Niche Down Now and Stop Being A Weenie!

Squirrel. I want to talk about the thing that all weenies. People who are afraid of doing the brave ass shit that's going to get them where they want to go have in common, especially when it comes to starting a business. Squirrel. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weenie cast. Squirrel. I want to go into what the stereotypical weenie is afraid of when it comes to picking a niche.

What they're worried will happen and the mindset crap that gets in the way. We're gonna be talking about the shift that needs to happen. We're also going to be talking about the major difference it makes in your business when you actually pick a niche that you feel aligned to and that exists out there in the world, that will pay for it. Right? Because you can start a business and not get any clients. That's not a business. That's a fucking hobby. Okay? We're not starting hobbies here.

We are starting businesses, right? Let's talk about the things that the stereotypical weenie in their business is scared shitless to do when it comes to starting their business and picking a niche. Number one is they're afraid that if they pick a niche, they're going to scare away potential clients and that there aren't going to be enough clients out there in the world for them. So let's talk about how many human beings actually live on planet Earth right now. Okay?

I looked up this number recently. I talked about this in my life yesterday. There are 7.88 billion billion people on planet Earth right now. If you think that out of 7.88 billion people, you're not going to be able to find, like, 600 humans who will pay you for your thing, then, babes, you need to do something else. Starting a business is not it for you.

And let's just talk about the scarcity mindset that just lives in this fear, right? Because I don't know about you guys, but, like, literally, I can't take on more than between nine to twelve clients, one on one at a time. Nine to twelve, one on one clients. I make a fair amount of money doing that. I can live a very comfortable, happy life just working one on one with clients. Of course I want to work with more people.

I want to be able to empower more and more folks to be able to start their businesses. I have group programs, but still through my group programs, like, I anticipate, like, I hope at some point to be able to have 500 people going through my programs every year. Okay. And assume I work for another 30 years. 500 times 30. Not that many, especially when we're considering that amount comes out of 7.888 billion humans, some of which may not even be alive yet.

There could be someone born today who I will be coaching in 29 years. And you have no idea. You have to believe that your people are out there. And believe me, they are. They are. And they are waiting for you. And honestly, you're just being a selfish asshole for not niching down and making it easier, easy for them to find you. So you need to pick a niche. The numbers are in your favor. There are billions of people out there in the world.

You're likely to be able to get, you know, enough of them to make a good living doing this work. But here's the key. They're not going to be able to work with you and give you their money and have impact from your work experience. It if they don't know that you existed, it's just never going to happen. Okay? So if you continue to be a weenie about not picking a niche, then guess what's going to happen?

You're not going to get any clients because how are they going to know that you're useful to them? And the example that I like to use, like, you know, I'm a trained life coach.

I went to life coach school. I'm certified. All this stuff, I use it, you know, in conjunction with a lot of the other stuff that I do. Okay. But there's always that joke of the life coach. Like, the life coach goes out to get clients and people ask, cool, like, who's your ideal client? And the life coach says, well, people who suck at life, I help them get better at being at life, you know, or in life or whatever.

How do you sort through, like, the list of friends and loved ones that, you know, for the people who are shitty at life? I mean, I know we all have some people that were like, they could really use some help. But then, like, even if you can think of one to five people, how do you make that introduction? Do you go, hey, George, you really suck at life, dude. Like, you out of one out of ten. Like ten being the best one. You're a negative two. And I think you could use some help.

I heard about this life coach who helps people who are shit at life. I think you need to talk to them and let me introduce you. No, no one's doing that. No one's referring people like that. Okay. Okay. Versus. You have a coach, let's call her Jane. This is the example that I put in my email today. Jane, who is a dating coach for lesbian moms who are recently divorced and who want to find their next partner, who will also be a great co parent for the children that they share custody of.

Like, that's very, very specific. Right? So you may not know someone who is a lesbian, who's a mom who's just gotten divorced and is ready to start dating right off the bat. Okay? You. If you do, you're like, oh, my God, this is so exciting. And, like, I have someone who needs to work with you, and you need to work with her because it's tough. Like, it's tough to find a partner, especially when you're a mom and especially when you're sharing, casting, all this stuff.

Like, you, you need to be able to really strategize how you're finding that next love of your life. Like, how excited would you be to be able to turn to your friend and be like, I found someone who can help you in this, like, major life project that you're working on right now. Like, let me make this introduction. Okay, that that could happen if you know that person. But here's the other thing you're more likely to remember, Jane.

You are far more likely to remember this person who niched down so specifically than you are to remember, you know, someone who's just a life coach. Life coaches are a dime a dozen. Let's be real. I was in a pilates class once. I was, you know, in my business, and, you know, someone asked me what I did, and I said, you know, I didn't really want to talk about it. So I was just like, I'm a life coach. Cause, you know, no one usually knows what to say when you say you're a life coach.

