How to Niche Down

Episode 12: How to Niche Down, with Erik Jensen

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How to niche down? Learn the art of attracting clients by fishing in the right ponds. Discover how to niche down here.

How to niche down? Listen to this podcast with Erik Jensen.  Erik is an owner and Chief Strategy Officer at Predictive ROI, a strategic digital marketing agency focused on helping agencies, coaches and consultants build and monetize an authority position.

If you have ever been told you need to be creating and sharing all sorts of content with your audience, but no one has shown you how it moves the needle for your business…PROI solves that.

Erik is all about helping business owners build more stable, profitable, and scalable businesses, not by shouting directions from below, but by helping shoulder owners’ burdens and hiking up the mountain alongside them.

how-to-niche-down

What you will learn about in this episode is how to niche down:

  • How to niche down and why it is invaluable in attracting and serving clients
  • How agencies, coaches, and consultants can start fishing in the right ponds by stepping away from the sea of sameness
  • How to niche down and its process with intentionality can produce complementary layers and relationships
  • Why asking the right questions and applying the right filters can help future-proof your business
  • Why viewing your company as a grapevine instead of a baby is essential for growth

Resources:

 

How To Niche Down: Full Episode Transcript

 

How to niche down? It’s time to find your niche market to create success for your business.

 

Welcome to the Sell with Authority podcast. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI. My team and I created this podcast specifically for you. So, if you’re an agency owner, a business coach, or a strategic consultant, and you’re looking to grow a thriving, profitable business that can weather the constant change that seems to be our world’s reality, well, you’re in the right place.

 

You want proven strategies for attracting a steady stream of well-prepared, right-fit prospects into your sales pipeline. Yep. We’ll cover that. You want to learn how to step away from the sea of competitors so you actually stand out on the ground you’re standing on? Yeah, we’re going to cover that, too. You want to futureproof your business so you can navigate the next challenges that come your way?

 

Absolutely. We will help you there, too. I promise you, that each episode of this podcast will contain valuable insights in tangible examples of best practices, not theory. From thought leaders, experts, and owners who have done exactly what you’re working hard to do. I want you to think practical and tactical. Never any fluff. Each of our guests have built a position of authority and then monetize that position by claiming their ground.

 

Growing their audience, nurturing leads, and converting sales. All the while, though, doing it by being helpful. So every time someone from their audience turned around there, they were with a helpful answer to an important question. So the prospects never, ever, ever felt like a prospect. I also promise every strategy we discuss and every tool we recommend will be shared in full transparency in each episode so you can plant your flag in authority, claim your ground, and fill your sales pipeline.

 

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How To Niche Down: Erik Jensen’s Introduction

 

Okay, so I am super excited for you to meet our very special guest expert today, Erik Jensen. If you’re meeting Erik for the first time, he’s my business partner here predictive and we’ve worked alongside each other for the last ten plus years. Erik has a depth of expertise in a lot of different ways. He wears the hat of Chief Strategy Officer here at Predictive.

 

So he’s often in the trenches working out the strategy on how to niche down with our clients, helping them fill their sales pipeline, working through niche, helping them develop their value ladder, and making sure that it’s priced strategically and accurately. The list goes on and on of the various areas and ways that Erik adds value to our clients. So here’s what Erik and I want for you.

 

As a result of listening to this conversation we’re going to talk about niche, can you be too niche? We’re going to talk about how to work that into your 90-day hero offer, what all that means for creating monthly recurring revenue or MRO for short. Because, you know, we love acronyms here at Predictive. 

 

So here’s what Erik and I want for you in this conversation. We want you to have the courage to actually plant your flag of authority, to claim your niche, to finally own the ground you’re standing on, and then to have the confidence to stand in the gap between the business issues and challenges that your clients and prospects are facing and the other side of the shore where the shore lies.

 

That’s where success is. And standing in the gap takes courage. It takes the willingness to teach and share generously and to do it over and over and over again without any expectation of return. Because when you do that, this amazing thing happens. You attract all the right-fit clients you need. And that’s not marketing hyperbole. It’s a tried and true fact.

