The niche is like the magic bullet in business. If you are looking for how to make money from home, this will be number 1 on the list—find a niche. Every marketing and business book tells you to just find your niche and success will follow. While in some instances, I’m sure this is true, it is not a magic bullet when you are looking for how to make money from home.
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In the previous post, Finding You Niche is Central to a Good Business Plan, or is it? We defined what a niche is, and why it is not necessary to start a business. The elusive niche is not a bad idea or a wrong one. But when we hyper-focus on one idea to the exclusion of all others it is a problem.
You Can Make Money from Home without a Niche
For all of you master generalists out there, I hope you feel hopeful about starting a business. If you’ve been looking in every direction wondering what is the one and only thing that you should be doing. You can break free from this mindset and look at all the possibilities before you.
1. Why you can start a business without a niche
There are so many small businesses and solopreneurs looking for help. Put yourself in the shoes of these business owners. You are looking to hire someone who can really take tasks off your plate, so you can grow your business. But you only have the means to hire one person. There are two candidates that applied for the job. One specializes in a specific field, which is great for them, but you need someone who can really help in many areas of your business. The other applicant has a wide variety of knowledge and a track record of learning new skills quickly and efficiently. As a small business owner, who would you hire?
There are so many businesses and individuals that need virtual assistants who are master generalists. That’s why I make the statement that anyone can start a virtual assistant business in any field. This is how you can make money from home without a niche.
2. What does it look like
Starting a business without a niche, looks like any other business. Except you have a longer list of services that you offer. And you focus more on WHY you are doing this instead of what you are doing. If you need help figuring out your why, I highly recommend Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why.
Ask, why do you want your business to exist? Knowing your why gives you the freedom to start a business that is not based on a passion for a product or service. This means you can break beyond all the mom gurus telling you that in order to have the life you love you need to start a business based on your passion. You can go beyond this idea that passion needs to trump everything. And this opens so many more opportunities, ideas, and freedom.
Your business doesn’t need to be based on a passion for a product or service. It is really easy to get caught up with the idea that you can only start a business if you are passionate about it. Now, I think you should like what you do. If you are dreading getting up every morning to do a task, then this needs to change. Liking what you do and being passionate about it are not the same thing. And that’s ok.
3. You aren’t limited to what’s familiar
You aren’t limited to industries that are already familiar to you. Usually, when you are determining your niche, you stick with the familiar and the knowledge you already know. Think about the possibilities, you can work in an industry that you’ve never considered. This is possible if you aren’t focused on a specific niche or target market.
You have more opportunities to say yes to things you would never have considered starting out. If potential clients know that you are open to trying different things, then you will be asked more often.
When I started out. I never listed bookkeeping as a service that I offered. This was a job that I did in the past and I was good at it. I just thought I hated it. However, I was asked if this is something that I could do, and I said, “Yes!” (I actually ended up writing blog posts and keeping the books for this client. Definitely not a niche job description.)
I kept getting requests like this and realized my market needed this service. And this was a service I could provide. I also discovered something else. Bookkeeping was something that I enjoyed doing if I worked independently. If I chose to just stick with a niche, I would have lost the opportunity to work with most of my clients. Or I would have turned them away because they didn’t fit my “ideal client”.
Is Making Money from Home with a Niche a Bad Thing?
Absolutely not! Whether you start a business with a niche or without one, you can be successful on your own terms. There is so much business advice out there that sometimes we get stuck with hyper-focusing on one idea. The popular one being that you need a niche. This post is meant to challenge the current idea and offer an alternative.
Conclusion
There is more than one way to start a business. When I was starting my own business, I heard so much of needing a niche that it really made me think that I could never be successful. And I want you to know how to make money from home without a niche. It is totally possible and you can do it. Give yourself permission to ignore the advice of finding your niche.
Be sure to download the 20-page Mom Boss 2.0 workbook! It gives you the tools you need to start a business without a niche. So you can break free from the 9-5, be your own boss, raise your kids, and enjoy your life.
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