Dominate your Niche

Hey, guys. Calvin here for Part 2 of How to Find and Dominate Your Niche. I’m here in Bali if you didn’t realize already. I’ve got the beautiful pool behind me. I’m recording this on holiday while I’m working and traveling and hustling. So let’s have a look at Part 2.

If you haven’t watched Part 1, it is prerequisite, it’s mandatory before you do Part 2. So please stop the video, go back and watch the first video which is about how to find your niche by looking at your industry, your sub-industry, then breaking that down into your niche and then your micro-niche. And then we take you through a process, a question-and-answering process that allows you find your dream customer, or your avatar if you will, within that niche. But assuming we have that and that you’ve done the work and you haven’t just watched the video, you’ve actually done it, then let’s move on to then how do we then do Part 2, which is to win the game.

So this is the process that I like to do when I’m going through designing my strategy, my game plan if you will, my tactics, my sort of guerrilla warfare approach to business strategy. And first things first…I’m a realist, right? But first things first, I remember a great quote from the people that were right there and they created the Walmart stores, right? It was Sam Walton who once said, “I spend more time in my competitors’ stores than I do in my own.” He said, “I’ve never had an original idea in my life.”

I think it’s important to understand that in the wellness industry there’s really nothing new here, guys, right? Like the principles of health, the principles of business, the principles of success, the principles of great relationships, the principles of great careers have been around for centuries. Now there might be some new strategies or tools or techniques or language that we use today that we didn’t use, say, 20, 30, 40 years ago, but the principles are always the same. It’s just about how we implement them.

And what I’ve realized is that it’s not in the knowledge but in the execution where your genius is found. There’s a lot of people with great ideas out there, right? So don’t get disgruntled when we go through this process, going, “How do I compete with these big players, Cal?” It’s not what it’s about. It’s about looking at what they’re doing and understanding this. Please write this down before we do anything. That you don’t have to be the world’s expert, you just have to be the expert they know. I’ll repeat that. You don’t have to be the world’s expert, you just have to be the expert that they know.

What does that really mean? When I got started I didn’t have decades of experience, right? Like people look in my industry, in our Young & Wildly Successful Success Academy, they look at someone like at Tony Robbins, for example. Tony has been doing this, I’ve worked with Tony, I’ve met Tony, great guy, great programs and courses, couldn’t recommend him highly enough. But I digged all of Tony’s stuff and I went through them.

And Tony has been doing personal development, if you will, and motivational speaking for longer than I’ve been alive. So I don’t have a competitive advantage in that area, right? Most people are going to choose Tony. Now that might not be the case in five to ten years as we develop our own expertise and our own results and case studies, but at the moment when I got started two years ago it was a no-brainer.

However, I picked a niche and then a sub-niche, or a micro-niche, on that niche that didn’t know who Tony was. So it was very easy for me to win because I didn’t have to be the world’s expert, I just had to be the expert that they knew. And that allowed me to get myself started to then branch out and do broader and bigger things, as well. So get started small, scale fast is the overall principle here. Let’s have a look at this stuff.

First thing I want you to do is I want you to look at how you win the game. And I’m using that language with volition, I’ll talk to you about that in a little bit. But how do you win the game? You want to first start by looking at your competition offerings. So now you know your niche, you know your sub-niche, or your micro-niche. I want you to look at those two levels, right? Not the industry per se or the sub industry, but the two levels there around the niche and the micro-niche. And I want you to chunk off on that and I want you to look at who are playing in your space on a global level, on a national level, and then on a local level, as well.

Because understand, if you live in Hobart, for example, in Australia, very different competitive landscape than New York City. If you live in Hobart, it’s a very different competitive landscape. You’re not really competing with somebody that lives in Paris, right? You’re not competing with those people, so you can learn together, you can collaborate, you can share resources, you’re not competing. If you’re online, the illusion is you’re competing with everybody and you’re really not. Because not everyone markets online. The United States, a very heavily saturated online marketplace. But if you went to, say, for example, France or if you went, for example, to, say, Ireland, if you went to, say for example, Scotland and you just competed online in Scotland, a completely different ball game.

