by helping you plant your flag of authority and becoming a trusted expert within your niche. It allows you to differentiate your business and to compete on value rather than joining the race to the bottom on price. And in this week’s episode of Onward Nation, you’ll hear a perfect example of how tight focus and a dedication to serving a niche can become powerful fuel for your business.
Parker Stevenson is co-owner and Chief Business Officer at Evolved Finance, a bookkeeping firm specializing in helping online coaches, course creators, influencers, and thought leaders to make better business decisions based on solid financial data. This decision to narrowly focus on thought leaders didn’t come lightly, but doing so has made a profound impact on the business and its growth.
What you’ll learn in this episode is about how to niche down your business:
- How Parker’s unique career path and experiences led to his role at Evolved Finance, and why taking the leap was one of the best decisions Parker ever made
- Why Evolved chose to niche down and focus on serving the financial services needs of thought leaders, and how that focus has led to their busiest year ever
- Parker will teach us how to niche down your business for refining business focus.
- How working with thought leaders, coaches and influencers differs from working with other types of business professionals
- How Evolved has been able niche down and streamline their efforts on their clients’ behalf to “do less but charge more”
- How Evolved will reconcile over $100 million in revenue in the thought leadership space by the end of 2020, demonstrating the value of their decision to niche down
- How the majority of Evolved’s clients are having booming years in spite of the global pandemic, and why focusing on this niche has helped Evolved grow even during the crisis
- Parker shares a case study of how Evolved was able to help a client niche down and become more operationally efficient, and why it made a powerful impact on her business
- Why almost every one of Evolved’s clients have found benefits from their efforts to niche down, regardless of their business size
- Why building out processes and systems and standardizing procedures is the key to maximizing the benefits of niching down
Resources:
- Learn more about how to niche down your business, and you can find Parker here.
- Enhance your understanding of how to niche down your business by tuning in to this podcast with Christopher Lochhead
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/parkerstevenson/
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/evolved-finance/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/evolvedfinance
- Twitter: @evolvedfinance
Additional Resources:
- Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
- Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
- Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
How to Niche Down Your Business: Full Episode Transcript
Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.
Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation. Before we dive into what is going to be, I’m telling you, Onward Nation, this is going to be a rock-solid, awesome conversation that we’re going to have with Parker Stevenson today. I want to quickly ask you if you have registered for our open mic Q and A, where it will take a deep dive in to how to fill your sales pipeline. So, Erik Jensen is my business partner here at Predictive. He and I kick off each of our Wednesday Q and A’s with five to 10 minutes around one of our latest strategic insights. Maybe one of our best practices is some of the test results from the experiments that we’re always running that we think are going to be helpful to you and your team.
So it’s a little bit of five to 10 minutes to have sort of experience sharing that we think is going to be helpful. And then we quickly get to the open mic to answer all of your questions. So why are we doing this? And why are we doing this every Wednesday? Because of the companies that are making it through, the companies that did make it through and came roaring out the other side of the last six recessions, we’re the ones who made progressive decisions. They’re the ones who have doubled down on filling their sales pipeline with right-fit clients. And our goal is to help you brainstorm ideas. Of course, answer questions. Think through some strategies and action steps that you can use to help feel your sales pipeline.
So just go to PredictiveROI.com/Sales-Pipeline. We’ve got all the details and the schedule posted they’re you can register, and we look forward to seeing you at next Wednesday’s session. Okay. Onward Nation, let’s dive in. Parker Stevenson is co-owner and the Chief Business Officer at Evolved Finance.
Evolved as a bookkeeping agency specializing in helping business owners just like you build profitable and financially stable online businesses. So we are going to talk a lot about niching and Parker has been behind the curtain. You know, he was certainly not going to share confidential information about anybody’s particular finances. Okay. But he has been behind the curtain, looking at businesses that have niched down as a way to give you additional confidence that niching down is if I Will strategy. So he also advised us some of the top coaches, course creators, influencers, and thought leaders on how to make better business decisions using their financial data.
So Onward, Nation, I am excited for you, and because of Parker’s insights and wisdom that he shares, this is going to be the information that you need to make some of those progressive decisions so that you can be in the best possible decision or a position to come roaring out the other side of this recession. So, without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Parker Stevenson.
