How to pick your niche

If you try and be everything to everyone, you'll end up being nothing to no-one.

For most health professionals, this advice is hard to accept. We are naturally geared to try and help as many people as possible and our curious, problem solving nature means we want to have a go at working with as many different types of patients as possible.

The problem is that in business, this approach doesn't work.

From the patients point of view, the only thing that they care about is that the practitioner they are going to see if the best as solving their particular problem. They want a specialist not a generalist. So with this in mind you must ask yourself - what is it that I specialise in?

You must ignore the other markets.

Instead, concentrate on developing a beachhead market. Once you gain a dominant market share, you will have the strength to attack adjacent service offerings.

A key determinant of success for health & wellness entrepreneurs is their ability to select a niche market and to stay disciplined by deselecting other markets.

It is better to avoid selecting the largest or very large markets, even if they seem like the "best" segments. For example, you're better off positioning yourself as the person to come to see when you have a rotator cuff injury, then as a sports physio. When the consumer is doing their research, if they have a rotator cuff injury they are more likely to select the specialist at fixing their particular problem than the generalist who can do it all.

The first service market you focus on will be a significant learning experience for you, so you are better off learning in a smaller market where you can quickly get high exposure among the base of potential customers.

You want to start in a market where you have great ability to dominate in a relatively short time period; a narrow, focused market is the best way to do so.

Choose a single market to pursue that meets the three conditions of a service market:

1. The customers within the market all buy similar services.
2. The customers within the market have a similar sales cycle and expect services to provide value in similar ways.
3. There is "word of mouth" between customers in the market, meaning they can serve as compelling and high-value references for each other in making purchases.

These three criteria for defining a service market mean that you will get efficiencies of scale in the market and you have a good chance to do that magical thing that all entrepreneurs want, "to go viral." And when you do we have the treatment rooms to service your demand.