Ep #62: When to Pick a Niche

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey, coaches, welcome to episode 62. How are you doing today? What’s happening? I’m recording this on a Wednesday and yesterday my coach and I sold our in-person event Selling Expensive Things with us two days with 10 people in Las Vegas at the Four Seasons, we sold that completely out in four minutes. What? That’s insanity! I’m so excited for the people who got in. Stay tuned if you did not. I’m sure we’ll do it again; we might do it again. Who knows? Stay tuned.

But I’m so excited. We are going to talk about selling expensive things, my favorite. I love to buy expensive things; I love to sell expensive things. If you’ve been listening to the podcast you know this by now, I have a lot to say on the subject so we’re going to bring it to Vegas for two full days. I’m pumped and I’m really pumped at how possible it is to make a lot of money in a small amount of time. All right, that’s that. That’s what’s happening with me. Feeling good.

We’re going to talk about when to pick a niche today. Are you ready? So many of you have so much drama around niches and I don’t teach niches in 2K and I get lots of questions about that. I don’t teach it for a very specific reason in 2K. I do teach it in 200K, have them pick a niche, it’s part of their simple offer.

So, I think because you don’t hear me talk about it a lot and because I don’t teach it in 2K that a lot of you think that what I’m teaching is to not have a niche. That it isn’t necessary and that I’m like anti-niche, right? It’s like you guys take it to this whole other opposite thing. It’s like you can only be pro-niche or anti-niche. A lot of you guys do this with certification, too. It’s so confusing to me.

It’s like there’s only two groups of people. You’re either all about getting certified or you make certification or not getting certified meaning like you’re above it and you’re a better coach because of it or you’re like a rebel or it’s a more worthy cause to not have one. It’s the craziest thing. I see you guys do this all the time. I see it on social media a lot. It’s like you guys argue about – you put down people who get certification, you put down people who don’t have certification. It’s like the craziest stuff. What is happening?

It’s possibly to have a middle ground when it comes to certification, when it comes to niches, right? It’s not black and white like y’all like to make it be. I don’t teach it, but you guys see that I have one. I help life coaches make money. I make a lot of money with my niche. So, I’m going to set y’all straight on this podcast. I’m going to tell you the mindset that I have behind niches and then we’re just going to close the door forever on all the niche drama, shall we? Let’s do it.

Let’s start with what a niche is. A niche is your specialty. It’s a coaching focus. It’s much like a major in college or a specialty in medicine. So, the way that we often talk about it is that you either have one or you don’t. It’s this very black and white thing and I don’t even think that that’s a problem to not have a specialty. I think it’s fine to not have a niche. That actually isn’t the problem. But – and this might blow some of your minds, if you think about it like this.

The way I kind of think about it is that even if you major, for example, in general studies or liberal arts or if you’re a general surgeon, I got that from Grey’s’ Anatomy, I actually know absolutely nothing about surgery. But I know that Meredith Grey is a general surgeon. So, if you major in liberal arts or you’re a general surgeon, you still have a specialty, right? You specialize in general surgery, in liberal arts. You have a focus, it’s a broad focus, but it’s still a focus.

So, if you sell general life coaching this is still a focus. So, for those of you having massive niche drama or for those of you that don’t think you have one try on the idea that you do, in fact, have one already. It may just not be as specialized as mine or other people that you see in the industry, but it doesn’t mean that that is wrong. Especially, if you’re one of the coaches telling yourself, “I don’t know what my niche is.”

Imagine the drama you could leave behind if you explore the idea that you do have one and you know exactly what it is, it’s general life coaching. All drama gone, one second. You’re welcome. You don’t even have to pay me 2K for that.

Now, here’s what a niche is not. A niche is not an offer. This is so important. This is why I don’t teach it in 2K. The only thing standing between you and money is an offer and do you know how much mind drama comes with just that? I want you to really ask yourself that today. Spend some actual time exploring for you what are all your thoughts and feelings that come up that keep you from making an offer, that happened before you make an offer, and after you make an offer.

If you’re being self-aware and letting yourself, like allowing yourself to see your drama, the stuff that’s there, you will find that there’s a lot of it. Now, this doesn’t mean that making an offer is hard. Making an offer is literally the words, “I can help you.” We make it hard in our brains. So, imagine all that drama that you have around a niche and let’s even say that you have drama around a coaching program because many of you think that that’s what you have to have in order to make an offer, right?

So, you spend six months setting up shop, creating an offer, picking a niche just so that you can say the words, “I can help you. So, now what you’ve actually done is you’ve added between you and money, a niche, a program an offer and all the drama around all three are now between you and money. What else are you putting between you and money? Is there anything else? I bet there is. I would sit down and write it out. I would draw a little picture, a little picture, a little stick figure of you and a little stick figure of some dollars and I would answer that question, “What are all of the things that you’re putting between you and money?”