How to Niche Down Your Business: Parker Stevenson’s Introduction
Thank you so much for the wonderful introduction. I’m excited to be here. Oh, you are very welcome. And thank you for saying yes to be here. I’m very excited. As you can tell, it’s my enthusiasm in the intro. This is going to be such a fun conversation in so strategic and yet also practical and tactical was going to be awesome.
So, before we do that, actually take us behind the curtain here and give us a little bit more insight into your path and journey. And then why Evolved and then we’ll dive into the — I’m sure it was gonna feel like a litany of questions I’m going to throw you away. But yeah, so my story is a little odd about how I got to this position because I never thought I would be co-owner of a bookkeeping business. Literally, if you told me 10 years ago, I would have thought you were absolutely crazy. We got out of business school, and when I was at school, I went to school in Los Angeles. I was actually a musician. I have family and the music industry. I’ve been playing music since I was 10 years old.
I thought I was going to go off and be a rock star. Like, I thought I had a band and we got to go play some great shows and we have momentum. But for a while, I was trying to get a band off the ground who was working for a small automotive consultant, a consultant agency. We did competitive intelligence in the auto industry, especially spying on all of the other auto manufacturers and sharing the information with the other ones. That was a really, I wish I was more into business at that time because I learned a lot, but I could have learned more. Well, I was there. So I was working like a grown-up job, but it was focused on music, but eventually I got into my mid-twenties, the band broke up, and I was like, all right, I think I’m ready for a little more stability. And I don’t really want to start over again. So my other passion at that time, other than music was golf.
So I moved back down to San Diego, where I grew up, and the golf industry is essentially like what Detroit is for the auto industry. San Diego is for the golf industry. And I ended up getting a job at my dream company, which was TaylorMade Adidas, golf at a time. A tailor-made is no longer a part of Adidas, but it was well, I was there and I spent the next five years, they were kind of getting what I consider my MBA. Like I just learned so much. And I had such crazy experiences that I don’t think most people would have at their first corporate job. They were really wonderful experiences. But what it kinda taught me was that I don’t think corporate America was going to be for me. I had success in it, but I think that entrepreneurial bug that hit me that kind of made me want to start a band that kinda made me enjoy working for a smaller company.
How to Niche Down Your Business: How Niche Business Decisions Lead to Fulfillment and Success
What’s a good example of how to niche down your business? Like I did with my first job at an auto store. I realized I wanted to get into it, but I didn’t have a business idea. I’d been thinking of stuff, but I really didn’t know where to start. My business partner, Cory, and his wife had it at all finance back in 2010. They’re our close friends. My wife grew up with them. And the more I kind of talked with him about their business, the more Cori and I started to go. I think I might be able to help you guys with this. I think I can help roll a ball in finance. And so, in 2014, we made the jump looking back. It seems insane to have left to my job, to go, to try to build, this business up from what Corey Nana had already started. And it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
How to niche down your business? Again, I never thought bookkeeping would be something I knew how to do, let alone running a bookkeeping company, but now I don’t think I’ve ever been so fulfilled in been so thrilled to wake up every day and go to work. Okay. Why was it one of the best decisions for you? Because it’s, it’s such a scary decision to leave security, right? And to leave stability. But I knew that in the long-term sure, I’d sacrifice some money in the beginning and sure, I’d sacrifice some of that stability, and I’d have to learn how to do something that didn’t really sound that appealing to me. But I was able to kind of move through that initial discomfort and go, I have the vision for what I think this business relationship can be, what this company can be.
And I just trusted my instincts there, and sure enough, six years later, I’m sure. Glad I did. But at that moment, it seemed like a really big leap, for sure. Absolutely.
I know you’re among friends because our listeners are business owners. So they’ve all had to make that same decision or a similar decision in the past as well. So you’re in the same.
How to niche down your business for starters? We totally get it. So give us some additional context here because we’re going to take in, look at Evolved from a couple of different perspectives and Onward Nation the reason why I would want us to go down that path, and then we’re going to get into some recommendations, insights, wisdom, that kind of thing too is because this is such a great example of how a company has Niche and done really well. But because of that, there are also helping business owners who are niching as well. And so that’s the piece where I want to ask Parker, again, not without, I mean, not breaching any sort of confidentiality, but give me just a few sort of sterilized examples, if you will, of business owners that have and are doing well online.
