WTF is it with this marketing obsession with niching? [Part 1]

In the first of our two episodes about niching  we welcome Liz Goodchild to the podcast for a fun conversation unpacking the major preoccupation service-based business owners seem to have about niching!

Spoiler; if everyone's saying that we 'should' be doing something we're probably going to have some...opinions on the matter 😈

Join us in the next episode where Lucy and Pippa dive into niching from a The Disobedient Business® Co. perspective and delve into the goodness from this episode with Liz.

About Liz
Liz Goodchild is a certified coach who helps people to shake up their lives and feel more bolder, excited, confident and content. She's also a writer, a huge fan of crisp butties and is currently training to be a psychotherapist. She's also quite fond of goats.

Where to find Liz
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Transcript

Pippa: 0:30

Welcome back, everybody. This week, we are talking to the wonderful Liz Goodchild about niching. Welcome, Liz. How you doing?

Liz: 0:40

I'm very good. Thank you for having me.

Pippa: 0:42

Oh, listen, we've been talking about having this conversation for months, right? So I can't believe we've actually finally got in front of a microphone to do it.

Liz: 0:49

Yeah, I know. I know.

Pippa: 0:51

It's wild, right? So listen, before we get into niching or what I think about niching, what you think about niching or any of that kind of jazz, tell us a little bit about you, about your business, about who you are, what you do and all that jazz.

Liz: 1:03

Yeah. So I am a coach. I run a coaching business called life coaching for people who give a shit. Thank you. I'm also a coach supervisor and, in my second year of psychotherapy training as well. So that's a bit about my business. I live between Germany and the UK. I have a German wife. So we live half of our time in Germany on, a farm that we've renovated. so quite a slow, slow bumbly life here in Germany. And then the rest of the time we, live in the UK and it's much more fast paced and lots more going on.

Pippa: 1:42

And, and do you always find yourself being in one place for long enough to crave the other one and then getting to the point where you get to the other one and being in that place long enough to need to crave the other one?

Liz: 1:51

Yes. Yeah. It's quite, it's quite a great way of living because my wife and I are quite similar in how we approach life. And we definitely need kind of the slow pace, but also the fast pace. So it fits quite well with our lifestyle. And yeah, especially in Germany after it's been quite slow and bumbly, we definitely start craving life in the UK.

Pippa: 2:16

I love that because, We so often think of life as a kind of, I'm either a city person or I'm a country person, which just feels far too simplistic, right? we're all a bit complicated and we need to balance a lots of stuff.

Liz: 2:29

absolutely.

Pippa: 2:31

Okay, so in this season, We are kind of exploring various aspects of marketing and whilst niching isn't just about, marketing, it's about lots of other things as well. I've always had, a really interesting relationship with the, the topic of niching and it's just, it's always sat really weirdly with me and kind of all niching for any US listeners. so we're I'm going to kick the tires of it and see where we end up today. So for a long time, I've harbored this idea that, we put far too much emphasis on niching and that it's pretty reductive. when it comes to human beings particularly if you're a service based business and working with the people that you love working with really, which kind of feel sits behind most people's objectives for thinking that they need to niche. and then I kind of circled all the way back to, well, okay, so if I don't believe in. Nishing as the quote unquote solution, how do we focus our attention in our marketing if we don't put a lot of time and energy into crafting that kind of God help me for using this phrase, ideal client avatar and all this kind of nonsense. So that's kind of where I'm at with it. And I vacillate between thinking there's some merit here and there isn't, and so on. a quick Google this morning showed me, I was looking for, thoughts and research around the argument against niching. And I found very few and yet hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of blog posts about why it's so essential, so essential to niche in your coaching business. So come on, give it to me. I'd love to know your initial thoughts and we'll see where the conversation goes from there.

