COVID happened last 2020 and caused a massive push for people to go online. Going online with your business has become successful even without a niche, but what comes after? Kendra Perry shares a cautionary tale about niching. Why is it so important to have a niche? After COVID, things shifted, and those businesses without a niche were only successful up to that point and are slowly declining. If you want to understand why Kendra strongly believes that having a niche is critical, tune in to this episode today!
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A Cautionary Tale About Niching
Now, I’m going to give you a cautionary tale about niching. This is going to help you understand why I’m this never-ending broken record of, “You need a niche.” I never shut up about it. If you have at all been around here for any minute of time, you know that I talk about niching all the time. This is why. I want to tell you about my friend, Amy. She is a very good friend of mine.
She is a health coach, and for as long as I’ve known her, she’s had a more general niche. She’s trended toward female hormone imbalance. In my opinion, that’s not really a niche but she has been overall very general and not specific. Now, her business is incredibly successful. I believe she makes somewhere around $500,000 a year. She does very well. She has been in business for 6 or 7 years, something like that, and she is successful.
She always had a good amount of applications come in for her group coaching program but in the past years, those applications have started to decline, and now they are this slow, frustrating trickle. She also noticed that she wasn’t growing on social media. We talk all the time. We are always chatting away on Voxer. I remember one day, this was maybe several months ago, she’s like, “I’m not getting the applications I want. I’m not getting the number of people that I want to enroll in my program. What I need to do is go more general.” I talk a lot about female hormone imbalance but about women’s health. If I talk more about women’s health, I will be able to capture all these other people.
This, my friend, made me cringe. My shoulders got all tight because I was like, “That’s not how it works. The more general you get, the more vague your messaging, your content, and your marketing get. Even though we think we are going to capture more people, we don’t. That’s counterintuitive. You’ve probably heard me talk about this before.
I have been trying to nudge her towards defining her niche more clearly for pretty much as long as I’ve known her. I also don’t want to force advice on someone who maybe isn’t willing to hear it, so I’ve tried to be a little bit more gentle. I’ve mentioned it and seated it in when we were chatting but try not to be all like, “In your face, take my unsolicited advice,” because I’m a projector.
If human designed, I’m a projector. I’m supposed to wait for the invite. People can feel repulsed when I give them unsolicited advice, which is hard for me because I want to all the time. I’m like, “Let me give you advice,” but I held back. I was trying to nudge her toward this as much as I possibly could. We were going through a course together on webinars.
The guy who does the course he’s just talking about building your webinar and hammers down on niching. Maybe hearing it come from someone else essentially, my friend Amy tripped over the truth. Suddenly, she had a realization. She’s like, “I don’t have a niche, and maybe my problem isn’t that I need to be more generic or traffic but perhaps I need to niche down.”
That’s what she did with my help. I helped her work through it, which I love. I was excited. I was like, “Finally, you are letting me help you niche.” I was pumped like weirdly pumped. We worked on her niche together, and she finally nailed down something that helped a very specific type of person with a specific type of problem. When she did that, she suddenly realized that she was getting more applications and that her Instagram was starting to grow again.
It’s exciting, and she was like, “This has been right in front of me all this time but I didn’t even think about it.” You might be asking, “That’s interesting, Kendra because you are all crazy about niching but your friend grew this $500,000 a year business without a niche. How was she able to do that up until that point if niching is so important?”
Now, my friend has a business that’s 6 or 7 years old. She started her business at a very different time. I know it was only several years ago but my friend, the online world, has significantly changed in the past couple of years. Years ago, there was a little bit more leeway to not have a niche because there was less competition. Niching has always been important, and I believe that the clearer and more specific you are with your niche, the easier everything becomes but like I said, there was a little bit more space or leeway for people to be successful without a niche. Something crazy happened in 2020, and we all know what that is. COVID ruins everything.
What happened with COVID is that it pushed so many people online who weren’t previously online. It pushed businesses online because, suddenly, we were in a situation where it was hard and unacceptable to meet in person. Suddenly, all these people who were doing it in person were like, “I need to go online.” There was this huge push to go online.
