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Maximizing the Design and Shape of Your Business

By Anton Pearce

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 04Sep2009 Word count: 564 Viewed: 402 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Shaping your Business

As you go through the process of choosing a niche for your business, you also need to start thinking about what your business will look like. There are many different ways you can go about this, but you really need to start with your own limitations and work from there.

For example, if you're going to be consulting or coaching part time, you need to identify, realistically, how many hours per week you can invest in your business. Keep in mind that you're not just talking about the number of hours you actually spend coaching, but how much time you can invest in things like sales, marketing and other tasks.

Next, you should think about how you want to see your clients. Do you want to interact with clients in person, on the phone, or via some other medium? Working with clients individually, in person, allows you to charge a premium rate. On the other hand, it also requires the most of your time and your energy of all the options.

You should try, at this stage, to identify opportunities for group consulting, as well. This could take the form of in-person seminars, conference calls or even webinars. Group consulting lets you offer some personalized attention to your clients while maximizing your profits.

A product-sales model is another option for your business. Rather than strictly consulting, either one on one or as a group consulting, you might choose to develop and sell products in your niche. Many consultants and coaches find that an integrated approach, using individual consulting, group consulting and product sales seems to maximize profit potential. This isn't the case for every niche, however, and you should spend some time thinking about how it will work best for you.

Identifying your Clients

Finally, you need to identify your clients. Not every person, of every age, everywhere in the world is a good target for your services and products. You need to identify the groups of people who will be best served by doing business with you.

In the process of narrowing your niche, you have already necessarily narrowed down your potential client base. Using our example, your target market starts with all people who have lower back pain. You can, from here, narrow that client base even further. The purpose of narrowing your client base is so that you can implement more directed marketing techniques. If you want to work primarily with older people, you're going to use different techniques than if you want to work with younger people, for example. While it isn't always necessary to narrow your client base, it is one option you have if you find your niche isn't quite narrow enough.

Once you've identified your target market, you can start thinking about specific marketing techniques. Armed with the other planning you've done, you can then keep that target market in mind when you design products or create group consulting opportunities, as well.

A successful business requires you to invest some time thinking about these things, and planning accordingly. Doing these things brings your business into focus, giving you some guidelines and overriding principles from which to operate your business. While you need to be flexible and will probably need to make adjustments as time goes on, creating this framework will dramatically increase the likelihood of success.

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