Niche Business Formula

It sounds like a bit of a trendy marketing term doesn't it but actually the theory is sound.

And I really want to emphasise how useful this little bit of knowledge could be to you, right at the beginning of your business idea journey because it will pay out enormous dividends in the long run.

You might want a bit of paper and pen for this one, to write down the 4 steps.

Niching your business is a whole lot more than just saying you work with only male or female, or mums or seniors or people who just eat fish.

It is more about the problem you solve and the end result achieved from what you do to solve it.

If you can understand this simple formula then you will completely understand what a niche business is all about and why it’s a good idea to consider it as a concept to help narrow down your focus.

You will then find sharing your particular message to the right people much easier instead of trying to compete for everyone and their dog, and then getting really annoyed and demoralised because the customers you are seeking are resisting taking up your product or service.

To illustrate this point, let me direct you to a quote from a book called Switch by Chip and Dan Heath because I think they express it perfectly.

Their quote is

Resistance is created through a lack of clarity

Resistance being, people don't want to buy your product or your service because you haven't narrowed down and specifically answered the questions to all 4 parts of the formula I am about to share with you.

Let explain a bit more and you will see why this makes absolute sense.

The problem most people have with creating a niche business is a fear-based one and in reality, it is unfounded and unnecessary.

You think you will miss out on business but the truth is the very opposite of this. The reality is you will create clarity in your bit of the market and your customers will be very clear if you can help them or not. There will be no ambiguity at all and no need for resistance from them.

If you narrow down your focus you will be talking to the right people, with the right message at the right time

You can then determine with precision, exactly

Read more about the niche business idea formula on my website

Book mentioned in this episode:

Switch - how to change things when change is hard - Chip & Dan Heath

 Business idea validation is a useful method to help you answer the question

Does this business idea have any hope of taking off?

A very sensible question to ask at the beginning of your business planning and it will probably save you a lot of time and money and frustration in the long run.

So here is a really simple formula d to use and you can apply it to any industry.

Take a piece of paper or however, you want to document your answers and divide it into 4 sections

You take your idea and apply the business idea validation formula to it.

So let me explain what I mean.

Say your idea is to start a baby clothes business?

Before you even have registered a domain name, or bought business cards and absolutely before you purchase any stock you go through the validation formula very quickly.

I would use them in the following order but, you could evaluate in any order you choose as long as you cover all 4 sections.

You are checking to see if your idea has a place in the world, with your stamp on it.

And if you have the right business for the right people it makes the marketing stage effortless later on.

So Step 1 is looking to your particular network

Ask your network of friends and people you think appropriate to share your idea with if they think you have a good idea about starting a baby clothes business.

If you are a parent, for example, you can ask other parents you know for their opinion to get a ballpark idea.

Aside from the ones, who secretly are jealous or don't want you to do well you could glean a mine of information about baby clothes such as what is missing in the market, what they love about clothes, what they don't love, what their gripes are about quality, price, accessibility to the market, any number of things really.

The feedback you get here could actually make your change your mind, develop your idea entirely differently or just tweak it a bit further.

Your networks have all had hands-on experience of babies which is why you are asking them so their feedback is totally invaluable.

Don't be shy about asking, you need this type of information and level of user input to move forward towards a successful venture.

And don't discount people who you think will be "negative" because they may just have the information you hadn't given any consideration to and it could be the difference between doing well, and not. You don’t want to be blindsided by something that is really obvious to others at this crucial early stage.

You then move on to Step 2 and to validate your idea offline

Business idea validation offline means you ask real people BUT outside of your network.

This group is made up of real people, who might use your product or service, so you could survey people as an example outside the school gate, hold a mini focus group of some kind, and find other non-competing baby businesses to chat with and maybe collaborate and so on…

Go to the places you will find your potential buyers and just simply ask them what you would like to know...

Read more on my website

Find your strengths

Welcome to Episode 5 and today I am talking about Finding Your Strengths and the importance of them in your business journey.

You need to find your strengths if you want to successfully design a business around who you are.

If you want the perfect fit that is?

If you don’t find those strengths and work with them instead of fighting against them, your work life will be a big struggle.

And who the heck wants that? Life is hard enough, right?

In modern life, positive psychology is all the rage and I don’t mind it at all in the right circumstances however, the quote that reads along the lines of...

Really isn’t helping people at all, because it makes people think hard work is all they need.

Unfortunately, no amount of effort makes you better at something you are not born to do or be despite any amount of passion for it.