So don’t get disgruntled or don’t get sort of overwhelmed by this process, because I know a lot of people start doing this and they go, “I can’t compete. It’s all too stressful. And what do I have to offer?” And all of their insecurities come up. I don’t want that. What I want you to do is go, “Look, if they can do it, I can do it.” Everyone that you see around in the world around you, Steve Jobs once said, was built by people no smarter than you. So when you’re doing this process, remember to stay true to who you are and that you have a unique voice, something that you can share that maybe very different to what everybody else has done. It might be the same principle but your own language is what’s needed in the world, as well. We need your unique voice.

So I want you to look at the global level, I want you to look at the national level, and I also want you to look at the local level. When you’re looking at these key players, I like do it on my browser. I’ll have like 10 or 15 different windows open and I’ll go bounce between, backwards and forwards between these guys and I’ll be looking at a couple of key things. Here’s a couple of questions I want you to have in mind when you’re looking at them. “What’s their core offering? What is it that they’re offering to the marketplace right now that’s their package, their product, what are they offering?” Because traditionally if they’re being very successful, then they’ve got their offering right.

Now traditionally speaking, if they’ve got a large business then they understand how to make sales and people are buying things from them. Not because they’re just good at marketing, but because they actually offer something the client wants. So you can save a lot of thought process about what to offer and how to offer and how to win by just simply taking something that somebody is already doing, creating your own version of it. Obviously always reference where you get client material from, but by all means reverse-engineer the program and then create your own version, right?

I want you to look at what their value proposition is. So what are they actually offering as value to the marketplace? Do they offer blogs and seminars? If you’re in the coaching space, do they offer online courses or training programs, and do they do seminars or workshops? Understanding their business model allows you to be able to turn decades into days. It’s taken them their lifetime to build something out, particularly if you’re looking at big players in the industry, it’s taken them a lifetime. You can shorten that down and you could re-engineer or reverse-engineer their success in maybe 18 months if you were diligent, right?

And then you also want to look at what their point of difference, what’s their unique selling proposition, how do they win the game, as well. Because they’ve got their own strategic aligns where they’re trying to penetrate from a certain angle. There’s a lot of different ways, a lot of different markets, and not everybody in the world that’s in wellness coaching is going to work with me. I understand that. There’s other people that they’re going to rely on more. Well, I tend to work with a certain type of client, so I’m aware that I’m going to be relevant for somebody but not everybody.

Even in your micro-niche you’re not going to have everybody in the world work with you, right? That’s not the intention. You just want to work with people that want to work with you. As Simon Sinek says, “The aim of the game in business is just not to make money from people that can pay you. The aim of the game in business is to work with people who believe what you believe.” Right? Great TED Talk which is called Start with Why.

So once we understand that core offering, the value proposition and also the point of difference, now then it’s about looking at how you fit in the space, as well. And so you want to look at what’s missing from the landscape. You might find that all these big players are doing this and this and this and this, but there’s a whole section here that’s not tapped into, that’s not understood, that’s not offered, that there’s a missing link in the chain. And it really helps to go through your competitors’ offerings, to actually buy their programs, do it, do it diligently and understand what’s missing.

Sometimes it’s actually not a strategy-based problem. If you’ve watched my other videos you’ll understand this. But sometimes it’s strategy, sometimes it’s training and execution, sometimes it’s emotional mastery. There’s a lot of business coaches out there that are in the world today that have got great strategies and they’ve got great training capacity. They’re a great coach, but they’re not helping their client go through the emotional reasons why they don’t succeed, like self-sabotaging, limiting beliefs.

One of the things that I know that stands Young & Widely Successful apart in the industry is not just because we have great cutting-edge strategies, not just because we’re great at also doing training and helping people execute, but because we look at the emotional aspects of a human being and we go, “We understand that you can have the best strategy in the world and you can have the best training in the world. But if you’re not motivated, if you don’t have the compelling direction, if you don’t have the internal hunger and drive, if you’ve got limiting beliefs, you self-sabotage, you hold yourself back, you’re not going do anything.”

So we start with the mindset and the emotions of a client before we go into a strategy. Why? Because they know that’s what’s going to give you the biggest bang for the buck. Not a lot of people do it because not a lot of people understand it. But I come from a background, and the background for me is looking at peak performance, it’s looking at psychology and human potential. So I brought that into a business environment and now we offer something that most people don’t, that’s my competitive advantage.

If you’re doing wellness coaching and you’re going, “How do I compete with Cal?,” find your own thing because you’re not going to compete in my space. You find your own space, but you can then dominate from another perspective. But you have something that I don’t have. And I think it’s important to understand that even if we’re doing similar things, we can still win at different games. So look at what’s missing.

