Your clients are all over the place? No similarities? No clear niche?
Squash, Cucumbers, and Watermelons are not the same. And yet…
I mean, it’s obvious, right?
All of them are technically fruits, but you only put one of them in a fruit salad.
One grows on a bush, another on a spreading vine, another a climbing vine.
They definitely don’t look the same.
And yet they are all in the same family.
They have to be grown differently, but there are actually a lot of similarities.
They also have a lot of the same pests, and pressures from the same diseases.
They need the same kinds of nutrients.
If you can grow one, there’s a good chance you can grow the others.
Last week I had a Client Cultivation™ Consultation with an attorney looking to grow a new service area with ongoing retainers.
She has 3 existing clients, and when I asked her what was similar about them… she was unsure.
They were in drastically different industries and were of different sizes.
But before we had gotten to that point, I had her explain to me why this service was important. Why it was needed in the market.
I had her also tell me about her story.
And when she started describing the clients one by one, it clicked.
She had a literal “I’ve got it!” aha moment.
The common thread between all of those clients was that they were innovators. They weren’t just business owners, they were entrepreneurs looking to create something new, or disrupt the existing model of how their industry operated.
Kind of like her.
Now, as we help her create and test messaging for that service, we know better how to “prepare the soil” to cultivate those opportunities.
Digging deeper, I pointed out they were also all immigrant entrepreneurs. Just like her dad, who had struggled when he moved to the US because he didn’t know who to listen to or who to trust.
Identifying niches based on industry verticals or basic demographics is easy.
But identifying them on psychographics – common beliefs, goals, ideals, frustrations, desires… that’s powerful.
So if you roll your eyes every time you hear someone say something like “riches are in the niches,” and feel like that means you would get rid of a lot of your existing clients…
Let me challenge you to dig a little deeper. You might fight the roots of those opportunities are more intertwined than you realize.
And if you’d appreciate a little help and guidance in that process, just let me know.
Riches are in the niches
