Jake Carter (00:00):

Welcome to Health School where we help health professionals create life-changing results for their clients and patients through functional medicine and nutrition, whilst equally helping them scale their business online and attract high value clients. I'm Jake Carter, your host and the founder of The Institute of Health. Make sure you sit back, grab your pen because we're going to dive in deep.

(00:21)
So when it comes to niche, you've probably heard everyone say this in the industry time and time again, and you may have even attempted this yourself. First of all, a niche is really important because it helps you identify who you are actually going to serve and how you help them. The reality with this is you need to have one person, one problem, and one promise, and we're going to be unpacking exactly how to get there in just a second. The reason why you need a niche is that if you try to speak to everyone, you speak to, no one. A good example of this is the bystander effect. If someone's laying down on the floor having a seizure and someone shouts, Hey, I need somebody to phone an ambulance, the reality is most often people lean back into the crowd waiting just for that one person to make that phone call versus turning around and saying, I need you to phone an ambulance.

(01:06)
I need you to support their head. That is going to really create that direct action because you're speaking specifically to them. They don't feel like they can lean back into the crowd and blur into the motion of everybody else. And this applies with your business. You can't try speaking to everybody because when you speak to everybody, you speak to no one, you can't hunt what you can't see. So the reality is with this niche, it helps you specialize. It helps you gain more market confidence, it helps you get more feedback. It helps you refine your program, refine your skills, it helps you really collect a hub of social proof. And then from then as you niche down and down and down and down, when you break through something, what we call the success line, then you can eventually open up your target audiences. But not until you've broke through that success line, that is an open loop for another podcast.

(01:53)
Today we're going to be going into exactly how to set up your niche. The first thing, what you want to do is recognize that you need to have one person and one problem, and the niche really sits in the middle of those two intersections. It is absolutely critical to do that. Now with the next step, we need to understand equally, there's two circles. Again, you can either have a big who and a small what or a small who and a big what. Now when I'm speaking about this, when we look at the who, it could be men, women, or it could be executives if you want to make that big, who even smaller or when we talk about the what it could be, let's say a big what could be gut health and then a smaller what could be autoimmunity. So as you can see, we don't want to have two big who's and a big what because in that case it just blurs the potency of your message.

(02:42)
And equally, we don't want have a small who and a small what because then it just limits the tamp, the total addressable market, what you can effectively penetrate. So what we now need to do is make sure that your niche is truly connected to you, and we call this alignment based coaching, the BC of coaching. Unfortunately, so many people just look at successful coaches and think I'm going to copy and emulate them. But the reality is you've probably been on your own hero's journey to get to where you are here today. So we need you to connect into your pains and turn them into your passions and your past into profit. And we do that by looking at your inner authority, your inner niche, and this way you can actually have the authenticity in your message and in your market and equally with your coaching because even if you don't have any results yet, you've probably walked through the footpaths of which your target audience is trying to walk through themselves.

(03:34)
So we have four questions here which help you understand which market to lean into, and equally we have four questions which are possibly creating some level of friction and causing you to lean out. The first question, what could you teach yourself five to 20 years ago that could have truly transformed your health and your life? What is the moral behind that? Quite often we want to work with gut health. If we've experienced poor gut health in the past, if we've had challenges with our skin, we want to be a skin practitioner. So if we think about five to 20 years ago along in your health seeking journey, what was the big hurdle that you had to overcome? What was that lesson? What was that realization? What was the moral? And if we can start to unpack that, we can really connect into that inner niche and help you develop that authentic authority.

(04:19)
Question number two, what did this enable you to achieve that you couldn't have before? So what did that life changing lesson enable differently? How was your life different after that particular lesson? We really have to tap into this because this is the result which often your audience wants, and we can sometimes forget the emotional relativity with the actual goal itself. Which leads me into step number three, impact. What was the biggest impact here, not just to yourself, but also to peripheral environment. How did it affect your relationships? How did it affect your home life? How did it affect your work? When you can understand this, it can really help you understand the true impact of helping your niche. Next up, question number four, what mistakes were you making? What stopped you from achieving this sooner? This is really important for you to recognize because with your niche, it's important to throw stones at the enemy for you to stand at the forefront of the army of the tribe and lead the way to newfound better life.

(05:15)
Now, they are the questions which help you identify what to lean into, but equally, there's often a subconscious level of resistance, something which stops you from leaning into much and actually causes you to lean out. We call this the three R's, and then we also have the healing question at the end. So the first one is resistance. Do you have any resistance to how that niche is currently being supported in the industry? Chances are it may be being misled, it may be being particularly touted that they have to do a certain thing which might not be in alignment with you, might not even worked with you. The second R here, which causes people to lean out is resentment. Do you have any resentment to your previous failed attempts or maybe past mentors or coaches, which couldn't enable you to get the results you truly desired?

(06:02)
Sometimes that resentment creates this energetic friction and causes you to lean out of that niche a little bit. Now, the third R, which causes people to lean out is regret. Do you regret spending so much time, energy, or maybe even money trying to get the results which you initially struggled for? And then the final question here, which is really important to recognize is the healing question is the possibility that healing still has to be done in the relation to this particular problem yourself. So that can help you understand the inner niche that you already have. And when you can unpack those questions, it can really help you develop that authentic authority to become an alignment based coach. Now, what I would next recommend you to do is draw out a table. I want you to pick three different niches. So row one, row two, row three, and then equally I want you to have four columns.

