How should a business coach choose a niche?
By business type and stage together, since a pre-revenue founder and a fifteen-person company have almost nothing in common as buyers. The clearest niches usually emerge from the coach's own operating background and from the clients they have already served well.
By business type and stage together, because stage is the variable most coaches ignore and it changes everything.
A pre-revenue founder, a five-person company hitting the owner's time ceiling, and a fifteen-person business needing management layers have almost nothing in common as buyers. Different problems, different budgets, different urgency, different language.
How to find yours:
- Look at your own operating background. The industry and the size you actually ran is where your credibility is highest and your knowledge is genuinely differentiated.
- Look at the clients you have served best. Not the largest, the ones where the work landed and you enjoyed it.
- Define by the constraint, not the industry. "Trades businesses between one and five million who have hit a ceiling on the owner's time" names a recognizable state.
Specificity raises the average fee, because a specialist is not compared directly with generalists. Nobody shops a specialist against three others.
Naming a niche does not turn other work away. It changes who arrives first and what they expect to pay.
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