Ep 165
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Melissa Kellogg Lueck: [00:00:00] Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Leuck, and this is the Doing Business like a woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom, one business at a time.
Good morning. How are you friends? I hope you're having a good one so far. I'm having a great one so far. I'm so glad to get to be with you today, and we're gonna talk about niche drama. Do you have niche drama?
Drama around picking the perfect niche so that all the clients and cash will come rolling in. If that's something that you deal with and think about and obsess over, this one's for you today. I have a [00:01:00] story around my niche journey for you that I wanna share today, so I'm really excited to do that because from the perspective and where I am now after being in business for twenty years I really have a lot to offer in terms of my experiences around choosing a niche and working with a niche and all of that good stuff.
in case we don't know each other, hello. It's so nice to meet you. I'm so glad you're here. my name's Melissa Kellogg Lueck, and I am the CEO and founder of the Avanti Business Academy for Women.
And I absolutely love helping women entrepreneurs to grow their businesses and to really connect and connect confidently with their next best fit clients. I do that as a private one-on-one marketing coach, and I also have a small [00:02:00] group program called the Ninety Day Marketing Accelerator, where I bring together a group of women entrepreneurs and we go deep into your marketing and really help accelerate the effectiveness and simplicity of your marketing to really amplify your impact and your work in the world so that you can create wealth through entrepreneurship, wealth in all of its forms, however you define it through entrepreneurship.
So that's what we're all about, and I'm so glad you're here with me this morning. This is such an interesting topic because it is something that I hear from a lot of women that I talk to picking a niche or
picking a specialty in your business, and a specialty of the type of people that you serve, and who you feel like you're best suited to serve, and who you want to serve, and then targeting your marketing and [00:03:00] communications to speaking to those folks. So that's basically what I mean when I say your niche.
And so my niche journey and I talk about it as a journey, and I think about it as a journey because I really don't see finding a niche or having a niche as something that you're one and done with. I have seen in my own journey as well as many of the women that I work with, that it is an iteration, an iterative process, and it is a changing process.
And that's okay because you are a changing person. You are gonna grow throughout the life of your business. And for me, I am definitely not the same person or the same entrepreneur that I was 20 years ago when I started my business.
I have learned a lot over those 20 years. when I started my business I don't even believe that there was even thoughts about a niche for me, [00:04:00] and maybe that was just I a matter of, I don't know.
I just didn't know. I didn't think about it. My primary goal at the time, I was single and moving to a new area and starting my business, and so my primary goal at the time was to start bringing in clients and cash, right? And so my first niche was nobody... was everybody. No niche. First, I was like, "I'm gonna serve all the clients.
All the clients that need my help, I am in," right? And yes, I guess I did have some-somewhat of a niche because I was a content creator and a marketer, and so because of my skill sets, I was serving businesses that needed those skill sets. So I guess that could technically be a niche. I was specifically focusing on finding clients that needed help with their marketing.
And so that was my initial niche, but it was a wide net, and That's what I always teach, is [00:05:00] like when you're first starting out, have a wide net because your network, the number of people that you're connected to is probably, when you first start your business, is the most limited, right?
'Cause you're just brand new. So when you have a smaller network, smaller list to market to, you wanna be sure, a smaller pool of people to market to, you wanna be sure that you have a wide net of services that you can offer, wide net of people that you can serve or businesses that you can serve. So that was me.
I was, like writing for the local newspaper. I was writing articles for magazines. I was a stringer for Judge Judy. I was going out and going to small claims courts and doing case research and sending, possible cases to the producers for Judge Judy. I was doing all kinds of things like that.
I would do survey market [00:06:00] research, and I was doing research and writing research papers for professors. Like, all kinds of random things. And it was fun. I loved it. I loved the variety of it. But there was definitely no niche other than my expertise. And so that's how I started out and then as time went on, My largest client at the time wasA mortgage bank that was based in Texas, and they were my largest client for many years. so then I thought maybe I will specialize and be offering marketing services to folks in the mortgage and real estate industry.
And so I started doing that. And so then my niche got a little narrower, right? And so then I was still serving them and all of their [00:07:00] mortgage loan officers, and then I was going out and meeting other folks in the real estate and mortgage world and signing on other clients. And it was fine. It was fine, but I just felt like it, it wasn't really a great fit for me.