 

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How To Niche Down: More Background on Erik Jensen

 

Niching down is a result outcome when you share your smarts. So without further ado, welcome to the Sell with Authority podcast. Erik, I am super glad to be here. Stephen, it’s kind of wild that this is the first time I’ve actually been on either of our podcast series, but I’ve had the privilege of doing a lot of the outbound podcasts and things like that, but it’ll be fun to actually talk with our audience too.

 

It does feel a little bit weird and fun at the same time. So before anybody wonders whether or not we eat our own dog food, we actually will have our own folks on the podcast. So we do try to make that happen. But we still have oversights like this. Sometimes, we’re like, “Well, that hasn’t happened.”

 

How to niche down and why? With no good reason. It’s only taken 1050 episodes between the two shows to actually have you join me. It’s weird. I think you’re saying we’re really slow learners. Well, that’s. Maybe I should rephrase. It’s only taking me 1050 recordings to actually think maybe I should have DirecTV be my guest. Wow. Big oversight on my part. Anyway, that’s all good.

 

So let’s say that our audience and obviously many of them, many of our listeners and people are in our world, our ecosphere, know who you are. They’ve met you in person at events. We just came from Build a Better Agency Summit 2022 in Chicago, which was, of course, off-the-charts amazing as Drew and his team once again blew away.

 

Everyone was just incredible. Many of our audience members know you, but let’s say that somebody is meeting you for the first time. Take us behind the curtain. Sure, give us some context around you and your path and journey, and then we’ll dive in. Yeah, you bet. So my path is a little bit of a convoluted path, but I was originally a Minnesota boy, and I grew up a little bit different than most folks.

 

But I started my my first business with my brother at an early age. We would help people carry wooden water at campsites and set up and tear down tents and eventually, we learned how to juggle. And then that took us all over the country for over a decade, which was a blast for anybody that gets to travel like that or has done those sorts of things, it’s a really neat experience.

 

And then that paid my way through college, which is where I got to meet you. Stephen So, well, it was while I was at the university, Stephen and I had a chance to work on several projects and the first one was for a nonprofit where Stephen was on the board and he really just impressed me. Well, I shouldn’t say he because I’m acting like you’re not here, so you really impressed me with the way that you really cared about what was actually going on for the people at that organization and the people that organization helped.

 

And it impressed me enough that I went on a tour and I got to see firsthand and it was awesome. I just and again, that dedication impressed me. And then I got another chance to work alongside of you later on, when a friend of mine and I were at a startup competition at Duke University. And I was I mean, I’m a student, Stephen and I at that point, you know, you and I had had very little interaction.

 

We had some, but relatively little. And you tapped your own personal relationships to be able to put me in front of actual investors, like sit us down in a room to be able to go and pick apart the business plan that we had in order to be able to do better within that competition. And that just for me, it really did, that someone was willing to go to the mat that way for for a student.

 

And so later on, fast forward a little bit of time when you called me and asked me to be a part of predictive, honestly, if anybody else had called me, I would have said no. I wouldn’t have even bothered because I was having fun traveling around the country with my brother. We were making decent money. We were we were having lots of adventures.

 

But when you gave me a call, I was like, You know what? Yeah, I do want to do this. And I’m glad that we did. It’s been it’s been an amazing journey ever since. I know that there have been lots of ups and downs. Anybody who has listened to this podcast before knows we’re pretty transparent about those ups and downs and some of the some of the downs were really down.

 

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How To Niche Down: How Erik And Stephen Became Business Partners

 

Some of the ups have been awesome. But that’s just running a business. That’s part of running an agency or consultancy, being a coach, and learning those lessons along the way. I do pinch myself that that story was a decade ago. But yeah, like, wow, how crazy that time can fly by so quickly, and just one little piece of behind the curtain regarding the story you just shared.

