Niche MAP

Speaker 1:

So we'll move on to step number two, which is selecting a niche. And let's do a quick summary of the niche selection process. So the problem, the high value problem for a lot of people before they select a niche is they don't have enough appointments with qualified prospects. So the high value result you're going to get from this is that high-end clients are going to come to you because they see you as an expert in their type of project. The low end of the market won't come to the specialist. The low end of the market will buy on price, but the high end of the market will gravitate towards those who are seen as the experts, or even celebrities in their particular niche. Now you do not have to give away your other areas of work. By picking a niche and coming up with positioning yourself as a specialist within that niche doesn't mean you have to stop doing other types of work. It's just for that niche, they see you as the specialist, even if you aren't a specialist, because you got to start somewhere.

Speaker 1:

So one way to get into a niche and be seen as a specialist is by being a thought leader on that niche. You can write about it, you can talk about it. You can interview people, you can review different examples of that type of work. And you can put all this content out to that market, and the assumption will be that you are an expert in that type of market. And it will be kind of true because you are, but you may not have had any projects, but you have studied that market, you have reviewed it, you have documented it, you've interviewed interesting people. How many steps? It only takes three steps to define your niche. And in this case, we are going to use a secret sauce. So we're going to use the niche selector and the new niche category creator. So you're going to go from a broad access, where you may look like you're a Jack of all trades or a generalist, and maybe not being seen as special or an expert in any particular type of project and not sought after by the high end of the market, to the glorious position of being seen as the go-to architect for your favorite type of project, known and valued by those at the top end of the market who paid the high fees, and able to focus and become an actual expert in a particular niche area if you want to.

Speaker 1:

So to sum it up using the million dollar message, which you're going to learn about a bit later, but I think by showing you and taking you through it each time, you'll really get the hang of it faster. This module turns underpaid designers who are frustrated with not being seen as special and takes you from having a broad focus where you're not known for anything particularly special, to sought after by the top end of a particular market. And it'll take you three steps using the niche selector method, without having to stop doing other of work, if you still like doing other type of work, or even if you're not a specialist yet. All right. So how do we do it? Step number one, you choose the potential niches you want to evaluate.

Speaker 1:

So What type of niches are there? Well, actually there's quite a lot. So I won't go through them all, but maybe you're a specific style specialist, modern traditional, simple house design, luxury, villa specialists, tiny houses, or maybe you're a specific method specialist. That could be a niche; passive house, feng shui, or using your own particular type of design methodology. Or you could be a purpose-driven design specialist; return on design, which is great for investors, allergy-free homes, green homes, sustainable homes, biophilic, wellness, socially conscious. Any of those could be good niches. By the way, this isn't an exhaustive list. You might have other ways of doing it. These are really just suggestions of ways that you can consider looking at it. Maybe it's a specific category; industrial housing, medical centers, commercial offices.

Speaker 1:

Maybe it's who you design for. Now, if you go, "I'm a residential architect, or an industrial architect," it is still kind of broad, but it is a way to do it. Or maybe you define yourself by the materials that you use. Maybe you're a concrete specialist. We've got a guy in Oakland who specializes in concrete, and we had another client who specialized in containers. Pretty interesting. Actually, another one specialized in high-performance yachts. Easy to niche yourself there. Or maybe something else. Maybe you specialize in difficult projects or projects over $3 million, or you were trained by someone famous, or you specialize in bringing projects in on time and on budget. Maybe that's a niche. So you can pick any one of those, and you would pick what you want, you would slot it in.

Speaker 1:

It doesn't really matter what goes in there, but what you're going to do is analyze each of these, let's say five different types of niches that you could choose and you'll rate them on this criteria. So the urgency, how urgent is the project? How expensive is the problem, or how much do they have to gain? Do you have any particular competitive advantage? Is this niche a good fit for your business? Does this niche or this category have a lack of specialist options? It's often a good one. Ideally, you want to be the only option in that particular category. So when they see that you're a specialist for their category, you're the only person saying you're the specialist for that category. That would be good.

Speaker 1:

Obviously they've got to have money, or at least access to money. They've got to be good to deal with. They've got to kind of resonate some different categories of businesses you might relate to. Maybe you relate to commercial, but you find residential frustrating, or vice versa. And economically reachable means can you get your message, your offers, and your content in front of that market? There are some markets which are easy. Maybe they have industry publications, or maybe you know who they are, you already have a database of them. And others are incredibly hard to really know where they are or who they are. So how easy it is, not just economically, but how easy is it to reach this particular niche? So for example, we've got villas at the top here. In New Zealand, they have these older houses built around the 1900s and they were a particular style. And the government built a lot of them.