Liz: 4:07

Yeah, well, I've been thinking about it a lot, you know, leading up to talking to you today. And of course, niching is important sometimes. You know, yesterday I had a cortisone injection in my neck, which was horrific. And I really needed the doctor. To, be very expert at doing that. So he is a, you know, he's highly niched because of his expertise and skill in helping people with neck problems. So I'm not knocking niche in completely. However, I work with a lot of coaches and small business owners, not necessarily on the business side of things, but they tend to come to me to work through. And what I notice, especially with brand new coaches who are fresh out of coaching training is that they're given this message. you know, as you said, you'll find millions of blog posts talking about how it's so important to niche. So they are obsessed with niching. And what I find is that especially at the beginning of their business. evolvement that they're so obsessed with niching that it actually stops them from coaching. So they're so, overwhelmed with finding their ideal client or finding, the thing that they're coaching on that they actually don't do any coaching and they just spend their time, filling in online client avatar. quizzes and things like that. Whereas my approach when I built my business was just to basically coach as many people as possible as I could. So just bums on seats. So I was coaching all sorts of people, you know, ages. Genders on lots of different things. of course there was some, Lying there, you know, I wasn't coaching on things that I didn't feel comfortable coaching, on and I still don't do that. but through that. I started to develop a better awareness of what I liked to coach on and who I like to coach. So it's still not a niche at all, but it gave me a chance to build my business without feeling really constricted about, you know, who I would be coaching.

Pippa: 6:25

Yeah. There's so much in there. firstly, you know, picking up what you said at the beginning, I too have worked with a lot of coaches and more on the business side of things, or certainly in the last three or four years anyway. and. Oh my god, you're so right. There's no other way of putting that. This obsession, even, with, I think it falls under the category, this kind of obsession with niching and the whole ideal client exercises in the myriad forms that they're presented to you, but arguably they're kind of the same thing, right? I'm pretty convinced, it comes from that really early need to get it all right, right? you've gotta have it perfect, you've gotta have a proper understanding before you can act, And you and I both know that as challenging as it is, and it comes with a whole lot of Everything from sort of belief system stuff through to past trauma type stuff in terms of how just trying and just experimenting and just, just being visible. is the doing answer as opposed to the thinking answer, right? This is a phrase that I use in, in work with clients all the time. You're, you're replying the thinking answer, you know, the sitting at home thinking, trying to see if I can figure it out, right? Rather than the doing answer, which is kind of what you were just saying about, you've got to feel your way, right?

Liz: 7:45

Absolutely, absolutely. I think if you, especially again at the beginning of a business, if you aren't Actually being a bit of a generalist and coaching lots of different people on different themes, you won't necessarily know what you enjoy doing. And I think that's the most important thing, right? When you're running a business, especially a coaching business is that if you're not enjoying working with people on, I don't know, self esteem or how to be a better parent. because that's the niche that you've picked, then it's really gonna reflect in your whole business ethos and the way you show up in sessions and your energy and dedication.

Pippa: 8:28

Yeah, and actually, you know what, and, this comes with absolutely zero diss to parents. I am one, you are one, so, you know, this is nothing against parents, but just picking that example that you just, that you just used, which is, so let's say you, you qualified as a coach, for example, and you decided that You'd been a parent for the last five years or so, you understood a lot of the struggles that parents were grappling with in that early first five years and you decided after much scrambling around with, you know, ideal client avatar exercises that you were going to niche into early, you know, pre fives parents finding parenting balance or that kind of stuff. And you go in hard with that, you really focus, you get your messaging right, and all the rest of it. And then it turns out, the last thing you want to be doing is being dropped back into the thing that's caused you as much strife as it has for the last fucking five years.

Liz: 9:18

Yes, exactly.

Pippa: 9:20

it turns out you just end up really resenting the almighty fuck out of the people that you work with all the time, because it's the last thing you want to be spending your time doing.