How to Niche Down Your Business: Why Evolved Focused on Online Businesses and Digital Products
How to niche down your business in your own agency? So first, kind of give us a 30,000-foot view of Parker of Evolved. Yeah, I mean, of all, Finance is a bookkeeping firm. I, it was funny. I looked up the difference between a firm and an agency recently, and I’ve kind of realized that refurb and not an agency, but yeah, we are a bookkeeping firm that specializes in online businesses selling digital products or services online. So most of our clients are going to have to be course creators, membership, site owners, coaches, they have coaching programs in masterminds, I’m, or maybe you have influence or business models, but essentially the people that just aren’t selling physical inventory online. And, so that niche has allowed us to really systematize and productize our service to be the best at what we do in the industry.
And so aside from just specializing in these businesses and doing the books better than anyone in the other thing that makes her story, it was a little different is we provided a little more guidance and insight because if there’s one area of most entrepreneurs, businesses, that they’re usually not super confident around if there are numbers. So, as part of our service, we try to go a little above and beyond what a typical bookkeeper would do to just make sure we’re educating and supporting our clients around understanding of what the numbers were telling them about their businesses. And maybe it’s a coincidence because I can’t really connect the data yet. I’m going to figure it out one day, but I don’t think there’s a, it’s not a surprise to us or our team that when clients sign up with us, their businesses grow pretty quickly after that, because that data, that financial information is just so valuable to you as a business owner to make better decisions as your business has grown.
How to niche down your business and how did it go? It was awesome. Okay. So take us, take us into the decision, and maybe it was a decision from day one for Evolved. I don’t know, or maybe its a decision that was made a few years ago, but why, why you decided to focus on a Niche, why you decided to focus on course creators and you know, membership sites or owners of membership sites, mastermind groups are influencers that like why focus on business owners who were looking to monetize our thought leadership as your niche? Sure. That’s a great question. So I would say there are two things that come to mind for me is number one, their business models are such that their finances are, we can create systems around how we could do the bookkeeping really well without having to like bring on full on accountants.
How to niche down your business and could you explain the process? The best way we can kind of describe that is if you have an e-commerce business, you have the inventory that needs to be managed on the balance sheet. You can’t write it off. You might not even have to do a cruel accounting versus cash basis. Accounting, if you don’t know what this stuff means, that’s fine, but I’m just kind of want to let everyone know that there’s complexity to certain types of business models, even like classic retail, business models or restaurants, there’s all this complexity around how these businesses work financially, that it is difficult. Like, I’m not going to lie. Like most bookkeeping firms and accounting firms their business models are kind of flawed, and it’s hard for them to provide a really good service. And so my business partner, Cory, who founded the business, I had the foresight of kinda accidentally getting it into the online space, seeing the opportunity and niche-ing there.
How to Niche Down Your Business: How Evolved Niche Down for Better Bookkeeping Support
But I think the other piece of this was also these business owners needed more help because it’s not like we have a bunch of clients who have MBAs from Harvard or Stanford and they have these complicated startups and stuff, but they have all this extra business knowledge, our client’s or regular people who are sometimes even just fell into their businesses. They never really had, like they never drank a lot of them never dreamt. They don’t own their own business as it is because, you know, the internet is a kind of democratized entrepreneurship, that lowers the barriers to entry. So, if there was any type of business that could benefit from not only specializing in their bookkeeping but also providing some of this advice, guidance and feedback, we felt like our Niche was the one that was going to respond to the way we set up our service the most.
And sure enough, that’s definitely been the case over the last six years as we’ve really growing the business and brought it on new clients. Okay. I love it. Let me get that back to you to see if I’m tracking as opposed to having a retail client have a manufacturer or have a contract or heard of it.