The lady that was asking was like, oh, I have a life coach. She communes with my dead animals for me. And I did not know how to respond to that because that is not life coaching. Okay? So there are a lot of people out there calling whatever it is they do, life coaching. All right? If you're just going out and say, I'm a life coach, no one knows what you're doing. No one knows how you can help. No one knows who you are useful to. All right? You need to tell people exactly who you are useful to.

Now, there's this other woman who I came across on Facebook. I just read this post that she did, and she is a health coach for people in the party industry. So bartenders, DJ's, and managers of nightclubs. Okay. She helps them design more healthy lives and healthy habits around their extremely unhealthy lifestyle without compromising the work that they love. Now, that's incredible. And that's also really easy to refer to.

Okay, so you can pick a niche that, you know, has a bunch of people, or you can pick a niche that has a narrow slice of humans.

But I want to remind you, the more niche down you are, the more specialized you are, which means you can charge more. Your general doctor, your general practitioner, probably makes, you know, $200,000 a year cardiologist who works on babies probably makes closer to a million, if not more, because they specialize. A neurosurgeon is going to make more because they specialize. All right?

You get to specialize in your business, and you're going to get to charge more because who are you competing against? Competing against other people who just say that they're life coaches? No one wants to hire. No offense, guys. You really need a niche, though. There's also this belief that, you know, like, but I can help everyone. I can help everyone. What I do is so easily applied to so many different scenarios. Like, there are people out there who need my help, and they're not gonna.

They're not gonna be able to get help from me if I niche down. They're not gonna get help from you anyway if they don't know what you're doing. And it's really hard for people to understand what you do if you're not telling them who you're useful to. Okay. I teach this in my build your own business beginner group program because it is such a critical part of building your business. Like, if you do not have a niche, you can't go and market.

If you don't have a niche, running sales calls is going to be so incredibly painful. If you don't have a niche, like, you can't. You can't design a website, it's going to be really hard to show up on social media. Like, you might get some people who just like what you have to say, but they're never going to buy from you. Okay? That is freebie chaser central when you're just out there giving value and spewing out all your beliefs about stuff. Stuff. Yes. The gazelle. Find your niche 100%.

So, so, so, so here are the three areas that I have my clients in my build your own business beginner program, and in my one on one coaching, like, everywhere, I have them ask themselves, okay, so, number one, everyone thinks that when you pick a niche, you're describing what you do. No, no. Your niche is not that you're a facilitator. Your niche is not that you're a leadership coach. Your niche is not that you are a stylist. That is not your niche, okay?

What you do, it informs how you describe your niche because, you know, if you're a builder, you're not going to say that you empower people to live in the best home of their lives. Like, that is missing a part. You know? Like, you also help build the house that they want to live in. Your niche is a combination of two things, okay? It's who you help, the descriptor of that person and the problems they have and the solution they want or the outcomes that they want. Okay? You need both. Okay?

But here's where, if you do this well, you're actually going to get more people that are outside your niche. Okay? So let me explain. So when I started doing business coaching and showing people how to start their businesses, I was very much in the coaching space, okay? I still am. Okay? I'm a trained and certified coach. I, like, accidentally fell into doing this because I come from a background in sales and marketing. And when I started, a lot of my friends were like, wait a minute.

How did you get clients so fast? Because they didn't know a lot of my early clients were coaches. And to this day, I have a lot of coaches in my client list. So when you have a niche, when you know who you serve, you get to be very specific about the problems that they experience. So when I started marketing, that I was helping coaches start their businesses, I'm a big believer in empathetic marketing. Okay?

So I would go and I would just say, hey, listen, you know, you're probably struggling with, you know, figuring out what to post online, and this comes up for you. You have this fear that you're gonna look stupid. You have this fear that people are like, oh, my God, what are they trying now? And I just go through, like, you know, listing off exactly what's going on in their minds right now. And what was funny is I'm describing all these problems that coaches had in starting their businesses.

And I was very specific that I helped coaches move through all these blocks. And you know what? I got photographers and lawyers and copywriters and social media marketers popping through and asking me, hey, I know you work with coaches, but all the problems you're listing are things I struggle with. And I don't know, but I really like your vibe, and I would really like to work with you.

If you take non coaches as clients, that is the power of knowing your niche, inside and outside, frontward, backward, sideways, all the ways. Right? So your niche is a combination of the problems that your ideal client has that you help solve. The things that they wake up in the morning so stressed out about, the things that keep them awake at night, the stuff they fight with their spouse about. Okay? The things that, like, they play over and over and over in their mind.

You know, I like to describe it to my clients. Like, imagine your ideal client is out. You know, they're meeting up with a girlfriend or guy friend. You know, after work. They got there early. They already had a glass of wine. They're halfway through their second one. Their friend shows up. What are they bitching about? Well, it's like the torrent of complaints that they have about their day in their life to this friend. Okay, that is exactly what you should be posting out on social media.