Liz: 9:28

absolutely. No, I agree, I agree. I think also, I was thinking about reasons to not niche, and, you know, if, I mean, I'm speaking about myself here. I am interested in lots of different things. So, recently, I've experienced a death in the family, which has catapulted my brain into all things death, from what it's like after you die, to, you know, what it's like to be in a mortuary, like, really fucking, like, You know, I've, I've fallen into a bit of a rabbit hole, but what that's done is it's made me realize that a lot of the work that I do with my clients is around kind of legacy and, you know, what's important to them in life and what's really integral to them and how they want to be remembered and all of those things that, you know, are quite common in coaching, but because I've become quite fascinated with death and pretty morbid stuff, but also the more kind of philosophical stuff that comes along with it. It's opened up some really interesting conversations with my clients who are also thinking about those things, you know, in a kind of existential way. And again, if I'd niched myself into being the coach who works with people who want to change their career, then I wouldn't be able to have those conversations with my clients, perhaps because they just wouldn't like, you know, they just wouldn't be, I don't know, they wouldn't be specific enough. So it works well for me as a human being. I have ADHD, so my brain works in lots of fascinating, ways and goes down lots of, you know, rabbit holes. And actually I found that a lot of my clients are also neurodivergent and I don't know if it's because I am and therefore they're just somehow kind of drawn to me. but yeah, if I niched myself, I just wouldn't feel comfortable having conversations like that with them about stuff, which again is really important coaching people when they're looking to understand themselves more. Does that make sense?

Pippa: 11:38

Oh, it makes so much sense. It makes so much sense. And I'm, I'm going to tackle everything that you just said in reverse because something just really lit up a, a light bulb for me there, which is what you said at the end around, it's turned out that, you know, just so happens. I don't think it just so happens at all, but it just so happens that a good percentage of your clients are neurodivergent. Well, I also have ADHD, who, who knows what other interesting spicy brains we've got, we've got a whole lot of spicy brains in the family. And also turns out, ta da, a lot of my clients are neurodivergent as well.

Liz: 12:09

Yeah. Mm hmm. Mm

Pippa: 12:11

Have you and I just kind of accidentally taken this conversation into a sort of sub niching kind of conversation, which is neither you or to my knowledge anyway, you know, I kind of follow you online and you know, I've been on your website enough times. I don't think either of us particularly going hard with the old ADHD marketing angle, right? It's not a come to me on ADHD coach, I can help you with your spicy brain and so on. And yet those folks have found us. Now, neither you or I sat down and went right, I'm going to niche into neurodivergent folks. Neither of us went, let's change the language that we use on our website so that neurodivergent folk feel welcome or feel like that you're the right coach for them. And yet they found you. Interesting, right? That's a literal counter argument to Nixian.

Liz: 13:00

Yes. It is. It is. My main philosophy for not niching is, is that I am the niche, so who I am attracts my clients because of not necessarily because of my training or my skills or my expertise. In fact, in the 10 years that I've been a coach, I think one person, has. asked me what training I have. That was a German person, no offense to the Germans out there, but you know,

Pippa: 13:38

but also not surprising.

Liz: 13:39

Yeah, so I can say it. I can say it. but nobody else has ever asked any of those things. I think it's something about me. I write really honestly. I write about what's going on in my life. I tend not to write things, whether it's on social media or on my own website, you know, blog posts and things like that, about, you know, ten steps to feeling more confident or, you know, these three things will change your life. I tend to not do anything like that.

Pippa: 14:07

me while I, while I'm a little bit sick in my mouth, but yeah, carry on.

Liz: 14:10

I tend to just write about me and what I've been discovering about things and, and not even necessarily saying, and this is how it might apply to you. It's just there. It's my experience. And I think that that's really powerful because people find something in these little, little kind of, details that I write about that really resonate with them or don't, you know, they might not resonate. I did, a talk a few years ago, for, for a coaching training company, about, I can't even remember what it was about now, actually. It was about, you know, being a coach and, and being yourself as a coach, essentially. And, you know, someone came up to me afterwards and said, I loved your talk. You are definitely a Marmite. I can imagine that people either like you or don't like you

Pippa: 14:54

Perfect.

Liz: 14:55

Yeah, and I was quite chuffed by that, because not everyone will like me, some people won't like my honesty or the way I write about things, the fact that I swear all the time, or you know, I'm pretty no nonsense and direct, but of course that does me a great favor, because therefore, those people probably won't want to work with me and I won't want to work with them. And what it does is it leaves, you know, people out there to want to work with me who resonate with what I'm writing about and talking about. so in a way that is the niche and going back to what you're saying about, you know, working with a lot of neurodivergent clients. I think it is just cause I'm quite honest and no nonsense. I know that's very broad and generalizing, but I think, you know, my copy and the way I write and talk about things appeals to neurodivergent people who perhaps don't always understand nuance or don't like nuance and just need things quite straightforward and just say it as it is rather than being flowery about things.