How to niche down your business and could you please tell me about the process? You know, and the list goes on and on, instead of having onesy twosies in a wide variety and then the bookkeeping methods that you’re doing for each of those clients needs to be different. You’ve decided to niche down into this area of people who want to be able to monetize their thought leadership and be able to build a business around that because then maybe one of your clients says to you, Hey, you know what I’m Parker. I’m thinking about maybe having a mastermind, is that a good thing to do? Like, or people making good money at masterminds or, you know, where people are still selling courses online? You give me some insights like, because you’ve worked exclusively with those types of owners, you can better answer those questions.
How to niche down your business? Is that a correct assumption? I mean totally. The one thing we tell when I’m on discovery calls with prospective clients, again, I think most bookkeeping businesses are flawed because they have, they’re trying to be everything to everybody. And so what ends up happening is you get a bookkeeper, that’s doing a mediocre job for all of their clients, if not a subpar job for all of our clients. And instead of doing a really good job for just one type of client. So that was something we realized, I think just early on. Maybe it was a little bit of luck and just seeing the opportunity of falling into the online space to begin with. But there’s no question we would not be able to scale this business if we were trying to serve everybody because of your systems and processes, which has to be, Oh, it would be insane.
How to Niche Down Your Business: The Strategy Behind Evolved Finance’s Success
Try to keep up with all of those for all of the different types of businesses that are out there. So honestly I think for us, it was just like, if we want it to survive, if we wanted our business to grow and thrive, we had to niche down. So we could be really good at serving one type of business.
Could you please provide some guidance on how to niche down your business? So, And you know, this is not an advertisement for Evolved Finance. This is a great example of Parker taking you behind the curtain into their decisions, operations decisions, and marketing decisions so that you can really see how they have been able to not only Niche down but then also I loved how you just mentioned the hook into scaling, right? So now, it is probably super efficient that if tomorrow you get 10 new clients and on Thursday you get 25 new clients or whatever the numbers are, is irrelevant, but it is so much easier for you to onboard each client. Because again, you’re onboarding probably everybody in similar ways, right?
Exactly. I mean, for us, this is the part that maybe some people need to hear a little bit right now over, since I started in 2014, we’ve done less for our clients. We’ve reduced the services that Corey was originally offering. So we were literally doing fewer things for our clients, charging more money for it at the same time. So that’s been a fascinating progression. So how I want to say it, how are you guys able to do that? Because that’s brilliant! Yeah, so let’s think when Corey was first starting out. Corey and Nana were super young when they started doing the books for these online businesses, they were doing it.
How to niche down your business? Well, there is a college, and so in the early stages. I think of any service-based business. You just go. Whatever you need will just do. And we’ll do it for a really good price. Right? And so, as people realized how good they were at it and started to refer more business to them Corey is realizing there’s only so many clients I can take on by doing all of these different things. So by the time I came into the business, we were really examining our service and what’s the most valuable things we can be doing for a client versus what are the things that we would have to charge so much more in order to be able to continue to do for our clients. We realize, okay. Things like, for instance, and again, I know no one, very few people here would probably have bookkeeping experienced, but we don’t manage payroll for our clients because the software for payroll has become so much better.
How to niche down your business? How did it work out? We really feel payroll is something that you want your accountant involved in anyways. And it’s something that really an admin assistant could manage payroll Gusto for you and make sure it’s processing every month. Why would you pay us to do it? When we were going to charge a premium when our specialty was reconciling the data and organizing the doubt in a way that made sense for our clients and business models. And so we just started to realize there’s all these other things we use to do because we hope that it would pull people in because we’ll just be able to do all the things. And we got more confident in our value proposition, and a value proposition is how do you build a more profitable business? And how do you get more confident about making decisions, financial decisions in your business? So there’s all these other little things that we realize our clients can be higher and admin people or a virtual assistant or someone else to do this stuff for 15 bucks an hour, versus we’re going to charge you a hundred bucks an hour or something along those lines that didn’t feel good to us.
How to Niche Down Your Business: How Niche Specialization Propelled Growth Amid Challenges
So we continue to hone the areas of our business, where we provide the most value and then increase our price to match that value. Cause a lot of our clients knew they were getting really good deals. And even after changing our service in Chief enterprise, we lost some clients. We lost a handful of clients, but we’re also bringing it on so many new clients that are growing your offer. Sounds exactly like what I’ve wanted. I can’t believe this exists. I can’t believe this is your specialty. And just this year, we brought on more clients than we ever have in a single year. And it’s the year we were more niche down and more streamlined with their offer than ever before. So, it was a really scary transition.