Online business is this beautiful gift. It’s the best. It’s this amazing gift that the universe has given to us. I always knew that people would figure it out eventually. It’s just that with COVID, it happened way quicker. It accelerated that. All these people came online in 2020, and there was this beautiful honeymoon phase of 2020 when people came online with their online business and crushed it. They did well.
Why was that? It’s because a lot of people were at home. A lot of people weren’t out traveling. They weren’t doing things. They weren’t going to yoga or the gym. Some people got laid off. Some people lost their jobs, whatever it was. Suddenly, people were sitting at home. They were online all the time and had all this time and space to do these online programs, and they still had money. We weren’t in a recession at that point.
People who came online in 2020 were like, “This is a gold mine. This is the best thing ever,” and they were sold. A lot of people who came online because they were forced to in 2020 stayed online. To give you an example, the application for new business licenses in the US has been fairly stable since the early 2000s. I’m looking at this graph. In 2005, there were 2.9 million new business applications. It went up a little bit but then it went down a bit.
In 2017, there were 3.18 million, so a little bit more. Definitely, that’s when things were starting to go up. 2019, 3.5 million. Basically, from the 2000s until 2016, it was in that 2.4 million to 2.9 million range, and then it dipped up from 2017 to 2019. 2019, 3.5 million business applications. In 2020, there were 4.35 million. A lot of people came online. When you look at this graph, there’s this huge spike, so all these people came online.
In 2021, there were 5.36 million. It’s crazy. From 2005, pretty much stable, and there was a million spike from 2005 to 2018. From 2018 to 2021, there were two million in those few years. Hopefully, you get what I’m saying. This is what I mean when I say the landscape has changed, and the landscape has shifted. We are living in this very different world where a lot of people are online and want to be online.
All these people who were living in cities doing their corporate job suddenly ended up working remotely, and then they were like, “I don’t have to live in this shitty city anymore. I can move to this beautiful paradise and work from my computer. I can move to Costa Rica. I can live in this mountain town.” All these different things.
There were a lot of people in business who had the same thoughts where they suddenly realized that they didn’t need to be doing a shitty job that they hated, commuting to work, having a boss that yelled at them, and working with annoying coworkers. They could start a business and not only deal with the inconveniences of working for an employer but also make a shitload more money. That was shown to people in 2020. Businesses did well in 2020 because of all those reasons that we talked about.
We are in 2022 going into 2023, and things are vastly different from 2020. With all these new business applications, with this huge flood of new health coaches, new coaches, all these different types of coaches and programs, and things that people can do online, shifted things. Now, we are in a recession in most places or at least some people think we do. I believe we are but I’m sure that’s open for debate, where people aren’t spending as much as they used to. They are not spending like they were in 2020. People are holding onto their money a little bit tighter.
That is why my friend, Amy, was able to grow her business to a very successful point without much of a niche until this year. This was when she started to notice that, “The things I was doing before are not working anymore.” This is not the only person that I’ve seen this happen to. I’ve seen this happen to a bunch of people who have these general health and wellness businesses starting to see a dip in business and enrollments this year.
When I go on and on about niching, there’s always somebody who’s going to point me to some business owner, some coach who has a general wellness niche. They are going to say, “So and so is super successful. They are busy. They get all these clients and don’t have a niche.” My responses are always, “You are not building your business at the same time that person built their business.”
If you are reading this episode, you are likely relatively new to your business. You are in your 1st, 2nd or 3rd year. Maybe you are further along. It doesn’t matter. This goes to show that even if you are not starting, having a niche is critical because there is so much competition that you don’t want to be competing with every freaking general health coach out there. With every random service in the health and wellness space, you do not want to be doing that.
You want to carve out this beautiful little piece in the market where you find your super fans. You talk about one specific problem. You serve one specific person. It’s going to be so much easier because you are competing with much less people. Messaging, niching, it is important. It has always been important but now it matters so much. You cannot get away with having a general health niche.