Pippa: 15:56

Yeah, I agree with you, and I kind of, I've thought about this a bit from our point of view as well, and I think it, for me, it's been a combination of well, how, how I slash we, so I have ADHD, my eldest, who works with me in the business, Lucy, is, old ADHD, so, they are autistic and, have ADHD, and, It's, for me, it's very much about how I show up as a human in terms of how I talk, the, the subjects that I feel see fit to speak about, the fact that I'm sweary, the fact that our business is about being disobedient, because I feel like there's a lot of anti the status quo in the neurodivergent community. that wasn't intentional on my part, but I guess the two things kind of joined together. But the thing that really grabbed me out of what you were just saying a minute ago was that, and it's what's been going around in my mind for the last five minutes or so, because you know ADHD, you're obviously always holding a conversation and having a secondary conversation in your head, right? which is this idea of you, you said it yourself, you are your niche, that being the more of being yourself. And it's not that you are your niche in the sense that people have to be you. So there's a lot, there's a lot of, and I've certainly spoken to a lot of early stage coaches and seen in coaching schools that you, you will end up coaching yourself a few years ago, which again feels massively reductive, right? but there is a massive piece in there that goes, if you can find a way to get the support, whether that's coaching support, business support or blender, both, whatever it is to be able to share. Yourself as, incoming buzzword, authentically, bleh, as possible. I'm just trying to come up with a better synonym for it, authentically, right? As honestly, as real as you possibly can. If you're a swearer, you swear. You don't swear because you're trying to be divisive, because then that's not you being yourself, right? You swear because you swear, or you show up in, I don't know, colourful cardigans, whatever the situation is, you craft your niche through doing that, right? You attract the people to you by doing that, not by trying to figure out what that's meant to be, and then being it.

Liz: 18:02

One hundred percent. One hundred percent. And that's something that I did from day one when I was building my coaching business without really realizing it. I don't know how to not be myself. so I was just myself and yeah, wearing colorful knitwear and cardigans and swearing and it didn't occur to me to not do that. and therefore. Yeah, it appeals to certain people. And as I said earlier, it also won't appeal to people who don't want someone swearing or being very direct and no nonsense. And also some people like the more kind of slick, sleek, super shiny, kind of preened type coaching.

Pippa: 18:47

I'm laughing because, right, okay, sure, not many

Liz: 18:51

some people do. I think some people do, you know, some people want that. They want, I guess they want it to feel more. Professional. And to use your words, I'm not being reductive there and insinuating that I'm not professional. Of course I'm professional. but I think some people want that kind of more, yeah, slick, suited and booted.

Pippa: 19:14

oh yeah, I mean, and we did an episode, God, right back in, it'll be in the first 10 episodes. We can link to it in the show notes. if we need to, which is exactly, it was, I can't remember the title of it now, but the gist of it was what the fuck is professionalism anyway, because. Let's face it, professionalism does not equal swearing, or does not not equal swearing. To draw a line between the two is just nonsense.

Liz: 19:35

Mm hmm. Mm

Pippa: 19:37

Absolutely. I just, yeah, this is such an interesting conversation. I did not travel quite the same path as you from a coaching point of view. I came out of, well, in actual fact, in the first few years, dabbled still backwards in and out of corporate for many, many years, either corporate corporate or, senior management in public sector, education specifically, and I had drunk the fucking Kool Aid for a lot of years. I had attempted at huge cognitive dissonance to myself to squeeze myself into some kind of weird, like, corporate, public sector management shape situation. And I was, and I, hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn't it? I never fitted, I never fitted at all, no matter how much I tried to belong, I never did. obviously a lot of learning in that direction since then meant that all I was ever trying to do was fit in anyway, but, and it took me the first probably three, three and a half years of my coaching business. So I'm like seven and a half years in now before the penny dropped, when, oh, okay. So there's a that this niche or this focus or this way of working or this type of people or whatever it was, wasn't landing. And didn't feel quite right. And surprise, surprise, wasn't getting any traction in my coaching business, you know, client here, client there, but nothing to speak of, was because I hadn't owned me in, in myriad ways, whether it was the kind of work I wanted to do, the kind of people I wanted to work with, the things that lighten me up, the kind of people that working with lighten me up. I hadn't found any of those. I was only ever. Entirely unintentionally pretending.