I’m not going to lie, but we would not be where we are today if we didn’t streamline our service and offerings.
Okay. Huge golden nugget right there. So let me tease that out a little bit further, please. Amidst COVID and all of the challenging situations and things that we have had to work through in 2020, it sounds like you’ve been able to grow even faster during a challenging market because of the strength of the Niche. Am I getting that correctly?
How to niche down your business and is it really good? No question about it. This year has been a wild roller coaster of emotions and just a new challenge, but we have seen the online space grow so much. And again, if we hadn’t niched down, if we hadn’t streamlined our processes, if we hadn’t kind of solidified or offer, I don’t think we would of been ready for the influx of Business. We had this year and I do, I want to let everyone listen to me. No, it’s not like we just completely altered our service and like a month. And it just changed everything all at once. I’d say over the last three years, we really started to make incremental changes of what we do, what we don’t do, who was our ideal clients and managing your current clients’ expectations along the way.
But this year was kind of our last big jump on our last big change. And the timing could not have been better cause it couldn’t have been any scarier, but at the time, we were going to have it had been any better. And the reality is as well. Well, yes, it sounds like I’m saying, yeah, we do less than in charge. More. The reality is we’re not really doing less, were just providing more value in the right places. And that’s allowing our team to show up for our clients in a really strong way and really solve the problems our clients are coming to us for. So it’s not like we’re just trying to treat our clients out of anything. Our service is better than it was when it was just Corey.
How did it go after you knew how to niche down your business? And I had a bookkeeper, and there was no question about it. We were doing more things for the clients. We were doing more hand-holding, but there was no question that with the team, we’ve built the systems and processes we built out and niching down and streamlining our offer to our clients or getting a better experience than they did it in the initial years of the business.
So smart. Hey, Onward Nation. I wanted to take a quick break from the Episode to share a practical and tactical Resource with you. When we first released our book profitable podcasting, it became a number one new release on Amazon in less than 18 hours. Well, that was nearly three years ago, and we’re still getting great feedback on how helpful the book has been to business owners, just like you, as they launched a podcast to build their business. When I think a strategies that you can apply right now during these challenging times, having your own show, which will be a conduit that you could use to teach and share your insights with your community, launching a podcast, or growing your existing show really should be at the top of your list.
How to Niche Down Your Business: Thriving in the Thought Leadership Economy
I want to help you get started by giving you access to a free chapter of my book. Just go to Predictive ROI.com/resources, and you’ll get the chapter where I show you how to confront and overcome your three biggest obstacles to success. And we will send it right to your inbox. So I heard a statistic the other day, and I wish I could remember the source. I don’t like to throw stats out there and not be able to cite the source, but it is super relevant for this conversation. Talking about niching and that is the people who you are serving, the business owner that you’re serving, monetizing their thought leadership.
I would say that they are in the personal development space. And I know that that may not be entirely fair for some of the clients that you work with. I get that, but it blew my mind the other day. Parker, when I read this, I realized that today, there are about 200 or so million dollars spent every single day on courses, masterminds, and workshops, as well as the types of things your clients sell and the projection. Again, I wish I could cite the source Onward Nation I’ll try to figure this out and put it in the show notes. But in five years, by 2025, the projection is supposed to be about a billion dollars invested every single day in the types of things that your clients sell.
And so when I think about the strength of doing the niching that you’re talking about, its like when, when those businesses grow and expand and so forth, there you are, every time they turn it around and there you are being helpful because also your investing in your own thought leadership, you’re out doing podcasts, interviews, your sharing, your smarts and all of that. So why wouldn’t they choose you? Right.
How to niche down your business, and how does it look so far? Yeah. I mean, just to add to that statistic, we’re going to reconcile, by the end of this year, over a hundred million dollars in revenue for these types of businesses. So it just gives you an idea of just our little client, the base of clients we serve, which is just a fraction of this industry. It’s going to be over $100 million in revenue. For most of our clients’ businesses, it’s crazy. And so that’s part of why I was so intrigued by this business model; it wasn’t even necessarily the bookkeeping. It was what our clients were doing. Right. And seeing them get so ahead of the curve. And I think for me, one of the things that a theory Cori and I had tested was that we think in a recession, our client’s businesses are actually going to thrive.
