When you first start out in business, it’s standard to service clients from a wide variety of industries. If you are building your client base it’s a smart way to start, and the only way to discover which industry you prefer or have the most success in. After a while, though, it’s important to look at your client base and start to choose favorites…favorite industry, that is. There is likely going to be an industry that excites you more than others, and I’d say that’s a good thing. One of the best changes we’ve made in our firm is to direct our expertise to a specific industry and create an ideal client profile. We call this effective niching. There are many benefits that can come from having a specific ideal client in mind, and we’ve compiled a list of some of the best reasons:
As much as we’d like to think so, we can’t be experts in everything.
This is sometimes hard to come to terms with as an ambitious business owner, but the fact of the matter is it just isn’t possible to be an expert at everything…and that’s okay. By trying to know everything about every industry that comes to you, you are spreading yourself too thin. It’s likely that you know a little about a lot of industries, but many industries like construction and health and wellness require background knowledge of specific requirements to complete tasks effectively. By attempting to know everything about all industries, you end up selling your clients short and wasting a lot of time doing research you wouldn’t otherwise have to do.
If you set your focus too broad, you miss out on opportunities to learn about the intricacies of certain industries.
Every industry has their specific requirements and by attempting to learn all of them you end up only scratching the surface on each. Imagine how much more valuable your services would be if you were an expert in someone’s trade? You would be able to give advice you are confident in because you’ve done extensive research and likely have had clients with the same recurring issues. Not only will you be able to help with the recurring issues, you will be able to educate your clients on matters they might not even know about yet. This will add unexpected value to your services that clients will be hard pressed to find elsewhere.
By Choosing a specific niche, you increase your value tenfold.
Have you ever tried to look something up on google and got back millions of results? In order to find something relevant to you, you must narrow your search. That’s exactly what your potential clients are doing when they are searching for the services you offer. By narrowing your services to a specific market, your SEO (search engine optimization) increases and the likelihood of you showing up on the first page of search results increases. When someone is looking for a specific service and they are choosing between someone who just “knows how to do it” and someone who specializes in it, they’re probably going to choose the specialist.
Narrowing your focus reduces your costs because you are only educating yourself in one area vs. many.
Educating your staff so they know more about industries you are working with is important for any business, but it can get expensive if you work with a lot of industries. The amount of time spent researching and educating alone will cost you, and that doesn’t include special software you’d need for certain industries.
Narrowing your scope can be difficult, but your life and the lives of your staff will be exponentially simpler once you choose an industry and stick with them. If you have more questions about narrowing your scope, feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to talk with you about our process and help you get started with yours!