 

I know that you know this piece, but for everyone else is that after I met Erik, I was working in the College of Business at the University of Wisconsin at the lacrosse campus. And so when Erik and I first met in the college business at my office, I went home that night, and I said to Christine, my wife, I said, I met this guy today, and I don’t know what it is, but someday, some way, shape or form, he and I are going to do something together.

 

I mean, like after the first meeting. And so, you know, obviously, it’s paved the way for this really amazing relationship. And now I have the privilege of calling you my business partner and building predictive alongside you. And that’s been just a wonderful blessing. So thanks, partner. I mean, I feel the same way. I’m grateful every day.

 

So let’s turn our attention toward sometimes what can be kind of a prickly topic on how to niche down. It’s a topic that you have, so you have such a gift of being able to walk in agency owners, business coaches, and consultants. Obviously, they are our tribe here at Predictive, and you have such a gift of being able to walk somebody through a prickly pear topic.

 

That niche is sometimes because there tends to be some defensiveness and it’s like, I don’t want to do that. There’s a scarcity mindset as opposed to abundance. And so let’s first maybe set a foundation for everyone listening to you right now of your definition around a niche, and then we’ll start to break it down, just like you did when you were facilitating the roundtable conversations last week at the Baba Summit.

 

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How To Niche Down: It’s Not the End of The World When You Start Over

 

But let’s first start with your definition of niche before moving on to how to niche down. Awesome. So even before the definition, the one thing that I always want to start with when it comes is one you can set either niche or niche either way. Okay, Now I know that the actual thing that I want to start off with is niching down is scary. Okay?

 

Just just accept that it’s scary. I have yet to talk to a single agency owner and it was not a scary process. It wasn’t a scary concept. It wasn’t scary actually going through it and doing it and making those decisions. So if you feel nervous about initiating a meeting down, it’s okay. Give yourself some grace on what that looks like.

 

The other thing about how to niche down is that it’s not flipping a switch. Okay? And I think that’s part of what leads people to that fear: They think that by choosing a niche, they’re saying no to half their clients. Right. And that they’re going to cut off their best efforts completely. And so it’s not flipping a switch.

 

How to niche down is a process. It typically takes years to go down the path of niching down, and so to kind of help with thinking about what that looks like, what it is, is looking at the sort of clients you want to have two years from now and what is the content you need to be producing, what are the relationships you need to be developing, What are the changes you need to make in the products or the services that you’re putting out there in order to be able to attract and serve those people.

 

Those are the clients you’re fishing for. Okay. What it doesn’t mean is that you fire half of your current client base because they don’t fit in the niche. And it also doesn’t mean that if somebody swims into your net who is not part of that niche, if you can do good work for them and you can do it profitably, great, do it.

 

There’s nothing wrong with that. So how to niche down, as far as bringing this back to the definition piece, is choosing the people and the businesses that you want to serve, choosing the business problems you want to help them solve, and choosing the audiences. You want to be able to help them speak to three different types, so we can dive more into those kinds of filters as far as what makes up a proper niche and things along those lines during this conversation.

 

But I just want to set that stage because I think a lot of people stop dead when it comes to the national conversation because they’re like, “Well, I don’t have the cash flow to say goodbye to half my people. I don’t know how to make this decision right now. Or this seems like business suicide in order to do this.”

 

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How To Niche Down: Serving Your Audience

 

Okay. So try to set that aside and understand how to niche down; just like every other piece of your business, it did not happen overnight. It was a decision you made. It was a goal you set. And he proceeded to take the baby steps necessary to get there over time. Okay, Let’s go back to I love the framing that you gave us when you said, looking at the clients that you want to have two years from now.

 

You then went on to say fishing, which made me think of the metaphor that you often use as like our fishing in the right ponds. So, peel back some of those layers there, too, because that just tells me that there’s a lot of intentionality. It’s not a case of you waking up Monday and firing half your clients.

 

How to niche down this long-range planning and also deciding which patterns match up with how you describe the ideal client. And then that helps you choose the right bait, right? Absolutely. Some of the decisions, like I said, that you’ve got to make will make choosing the patterns that you want to spend time in easier. Okay, So there are a couple of different things.