We didn’t want to ever have to test that theory. Unfortunately, not all of our clients and business models were set for something like COVID in a year like we’ve had this year, but that was when we ended up being true. I mean, we are seeing our clients grow out of their biggest years. Many of our clients have had the biggest months that you’ve ever had. So, you know, that, the other thing that I think you just have to think about too, especially with an agency or a firm model, is what happens with things, our goal, well, for your clients, how do you protect yourself? Well, how do you make sure that you have a plan for — When you can’t just expect the Business to always be growing in the economy, have to always be perfect. Still, we did feel like a with our niche and who we serve, we had some protection there, and I guess for better or for worse this year kind of tested that theory.
How to Niche Down Your Business: The Power of Focus in Business Growth
Did learning how to niche down your business really make a big difference in you and your business as a whole? And we feel even more confident in doubling down on our invested investments and the business and really pushing it forward. And knowing that if this was about as bad as it could get, then we were in for a real good ride over the next five to 10 years. Well, the Onward Nation of the park and just shared with you, these are the progressive decisions that we’ve been talking about for months and months and months since COVID for a set way back in March and at least here in the U S wave back in March and into here, the enthusiasm and confidence in parkers voice. And again, Evolved Finance, there are behind the curtain, they see the numbers, right? So its not like they’re making these decisions in not having good data in front of them, in their clients who are doing well, Parker I don’t want so correct me here.
I’m going to kind of make an assumption, and then I would love to get your point of view on this because you obviously see the numbers, and I do not. So that’s why I’m making an assumption, your clients that are doing well and having their best months and you know, it really gaining some momentum or are they the ones who are also niching down in their respective industry? The short answer is yes. Okay. The one thing that is a universal truth that we’ve seen from looking at the numbers from 16 years of combined experience between my business partner and myself. Okay. Less is more always, always as your business gets to a certain point. You’ll realize when you have the resources, the money, the time, and the team to expand for what you’ve built your business upon.
What were your starting points on how to niche down your business? But when your building that foundation, Les is always more. So, I’ll give you an example. We had a client when I first got started in the business, and if we looked at her profit and loss statement where her expenses weren’t awful, but her revenue, I mean, she must have had 15 different revenue streams on her PNL like it was everything from speaking to consulting to some courses, to some consulting too, some affiliate income. I mean, it was all over the board. And based on our discussions with her, she was burned in it from both ends. All the questions she was hustling for every dollar she could get.
And she felt like she was spinning her wheels. And even though she was generating revenue in an amount of revenue, that should of felt like she was being successful. If you look at the bottom of that profit and loss statement, there’s just no way she was going to be able to profitably support all of those different revenue streams that she had on her PNL. And it was something we talked to her about, but it’s so hard to tell someone like get rid of these revenue streams and focus more on selling more of what you already have. Right? But she ended up working with a coach. He had a week or weekend intensive. And luckily he said the same thing to her and said, this thing, this one program, that’s one thing you do.
That’s your business? Wow. After that she stopped doing 90% of the things in her business and she sold one course. And in that year she went from being maybe a lower six figure business to doing over a million and now a multi seven figure business from that selling one thing really freaking well. And now it was, and that was the epitome for me of when you build your operations, whether it’s your marketing communications, your internal operations, your work, your software and your systems, when you can focus all of that around one main offer and an offer that you can deliver scalably.
How to niche down your business for different industries? I guess if you have a firm or an agency, it is a little different than selling a course obviously. But when you can bring that focus of your operations toward that one thing, its operational efficiency, as you’ve never seen because you’re, again, not trying to do all of the things for everyone. You’re being so laser-focused with your messaging and who you’re trying to target that just naturally, you’re not going to have to spend as much money to support it because everything’s pointing in the right direction. In her situation, where she was branching off into all of these things, it was just going to be impossible for her expenses to truly support all of the different revenue streams she was chasing. So whether you have an agency model or a service model coarse or an influencer model or whatever it is, there is just always there’s power in knowing the problem you solved, how you solve it and who you solve it for.