On the flip side, what is it they want for their life? You know, what is it that they just wish that they could have that they don't think is available to them? You know, what's something that they've always wanted but haven't really had the courage to go for it? What's the thing that, like, the goal that they have been working towards and working towards and working towards and can never just quite get there?

I used to work for a fitness company, and there would always be that, you know, stereotypical person who would come in. You know, they had lost a lot of weight. You know, they went from being really, really heavy and unhealthy. They lost weight. They're in the healthy range, and they just wanted to lose the last ten pounds. The last ten pounds to get down to, like, a certain weight that their doctor recommended or whatever. Like, that problem. Like, it's just.

That's just a sticking point, right? If you can identify, like, what is that final stretch of your goal? And I want to help you get there, that is really powerful. But here's the thing. To know those problems, to know what they want, you have to figure out who you want to serve. Who do you want to work with? Because let me tell you, let's stick with the fitness analogy, right?

So imagine you have, like, this ex wrestler, meathead, personal trainer, really nice guy, really nice guy, maybe a dad of two, you know, really passionate about personal training, and he decides that he wants to work with postpartum moms, women who just gave birth maybe in the last year. And he is like, yeah, I'm gonna be a postpartum personal trainer. Is he gonna fare as well as the woman who's also had children, who's a personal trainer who's been through it?

No, no, no. Also, a regular personal trainer is not gonna be able to market to, say, the meatheads who want to, like, build muscle mass and the postpartum moms who want to recover and get their bodies back to what they're comfortable with. You need a niche. You need to know exactly who your clients are, and in doing so, you'll understand on a very cellular level what they're struggling with and what they want instead. That is your niche. Now, this is hard to get into.

This is hard to understand because oftentimes when we think niche, we think, okay, cool, well, I'm going to work with women who, who are between the ages of 30 and 45, who have professional jobs and who are stressed out. And you know what I'm going to tell you, right? That's not a niche. That's not a niche that. No, no, no. A niche is also not. I help people going through transitions. I don't know a single person in my life who isn't going through a transition of some kind or other.

Everyone goes through transitions. That's what life is all about. We're just all. That's. That's just, like, a cuter way of saying that you're a life coach and no one knows what a life coach does. No one knows who a life coach is helpful to. If you want to say that, you help, say, parents whose children are getting sent off to boarding school because they are problematic. Like, that's a big transition. That's a big thing. You can absolutely niche down in that.

Anyway, so here are the things that I do with my clients when they join build your own business, beginner, and all of my programs, we get really deep into what are the conversations that you want to have all the time?

Like, what are you interested in? Because especially if you're not even sure, like, really what your business is going to look like, it's really important to start at least there, because how miserable would it be to start a business that you're bored of? Six months in, like, this happened to me. I went through this. I picked the wrong niche. When I first started, I was going to be a dating coach for men, and I went out and I announced I'm a dating coach for men.

And I got mostly female clients, and only one of my clients, one woman, stuck with the dating coaching topic, and I got so bored talking about her dating life all the time. I loved her to death. She was an incredible client. She did the work. I was so thrilled for her, but I was so bored of it. I just. I didn't want to do it anymore. And that's one of the reasons I switched to leadership coaching. You know, it was also where my clients naturally needed support.

But you need to figure out what topics you're interested in, right? What can you stick with for a good chunk of time? It doesn't mean you can't change it. I've changed multiple times in my career. But you need to start there. You then need to look at what are your skills, what are your strengths? What's your life experience?

Are you a recovering alcoholic and you've had this, like, road to redemption in your life and you are really claiming your new identity and you are establishing yourself and wanting to turn around and help people who have also gone through a twelve step program of some sort. That life experience is so valuable because people who've gone through that want someone who really gets them. All right? And are you willing to go there?

You know, for a lot of people, if they want to coach on stuff that is related to the trauma that they actually have, it can take a while for them to get into it. And there's nothing wrong with that if that's really the impact you want to have. You just have to plan like a bigger gap of time for you to work on this. Right. You also need to go out there and you need to talk to your ideal clients.

One of the things that I stress in all of my programs, and let me tell you, this is the number one indicator of success, okay? The only clients that I've had who didn't get any results with me are the only ones who didn't do this step. And that is you have to go and interview your ideal clients. You have to find out what they're afraid of, what they're struggling with, what they want, all this stuff. Squirrel, squirrel.

If you're ready to stop being a weenie and actually run a business that makes money, then go ahead and book a generate income strategy. Call with me by going to weeniecast.com strategycall. On this call, we will talk about your goals, your dreams, and your frustrations in getting there. And if it's a fit for both of us, then we can talk about different ways to work together.