Despite being a professional graphic designer for over 16 years, when I first made that serious step towards self-employment, I knew from the generic presence online, locally, of course, I had to show up differently.
But honestly, at the time, I didn't know how I was going to accomplish it. A year later an experiment led me to sell a very specific product and idea to a very specific type of person, which happened to be so different for my neck of the woods and financially rewarding that I decided to double down on it. Doing so gave me the funds I needed to fix my home after a very bad earthquake wrecked it in 2018.
So when I hear local service providers encouraging local small service business owners to “free their minds from thinking they need to pick a niche”, I feel sorry for those who are unable to determine who that kind of advice is for.
If you really want to be like Gary Vee, consider how he started.
"That experience was vital to my success today!”
110 thousand people all heard Gary Vee admit to growing his family business from $3 million to $65 million a year through innovative marketing techniques, and crediting that experience as “vital to his success today”. Today, his social media agency VaynerMedia makes $150 million dollars a year providing marketing strategy services to many Fortune 500 companies: We're modern-day Mad Men, he says. Today, he’s investing in crypto and NFTs successfully, and dabbling in a bunch of other entrepreneurial interests. But he’s only able to achieve fulfillment in other areas of his multifaceted life because he understood first, what he’s good at.
So, even if we’re going with the theory that “it's not what you do but how you package up all the different things you do into a cohesive ecosystem”, you'll still end up with the VaynerMedia brand paving the way for Gary Vee the serial entrepreneur brand.
That said, when you barely have two cents to rub together and all you’ve got is a skill set, dabbling in many different things for the sake of being a “multidimensional person” won’t birth ‘a Gary Vee brand' ( i.e a machine that generates time and money for you to do other things) if that’s your goal. A point emphasized by the Belarus immigrant.
When do you need a business brand vs a personal brand?
I believe I’m a testament to the quote “Everything works, not everything works for you.” In my experience deciding on what type of brand I wanted to start with depended on the personality of the type of clients, I was targeting.
I knew brands like Laughlin, Beacon. and Regus weren’t the type of clients who trusted a personal brand so I didn’t build one. On the other hand, you might be a relationship therapist, private practice being characteristic of that industry, clients will more readily trust a personal brand than a business brand. But then there are industries like the law industry that you could go either way. So it depends. But the type of brand you build doesn’t exempt you from niching and having one certainly doesn’t mean your services can not evolve either.
The founders looking to (what we as trinis call) “breaks”, from picking a niche are just trying to escape boredom: they don’t want to do the same thing over and over because they've passed a certain stage. But if you’re now trying to get your name out there so you can earn an income, conversations around ‘you being your niche’ wouldn’t help you achieve that Infact it won’t be a real consideration for you until you’re much further along with a business that’s established.
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