How to Niche Down Your Business: How Focus Boosts Business Success
Even if it’s scary to think about having to push her away. Some people for a little while. I just, I don’t know if there’s anything more universally true in my six years than less is more like Sell less, but Sell more of it to fewer people or so more of that, one thing, fewer things, and just see it as many people as you can in front of your one main offer. And then from there, you can start to build other offers around that one offer, but we see clients sell one thing and build seven figure businesses off of one thing. Wow.
Okay. So then as I heard you describe this, like the metamorphosis that she went through, my thought is also not only did operations and the finance side of her business get less complicated and she probably felt some relief as far as no longer burning the candle at both ends. And in the middle, she was probably also able then to redirect her smarts toward the one thing, the offer, and that she was going to focus on and make it that much better too. Right.
Well, I mean, she’s a phenomenal sales and marketing person. Her strength is getting in front of people, connecting people, connecting with people, and audience building, and that became the main thing that she did. And she doubled down on that. She was making the money to then build the team to support the other aspects of the business that just weren’t necessarily for her to be doing anymore. And you’re absolutely right. Sure. Her super powers started to come through or even more strongly through her, just not trying to do everything all the time. Right. So there’s definitely truth to that.
So let me ask you about profitability now. I’m not sure if you guys have done an analysis like this with respect to your clients. So Onward, Nation the, this is the question I’m just pulling right out of the air to ask Parker. I did not ask him to prepare for this in advance. So maybe you guys have the data but don’t if you were to look at all of the clients that you guys serve at Evolved and you were to look at the ones who are like truly Niche versus maybe these others who are a little bit still generalists, but the ones who are truly niched on a profitability percentage or the ones who have Niche more or less profitable, or maybe that’s an irrelevant number and, or maybe you guys aren’t even tracking it.
No, I mean, it’s always profitable. And I’d say almost every single one of our clients has figured out their Niche. I’d say our clients, just to give me some context, you the ones that are maybe doing less than 300,000 a year, they might still be figuring out what’s our main offer, but they still have a pretty good idea of who they’re selling to. It’s just, what’s the best way of taking my expertise, my knowledge, my offer in putting it in front of them? So they might have a little more, you know, they may be throwing some spaghetti on the wall and have some offers that they’re just trying to test out and see what works best for their audience. What solves that problem best for their audience? And then eventually, something hits. Then they realize, Oh, this one offer that I’ve done.
This is it. I’m going to build my business around this. So, our median client is around five to $600,000 a year. We have quite a few clients who are in the multi seven figure a range as well. We’ve seen at a lot of our clients to grow into multi-seven-figure businesses. So we’ve seen the full gamut, but the one thing is those businesses get close to a half. A million mark and beyond is they’ve definitely focused in on their main offer. And again, it’s just the profit happens because if you have operational efficiency in your business, it’s not going to be less expensive to generate the revenue in your business. So, and I think especially if you have an agency, you’re a firm, like if there’s one thing that’s changed our business, it’s operations getting really systematized documenting how everything is done.
How to Niche Down Your Business: Insights from a Hundred Million-Dollar Niche
And so between the niching and the systematizing of our client’s businesses, the profit always is just going to increase. I don’t see how it can.
Oh, I love that. Okay. So, Onward Nation, let me give you just now a data point back here because Parker had shared with us that for 2020, I think you had said that for 2020, there is going to be about a hundred million dollars in total revenue that you guys are essentially bookkeeping, if you will, for your client base. Do I get that right?
Yes. And in total revenue that we’ve seen go through all of our client’s businesses. And that’s annually or the total for the year total across our client. Yeah. So by the time December hits will have hit all over a hundred million dollars in revenue.
So Onward, Nation, here’s why I think that’s a relevant statistic. And my point of view is that their average client is about 500 to $600,000. Right? So we were talking about hundreds and hundreds of clients. Onward Nation that is making up a hundred million dollars. Why is that important? Because of the insights and wisdom Parker is sharing with you is not that they worked with five versus six or seven or eight or 10 really big clients to make up that number. We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of clients, which represent thousands and thousands of data points in this research set. If you want to call it that this data set that he was speaking from, in giving you insights and wisdom behind the curtain.