It was a way to make money, butI didn't feel a lot of passion, a lot of heart for that. So I worked with folks in that industry for a long time, and it was great and very successful. But my heart wasn't really in it, right? And I think it was during that time that I went through a period of feeling disillusioned with marketing and really not enjoying marketing and not enjoying the work that I was doing.
Really seeing a lot of purpose in the work I was doing is really what it was. It wasn't the actual work. It was me not feeling purpose and not really feeling like I was making an impact on the world [00:08:00] like I wanted to. And one day, and I remember this day so vividly, I was in my house. It was on a weekend, and I was cleaning the house.
And as I was cleaning the house, I was listening to a podcast. And it was a podcast I'd listened to many times before, I don't even remember the name of it now, It was an entrepreneur podcast, and they always had interviews. So they had different people on there that they would interview and talk to.
And so this one particular episode they were interviewing it was mainly podcasts of entrepreneurial men hosted by a man, and on this episode, they had a woman. And I was like, "Oh, this is fun," and I really was enjoying the episode. And the interviewer was talking to her about her new, focus in her business, and I remember I had my rubber gloves on, and I was cleaning my shower in my bathroom and listening to the podcast, and she [00:09:00] talked about how this new enterprise or this new thing she was doing, she was going to be helping women entrepreneurs grow their businesses. And that just hit me like a sword through my heart.
It just viscerally hit me so deep, and I burst into tears, and I'm standing in my shower listening to this podcast with my rubber gloves on, scrubbing the walls of my shower and crying. It's just like just sobbing because I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's what I wanna do. That's really what I wanna do. I wanna help women grow their businesses.
I want to impact women's lives and help them to achieve freedom and wealth through entrepreneurship." but I had never thought before that moment that was a possibility, that I could even do that. And it's just hearing her say it [00:10:00] just brought that desire up, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks.
And from that moment on, I knew that the next stage for me was to serve women entrepreneurs and help them grow their businesses. I'm pretty sure that was about 2016, and so that's 10 years ago this year that I decided to shift the focus of my business to serving women entrepreneurs.
And in that moment also, I shifted back into purpose. I saw the purpose of helping women with their marketing would help them achieve greater freedom and wealth through entrepreneurship. And in that moment, just solved for that disillusionment. I was like, "All right. This is it." And it's so funny how that since then I have focused all of my efforts, all of my business on serving [00:11:00] women entrepreneurs.
Now, let me be clear, I didn't throw away all of my other clients. I was still serving clients in the mortgage and real estate industry. But I knew I had to continue that because I wasn't gonna just that's not a very wise thing to do, right? To just throw away everything that's going well and into something new.
But so I slowly made that shift but it really helped me feel purpose in everything I was doing because I knew the ultimate goal was to be serving women entrepreneurs and helping them with their marketing full-time. And so over the coming years following that moment that's what I did. I made that shift and you know, technically changed niches.
Even though I was serving some women in the mortgage and real estate industries, [00:12:00] I changed my niche and focused all of my time and attention on growing my business around serving women entrepreneurs. And so here we are, 10 years later, that's still what I'm focused on. Now, I have focused in even a little more and I have found through serving my clients and through noticing what I most enjoy and who I most enjoy working with, and what I'm best at, right?
I'm best at serving women that are building service-based businesses in trust-driven industries, right? So industries where trust is paramount to clients wanting to work with you. So like coaches and consultants and advisors and assistants and attorneys and folks that are in home services [00:13:00] or virtual assistants or, all those sorts of helping and trust-driven industries.
the way I like to think about niche choosing a niche is that it really is much more of an organic process than just deciding, "This is my niche." I talk to a lot of women that- Experience a lot of perfectionism around choosing their niche, that they, feel held back, like they can't go forward, like they can't get out there and do things and say things until they know exactly the very specific niche that they are serving.
And what I have seen that to be more of a distraction, that in the early years of your business, just get out and help as many people with what you're best at, and serve them and help them get great [00:14:00] results. And over time, you will begin to notice patterns and trends, things that you like more or less, clients that you like serving more or less.