 

One, I’m a big fan of Pam Slim. I actually got to meet her at Baba. I was excited. Anyway, she talks about and teaches around this audio ecosystem idea, where your audience is at the center. Okay, all of us serve a particular audience. Now, when you serve a niche, it is easier to identify all the facets of that audience.

 

So let’s talk about how to niche down a little bit more. But regardless of whether you’ve niched down or not, you serve an audience. Even if that audience is as broad as business owners who can write a check. And around that audience, there are multiple different layers of businesses, organizations, associations, relationships, you name it, that serve that audience in what Pam Slim calls a peanut butter and jelly relationship right there, complimentary and non-competitive.

 

So when you’re thinking about times, in order to be able to dive into what you do if you’ve got that audience at the center, then you go, “Okay, who else helps these people? What other advisor do they need? Who else is helping them solve other business problems?” And by the way, business problems are a distinction, and again, we’ll cover that in a little bit.

 

Then who else are they going to for advice on how to niche down? What are their thought leaders listening to? What’s surprising is that the more you know about your audience and the deeper that niche is, the more these things become really apparent. Like. So, I had a an amazing conversation with an agency owner just yesterday. I won’t go into details because I didn’t ask permission to share.

 

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How To Niche Down: Being More Analytical on The Best Pond to Be In

 

So I want to I want to be careful about that. But he was really specific about the niche that he wanted to serve. And I kid you not. I mean, it was like we were on the call for about an hour and it was just like idea after idea after idea of us. Well, you could totally talk in this pod.

 

You should totally get to know people over here. These are people who can absolutely help educate your audience and the number of relationships. I mean, seriously, after an hour of conversation, he’s got a lifetime of relationships he could build just around this niche. How cool. No, not all of them are going to be the same.

 

And we can talk about that. I don’t know if this conversation would be appropriate, but there are ways of filtering which ponds or the best ponds to be in, and there’s ways to make that decision a little bit more analytical than a gut feel. But ultimately, being able to identify where to start looking makes a huge difference in actually stepping into a pond.

 

Okay, so let’s think about how to niche down. Or maybe let’s take that piece a little bit deeper. It’s what I meant to say, and maybe this is the appropriate place for you. Tell me, is this the appropriate place to walk through the four questions that you used during the roundtable to help somebody start to think about or define their niche?

 

So is that how you use the four questions with regards to how to niche down? Yeah, absolutely. So I think what I’ll do is I’ll actually combine kind of the three filters and the four questions all together, because ultimately, if you go through these, I’m going to say that you’re going to have the perfect answer. Okay, That’s probably a little bit too, too braggadocious.

 

But what I am going to say is it will help you in a way that just looking at the numbers doesn’t. So a lot of times agency owners will go and they will do all the research right. They’ll do the SWOT analysis, they’ll do the audience analysis, they’ll do the competitive analysis, they’ll do all of these different things.

 

And then at the end, they either have two things happen, they look at all the data and they go, “Wow, I have no idea what to do with all this data. I don’t feel like I mean it. Plus all the decisions. That was a lot of work for nothing.” Or they go,” Wow, there’s like 17 potential measures in all this data, and I could go 17 different directions, which is just back.”

 

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How To Niche Down: Choosing an Industry to Serve

 

How to niche down? There are a few things that I recommend to help solve that issue. So we’ll talk about the filters first, and then we’ll move on to the questions. When you think about a niche, the filters are three different things: the industry or the industry that you serve, the industry or the industry that you serve, and the industry or the industries that you serve.

 

Okay. Oftentimes, this is where most agencies, coaches, and consultants stop, right? And what happens is they happen to have a client over here, they get some experience in, and all of a sudden now, I don’t know, legal is kind of their thing, or medical is their thing, or technology is their thing. And they inevitably have two, three, or four of these different industries that they serve.

 

Yeah, okay. That’s sort of niche down. But the problem is when you have multiple industries like that, that’s like multiple legs on a stool or on a chair, but the chair doesn’t have a top. So if you sit on that stool, it’s mighty uncomfortable, okay? And that’s when the question comes up, well, on your home page, on your website, because this is this is inevitable if what it is, is well, why don’t we put what who do we say that we serve?

