5 Questions to Help You Find Your Niche

Find Your Niche to Make Your Business More Profitable

If you want to make more money in your business one of the first things to do is to make sure you know who your best customers are. Instead of trying to serve anyone and everyone who might possibly need what you sell, take some time to find your niche. Business owners often feel like they can’t niche themselves, especially if they are new to their business. But that’s not the case. Here’s help.

• Everything you’ve done up to now gives you many layers of experiences and expertise that help you find your niche.
• Assessing your strengths is the first step.

How a man with no arms or legs found his niche in a new career

One of the most inspiring patients I ever worked when I was a rehabilitation counselor was an electrician. I’ll call him Tom. Tom had been a lineman for 15 years when, one day, the cherry picker arm failed while he was up in the air working a line. He fell against multiple lines, electrocuted and unconscious. The end result of his accident was that he lost both of his arms at the elbow and both of his legs above the knee. After about 8 months of hospitalization and physical rehab I met him. His next problem was what to do for a career for the rest of his life. Tom was a married man with 3 children and a wife who had been a full time mom. 

Tom felt as if all he could do was lineman work. Our challenge was to find his transferable skills and expertise, and match those to a new way for him to earn a living. 

The first time Tom and I met he was still getting used to his prosthetic arms and legs. Because he was physically strong before his injury he had a good sense of balance and good core strength, and that worked in his favor. It was a transferable skill. As we started to talk about his accident and how to craft a new career for him, Tom mentioned that he’d always been the lineman who managed the equipment, kept it straight, let his boss know when they needed new supplies. I could tell that his personality and character leaned toward numbers and being exact in his work. So we used those traits and eventually turned that into his new career. Tom went back to school and earned a degree in accounting. A few years after that, with some experience and more training, he proudly passed his CPA exam.

In times of crisis and global change we sometimes have to find new niches to keep our businesses alive Click To Tweet

Right now, I’m getting calls and emails from women business owners who see that their business income is dramatically changed because of the worldwide pandemic of coronavirus. I’m being asked, “If I need to shift my business to create new income, how do I get started doing this?”

Here are 5 questions to help you find a new niche when you want to create new income streams in your business. 

Ask yourself:

• What are the skills you have developed through education and training throughout your entire life (not just recently)
• What do you have a natural talent for? (This may be more than one thing.)
• What experiences in your life have you had that not many other people have had? 
• What are you well known for, things people would say you have expertise in? Things where you have credibility?
• What are the things you love to do?

It might be that your current business makes use of only 25% of your expertise, skills, training, education, and experiences. So the first step in “what’s next, I need to make a change” is to take inventory. Ask yourself these questions and create a checklist, a “map” of yourself. See what thoughts come to you. Asking these 5 questions helps you to think outside your current business and opens your eyes to new possibilities.

Get the checklist

You can download the Find Your Niche Checklist by clicking here. You can find my How to Find a Super-Good Niche in Your Market (case study) here.

For more help with your business (for women business owners) you can also check out these resources.

• To keep developing yourself consider joining my CEO Circle. We thrive on taking the long view and creating a plan out of what might seem chaos.
• Join in my Monday morning Let’s Talk open virtual meetup. Find the details right here.
• You can read my own story of staying resilient in a chaotic time here.

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