And once you notice those things, then you can focus your energy and your service in those areas, in those directions. But you don't have to have everything figured out at the beginning. And, when I am sharing these lessons and sharing these stories, I am thinking about the woman that I was early on when I started my business, and what would I love to go back and tell her and what would I encourage her to do now, as I'm 20 years into growing this business, right?
And one of the things that I would definitely tell her is, definitely go out, serve as many people as possible. Don't worry [00:15:00] about the niche and having it all perfect, that it will reveal itself to you organically over time, and that is okay. It can be an experimental, iterative process, and I think that's more fun.
Some people might not agree with me, but I think that's more fun, when we just allow our niche to grow and reveal itself to us naturally. So what I would rather have you spending your time on, rather than obsessing over a niche and having the perfect one, is thinking about the result that you want to offer.
Seth Godin I was part of his marketing seminar years ago, and he opened the seminar by saying "What is the change you seek to make in the world?" And [00:16:00] that your work, your niche, your offers, your business is built around that. And so just connecting to the result that you want to create in the world.
for me, I knew that I wanted to help women to create freedom and wealth in all of its forms through entrepreneurship. And obviously because of my expertise in marketing and my decades of experience in marketing, I have an MBA in marketing, all of that, my specialty is marketing.
And that was the result that I knew I could help women create through marketing. And so I think about the niche. You don't build a niche around a group of people. You build your niche around you, around your desires, your strengths, your experience, your education. [00:17:00] And for me, that seems to be much more aligned, easier way to form a niche.
My challenge to you today as we wrap this up is to really drop the perfectionism around having the perfect niche, because it's not the perfect niche that's going to bring all the clients and the cash into your business. It's you knowing exactly who you are, what your strengths are, who you want to serve, and how you want to serve them, and the result that you want to offer in the world, and the change you want to make in the world, and going and helping all the people that want that.
For me, that's the niche, right? And I just challenge you to consider your niche as an experiment. It is an iterative process throughout the journey, throughout your entrepreneurial journey, and it's going to change throughout your entrepreneurial journey, and that's okay.
And [00:18:00] you don't have to find one specific thing and stick with it forever, or maybe you do. Maybe you know exactly what that is, and you are just ready to go, and that's gonna be the niche that sticks with you forever. But either way, it's okay. There's not one way to excuse me, to pick a niche.
There's not one perfect niche for you. It's an iterative process. It's a journey. And so I want to just encourage you to Have fun with that, right? And to have fun discovering the through line. So for me now, as I look back 20 years, the through line that has and even longer than 20 years, it's like what I have been most interested in throughout my career and my journey my life is really empowering women and helping women to be the fullest [00:19:00] expression of themselves.
And in my business, it's helping them through entrepreneurship, right? And so if discovering that through line and really seeing and knowing who you are and who you are best suited to serve, if that's something that's challenging for you, I would love to help you with that. As a coach, that's what I do with my clients, and I would love to help you with that as well.
I I do have some private one-on-one slots open,I will spend 60 minutes with you and really dive deep with you into your marketing, what's working, what's not where you are now, where you wanna be, and I will help you develop the roadmap, all the steps to get there throughout the course of that call.
And whether we decide to work together or not is up to you. But you always walk away having that roadmap in hand and knowing exactly all the steps that [00:20:00] you need to take to get there. And so I wanna make sure that you know that offer is open to you. there's a link on my website, melissamkellogg.com, to schedule that call.
There's a Book a Call link right there on the homepage that you can go and click on and take advantage of that. that's what I have for you today, my friends. I hope that this has been helpful for you and really will inspire you to let go of any drama or perfectionism that you have around finding a niche.
And know that it's just part of the journey, and it will iteratively grow and change just as you do, and it's all a beautiful process. It's been so great to be with you for a little bit this morning, and I will talk to you again real soon.
I'll see you soon. Bye.
Hey, if you like this podcast, I wanna invite you to become part of my community Each Friday, I'm gonna deliver to your [00:21:00] inbox my weekly celebration, as well as my thoughts on the latest and business and marketing. I wanna keep you in the know about my upcoming events.
Free trainings, book clubs, all the fun things, even some free gifts. And of course, I'm gonna let you know about these new podcast episodes. I'll see you there.
