When YOU are your business

I was reading a couple of interesting books over the holidays about becoming a person of influence & about marketing in the fast moving world of technology. All very interesting but not a huge amount of new stuff apart from one thing when you look at the two books together. Becoming an expert in your micro-niche and growing the micro-niches to grow your business!

Essentially this is what Richard Branson does with looking at a product/service where he believes he can deliver a better value for money proposition than is currently available. He looks to own a micro-niche.
When an entrepreneur looks to start a business, the do what they are good at or in the field of where they have experience, which is a great place to start. Unfortunately this creates a challenge in itself. Whereas Richard Branson has the resources to employ/partners with experts and is able to gain credibility under the Virgin brand, many of us don't. It is just down to us!

So many knowledge based businesses are completely dependent upon the expert (s) - often the founder member (s). They are the people who have dared to explore and try new things within their sector; often achieving great results, but the business still depends on them as they're the one with the experience, knowledge and thought process behind the delivery. Sound familiar?

The downside of this is that you are naturally stuck. Stuck in the limits of your own capacity and time constraints and with the best thoughts of delegation, it is really down to you.

If this is the case for you, then you need to look at this issue slightly differently. You are not going to dominate a whole sector - there is afterall only one of you. But you can dominate a micro-niche.

Essentially YOU are the brand and YOU need to build credibility within a small target group of companies which is big enough to support your growth ambitions, but will allow you to generate a big name for yourself in that smaller pond (the niche).

You may have already started this and have become well known in your business sector, but almost certainly you’ll have not taken the second step which is to develop systems to systemise that knowledge dispersion so it is not entirely dependent upon you in thefuture. This can be through online webinars, e-learning programmes, publishing a book, running seminars, online communities etc. With e-commerce, the opportunities are now boundless.

But where does the growth come from? Well, once you have saturated your micro-niche, you can start developing related micro-niches delivering through either partnerships or building on the expertise of your own team to deliver.

Inspired? Now you can get planning as I've been doing all last week!