Well, I learned something interesting from something on my bookshelf recently, and I found it a complete revelation.

What do you think about this as an alternative instead?

I thought it was genius!

Now, doesn’t that immediately make you feel better?

At last, not some advice to try harder at what you don’t like doing much and will always fail to master no matter how long or how hard you try.

I learned this from the lovely Marianne Cantwell, she has written a great book call Be A Free Range Human and she talks about how to get off the treadmill and become the person you really want to be with a career to match.

I absolutely love that way of looking at the world.

If you struggle to find your strengths, perhaps if you look at your perceived weakness instead, and flip your world view, you might find this approach more helpful.

Marianne explains it better.

She uses herself as an example when she was originally in  the world of corporate job land

“I changed career back in the job world.

I thought I had a huge weakness of constantly wanting to change how things were done.

I came up with new ideas all the time for how we could improve the status quo.

My boss wasn’t interested; he wanted me to focus on the job at hand, which had nothing to do with creating change.

My constant need to make things better and better – and never settling for average – was a weakness when I was supposed to keep things ticking over quietly.

Then, I changed my career into consultancy...

Mentioned in this episode

Finding Life Purpose, starting with a quote from James Redfield.

He is the author of super famous The Celestine Prophecy and very widely respected as a writer, actor, and screenwriter and thought leader.

He writes a lot about purpose and vision in his very successful Celestine series of books.

"Once you have learned what your life is about there is no way to erase the knowledge.

No matter how afraid you become you have no choice.

If you try to do something different with your life, you will always sense there is something missing"

Finding life purpose is actually easier than you think.

Clues are everywhere in your life and the reality is you do already know the answers, you are just not hearing or seeing them.

So in order to access the answers, you need to listen more, observe more and pay much more attention to your world around you.

Your perfect business idea can link seamlessly into your purpose in life but you need to give yourself the time and mental space to hear it and feel it.

Once you get “what you should be doing with your life”, you can build your business around your world and not your world around your business.

One thing is for sure though…

You won’t find it watching TV or sitting over a glass of chilled white moaning to your friends for the hundredth time.

Move away from the noise and chaos, you need some quiet introspection.

Read more here and access the 11 questions to ask yourself in the exercise

Learn to create your own business and design it around who you are and how you want to live your life

Words of Gratitude 

Welcome to Episode 3 and today I will be talking about the absolute importance of words of gratitude

You hear a lot from others, don’t you about how grateful you should be? What are you grateful for today? by an anonymous writer “Be grateful for small mercies” or “you should be grateful you are not poor” or “think yourself lucky you have got a job or your health or your family ” and so on Insert the appropriate phrase; I am sure you get the picture. 

Those common, trip off the tongue,  words of gratitude, how lucky I am to be alive, how lucky I am to have food to eat, how lucky I am to have a job or whatever it was I should be eternally grateful for.

 I am ashamed to say, as a younger woman I never really took any of it as seriously as I should have. 

To me, it was something your elders trotted out when they wanted to make a point about you being an ungrateful little so and so. 

So, naturally, it went in one ear and out the other. 

It is only later and I am not really sure why the acknowledgement of words of gratitude seems to have taken on a greater significance in my life.

 Perhaps it is because I can now hear all the time, the much younger generation behind me, dismissing those words of wisdom in the same cavalier fashion I did. I hear them poo-pooing parents and grandparents and elders, just like I did at their age and into early adulthood 

And I don’t like it, says she who is now acutely ashamed of herself for being like it herself. 

Their arrogance and sense of invincibility matched with a “nothing can touch me” attitude pervading their snorts of mocking. The “old fogeys” are just rattling on. 

Recently I have found myself wondering why it has become so important to me now. I think it is because it has just dawned on me I might have become the “old fogey”... 

Read more here... 

Websites mentioned:

 Mindset change is

definitely in order if you constantly think you will fail with your business idea or you think you can't have, be or do something or, you are faced with other people, however well-meaning, who point this sort of thing out to you and you believe them.

Your mindset is the single most important thing in the world to get right and keep right if you want to move forward with your business idea...

And here is my own quote about it...

"You have to treasure your mindset and nurture it like a child"

The simple truth is if you think you can’t about something then you won’t.

Lack of confidence in your ability is an absolute killer and other people can be complicit in the murder of many a fledgling business idea without even realising it.

It is SO easy to be derailed by a single random or throwaway thought, word or action in the blink of an eye.