So all of that, I mean that is an impressive data set, Parker. So congratulations one for building a business like that, but then also peeling back some of that curtain. So we can see some of these data sets for data points as well to know that there was a lot of power in niching down.
Well it’s just knowing what’s possible. I think the one thing I wish I could transfer to all of our clients, but like it was like, I wish I could take a snapshot of what I’ve seen in my brain, looking at all of these profiting and loss statements and see all of these businesses and just dropping it in people’s heads so they can go, oh, it’s possible. Like, Oh I didn’t like it, I don’t want to say it’s easy, cause it’s not easy, right? You don’t know what you don’t know and we all have our sealings and have those challenges, but there are sometimes it’s just that, that believing it’s possible like really understanding what, what you’re capable of and the potential and your business that the numbers just don’t lie. When you see the numbers, you go, oh that’s tangible evidence of what’s possible.
And so that’s definitely one of the unique advantages as an entrepreneur myself in supporting other B2B or having a B2B service and looking at all of these other entrepreneurs, businesses, is it just instills more confidence in us. The more profit and loss statements I look at that like we could make this happen to and the sky’s the limit.
The man was just awesome. So, I know that we covered a lot and our budget, but our time is quickly coming to an end. I am grateful. You took the time out of your compressed schedule to come onto the show to share your insights and wisdom. But before we go, I shouldn’t say, but before we go in and close out and say goodbye, I should say any final advice that you’d like to share or any final recommendations that you think we ought to cover. And then also please tell us the best way to connect with you, Parker.
How to Niche Down Your Business: Last Bit of Advice and Connect with Parken
Yeah. So I think again, being that, I think we have a business out of all. Finance that’s very similar to the audience here. I just can’t emphasize enough what I was talking about with honing your offer and then building truly building systems and processes as soapies changed our business. And it’s what allows us to move from Corey and I kind of doing all of the things with a small team to now having a team of people that are managing the entirety of our client load like Corey and I aren’t doing client work anymore or very little of it, I should say. And so understanding that the unsexy part of running a business like this is documenting how work gets done.
That is also, what’s going to free you from this business. And it’s going to allow you to teach others to do things the way that you want them to be, to be done, and also get you to a place where no single one employer in your business so that if they leave, they can completely collapse the business, right? Because we have systems and processes and trust me, I want to reward employees and team members for doing good work. And I hope everyone on our team stays around for a really long time. But SOP has been such a game-changer for us. The more you can find the time, which I know is not always easy to really document how your business runs, just the absolute dividends you’re going to get in the long run. So, is that helpful to you?
Oh my gosh. It was extremely helpful. And in a great reminder of the power of not having to reinvent the wheel for every new client or when you onboard a new teammate, you’ve got the institutional knowledge, but it’s not in your head or Corey’s head or whoever has had an exam. It’s well-documented. So the business you’re, you are not the business.
You own a business that is run by other people. Yeah. And I know a lot of people probably have heard that before, know that, but I just want you to know, that if you have a priority in 2021, it might be the year you need to start prioritizing and really thinking about not just bringing clients in, but how you do the work and documenting how you do the work. But that being said, if anyone’s interested in what we do at Finance, EvolvedFinance.com is the place to go. I have a podcast where I just do kind of 20 minutes of sharing little tidbits like this so if you’re interested in learning more about the financial side of your business, check out the podcast, otherwise just don’t look at our Instagram because its very, a very boring check out.
Our website is that if there’s one place I need to up my game, it’s our social media, but it’s a lower price priority right now. So I just don’t judge us from our social media at this point Parker, you can hit on all cylinders, all that. Now I want to do, I want to do, but I have to be patient if you give yourself a little bit of grace here. So Onward Nation no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and relisten to Parker’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do the key is you have to take these golden nuggets that he so generously shared with you, take them and apply them into your business right away and accelerate your results. And Parker, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day.
And I’m grateful, my friend, that you said yes, came on the show. You are a mentor or guide to help us move our businesses onward to that next level thing. Thank you so much, Parker. Stephen. It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
This episode is complete. So head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more foods to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.
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