One of the biggest challenges micro-business owners face is understanding their “niche.” One reason they struggle with this so much is that they’re focused on the wrong thing. Let’s take a look.

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Welcome to the distilled brand happy hour. My name is Ryan Rhoten. I’m the owner of the Distilled Brand and I’m on a mission to help micro business owners clearly articulate who they are and what they do. Wondering who exactly is a micro-business owner?

At The Distilled Brand, we define micro business owners as anybody who’s making less than 200,000 a year and has been in business for one to five years. You may call yourself a coach, consultant, freelancer, or solopreneur, but whatever your title, we know that with just a few tweaks to your messaging, your process, or your offer, you can really start to gain traction in your business and start to grow.

And so, this micro happy hour is dedicated to micro business owners. Each week we’ll do one micro-lessons for micro business owners. And with that, Let’s belly up to the bar and dive into today’s first micro lesson.

The two parts of a niche

We always start our process out with all of our clients by helping them identify who their audience is, in other words, what’s their niche is. The reason we start there is that we know a lot of mico business owners struggle with this. And if you don’t have your niche or your audience, well-defined, it’s really hard to come up with the messaging that’s going to connect.

Part one – The WHO

When most people think about a niche, they always start with who and who is part one of selecting or understanding your niche.

So when people think of a niche, they think:

• Audience
• Target market.
• Avatar.
• Persona

Whatever term you’re used to hearing, you’ve probably seen a lot of ways to slice and dice your niche. This is where most micro-business owners get stuck. They fixate too much on who they serve and it paralyzes them in the rest of their business. You’ll know you’re in this situation if your message feels all over the place or muddled.

Part two – The WHAT

You can’t have a niche without knowing who you serve but you must also know your WHAT – what is the problem that you solve. It’s the thing you do best, it’s how you help and serve your customers. It’s also how you solve the problem.

It’s your process, your methodology, your system. So it’s the problem you solve and how you solve it.
These two things together will help you understand the niche that you serve and how you help them. This is how you can start to clearly articulate who you are.

You need to know both to understand your niche

What most micro-business owners do is draw these two circles the exact same size. When you do that, you’re basically saying I help everyone with everything. Now even if you know, in your heart of hearts, that your services can absolutely help anyone who comes along, that messaging is only going to continue to muddle your message. You’re not going to be able to gain traction as quickly as you want if you only focus on who you serve and not what you do.

Here’s another thing about defining a niche –

You can only become known for the problems you solve and how you solve them.You cannot become known for who you serve.

So if you’re stuck and your message feels messy or muddled, step back and focus on the problem you solve and how you solve it. Once you have that figured out, it becomes much easier to determine who has those problems.

So that’s today’s micro lesson for The Distilled Brand Happy Hour. If you have questions in your micro business about avatars, messaging, website, and all those types of things, schedule a call, and let’s talk – SCHEDULE CALL.

Because finding the right message should be easy, not your life’s work.