Liz: 21:18

Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, that's what I found that, you know, people are seeking guidance from you, you know, the person who has the human being who has, you know, particular insights and knowledge and experience in certain things and that, that, without that, without being yourself. And I know that that's such a kind of contextualized theme here around like, you know, what does it actually mean to be yourself? Like we could go down a whole rabbit hole there,

Pippa: 21:48

It's a whole other, it's a whole other episode, isn't

Liz: 21:50

absolutely, you know, but if you're trying to essentially be someone you're not as a coach, or even if you're making candles or whatever it is that you're doing as a business, Based on some information that that's what people want from you, then it just won't work. It won't work because people will see through it. People will see that you're not comfortable, you know, creating that product or coaching in that way. And it just, you know, the energy will be terrible. Won't work.

Pippa: 22:20

It's no better living somebody else's business than it is attempting to live somebody else's life,

Liz: 22:24

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I said earlier, you know, that from day one, I was always myself and actually I'd like to retract that. And I think for about a week, whilst I was thinking about my business at the time, do you remember, well, she's still going actually. Do you know the coach, Danielle Laporte? She's Canadian. She's very like ethereal

Pippa: 22:45

And vacillates between being lovely and really problematic and everything in

Liz: 22:49

yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I've lost track of Danielle Laporte, you know, over the last, Several years. so I don't know what she's up to now, but at the beginning of my coaching journey, coaching, training, she was quite big. She was like a very, very, very well known coach. and I know that, yeah, there's some things that she's done that's been quite problematic. Also Tony Robbins as well, whilst we're

Pippa: 23:11

no, I mean, I, I, I'm not putting my hand up to ever

Liz: 23:14

was.

Pippa: 23:15

Sorry, that's. It's not happening.

Liz: 23:16

He was the other big coach out there that everybody knew about, you know, and she was the one that was definitely kind of, more appealing and resonated, with me more than him. And there was about a week where I tried to, be a bit like Danielle LaPorte. Which, you know, obviously fell flat on its face, you know, when I was trying to write my copy and things like that, you know, you just can't, can't, you know, you can't be Northern and direct and no nonsense and try and sound like, you know, some kind of Canadian ethereal coach talking about, I don't know, yeah, embracing your inner

Pippa: 23:54

It was all about the, it was all about the desire map and all that shit, wasn't It Back in the early days. Yeah. Oh, listen, my experience was so similar, but I'm going to admit to being it for a longer than a week. It was. And it was exactly that. It was getting sucked in by, I am going to use the phrase celebrity because that's the status that they all try to get to, you know, to being. It was getting sucked in by your Daniela Portes, your Tony Robbins, your Marie Forleo's. Yeah. I'm going to put my hands up and say, I did B School. That was the worst 2, 000 I have ever spent in my entire business life. There was Amy Porterfield, you know, there's just so many of them

Liz: 24:34

Yeah.

Pippa: 24:35

whose brands are very deliberately shiny. They're very deliberately aspirational. And I'm not knocking that for them, you know, have at it, do whatever it is you want to do and so on. But how that sets us up as early stage business owners, whatever it is we're doing, coaches or otherwise, is to believe that we can go, if we just do. the things that they're saying, which in this case is, niching in a particular way, whatever their particular five step framework for niching happens to be, right? that we too will go from us to Daniel Laborte status in three months, six months, whatever. I mean, what a crock of bollocks.