In 2K I take all of that away. I teach you how to eliminate everything between you and money. How to think like someone who takes the simplest route. Offers are the simplest route in the beginning and I think you have to take the simplest route in the beginning because of the drama you have just about the simplest route. That already causes you so much drama that you quite on yourself and don’t make it to the money. You don’t need to add anything else in-between there, right? That’s why I don’t teach it in 2K because your brain is not prepared for it.

It hasn’t learned how to handle just the drama of you and money and the offer in-between. I’m kind of a genius here that I teach you guys this route that nobody else is teaching you, but this is best, fastest, simplest route. There is so much confusion in the entire industry about what to do to make money and I think that if you want to make a lot of money you have to get very clear on what creates it, on how you create it. Offers, that is what creates money. If you’re making offers and not getting clients it’s not because you don’t have a niche, it’s because you are not selling your offer in a compelling way.

I also teach you this in 2K. That is the only reason ever that you are not making money. That people are not taking you up on your offer. This is so important, because if I can teach you that offers are the only thing you ever have to do to make money, if someone took away everything from you tomorrow, your email list, your social media following, your blog, your podcast, whatever you think that you either have already that’s making you money or that you have to have in order to make money, if you did all those and someone then took it away, but you really knew how to make a really good offer you know that the offers are the fastest way to cash. You would keep making money.

You would be the only thing you need. So, I teach you how to be the moneymaking machine, not how to find a moneymaking machine outside of you which I think a lot of you think is a niche. That’s going to be your moneymaking machine. That’s what most of you think happened with Make Money as a Life Coach. You think it’s brilliant that I stumbled on greatness.

No, I created it because I am a selling machine and because I went out and made a thousand offers. I gave my 200K Mastermind a book, I call it, Million Dollar Copy and it was every single email I wrote in 2019, my first million-dollar, and coincidentally multi-million-dollar year. It was just a book of offers. That is why my brand is what it is today. Not because of the niche I chose or what you think I found, right, but because of what I sold how many offers I made to people who wanted what I had to offer and I made them want that. It was me. I’m the selling machine.

I want to help you have that, so that you never fear if something shifts and changes in the world, Facebook goes away tomorrow, people stop reading emails, people stop reading blogs, people stop doing Pinterest, whatever it is, if that all goes away I want you to feel like, “I still know how to make money.” That will be true if you understand that the only thing between you and money is an offer and you know how to make one.

The other thing I want you to consider is that although I have a niche that I think is pretty amazing and I also sell it really well and I am the selling machine behind it, I couldn’t have been ready for this niche when I first started out. I couldn’t have sold it the way that I sell it. I couldn’t have had experience to lend to the people who joined me in business, bought from me in business. I couldn’t have the marketing skills to talk to my clients. I could have had none of that when I first started out because I hadn’t coached anyone yet.

How could I have taught any coach to make money as a coach? I wanted to. I actually knew right away that I wanted to help life coaches learn how to sell. I talked about that in my certification class. We had to pick a niche and I said I wanted that to be my niche, but my coach pointed out that I hadn’t sold any life coaching yet.

So, I went out and I sold life coaching to the tune of $500,000 before I started teaching life coaches how to make money and even then the way that I made that money was unique to what anybody else was teaching or doing, right? I just cut out all the middle stuff, focused on making offers, and so my experience, the way that I went out and made money, helped create my niche and my coaching philosophy and my coaching concepts and the process I teach my clients.

So, there’s no way I could’ve had this niche and it could’ve excelled the way that it’s excelling now at the beginning because I hadn’t created the theory of what are my coaching concepts now and then gone out and tested them and made them work and then learn how to teach them to other people. It’s like the niche came after I did all that.

My specialty, my specialization came after tons and tons and tons of tested theory and doing it myself over and over and over and then slowly starting to teach other people how to do it. Some of you think that you need a coaching program right along with a niche and I’m always thinking the same thing, “What are you going to teach? You have no experience teaching yet.”

I know what to teach, and I have lots of things to teach on now, and lots of concepts to talk about on the podcast because I have so much experience coaching. Many of you just need to coach on anything and everything. So, this is something to just consider. There are some people who know right away who they want to teach, and maybe you are ready to teach that thing.

Maybe you want to teach weight loss, and you have lost 100 pounds, and you know exactly who your person is, and how to talk to them, and exactly what to teach them. Great. This is not a problem either. Again, I’m not teaching not to have one.

You guys think, “Oh, I can’t work with Stacy because I have a niche, and she thinks they’re wrong.” No, not teaching not to have one, but if you aren’t the person who has already done the exact work and lost one 100 pounds to help the people lose the 100 pounds, and you don’t know exactly what you want to teach them, exactly what they need to know, and you don’t know exactly how to talk to them.

