Niche then niche again

Yes I know it's scary but read below to see why you should...

A real challenge for small business owners in the early days of business is deciding who your ideal customer is. It’s so tempting to provide solutions to anyone who’ll pay, but in the end, you have to choose who you serve and then get very good at doing that.

We have run a marketing company for restaurant owners for years. Initially, we would offer marketing services to any hospitality business, including cafes, bars, hotels, clubs, food trucks, and so on. We did our best to please everyone, but we couldn’t. The results we produced for owners of medium to large restaurants were so much better than for anyone else, and so we decided to focus only on that group and turn away business from everyone else.

Saying no to business (and income) is tough, especially in the early days, but providing a very niche solution to a very “niche, niche” customer group pays off. You can dig deep into their issues and needs and provide specific solutions designed just for them. Consequently, you can charge more for your expertise. Ironically, your income increases by working with fewer clients. Eventually, because you are known as “the specialist in the industry,” you attract more of the right kind of clients who are happy to pay more because you are known as “the expert”.

At Restaurant Profits, we eventually had a checklist of requirements that businesses had to have before we worked with them. These included their business was a restaurant, not a café, it had to seat more than 55 people, it had to open for dinner, it had to have a drinks licence, and it had to have been established for more than 18 months… amongst other things.

If the prospect could meet all of our requirements, we would work with them; if they couldn’t, we would politely refuse, give them some free guidance, and say goodbye. Making prospective clients “qualify” to work with you also raises your status and allows you to charge a premium too. Those clients are also much more likely to follow your processes, so are much easier to work with too.

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