(06:52)
Column one is going to be love. Column two is going to be help. Column three is going to be pay, and then column four is going to be the percentage. Okay, so let's just say column one is going to be gut health executives. We have a small who and a big what in the love column. The first column you're going to market either first, second, or third. First is going to be first place. It is the niche, what you love the very most out of the three, what you're doing this audit with. And then second would be obviously second and third would be third. Then for the second column here, we want to look into help. We want to look at your skills in helping CEOs with gut health challenges. Again, we're going to rank this first, second, or third. Then we're going to look into how much can they pay.

(07:36)
Can CEOs with gut health challenges pay a lot? I would think so. So again, we're going to rank this first, second, or third. And then finally we're going to look into the percentage. What percentage of your current audience or past clients or current clients represents this niche? It's really important to recognize that because sometimes people want to move into a niche where they actually don't have much of a footprint in that network. So we need to sometimes bridge that gap by looking at some stepping stones in order to get there. So you go through this with niche one, niche two, niche three, and we tally up the score and the score with the lowest points is obviously going to be the winner. So when we break down these columns, we can look into column one and column two, and this can help you understand the likelihood for you to maintain momentum if you love helping them and you have the skills to do so, it's going to really reduce that likelihood of being overwhelmed.

(08:28)
And then this third column and the fourth column, which is how much can they pay and the network affect what you have equally indicates the probability of success. And this is really important because we need to have the probability of success equally matching your commitment to that because when you match all those four columns together, we can have a strong indication of how effective this niche is going to be for you and your business. So the next thing, what you want to look at with your niche is their age. For any change to occur, it actually is an exchange within their body all their life. They have to release old habits or things, what they're possibly doing, which are no longer serving them. And any exchange requires a level of energy. So this is why we see younger individuals adopting change more readily than older age individuals, which are more accustomed to the old ways.

(09:17)
The reason for this is because the older age individuals tend to be more conservative with their energy due to being in a lesser of abundant state. And the younger age individuals tend to have far more energy, so change is much easier for them to adopt. So we have to look at the change what you are installing with your niche and recognize that if they're younger, it's going to be easier for them to adopt the concept of a big change in their life. Whereas if they're older, we have to be more conservative with how the change is going to occur. Equally with this, the older they are, the chances are of them having possibly more money and more affordability because of the success in their business, or at least the steadiness and consistency in their business. It's not always the case, but usually the case, whereas the younger they are, the less likely they are to have that affordability and the opportunity to invest into their health.

(10:06)
And then the other aspect here with age is we need to take into account their interests, their psychographic values based off their demographic tendencies. So the younger age individuals, let's say early twenties, may be more interested in their physique and as they get a little bit older, maybe more confidence when they reach thirties, it may be more around business and family, and then when they reach mid forties, maybe fifties, it could be leaning more into that whole concept of andropause, gastropare and menopause. So this can really help you articulate the frustrations, their values, and what they're possibly thinking about. Now, last but not least, we need to piece all of this together and we do that with your offer because if you don't have a crystal clear offer, then your audience isn't going to have a clue as to what you are selling and how you can help them.

(10:52)
There is a simple formula that we recommend called a rots framework that stands for ROTS results objection, time, and specifically. That way you can make sure you include the specific things that they're thinking about when you are conveying the niche and the thing that you help them overcome. Now, a way to install the objection or at least pre handle the objection should I say, is by having without an insert objection or even if an insert objection. When you have this in your offer, it's really going to help them build more trust and lean into what you're providing much sooner. Equally with this, we need to have a timeframe. They need to have a container of their expectations of their results. Is it 90 days they're going to be expecting this? Is it four weeks? Is it six months? We need to understand what it is for them to be able to conceptualize all the things that we are particularly talking about.

(11:45)
Now, with that, we might actually have two offers. We could have a short-term offer and a long-term offer. The short-term offer could be something what they can just lean into and almost touch to create that level of belief. And then the long-term offer is something which keeps them in your program for longer and actually extends that lifetime customer value. So some simple frameworks for you to insert all of this in which loosely follow the ROTS framework. You may say something like, I am dedicated to helping niche who are frustrated with frustration and ultimately aren't dream enough. Now, the last thing you want to do is you want to create multiple offers, and again, split test them. Similar to how we actually tested what niche was going to be best for you, we now need to test your offers. So we need to create possibly three different offers, and we want to go to your past clients because they previously gave you money, and equally with you crystallizing and distilling down what you actually do.

(12:39)
There's an opportunity for you to reactivate them. Then you want to look into your results and what's the level of results you're being able to achieve recently? Does that align with that? We also want to ask your current clients and get them to poll on what they would like to achieve most out the three offers. And then last but not least, we also have your audience as well. So this can really relate it into your skillset, the people which have paid you money and the network opportunities that you have. You've made it to the end, and that means not only are you committed to yourself, your business, but also your clients, and we'd love to support you. So whether that means attracting high value clients, scaling your business online, or simply creating lifechanging results, head over to my Instagram, Mr. Jake Carter, and send the word ready.