Liz: 25:13

it is. It is absolute bollocks. It's bollocks. And I think that, yeah, if you're trying to be Danielle Lepore or Tony Robbins, God forbid, or whoever's out there, then you're missing out completely on so much about who you are, who you like to coach, what you like coaching on, what your approach is. And again, it goes back to what I was talking about at the beginning, that that's the most integral part. Of being a coach or as I said, if you're selling candles, whatever it is that you're putting out there is, is that essentially I think that it's, you know, you got to start with offering what you know, you learn as you go and you try out like a bunch of different things before you even realize like, you know what, I do kind of enjoy coaching. Parents on things, maybe not niching so specifically that, you know, I'm coaching people who are parents of five year olds or do you know what? I don't, I don't like coaching men or I don't want to coach people around their businesses because I don't know enough about businesses. but you won't know any of those things at the beginning because you've not sat through session after session after session kind of cultivating that awareness for yourself. Which is why I just, yeah, wholeheartedly believe that it's not important at the beginning, especially.

Pippa: 26:33

Yeah, so let's, let's look at the question in two parts. If you're early stages, where to start if niching isn't the place to start? And maybe the secondary question is. If we're not really focusing on being the next specialist who you, you know, you want the next specialist to be specialist in next, right? but you know, we're talking about service based business owners. So unless you're training to be a chiropractor, perhaps your work's going to be less specific is how we go about Differentiating what we do, particularly from a marketing point of view. Cause Hey, crowded industry, right? niching isn't the answer. So let's tackle the early stage people first. What do we think?

Liz: 28:06

Well, I know it's going to sound a bit wanky. but I think it's about being yourself, being authentic and being vulnerable. So to use some buzzwords there that make me feel a bit sick myself, I think that actually is the place to start.

Pippa: 28:22

Agreed.

Liz: 28:24

So If you're, like I said earlier, if you're putting things out on social media or whatever it is, wherever you're writing about things that ultimately you're hoping people will read and it's like five steps to be more confident, I just don't think people are interested in that. I think people want to know. about your experience of not being confident or how you have navigated that in your life and not just in a kind of neatly wrapped up like I was not confident once and now I am and you know I can help you because I think just people don't buy that but actually you know being really human about it and messy and trying to not be perfect I think I mean I'll go off on a slight tangent here but as part of um Uh, a coach training that I did, I had to write, an assignment around, you know, the concept of being the good enough coach. A lot of the coaches that I work with, you know, really struggle with not feeling good enough, not knowing enough, almost feeling that they have to be perfect. And their clients can't possibly know that they are actually a human being underneath all of that and have struggles themselves. And again, that's never been something that I've. Struggled with sharing. Obviously I'm not going into, you know, like fucking hell me and my wife had a massive fight today. And, you know, and talking about things in the moment, you

Pippa: 29:47

not bring active trauma into a

Liz: 29:49

absolutely like, let's not bring those things in, you know, be really discerning about what you're sharing out there in the world, but you don't have to be perfect and I think that's something that also holds a lot of coaches up, like, you know, how can I possibly help people if my life isn't completely sorted myself? And of course. Because we all know that no one's life is completely sorted. But I think, again, you can see through that with a lot of coaches who are just trying to, you know, present themselves as this, like, all knowing guru who's got it all sorted.

Pippa: 30:20

It's interesting because that almost puts niching, I'm almost taking us back into the conversation now. I'm not, I'm going to hold us back, but that almost puts niching into the category of one of the many, many protective behaviors, right? That protects us from risk because the narrower we get it, the more perfect it feels. And that arguably makes us feel safer in sharing the work that we do. It's untrue, it's smoke and mirrors, but,

Liz: 30:43

I think that's important though, you know, to be like, not niching allows you to be really flexible and adaptable. So again, in a rapidly changing world, not niching gives you flexibility, right to adapt to shifting trends, evolving client needs, you know, I've noticed over the years, again, that my clients have matured. So perhaps, you know, earlier you know, in 2013 or whenever it was, people were more concerned about things that now just don't matter because the world's like on fire. Right. And people are much more existential, much more concerned about contributing beyond themselves in a more meaningful way because yeah, the ice caps are melting

Pippa: 31:26

yeah, because the world, because the

Liz: 31:27

a. yeah. it's on fire and it feels like an absolute shitshow. People weren't talking about that ten years ago. Or my clients weren't, anyway. So, not niching, you know, how, you know, if I was like, I am the coach who works with people to, help them not have panic attacks anymore. I just, naturally for me, I probably would be talking about those things, you know, the more existential things, but would those clients be coming to me? Probably not.