If this isn’t you, you are in what I have seen to be the 90% club of coaches who just want to coach and who have no clue what they want to coach on or what clients even really want coaching on. If that’s a you, you just want to start coaching on anything and everything. You may not be ready or have the experience required to specialize.

That’s the way that I want you guys to think about it, is just am I ready to specialize? If you try and force it, you will spend a lot of time consumed with this decision and not making offers. Every second that you spend thinking about your niche, you are not thinking about making money. In fact, I always tell my clients, even if you have a niche early on, take anyone that comes your way.

If you haven’t signed at least 10 clients, you want to sign 10 humans and coach them no matter what they want coaching on. At least 10. After 10, you might have an idea of who you like to coach and what you’d like to coach on. That number might also be 20. If it is, it’s okay. A million-dollar niche might just emerge after if you let it. It might emerge from who you become after you make $200,000. Why are you in such a rush? That is the question I would ask yourself. I think for most of you, here’s why you’re in a rush, is you think a niche will make you more of an expert. That is just a thought.

You know what actually makes you an expert? Experience. How many clients you have coached. How much money you have made as a coach. How many people you have gotten results. That makes you an expert. The great news is you don’t even have to be an expert to sell coaching. Residences, they will totally see you. They’re learning, but they’ll come in and treat you, and you’ll let them. I love that I’m using doctor analogies, and I know nothing about medicine. It’s fine. It works.

Now, here’s the other thing. You can also decide to think that you’re an expert now. You could totally think that as well. I don’t want to take that from you. It is a thought, and you could decide that about yourself now. I just want to make sure you understand truly that an expert specialization will come from experience, but you can’t decide to think that your life coaching expert. You might just go create more experience with that thought too. Fascinating how that works.

The other thing to consider that I really consider about niches is the customer because I have a sales mindset. It’s very helpful when thinking about your customers and what you’re going to sell them. There are millions of people in the world who want change and don’t even know the change they want. Or they want lots of changes. They want to lose weight. They won’t have a better relationship. They want to feel grief. They want to make more money. They want to get along with their boss better. They want to feel less anxiety.

That’s an actual client. All of those things, an actual client. I signed my first year of coaching, and I worked with her for 18 months. We worked on everything. I think we even worked on sex, everything. There are a lot of people out in the world like my client who just want a better quality life. They want to feel better. They want lots of changes. When they are in the place, they just want to feel better. They want lots of changes.

When they’re in that place of wanting lots of changes, they will also have a hard time prioritizing what they want. So, they will be less likely to pull the trigger on just one of their problems just like all of you. You guys send me messages, and you can’t decide between joining 2K, hiring one on one coach, doing a coaching certification. I bet if that’s where you are, you’re too busy thinking of deciding to actually decide. Am I right? I might be. Clients are like that too.

There are a world of clients who are decided specifically what they want help with on a very specific thing. There are a world of clients who want help on everything. I just hired a coach recently. I wanted her to coach me on everything. I had a whole list. It was a broad number of topics, and not all of the topics were life altering.

We spent an entire coaching call talking about coats, coaching on coats. Coats that I wanted to buy and I didn’t want to buy all at the same time. That’s what I wanted coaching on, on the everyday stuff. My frustration with travel, how worked up I get when I’m in traffic even when I’m not in a hurry. It’s really helping too.

I was finding that after I make all my big decisions in my business, in my wedding, in my life, I was struggling with all the little ones and all the little everyday things. You don’t even have to be a coach to want coaching on the small stuff. Many of my clients, when I was offering general life coaching, once they started coaching with me, brought the same small stuff that felt very big to them.

Our life is made up of the small stuff. So, I think as a side note, this is why general life coaching is so important to our world. We need more coaches out there just helping all the people who don’t fit the making money, weight loss, relationship mode.

I also feel very passionate and have such deep belief in this because I hired my first coach for these very reasons, and I worked with her for three years on everything. I just became a different person with her. For the first year that we worked together, it had nothing to do with wanting a business or wanting to become a coach, and I was only making $50,000 a year. I was paying her like $400 a month, living in a tiny apartment with no savings, and I just wanted help in all the things.

Your predominant thought when it comes like, “I have to have a niche, and I have to specialize, people won’t pay for coaching that isn’t specialty coaching, and if it’s non-specialty coaching, I’m going to attract people who don’t have money.” You guys have all of these thoughts. I see them on the 2K page all day long, and I just know that none of them are true because of who I was when I hired my first coach.

Because I hired my first coach that way, it never occurred to me when I first started my business that I needed a niche or that I was less than without one. In my certification, when they said, “You haven’t sold life coaching, how can you teach other people?” I was like, “Okay, I’ll just go sell life coaching.”

