As a new coach, you’re probably wondering whether you should focus on finding a niche right away or keep exploring different coaching areas. It’s a tough question to answer, but the good news is that you can do both.
Coaching is a set of skills, but it’s your unique strengths, interests, and experiences that determine your area of expertise or specialty. A niche, on the other hand, is the specific goals and challenges your specialty helps solve. People don’t pay for coaching, but for the transformation and result it provides.
So, should you be a generalist and take any clients you can get? You can, but it’s going to make it a lot harder to gain traction as a coach. Figuring out your specialty, niche, and value takes trial and error. Here’s what I suggest for new coaches in those early, messy days instead:
- Create a list of topics and challenges that interest you and you’re passionate about.
- Use your gut and information to pick one niche to test out. This is your hypothesis.
- Go all in on that niche with your content, marketing, and connections for a specific period of time. Be agile.
- When something works well, spend some time thinking about why. When something doesn’t work well, spend some time thinking about why. Be curious.
- Use the data collected to determine if you want to keep going down that path, make slight adjustments, or try the next idea.
- Keep experimenting, improving, and innovating.
The speed of your experiments, your willingness to fail fast and forward, and the quality of your reflection will determine how quickly you find your niche. Just know that it will evolve and change over time.
In conclusion, finding a niche vs. exploring your specialty isn’t an either-or question. As a new coach, you can focus on both by testing one niche at a time and being open to opportunities outside of your defined niche.