This is a cautionary tale because even if you were able to build a business in a general wellness niche up until this point, the way the market and the field have changed out there in the online world is going to push you to be more specific, and if you can’t do that, then your business might not make it. This is not me trying to scare you because this is just a simple shift. Choose a niche. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s a business decision, and it’s going to help you.
This is why I am in the niche military. This is why this is important. I don’t want you to struggle in your business. My goal is for you to have success as soon as possible, and I want you to be able to stand out. I’m going to give you one more example about the power of niching. I don’t talk about it much on this show but I have a course called HTMA Expert, which teaches health practitioners and professionals how to interpret and utilize Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis.
Most people, the great majority of people on this planet, have never heard of Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis, even health practitioners. It is a very obscure, functional test that not a lot of people use. It’s powerful. I have a course that teaches that, and the reason why I created this course is that I had my own health struggles. Finding that test and learning how to utilize it was a big piece of my healing journey, and then when I started utilizing it with clients, I saw amazing results.
I created a course because, at the time, there wasn’t any education on it. There were a few courses out there but almost none of them wanted to teach you the protocols. That was frustrating to me because I was like, “What’s the point of learning how to read something if you don’t know how to confidently create a protocol for your client? What’s the point?”
That’s why I created the course because I literally had to hire all the top experts in the world. I spent tens of thousands of dollars working one-on-one with some of these HTMA experts so that I could learn it, and then I put that into a course. The crazy thing about this course is that I have no marketing strategy. I don’t outwardly market it. You rarely will hear me talk about it on social media. I don’t talk about it on the show. It’s not on my YouTube channel. I don’t have emails that go out for it. I have people on my email list for a few opt-ins I have out there. I do not email my people weekly. I don’t do much at all.
I have a few affiliates. For example, FDN is one of my big affiliates, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. They promote my course, and then I have Vykon Customs, which is a supplement company that makes custom formulas for HTMA. One of my colleagues heads up that relationship with the supplement company, and that’s basically it. I have a couple of affiliates. I have people who’ve joined my email list. I never communicate with them but that course sells like gangbusters. It’s crazy. I make way more money on that course than I do on Health Coach Accelerator.
If I were a smart person who only cared about money, I would focus on HTMA Expert because that’s what makes me all the money. If I put any amount of effort into that, I could probably have a million-dollar business in no time. For me, it’s about passion, and as much as I love HTMA, my passion is business. I don’t care that HCA makes me less money because I’m incredibly passionate about it but the reason why HCA makes less money is that I’m in a much more competitive market. There are a lot of business coaches out there.
Anyways, I’m getting off on a tangent here but I want to tell you that. The reason why that course does so well is that it is hyper-niche. It is incredibly niche. There are very few programs out there in the world like it. I would go far as to say as it’s probably the only course in the world of its kind. I feel like I can confidently say that, and I’m not competing with many people. Sure, there are a few courses out there but not compared to how many business courses are out there.
That is a testament to the more niche you can get, the easier things are. The truth is, if I had to market both programs if I had to market HCA and HTMA Expert, I couldn’t do it, and I would have to choose. The reason why HTMA Expert still is going on and will probably never die is that it sells itself and because it’s hyper niche. I’m not saying that you can niche so far down that you don’t have to put the effort in. I’m obviously in a unique position with HTMA Expert but the more niche you can be, the better.
I have a client who specializes in alopecia for women. She helps women in their 30s with alopecia. I rarely see people talking about that. I see a lot of people talking about weight loss, fatigue, anxiety, and thyroid but alopecia and rheumatoid arthritis are niches that I don’t see often served. If you can go super specific with your niche, it is going to be so much easier because you are not going to have much competition.
That is my cautionary tale. I want you to think about that because I know there is much resistance around niching. A lot of people don’t want to do it. They get tripped up with it but the reason why I am in your face about this is that it’s going to make your life much easier. Thanks so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I will see you next Monday at the same time, the same place where I help you become wealthy AF.
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