I only have the experience thus far of hiring a life coach who coached on everything in life. I thought that that was the way it worked because it was my experience as a customer. So, I didn’t have in me a thought against that, a thought that negated that or made that less than. A lot of you do because you see people like me who have a specialty, and you hear that that’s the way to make a lot of money, and I don’t even want you guys in the beginning thinking about how to make a lot of money.

I want you to think about making your first dollars. When you’re just starting out, you’re going to be meeting people, telling them who you are. You’ll be telling people in person or on social media, and a lot of your first clients will be in your social circle or some mix of six degrees of separation from it. My first client was my sister’s best friend’s best friend, who’s now, ironically, one of my best friends.

You’re not going to know a huge pool of people in a specific group yet. That’s another reason to not specialize, is you’re just going to be going out and expanding your network and your possibilities. So, general life coaching is going to appeal to the people you meet in the beginning. If they want specific help on something, I would offer it to them. Just because it wasn’t my specialty doesn’t mean I couldn’t coach them on weight loss.

You know how I knew I was the right person for someone who wanted weight loss and someone else who wanted coaching on their professional athlete career? Because I was the person in front of them ready and willing to help them, and able to make them an offer in the moment that they needed it. So, if you let them slide through the cracks because it isn’t your niche, they may never get help. So, the best person to help them is the person willing and able to help them right then and there in the moment they need it.

I want to end this reminding you that this is not an argument for not having a niche. I’m just going to say it a bunch of times throughout this episode. That is what people think I’m about. Have one if you know, and you’re ready, and it makes sense for you, for sure. Specialize when you know exactly how to market to your people, where to find them, and you have a ton of experience to lend in that space.

Here are two things I do recommend to kind of test that or just in general. Get 10 clients no matter what. If you know your niche, and you just know it’ll work, and people will buy, and you know where to get them, go get them, 10 of them. Then you have proof that you are ready for your niche, and you have the ability to make money with that niche.

If you don’t know what you want your niche to be, shelf the entire idea for now and go out and get 10 clients. Then check in and see if you are ready to declare one. If not, go get 10 more. The message really is do not spend any time having trauma about what one. The message is also go get 10 clients. You like that? The answer is the same always. How many? You should get 10 clients. Don’t get one, go get 10 clients. Having 10 clients and money puts your brain in a completely different place.

Remember the goal when you’re first starting out is make money as fast as possible. You want to cut out all the shit that doesn’t deliver that result right away. Now, I’m going to test you. What delivers that results? An offer. Ding, ding, ding. You got it! Don’t argue. Get 10 clients. If you’re ready to make it work, you will with 10 clients.

I had a client once who was dead set on a niche that she created, yet she wasn’t making money yet. Either her specialty was not big enough, which is what I thought it was. This never or rarely happens, but it really seemed almost too small, or I wasn’t sure if people would buy it, or that she wasn’t the person yet to make the offer to them. It was like one of those three things, but I just had a hunch she wasn’t ready yet.

So, I told her if she wanted to stick with it, she had to go get 10 clients in 30 days, and she freaked out. She wanted six months. She wanted six months to get 10 clients. This is how I knew she was putting a bunch of things between her and money. There wasn’t just an offer between the two. She had a whole list. That’s why it was going to take her six months.

If you’re giving yourself more than 30 days to make money, you’re putting too much between you and money. You are believing that other things create money other than an offer. If you believe an offer is what creates money, you go out, niche or not, and make money.

That is really the test, is what do you believe makes you money? Are you willing to go out and commit to making money in the next 30 days? If you think you need coaching, or you need any help deciding on a niche in any capacity. Meaning when you think about joining 2K, and you’re wondering if I’m going to help you on your niche, you are not ready to have one yet. Period.

The drama tells you you’re not ready for a specialization. A specialization comes after you have created a specialty with experience. When you are ready for one, you will not need anyone to help you decide. You will know, or you will just decide, and it will be done. That’s the test of when you know you’re ready for a niche, is when you don’t need any help with it. All right. That’s all for now.

Now, I do want to take a second before I let you all go and let you know because many of you tell me that you love the content of this podcast, and that you take notes, and you listen multiple times. I just want you to know if you go to www.staceyboehman.com/podcast, or you can just go to SASE www.staceyboehman.com and find the podcast tab, you can click on each individual episode and download the transcript. Did you know that?

You can get the whole written transcript of the podcast, so that you can print it out, and highlight things you want to coach yourself on, write things you want to make sure you remember, things that inspire you. We have them for every episode. I just thought you might want to know that. Just a little love. Little love gift from me. They’re there for every episode. All right. Have a great week. I will talk to you next week.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.