Hey, it’s Veronica Wasek again, and we are talking about selecting a niche for your bookkeeping business. Do you really need a niche in order to succeed with your bookkeeping business?
In selecting a niche you need to first understand that merely selecting a niche is not a guarantee of success. I do, however, think that it’s a great idea to have a niche because it helps you with your marketing. It also helps you to create workflows within your business that are more predictable, more standardized, than trying to work with lots of different clients. Now, I discourage you from picking a niche out of the blue if you don’t know anything about it. Some industries are more complicated than other industries. I would, however, encourage you to think about a niche not in terms of an industry alone. Perhaps your niche is software that you specialize in. It could be an app that you also specialize in.
As an example, my company, VM Wasek, specializes in QuickBooks Online for service-based companies. While I don’t have a specific industry niche, my niche is QuickBooks Online for service-based companies. I’ll tell you that my team and I know QuickBooks Online inside and out, so I can truly say that we are QuickBooks Online experts for the service-based industries that we serve.
The reason that I haven’t narrowed down my niche even more is because I don’t feel that I need to. I’ve done a fairly good job over the years with my blog, and with my YouTube channel, of promoting myself as a QuickBooks Online specialist, which actually brings me quite a few prospects on a regular basis. So I personally don’t feel the need to niche down further than what I already have.
I did make a conscious decision to not work with product-based companies, primarily because I’m not personally that excited about working with their financials. They are harder to support and to deal with because, I believe, when you’re working with manufacturing, with inventory, even e-commerce, that that’s a whole other animal, and again, I’m not that excited to work on those areas.
As I’ve said, selecting a niche not a guarantee of success. A niche maybe is not an industry, perhaps it is something else that you specialize in. Your niche could be even the way in which you deliver service to your clients, if there’s something different about the way in which you do things.
When you’re thinking about selecting a niche, first of all, be more open-minded to what a niche is so that you can then make a more informed choice about your niche. Then second, think about the experience that you have. Are there any particular industries that you like to work with? Don’t focus so much about whether it is a highly profitable industry. Perhaps that’s not the right reason to pick an industry to work with if you’re going after an industry niche. Because at the end of the day, you have to work with your clients, you have to love working with your clients, and if you pick the wrong industry niche, perhaps that may not be the best fit for you.
I would also encourage you again to look at having a software niche, even a software niche for a specific industry. That’s even better! Also then, do some research. Research the industry that you want to work with. Research the software that you want to work with. Then the next step is to develop very deep knowledge, so you want to learn everything that you can about that industry, about the biggest problems that that industry is facing. Like for me for example, QuickBooks Online is my niche, and I want to know about the biggest problems that my ideal clients are facing with QuickBooks Online because then I create content and videos that address those biggest needs.
Finally, again be open-minded to defining what a niche is, defining what that means to you, and give yourself the time to work toward building a niche. It may be that you find clients that are not in your particular industry niche, but perhaps they have a great personality. They’re willing to pay your fees. They’d be a great fit for your business, and I would say take them on. There’s nothing wrong with that. I think you need to understand that just because you have a niche, that doesn’t mean that you say no to everybody else. It means you say no to less than ideal clients, which is different.
It might take you a while to find a niche, and in some cases a niche might find you. So the biggest piece of advice I would give you is then to be open-minded to the clients that you work with, especially if you’re starting out. Be open-minded. Take on good clients, good paying clients who value what you do. That is the best type of client that you can have! Then work toward building a niche because eventually, once you make your marketing more efficient, and narrow down the types of work that you do for different clients, that will eventually help you to develop more standardized workloads in your bookkeeping business.
