What is your Business Niche?
Are you spending your time standing still or trying to expand your market reach where you as an individual or as a business can deliver value?
Isn’t business really about having a niche? If you own or run a business, you need to understand and define your target market, your target customers and what it is your business does to deliver value to them. If you are the professional, employed by a business, you need to define what your unique qualifications are and the respective value that you deliver to your employer.
On a personal note, as a consulting recruiter, I am frequently asked: “What is your niche?” and my response continues to change or evolve.
Change is a constant force that drives why you would change your business niche. How you “scratch” your business niche requires an adjustment both from a philosophical perspective as well as from a execution perspective.
If your business once upon a time involved the manufacturing of buggy whips, perhaps today, your business might involve the manufacture of fine leather goods for numerous markets. Had you remained “The great buggy whip maker”, you would be working in a very limited market sector.
What’s driving the change and where is the benefit from embracing changes?
The Information of Change
In my experience, unlimited access to information has redefined how business is being conducted. There was once a time when the value of a business or the value of an employee was protected information. In other words, the unique information being held by the employee or the business could be kept privately or shared based upon the decision of the holder of the information. This was during the pre-internet period.
What made the buggy whip company valuable was no one had easy access to their business information. Today, much of what anyone would want to know about that buggy whip company is accessible on the world wide web.
As a business leader, are you still answering the “What is your business’s niche?” question with the same answer from 10 or 20 years ago?
As the professional employed by a business, do you still answer the “What is your niche?” question with the same answer that you have always given?
If you are answering “Yes”, then the many changes happening around you may be leaving you stale and a less than relevant player in the today’s business landscape.
Taking the nimble and agile approach
One of the great advantages of today’s unlimited access to information is also the unlimited access to connect with an unlimited number of people and connect with an unlimited number of markets. This access offers us the avenue to change how you can refresh and update your business niche. Change the way how you think about what you do and you have dramatically widened your lane for business and widened your opportunities.
Let’s say that for the most part, business is about solving some sort of challenge by delivering a solution or a value. Let’s say that buggy whip company recognized many years ago that the horse was being replaced by more advanced means of transportation. If the buggy whippers broadened their philosophical approach, they could transition their craft into many different relevant ventures and would have unlimited access to identify target customers and numerous means to reach their target audience.
They would no longer describe their niche as serving the horse drawn market sector with a product but instead serving multiple markets with knowledge and valued proven experience.
Wider view equals evolving niche
I see today’s marketplace as a 360 circle that wants help with challenges that a business does not have it’s own answer for.
– Businesses want help with challenges that they can’t solve. The help could come in the form of the product or service that your company provides or in the form of hiring the talent who can fix the issue.
How do you define your business niche and more importantly can you define how it continues to evolve in our changing marketplace?
Good hunting!