Pippa: 31:53

Mm, absolutely. So if you were a, well, I was gonna say, if you were a, you are a later stage business, you know, and I don't mean that in the sense of later on the way out, I mean, just in the sense of you're more established. and, you know, and I'd put us in the same, kind of category as well when it comes to the sort of nicheing topic. Particularly from a marketing point of view, what, what would you say? Well, I mean, where do you stand on that sort of focus or lack of focus on niche when you're at the kind of stages that we're at?

Liz: 32:23

some coaches, after, you know, a good few years of working with a lot of different people, as I said earlier, it might be that, you know, you realize you don't like coaching men or you don't like coaching, people, you know, you much prefer working with, women or. You know, gender nonconforming people who are in their 40s and you like talking to them about working with them around, I don't know, career change and things like that. So I want to be really clear that I'm not knocking niche in completely. Also, some coaches don't train in a much more integrative way. So it might be that the way they train is around setting goals or career change and therefore they're not experienced enough or don't have the knowledge. or the. integrated training to be able to help people with different things, but for those people who actually realize that they do enjoy working with someone on career change, one session and the other session, they're talking about big existential things, what it means to be human and everything in between that, like me, then. It's, you know, it's almost like a permission slip to not have to niche. So for later stage businesses, I think through client feedback, you know, reading testimonials, what your clients saying about you, almost that might tell you a lot about your niche. you know, the things that you enjoy writing about, things that you enjoy coaching about, they might actually lead you to a niche and therefore it might be more important at a later stage business or not. For me, it hasn't been that way.

Pippa: 34:05

Yeah, no, me either. and, you know, I wrote down a phrase this morning before we started talking, which feels so much more resonant now than it did this morning. And I kind of, it grabbed me then, which was that your niche finds you. You don't find it.

Liz: 34:18

absolutely. And I believe that is through you being yourself,

Pippa: 34:22

Yes.

Liz: 34:23

like your true niche, not the niche you think you should have, but your true niche finds you through you showing up as you.

Pippa: 34:33

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, amen. Amen to all of that. Jesus.

Liz: 34:38

Yeah. Yes.

Pippa: 34:39

I just took us proper biblical then what the hell? Yeah, no, my experience in coaching, humans is it is almost identical to yours. I know we have a different focus and a different flavor as such, but I'm as likely to be in a mastermind call or a one to one call with a client talking about. Anything in life that's yeah, sure. Because potentially impacts their business or almost all impacts their business, but let's face it being quote unquote successful, whatever your definition of that in your business is way more to do with you as a human and all of the human shit that you bring to the table that it is to, whether or not you know how to craft a funnel or write an email, welcome sequence, or any of this kind of shit can help you with all of the practical and strategic stuff, but it's going to be the stuff that. Unites us. And that's the same with your work, just not from a business point of view,

Liz: 35:26

Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, having worked with you, your coaching approach is very relational. Mine is too. So it's about what's going on relationally in the moment between the two of you. And as you say, someone might need help with a email sequence, but actually not, you know, them not having an email sequence, as you say, might have more to do with their self doubt or perfectionism or whatever it is that actually knowing what to write about.

Pippa: 35:56

Yes. Oh, I'll tell you what we could, I'm going to stop the conversation now because, well, because podcast episode. but I felt like we, I felt like we should record a series together, Liz. It's been so good. Thank you so

Liz: 36:05

Yeah, you're very welcome.

Pippa: 36:07

listen, tell us where everybody can find you on all of the various online, interwebby, portally type things. What's your, what your location of preference.

Liz: 36:16

you can find me on Instagram, liz. good. child. I mainly post, videos of my dog.

Pippa: 36:24

Nice.

Liz: 36:24

Beyond anything else. You can also find me on Facebook. I tend to use Facebook a little bit. Or, you can find me on my website, which is lizgoodchild. co. uk. That was,

Pippa: 36:33

that is fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on. I have a feeling I may be attempting to invite you on another day to have another conversation about something else because this has been such a good one. but that is all we have time for this week, folks. We will be back next week with more disobedient business fuckery and messing with the status quo. See you next Tuesday