Finding your Niche as a Small Business
If you Google “how to find your niche as a small business,” you’ll come up with various 5 step plans and processes that claim to help you find that one thing that will be both profitable and fulfilling for you. Truth be told as I started to research for this article I thought I could write a post to that effect, but then I realized it didn’t really happen like that for me. So instead of telling you 5 things you should do to find your niche, I’m going to tell you a story about how I found mine.
Once upon a time, there was a girl with a disposable camera. Yep, ever since I was young I’ve enjoyed taking photos and I was the girl who just had to have a disposable camera for every family vacation. In high school, it was a no brainer to sign up for photography class, Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot in hand 😆
I took pictures of anything and everything and thought I was pretty good with my little camera, especially when friends started asking me to take their senior photos. And so as I continued into my college years I set out with a dream. A dream to be a photographer. I didn’t care what I took pictures of, as long as I could figure out how to do that for a living. I jumped into running a business as a kid basically, with no knowledge of how it worked…now with my slightly more expensive, Canon Rebel in hand.
As the years went by I grew my little business…a little. I took anything that came my way, whether it was a paid gig, or not. Family photos, senior photos, wedding photos, you name it. I got a lot of practice in over those years, but my business never really took off like I wanted it to. For a while, I would decide I wanted to focus on one type of photography or another but I never really stuck to it, flitting around like a hummingbird.
Then one day I did a branding session for another small business and I was HOOKED!
I ended up pivoting my business from jack-of-all-trades photographer, to brand photographer over about a year (eventually adding in the social media side of things). For that year, I mostly advertised for brand photography but I still took other clients that came my way, thinking, “well, at least those other sessions help pay the bills.” But what it took me a year to realize was that if I didn’t start saying no to all the other things, I wouldn’t have the time and energy to really go all-in on the one thing I really wanted to do.
And you know what happened when I finally followed through on that realization? My business exploded! When I finally niched myself as a brand photographer, I doubled in size. No joke.
So were all those years of flitting around wasted? Though I’ve been tempted to think they were, I actually think they were practice years. Years of figuring out what I did, and didn’t like until I finally landed on my dream job.
My advice to you? In the beginning, take a range of different jobs within the field you want to go into to figure out what you do, and don’t like before picking that one thing and diving deep. Make sure you love it before you commit, and make sure there’s a market for it too. Then go all-in! I know it’s scary but I promise it’s worth it!