 

Because we serve all these different industries, it’s like, well, you can’t. Okay. So if you’re going to niche by sector, you have to choose an industry. Let’s say you go, “Erik, that’s not going to happen. That is not what we’re prepared to do. That is too scary of a step.” That’s fine. So what you need to do is you need to be willing to put a top, a seat on that stool, something that ties all of these disparate entities, these industries together.

 

And so, generally speaking, what I would recommend is the business problem that you solve on how to niche down. When I say business problem, I mean business problem. I don’t mean the thing that you produce. So a lot of times, organizations will come up, and they’ll talk to us and say, “Well, we build websites for them, or well, we do branding for them, right?”

 

And it’s like, okay, that’s the output, but that’s not the business problem. They’re coming to you for a website because they think the website will solve a business problem. Is it lead gen? Is it nurture? Is it conversion is an audience? What is it? Branding? They’re not coming to you just because they want a new logo. They’re coming to you because they believe branding is going to solve a specific business problem for them.

 

Do they not stand out? Are they hard to find? Do they look and sound like everybody else? Those are the business problems that they’re trying to deal with. And even then, I would go deeper and deeper and deeper into it so that you can really find that business problem that ties all these industries you serve together. So are you saying that is a business problem you solve?

 

Is that filter number two, or is that still nested up into the filter? No, filter number two. So you can use industry, you can just choose one industry. If you’re going to select multiple industries, then you got to have a different filter because multiple industries aren’t really a filter. So, filter number one is industry. Filter number two is the business problem you solve and taking deliverables out of the mix is truly the business problem.

 

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How To Niche Down: Know The Audience You Need to Reach

 

The business problem on how to niche down, the deliverables are the ways in which you solve the business problem. Sure, they are not the business problem itself. Got it. And that can be really tough to wrap around your head. Wrap your head around if you’re used to thinking about the deliverable URLs as being the thing that is actually selling to your clients, they don’t actually care about.

 

The thing they care about is the problem being solved, and if you tell them that the problem will be solved by doing the thing, great, then let’s do the thing. And then the third filter is audience. So this is a great example. There’s a great example within the book that you and Drew wrote, Sell with Authority.

 

And with that, what you want to do is look at the audience. So, if you are an expert on the audience, that is also a great filter. You might serve multiple companies, but if you’re like really good with moms, you know, moms, you know how they think, you know, why they make decisions, you know what worries they have, you know, where they spend their time.

 

You understand how to niche down and what they’re looking for from companies in communication. You know, what they’re looking for from their products and services. But if you know moms better than anybody else, that can be a niche. And it’s one that’s underutilized a lot of times. But if you’re good at that, then you can again serve multiple industries, serve multiple companies, serve companies with multiple problems because again, for them, the core tie together is, you know, the audience that we need to reach.

 

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How To Niche Down: Asking Yourself These 3 Questions

 

Yeah. So those are three really good filters when you’re thinking about how to niche down. Then, the questions that you can ask yourself are after you’ve gathered all that data, right? Still get to do that. 

 

Like I said, audience analysis and all those things, the first question is: What is the client that walks through the door that almost makes you rub your hands together with glee? What’s the problem that they have with the industry that they have? What sort of a company are they from? A size, from sophistication. All those different things, like what is it about them? Like when they come in and they explain who they are, what they need from you? You’re like, “Yeah, we’re going to knock it out of the park for these guys.” Like we are going to crush it, like, that’s a pretty good indicator of the certain niche that you should be focusing on because you know you’re going to do great work. 

 

Okay, that’s a good one. Now, another question you should ask yourself is: Can you serve that client profitably? Sometimes, we get confused about whether we love the work or not. If we love the work and it doesn’t pay our bills, we’re not going to be doing that work for very long.