Then get clear about your own strength. I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk that said if he had one injection, one tablet he could take, it wouldn’t be hustle, it wouldn’t be intelligence, it would be self-awareness. So getting clear on what your business strength is, and your strength today may not be your strength in 12 months. But right now what is your strength?

Is it your strength is the ability that you’re actually really small and it’s just you so you’re one-on-one with the client? Is your strength that you come from a corporate background where you’ve got a decade-plus experience in your area that makes you more qualified than anybody else in your industry? Is your qualification or your strength that you’ve actually got a lot qualifications? Is your strength the fact that you deeply care and you’ve got your own proprietary way of dealing with things? Is your strength your own story and people buy into you because of your story? I don’t know what your strength is, but you’ve got to identify what’s missing and what’s your strength.

And then the next piece is then I want you to ask how you can win. And in this one we’re going to go a little bit more detailed into this process because Part 2 is about how do we win the game. Now we’ve understood the industry and we’ve understood, if you will, the game that we’re playing, but you need to understand, “Are you playing it like the Premier League? Are you playing in Division 1? Are you playing in the championship? Are you in the…if this was an AFL analogy, are you in the Premiership? Are you in the BFL, like the sub-league down below that? Or if you’re just doing social soccer or social football. It’s a completely different game, therefore a different strategy, different competition. You need to understand who you’re playing with, as well.

But now you understand what’s missing and also what your strengths. Now the next question is, “How do you win?” And there’s a great book or article, I should say, it’s like an essay. A guy called Andrew Spark, and he created…or sorry, Andrew Mack, not Andrew Spark. He’s from Stanford University and it’s an article that he created and it was all around why do large countries lose small wars. You can check it out online. Just “Google Andrew Mack, Why do large countries lose small wars?” And he’s a Stanford research professor and he created this.

And really what it’s about is in guerrilla warfare, if you look at big super powers which might be your competition, big super power, right? And you might be the small, little nation or a small little army of one or two or three or maybe four at the most. How do you play? Well, if you play by the big guys’ rules, you’re definitely going to lose. Why? Because they designed the rules so they could win, they’ve got all of the resources and all the support.

But why was it somewhere like in North Korea was able to defeat the United States, the biggest military superpower in the world? Well, first and foremost, they didn’t play by the same rules. The Dalai Lama once said actually, “Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.” Right? So they didn’t play by the same rules. So if they didn’t play by the same rules, how can you design the rules yourself so that you do win?

And they did a study of every time an inferior force went up against a superpower. Whether it was a military force, whether it was a supporting force, whether it was a country or a community of force. And they looked at the divide had to be 10X. So the small force had be 10 times smaller than the larger force, the dominant superpower, i.e. the United States and North Korea, right? The United States 10 times bigger, at minimum. I think it was like 40 times bigger, but 40 times bigger and more military than anything else, right? Huge superpower, this tiny little nation of North Korea.

And what they looked at was that the small player, the underdog, the minutiae, they won on average 33% of the time. So one-third out of the whole thing they won. And that’s ridiculous. If it’s 10 times more, the company is 10 times bigger, the country is 10 times bigger, the organization is 10 times bigger, the supporting team is 10 times bigger, you would expect them to win 10 times more. You’d expect maybe less than 10% of times to have a fluke victory. But 33%, one-third, one out of every three battles the underdog wins? Why?

What they realized was this: the 66% where the underdog lost was they tried to play by the same rules that the bigger player had designed, right? So they were trying to compete when they had a dramatically scaled disadvantage, right? The 33% of the times when the underdog won was they changed the rules of the game. You went from, for example, in World War I and II, you knew who your enemy was. It was on the battlefield, the United States won because they had more military power, right? More tanks, more people, more soldiers, all the rest of them.

You got to the Vietnam War, you don’t know who your enemy is anymore. And they’re not hiding in front of you shooting back at you, they’re hiding in the ground or in the trees, right? And they’re camouflaged. And then you’re working with them during the daytime and on the nighttime they’re trying to kill you, right? It’s a completely warfare. And obviously I’m not an expert on the Vietnam War, but I understand enough of it to understand that the Vietnamese played by completely different set of rules and that’s the reason why they won the war, right? Great lessons to learn there, as well.