So, if you are serious about beginning your perfect business and then actually doing something about it, then you need to get a handle on this dream destroyer straight away.

If you feel you are long overdue for a mindset change then...

Let’s start with a definition of mindset

Just so you can start with an understanding of what you are dealing with.

And I quote from one of the great dictionaries of the world - mindset is

A fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person’s responses to and interpretation of situations

or

An inclination or habit

Once you understand you have this fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines how you approach life then you can work towards change.

But what do you need to change you might ask?

Well, you need to move away from what is known as a fixed mindset where you find yourself saying

“Well I can’t do this” or “I am too old/young/fat/thin/time poor/money poor”

or other negatives such as

“Well I blame my parents/partner/children/boss/friends” for whatever it is you think you can’t be, do or have.

You then need to move into two very important and alternative mindset change patterns.

They are a business one and a growth one.

If you can’t move away from your fixed mindset and develop these two then, in all honesty it is game over before you even take the first step.

It’s a bit like a battery in a torch;

You can’t make the light shine on the negative settings.

You have to have the positive side facing the right way to make the connection.

You can press the on button for as long and as often as you like but nothing will ever happen and you will never see the light come on...

Read more here...

Mentioned in this episode:

Dr Carol Dweck - Mindset Expert

Learn to create your own perfect business and design it around who you are and how you want to live your life

Starting a small business or hoping to? Welcome to episode 1, and here is my question to you if you are. Why? Why are you doing it? 

From what I see, many people seem to want to start out on their venture the wrong way round and especially for the wrong reasons. 

The fact you would rather stick a pencil in your eye than keep going to work for someone or something that means nothing to you, is, surprisingly for some not the best reason for striking out on your own. 

So I would like to share a few things I have learned along the way on my travels about starting a small business.

 The glaringly obvious points when seen retrospectively, as I did after a number of false starts with my own efforts, become blindingly obvious. And let me tell you until I learned my lesson I made this mistake several times over. 

Not just once. If you have the time to read it, I mention in my about me page on my website, how I have started several online businesses and one offline in the real world. I talk about how I didn't get on very well with any of them, I tried and failed miserably which completely put me off business at the time, I thought, for life. I made the classic assumption I was rubbish at it, with no hope. 

As time went by though, with that 10th wonder of the world hindsight,  I can see quite clearly the reason they all went wrong, and how I set myself up for failure every single time. 

Aside from not choosing the right business model for me or the right subject area, and I will cover this in more detail in a later recording. The other glaringly obvious mistake I made was not being absolutely crystal clear as to why I ever wanted to start a business in the first place nor did I pay any heed to who I wanted to serve, or actually how I wanted to serve them. 

My website and course is the premise of this topic now, after such a bad experience. I didn’t want others to have to take such a hard road. 

The complete understanding of the question of why it is absolutely crucial to get right in the beginning. I can't emphasise that enough. 

Ask yourself and answer honestly, why is your business in existence?

Learn to create your own perfect business designed around who you are and how you want to live your life

Business Ideas For Beginners

I decided to start this podcast as an addition to my website createyourperfectbusiness.co.uk

It is a site about helping people come up with their perfect business idea based on who they are and how they want to live their life.

A tailor-made business to add value to the world and with passion and personality included as standard.

I wanted to branch out on the website to include a podcast and talk to people who are just like you and I, starting their business from scratch and finding their way

So why did I pick business ideas then? You might be asking.

Over the years I realised I had a gift for putting ideas together for people, in ways they hadn’t thought of themselves.

And people often came to me for my advice about quite a few things, I think, because of the lateral way I process information.

I seemed to come up with an answer they hadn’t thought of, perhaps about their career or relationships or life in general.

And as career and work have been one my greatest challenges over the years I thought I would apply my talent to this area and not choose broken relationships or money problems, both of which I have excelled in with honours.

And when I found a career coaching course run by the brilliant Dr. Valerie Young  (If you want to look her up, she wrote a bestselling book about The Imposter Syndrome, and you can find it on Amazon),  I did actually do a little happy dance because I felt at last I had found something that felt right for me. People often talk about feeling like they are coming home to something, and here I was right at the front door with a key.

I realised I could put a frame around my talent, turn it into something useful to help others and it was possible to monetise it too.

So, the business of business ideas became my path to follow.

Mentioned in this episode:

Dr. Valerie Young - Changing Course

My course: Create Your Perfect Business Idea  - From Idea To First Product or Service