 

Yeah, now that could be because that particular audience can’t afford you. That’s possible. And you do need to pay attention to that with the niche that you’re choosing. Or it may be that you need to look and say, if we’re going to serve that audience and this is only what they can afford, then what do we need to change as an organization internally to be able to deliver our products and services in a way that is still profitable to them and solve their problem but prevent ourselves from over-servicing them?

 

Okay. Third question on how to niche down: Can you get a case study out of the client you’re taking on? Again, if the answer is no, I don’t think we can. The problem is too murky. The work is to me, we’re not really sure if we will be able to knock this out of the park again.

 

That’s probably a good indicator that that’s not going to be a good opportunity for you to build a niche around that, because then you’re just taking on a paycheck or a project and not a long term profitable client. Right. Okay. And now the fourth question. This is one that a lot of organizations don’t think about, and that is can you staff for it?

 

So let’s say you’ve got a really good like, I love these clients, we can totally do this work profitably. And you know what? We can make rock solid case studies for these. And as long as we have the principal on this account who’s got 20 years of experience working on this, we can do really great work. Or as long as we’ve got the the account team that’s got 12 years of experience in solving these exact problems, we’re going to we’re going to crush this.

 

Right. But now my question to you is, could you bring on someone else and train them up? And within nine months have them be able to lead this sort of a project or take on a significant portion of this work in order to get it done? If the answer is I would spend nine months just recruit in that position, then that might not be a great mystery.

 

I’m not saying rule it out, but consider it okay. It should be part of your consideration set when you’re looking, and can you staff for it? That is awesome. There is really, really good. I love how you tied in the business problems that you solve and then in the audience, too. So these filters, I think, are powerful.

 

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How To Niche Down: The More the Filters, The Lesser the Competition

 

Would you agree or disagree that there is also strength in knitting together one, two, or three of those filters? Yes, absolutely. Think of it like a telescope. A telescope is made up of multiple lenses. If you put in one lens, you’re going to be sort of focused on the amount of sky you’re going to see, which is still pretty broad.

 

Yeah. If you add another lens, you’re going to narrow it down. Each time you add a lens, yes, you narrow your focus. But what is in your view becomes significantly clearer and more precise. Okay. So, if you can knit these together, that’s ideal. If you’re uncomfortable knitting them all together, at least have one of these filters in place, ideally two of these filters.

 

The other great thing about how to niche down is that the more of these filters you have in place, the less competition you have. You have 100%. You can talk to the client and say, “Well, I know this industry, right?” This problem is to be able to speak to this audience. And that’s the problem that that business has. Why would they ever hire someone else?

 

Like we talked about or as I mentioned in the introduction, and stepping away from the sea of sameness. Right. And being able to truly plant your flag, it was already. But let’s also think about that from an authority perspective; it’s difficult to find and create a content calendar if you will, or a content blueprint using our words around the things that you’re going to teach if you’re trying to boil the ocean, what you just walked us through with the filters and then the questions from that, it becomes much easier to say, “I’m going to teach this and share it with this audience and be helpful there around these business issues and challenges or these business problems.“

 

You’re using your words because otherwise, you’re just literally a ghost, not another metaphor from you. You like to use throwing spaghetti at the wall and you’re not teaching or sharing anything with anyone because you’re trying to do too much. So that’s a good litmus test. Can you take your content and put it on to a competitor’s website?

 

And would anybody be able to tell the difference? If the answer is no, then you are probably too generic either in what you talk about or how it is that you teach. Usually that comes down to you’re not very precise. So the more you niche down, there are a bunch of different benefits from a precision standpoint. One, you get more helpful and it’s easier to be helpful to your audience because you’re talking about specifics, not generalities, right?

 

Identifying and being useful in the ponds gets easier, and it’s easier to step into those ponds and demonstrate value and be able to actually get clients from those ponds and then from those relationships. Fantastic. It makes it easier to develop products and services and monthly recurring revenue and all sorts of other things that come out of that. Because again, if you’re trying to serve everybody with everything they could, they could possibly need help with how on earth are you going to get really good at pricing your stuff?

