Choosing Your Coaching Niche
Choosing your coaching niche? Overcome the “fear of narrowness” by focusing on your “entry point of extreme credibility.”
Are you good coach who is avoiding picking a niche for your coaching practice?
The conventional wisdom about coaching says to pick a niche and focus on it. Why? By clearly establishing your expertise within a particular target market, you allow potential clients to find you based on their specific needs. As the expert, you also sell more easily with higher fees.
Yet many coaches resist choosing a niche. They may be good coaches, yet they ignore this advice and often are not generating very much business.
Why the resistance to picking a niche? While some of the resistance comes from fear of marketing, sales, or rejection, I think there is a deeper reason that I hear in my conversations with coaches.
What is the deeper fear? The fear that by picking a niche, you will lose opportunities to coach people on a range of connected issues. This is the “fear of narrowness”.
In the past few years, I have mentored about a dozen coaches on practice building and presented to several coaching audiences. Many coaches I know have completed training and certification programs and have a high degree of competency as a coach. They are well-trained coaches who know how to listen to the client, help the client clarify their desired outcome, and create an action plan to move forward. At a basic level, that is what good coaches do.
Yet some of these coaches avoid picking a niche because they want to work with the client as the “whole person.” They want to bring all of their experience to the process. Somehow they fear that by selecting a niche with a particular problem set, they will forego the opportunity to work on other issues. They are afraid to make a choice, since they think they are making a tradeoff they will regret. This “fear of narrowness” makes perfect sense for coaches, since they tend to be people with broad life and professional experience. Yet this fear is precisely what prevents coaches from taking effective action to get new clients.
I understand this concern, since early in my practice I had similar limiting beliefs. Yet my experience has taught me that this thinking is a fallacy – a false tradeoff that does not exist. If you coach human beings, you always are coaching the whole person. If the client puts the issue on their agenda, you will have the opportunity to help them in many different ways. Hanging on to this thinking will cost you opportunities to serve clients and to generate new business.
Here’s a specific example. I coach people on business models. Whether they are a solo professional or an executive at a large corporation, they know or suspect that their business model is broken. I help them pinpoint exactly what is going on and what to do about it. They hire me because I have extreme credibility on this topic based on my professional experience. As a doctor would say, the business model problem is their “presenting issue” and I’m the expert. Yet, over the past five years coaching business people, I have had entire coaching sessions on various other issues raised by clients. Most of these coaching sessions focus on related business issues like sales and marketing, organizational changes, compensation, negotiation, hiring and firing, board governance, or finances.
On some occasions, however, the coaching relationship goes into personal territory – even though it definitely did not start there. At various times, clients have asked me for help on personal issues including:
- Starting an exercise plan
- Adjusting to life in a new city
- Negotiating conflict about a family vacation destination
- Dealing with aging parents or troubled children
- Interventions with family members suffering from addiction
- Dealing with marital or relationship problems, including divorce or infidelity
- Spiritual crises, including a complete loss of meaning
One very important point here: I never, ever represent myself as a mental health professional and I make appropriate referrals. I disclose my limited professional expertise on these matters, yet I can offer my own personal experience and wisdom when appropriate. When these issues do arise, I rarely ever spend more than one session on the personal issues, since the plan of action generally involves getting help from a different specialist. Generally, just listening is enough.
It is highly unlikely that someone would come to me as a brand new client to hire me to work on any of the personal issues described above. Yet, over the course of a trusted relationship, these things come up because we are human.
What’s the lesson for coaches? You can coach on anything and everything you choose – but if you try to sell that way you are guaranteed to lose.
If this resonates for you, then your issue isn’t so much one of picking a niche, but of picking an “entry point of extreme credibility”. Find the one area where you have extreme credibility – where clients can hire you to get rapid results. Use that entry point to start the client relationship. The rest will come if you want it to.