So you want to design the rules of the game yourself. And here’s a couple of steps as part of this process. You want to choose your game, and we’ve talked about that a little bit already, then you want to design the rules so that you can win. And then finally, you want to execute on your strengths. And so when I look at my strategy within Young & Wildly Successful, let me give you a bit of an insight on this.

I looked at the industry of business coaching, I said, “I don’t want to work with everybody, I just want to work with wellness because I’m passionate about wellness.” And then I said, “Within wellness who am I going to really target?” Well, I could target the people that are over 50 or over 40, and I could really help them. But the reality is that they are not going to see my value. Who would see my value? Who’s going to jump on board straight away? Who is the vein of gold, for example? Who’s the lowest-hanging fruit?

Well, if I work with young people, 20 to, say, 40, that are in wellness businesses, then I’m going to have more rapport with them, they’re going to like the fact that I’m young. And the fact that I’m young and have achieved a lot is actually a strength, not a weakness. Whereas if I compete with people that are trying to market to the 40s and 50s and 60-year olds, they’ve got more experience, they’ve got more feathers in their hat, so to speak, they’ve got more…not just on their belt, and that client is looking for something more matured and more established and more traditional. My younger marketplace is looking for something edgy and different. In fact, they don’t want an old business coach, they want a young business coach that gets them and is in the same space as them.

So I designed the rules of my game to win. I looked and I said, “I’m not going to target people over the age of 40.” Very rarely we have a couple of clients over 40, but most of our clients, 99% of our clients are under 40. That’s who we’re going to play with. And even then, sometimes it’s under 30, right? Now in business it’s obviously stretching the game, but in personal development it’s oftentimes 20 to maybe mid-30s, 25 to 30. That’s the sweet spot for personal development, but for business it’s sort of 20 to 40. I’m working in that space, and so how do I make myself really engaging and really apparent?

So I chose my game. My game was going to be under 40s, in wellness business, that was going to be the game. Well, who else is playing in that game? Not a lot of people. Why? Because their belief was that they didn’t work, so I designed the rules of the game to win by starting a brand myself, Young & Wildly Successful. It shows the market already. It made it very easy for me to say “no” to people that were over 40 because they self-selected. I didn’t have to do the hard work myself.

Then it was about making sure I designed the rules of the game effectively. So I was going to dominate social media, right? When all of the established businesses didn’t know if it was relevant, if it was going to work, I was like, “I’m on it and I’m going to engage.” Why? Because my generation is on it, as well. So I was already starting to win the game. But if I look deeper into the nuances of my industry, a lot of people that are speakers and trainers, they didn’t understand how to market previously.

Their strength was to just go and speak to people and sell to them on a stage, and I understood that that wasn’t the future of the industry. I was looking forward and I said, “The way we’re going to win the game is by understanding how to fill a room and sell a room.” We knew how to sell a room, but now need to fill a room, as well. And so we understood how to market that. And we invested a lot of money in Facebook marketing when no one else was doing it, and now we’ve got market share.

So you’ve got to clearly identify the game you’re playing and how to win the game, and that’s a strategic conversation to have. And what I would encourage you to do, I believe you’ll see on the right-hand side or left-hand of this page, wherever you’re watching it, there will be an opportunity for you to have what’s called a strategy call.

Now in the past, if you look at the old school way of doing a strategy call, it was really just a sales call, right? We don’t do that, but what we do is we’ll be able to help you outline and map out a $100,000 plan, or a $250,000 plan, or a million dollar plan, depending on the level of your business. If you’re just getting started, it will be 100K plan. If you’re already at a 100, we’ll show you how to two and a half X your business, minimum, over 250K plan. And if you’re already at that level, we’ll show you how to scale to $1 million.

There will be a form to fill in, and it’s just a free gift from us. If you want to take it up, take it up. If you don’t, then don’t. But I want to encourage you to take action because if you fill this in and you’re looking for clarity, you’re looking for someone, I guess, stress test your ideas and your plans, we’d love to be able to do that for you. And we’d love to be able to work with you and connect in, as well.

So there, guys, is how to win the game and how to find your niche and dominate your niche, as well. And behalf of myself and the whole team here at Young & Wildly Successful, live Strong, live with passion, make today and everyday a phenomenal life-changing adventure. And above all else, here from Bali, encouraging you guys to live life on your terms. Over and out.