Every bit of business advice going tells us to pick a lane. Niche down. Pick one thing. Be the person for one specific problem and one specific client – the riches are in the niches, and anything else is just diluting your message.
I’ve built a business doing precisely the opposite, and it works.
I’m a coach, a speaker, a speaker trainer, an author, trained in shamanism, breathwork, trauma release, NLP and more, and I spent decades in PR journalism before any of that. On paper, a niche-or-nothing stickler might call it a mess; in practice, it’s why people trust what I say, because none of it’s bolted on for content purposes. It’s how I think, and it shows the moment I open my mouth.
Niching down asks you to amputate the parts of yourself that don’t fit the brand you’ve decided you’re supposed to have. I’ve never done that. Instead, I looked for the thread that runs underneath all of it – the actual connection – and led with that instead of picking one piece of myself and filing the rest away.
Once you find that thread, you stop needing to pick a lane, because the lane was never really the point. The point was always finding the version of you that’s underneath the job titles.
Ask yourself: are you niching down because it’s the right call for your business, or because you’ve been told that’s what “proper” business owners do, and you’ve never tested whether it’s true for you?
There’s a real version of niching down that makes sense for some people, and plenty of businesses are built well on exactly one clear thing. What I’d question is whether yours is one of them, or whether it’s just made you smaller and safer rather than clearer.
Something to try this week:
Write down everything you are, professionally, without editing for coherence. All of it, however mismatched it looks on the page. Then look for the thread that actually connects it, and lead with that instead of picking one strand and cutting off the rest.
Let me know how you get on.
#UnleashYourAwesome