Speaker 1:

So are they easy to find? Yes, because you can drive down a street and you can see which houses are villas. So you could go straight to their letter boxes. Medical clinics, probably not too hard to find, not too hard to find. You know where they are, you could form a list or get a student to form a list. Return on design, this would be people who are looking ... sort of investors, maybe. Maybe there's investors lists that you can find or property investors associations, depending on the type of investors you're looking for. Community centers would be local councils, local government, wellness centers. So in this case, all of these are probably find-able. There are other categories which would be a lot harder to find. Now what you would do is you would go through each of these eight things, maybe plot the numbers in here, or put them on this chart here if you like it visual. These numbers here are the same as these ones here.

Speaker 1:

So that's the niche selector worksheet. It's a nice, simple worksheet to go from. It's just a case of working out what niches you want to analyze. Now, if you find you're in residential and you say, "I'm just in residential," or, "I'm just in commercial," and you're too broad and you don't like any of the categories on the other page, the other option ... this is a bit more of an advanced option, I suppose, but it's where you create a Venn diagram and you take a number of categories and you combine them together. You combine them together, and what you do is you form a new category. So you form a new category. You might create here's the ... it's almost like creating a new religion.

Speaker 1:

I was sitting beside a guy on a plane once and he was a Lutheran minister, and he was telling me how the Lutheran church broke away from the Catholic church back in 16 something something, because of some reason, they weren't happy with the Catholic church at the time. And so they decided to create their own church. And it's a bit like this; you're doing a splinter. You're splintering off your specific type of design to create your own design method. So you might take a number of different elements and yours is the one that fits in the middle. Now, a couple of quick examples, these are reasonably simple ones, but Lisa took aging in place and discreet design. And this is for aging in place or aged care facilities. And the big problem, the expensive problem they had was they kind of looked like a hospital. So she said, look, there's a lot of great design things you can do and fittings and design in a way that's not patently obvious that it's an old folk's home. And she called that invisible design.

Speaker 1:

Julia, once again, another one for aged care facility. She'd take a number of different elements, and I know these were some of them. There might've been more than this, but she took the history, the environment, and a few other things. I've got history there twice, and created a thing called story design. And she had great success by talking about story design to the owners of these facilities as a way to differentiate themselves from anyone else, rather than just get any old design and come in and I'll do the standard thing. We'll go in and we'll create a story design, which will tell a story about the residents, the history of the area, the environment, and we'll build all those aspects into a story and make it a place, make it a story the people want to live in. Pretty clever.

Speaker 1:

And then Michelle, one of the earliest examples where we combined different categories together, and she worked with banks and did this thing called strategic branded experience. Or she was sort of informally doing it, but what we did was create this Venn diagram and she was able to list, I think, five or six different categories that she used. And those five or six things, when they came together, it created a strategic branded experience and delivered a unique outcome for banks. It was a way for banks to incorporate their brand into their physical spaces, and great for retention of staff and great for increasing sales.

Speaker 1:

But you need to know exactly what you are, what the elements are, and what the rules are for designing this. Remember, you're creating your own brand. Here's one. This is kind of a worksheet I had with Brad not too long ago. He combined luxury home design with land optimization and lifestyle optimization. And when those three things come together, using his three methods, he called it S6, or the Super6, and it was built on a platform of collaboration, communication, and creativity. They were the three underpinning things that fitted within all those three categories. And when you have C3 and L3 ... I can't remember what L3 was, but it was something else ... then you had Super6 design.

Speaker 1:

So you can keep it simple by going back to just the list up here and pick one of those, or you can combine things together like this and create your own design religion. And of course, if you create your own design religion, if you create a new category of design and call it story designer, invisible design ... these ones are taken, by the way, but you're the only one doing it. And the benefit of being the only one doing it is you become a specialist, you become unique, and you become number one, admittedly, in a category of one, because you're the only one doing it, but you still become number one.

Speaker 1:

And if you can sell the concept of story design being something special and better than any other type of design, if you can sell that concept, or if you can sell invisible design as being the way to go, or you can sell strategic branded experience, then you're going to be the only one that I can turn to. So you only have to sell the new category that's been created, you have to sell the big idea that this is the way to do design and you're the only one they can turn to. So to start with, let's say keep it simple, but you get the idea of how this gets done. So this is a couple of strategies and even advanced strategies on how to think about niching. So take your worksheets when you get around to it and I'll look forward to seeing what you come up with.