 

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How To Niche Down: Shifting Your Mindset

 

So one of the things that helps with your profitability as an organization is repetition. And you don’t get repetition. If every week is a different problem, what gives you repetition is if every day is something similar. Now it might be variations on a theme, but it’s something similar in that, you know, this is the problem, this is what we’re trying to solve it for.

 

And this is the process that you take to be able to solve it right now. I know that gives the heebie-jeebies to some folks that are like, well, that sounds boring. I promise you, it does not have to be boring because you can run toward the pain within this niche just as well as you can run toward the pain in a broad open field.

 

So what you need to do is just shift your mindset from being the challenge is figuring out a new thing every day to do. The challenge is how can we be better at what we do every day and how can we serve the people we serve every day better. It’s still a challenge. It’s just a different framing of a challenge.

 

It’s still brain candy. It’s just a different framing of the brain candy cow. And this is so, so great. I feel like I’m kind of cutting our niche conversation short here because I want to keep in on the acronym that you just mentioned, which is our monthly recurring revenue. Yeah. And some in our audience will know that we’re big fans of Amarah.

 

Yes, but I know that we’re quickly running out of time here, so we’re just going to take a few minutes to talk about Amarah and its connection to niche, and then I’m going to be sure to have you back in the not-too-distant future for an encore so that we can really, with some depth, have the conversation around our 90 day offer and that kind of stuff.

 

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How To Niche Down: Business Problems Are Solved Over Time

 

So, let’s talk a little bit about the connection that you see between, an agency, a coach, a consultancy that is niched and the opportunities then because of the niche to create them are. So where this really gets back to is again that that is solving the business problem at one of those filters. So business problems oftentimes are not solved by a silver bullet and done solution business problems are generally chronic and they are something that continues to take effort to solve over time.

 

So we’ll just use the lead gen as the example here. You don’t just get to go like, “Whew, we did a great campaign. We got you a bunch of leads.” All of your business problems are solved now, right? That was great for this month, maybe this quarter or maybe just a week.

 

I don’t know. Depending on how many leads came in and how many the organization needs. You solve that problem of lead gen, but it needs to be solved again and again. Every single month in order for this organization to be able to thrive. So if a campaign was how you went about solving that problem the first time, fantastic, what would that look like if you turned that into an ongoing product or service to say, “Great, that worked one month, let’s do it every month and this is what it costs every month for us to do that.”

 

And then once that’s into a rhythm, they say, “Well, what else can we do to solve the lead gen issue? If that’s the business problem that we solve?” And it might be okay, we need to make sure that our sales team is actually aligned with the marketing efforts. Well, if you train a person once, that’s great, but they’re probably going to have new people coming in.

 

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How To Niche Down: Looking At Things That Do Well in The Business

 

People forget things, right? So again, training them one time to be able to fire to that marketing message is great. But the marketing message is going to evolve over time in those campaigns based on data, and you’re going to need to continue that training. So again, one-and-done does not serve the purpose of solving the business problem.

 

If you’re going in and you’re saying “I’m building a website and that is the problem that needs to be solved,” it’s like, well, sort of accept that users continue to evolve how they use websites. Content needs to be continually added to websites, offers and products and services are going to be evolving over time. Usability is going to be something we absolutely are optimized.

 

SEO is something that needs to be continually thought about, like each one of those. Again, if the website is serving a problem so then look at the things that actually the website is doing well. And continue to do better with improvements over time and that becomes your monthly reoccurring revenue product or service. But if you just think about the product or service as the thing that gets completed and then you move on, you can have a really tough time developing any sort of offers.

 

This is so awesome. I’m so totally having you back for monthly recurring, so conversations where we can take that deeper into into the encore. So I’m going to get on this stuff about product design and whatnot too. So one other thing I wanted to bring up because I know we are getting close to time and I get asked this question all the time, which is I want a niche, but I’m scared too, right?

 

Do I have to keep it all in one company? Or what if I did another company and I have that company be the niche and then my main company just continues to do what it does? Yeah. So for those who are considering this, there’s one simple question to help you filter whether you want to do that. Do you want to run multiple businesses?

 

If the answer is no,  you shouldn’t split it into multiple businesses because that’s what you’re doing. Multiple marketing efforts, multiple websites, multiple strategies, multiple conversations, multiple content that you need to create, etc. If you are comfortable with being able to do that but you still want the general work that you’re doing, it’s okay. What you do is you create that subset of a business and all that work, the actual doing flows back to the main business.

 

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How To Niche Down: Creating A Distinction Line in Your Business

 

So your niche business actually outsources all the doing back to your main hub. And that way what happens is what we call above the line or below the line. This is not to say that one is different than the other. Above the line is the strategy and the relationships. Below the line is the actual getting stuff done.

 

We make that distinction simply because we know that those are two different skill sets within most businesses, especially for agencies, coaches, and consultants. You need your above the line in that small business that is niche down and then you’re below the line of getting stuff done and can remain within the main organization. Yeah, in our audience, if you happen to have a copy of the book Sell with Authority that Erik mentioned, there’s a great example of what a company that has done exactly what Erik just described is called Echo Delta, the name of their agency.

 

So that will break it down with even more detail on how to niche down. So before I ask you to share your final advice and the best way to connect with you, Erik. One thing I wanted to share with our listeners is if you’re not yet a member of our Facebook group, our free Facebook group, you can go to PredictiveROI.com/group.

 

And when you do that, you’ll find several Q&A recordings. You know, every Wednesday, Erik and I host an open mic Q&A. And Erik spent like two back-to-back sessions where we really sliced apart this mirror or monthly recurring revenue topic in during those companies and all of those recordings. The full recordings are posted in the Facebook group.

 

So I would encourage you to join us if you are a member. Go back and watch those recordings because Erik did a phenomenal job, and there were some great questions, too, for everybody who was in the room. So I know that we’re quickly running out of time here. It’s like sand through the hourglass, and it’s going to.

 

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How To Niche Down: Final Words with Erik

 

So, any final advice that you want to share, or anything you think we might have missed? I’m sure it’s a long list, and then the best way to connect with you. Erik: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot more to go into this. I’ll just leave you with a thought: Your business is not your baby. And I know that that term is used all the time.

 

It’s like your business is your child. Your business is not your child. Your business is a grapevine. In order for a grapevine to get the most out of what it’s meant to produce the grapes, you have to trim away excess branches. You can’t do that with a child. That would go wrong. But that’s why it’s for people that think about their business that way.

 

It becomes really, really difficult to make some of these niching down decisions. I’m telling you, if you want your business to produce the most that a can of what it should be producing and extraneous leaves and branches. But the actual fruit of your labors and you need to be willing actually to trim it back in the right places.

 

Yeah. And then as far as ways to be able to reach me, obviously I’m on LinkedIn, there’s like a bazillion Erik Jensen’s on LinkedIn. But if you type in Erik Jensen and then include Predictive ROI, I will be there. If you really want to just get to know us. Honestly, my favorite thing is just to have people sign up for the Q&A, It’s just PredictiveROI.com/qa/ where we keep it simple. I mean, you can be a fly on the wall, you can just be there and get a sense of who we are and what the community is like. There’s no pressure to be involved, and it’s always a fun group.

 

It’s always fun topics, and I think that it’s rare that you get a chance to really get to know a business and in the community before you really kind of step into it a little bit more. And the Q&A really gives you that opportunity to do so. So I would encourage that for sure. Amen to that. Okay, everyone, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and listen to Erik’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do.

 

The key is you actually have to apply the filters of how to niche down. The key is you actually have to ask the questions that he so generously shared with you. Ask them, apply them, take action on what he shared you, and accelerate your results because you did so in. Erik, thanks very much for taking the time to come on to the show, to be our mentor and guide to help everyone move their businesses onward to that next level.

 

Thank you so much, Erik. You bet. And I hope it was really helpful for everybody. And obviously, if there are more questions, you can always get a hold of me and I’ll do my best to answer.

 

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