In my business, I get to talk to a lot of educators who are thinking about starting their own educational consulting businesses, and let me tell you, they have LOTS of questions. Should I incorporate or not? How much should I charge? What should I put on my website? It goes on and on…
And they’re all good questions.
But I don’t often hear perhaps the most important question they SHOULD be asking: “How do I find a niche market for my educational consulting business?”
Because if they don’t think about that question and take steps to get it right, it could mean the end of their fledgling business before it even gets off the ground.
So, when I get a chance to address start-up educational consultants about finding their niche market, I like to walk them through the simple step-by-step process that I’d like to share with you today.
But first of all, some of you may be wondering…
What IS a Niche Market?
According to Dictionary.com, a niche market is “a demand for a very specialized product or commodity.”
Now, a consultant doesn’t deal in commodities, so the key words for us here are “demand” and “specialized product” (to which we could add “or service”).
I’ll dig into this more below, but just as a starting point, a successful consulting business would offer products and/or services for which there is sufficient demand. Sounds simple, right? Just offer a product or service that a lot of people in your field could use.
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. If the product or service you offer is in too much demand, you’ll be competing with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of other consultants. As the new kid on the block, you’re probably not going to win that game.
It’s the Goldilocks Principle in action: what we’re looking for is a business focus that’s at that “just right” level of specificity where competition isn’t overwhelming but where there’s still plenty of demand.
OK, now that we’ve gotten that definition out of the way and explained why establishing yourself in a niche is so important, let’s break down the process step by step.
Start with Expertise…Or Don’t Start at All
The first question I ask educators looking to launch a consulting business is, “Do you have an area of expertise?” Obviously, if you don’t have an area of expertise, you can’t really expect others to hire you, right? But even though this one is super obvious, I feel like I have to mention it right up front because expertise is the basis upon which everything else is built.
You have to know more about something than anyone else or be better at something than anyone else (or, at least, than 90+% of the educators out there) so that you have something of value to share.
So, do you? Because if you’re thinking about launching an educational consulting business, and you can’t confidently say that you know more about X (whatever X is) than 90+% of educators in your field, you need to hold off and spend all your free time building that expertise first.
How? Read books. Research. Interview experts. Do action research in your own classroom. Do whatever it takes to build your expertise in one area until you reach the point where you’re seen by those around you as the “go-to person” on topic X.
Your Unique Selling Proposition
So yes, you need to become an expert on a topic. But that’s just the price of admission. It doesn’t guarantee you anything.
So, now what?
The next step is to figure out how broad or how narrow your area of expertise needs to be.
On one hand, many consultants worry that, if they don’t narrow their area of expertise down to something really specific, they won’t stand out enough from everyone else to be noticed. On the other hand, they worry that, if they carve out a niche that’s too narrow, they won’t get hired often enough because their expertise won’t be seen as the answer to a broad-enough problem.
So, what’s the “sweet spot” of specificity to go for? I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve talked to a lot of successful consultants about it, as well, and there’s a strong consensus on the right answer.
And that answer is: carve out a very specific, unique niche in an area where your target audience is struggling. The truth is, your new business has a better chance of succeeding if you err on the side of being too narrow and specific than if you err on the side of being too broad.
Why? Because your first challenge as a consultant is to get found (at least until you reach the level of “household name,” and then most of the work comes to you). And if you’ve defined yourself and your business very broadly, it’s going to be very hard to get found.
Here’s an example. I just typed “educational consultant” into Google. You know how many results Google delivered? 920,000,000. Yep. Nine hundred and twenty million! Good luck rising to the top few pages on that search term.
But let’s say that you’re an expert on the teaching of reading. Type “reading consultant” into Google and you still get 258,000,000 results.
Let’s go narrower. Let’s say that you’re really more of an expert on teaching reading in the content areas. Let’s type in, “consultant teaching reading in the content areas.” 66,800,000 results. Still a lot.
Now, let’s say your background is as a secondary language arts teacher. Let’s narrow things down some more by adding “secondary” to our search. Now we’re down to 33,700,000, and several independent consultants actually show up on page 1. Now we’re getting somewhere! At that level of specificity, a good, targeted website written by an SEO expert can start getting you positioned where you need to be to get found.
The point is, if you really do have expertise in teaching secondary teachers across the content areas how to more effectively teach reading, you should say so! If you just call yourself an “educational consultant,” you’re going to be lumping yourself in with 920 million other search results, and you’ll never get found.
So, the first step is to think about your area of expertise very specifically and try to nail down what folks in the business world call your “unique selling proposition” or USP.
All that means is, how are you different from everyone else in your broader field? Sure, you’re an educational consultant, but more specifically you’re a reading consultant…and more specifically than that, you’re a secondary reading consultant…keep niching it down until you describe as precisely as you can your true area of expertise.
Oh, and remember the fear that many consultants have that, if they get too specific, they won’t be able to find enough work? Don’t worry too much about that.
Look at our example. Are there secondary schools out there who are focusing on trying to improve their reading scores and have decided that they need everyone on staff to do a bit of the work, so they’ve decided to make reading across the curriculum a focus? Sure. Hundreds and hundreds of them across the country, in fact. And there’s no way you could work with them all. If you could sell your services to even a fraction of that group, you’d have plenty of work.
Niche It…Then Twist It
If you do what I suggest above, you should be able to find yourself a niche in which you can compete. But you’re not home free yet, because guess what? There’s still going to be competition even in that narrow niche.
Remember how many results we found on Google when we typed in even the very specific search term of “consultant teaching reading in the content areas secondary”? Right, 33,700,000. Now, most of those results aren’t consultants. They’re companies producing materials, they’re research articles, they’re products, and on and on. Still, thousands of them are consultants.
I said in the previous section that there were plenty of schools who might need your services, but what’s going to make them choose you over someone else in your niche? I suggest my “niche it, then twist it” approach.
In our example, our consultant has found her niche—doing PD for secondary schools who need help on effectively teaching reading in the content areas. So far, so good.
But now she needs to set herself apart in some way from the other consultants offering the same services. She needs to “twist” it. By “twist” I mean, are her materials different in some way than those used by others in her niche? Does she offer some kind of unique follow-up service that leads to a longer-term relationship with the school? Is she a more engaging presenter? She needs to find one or two things about her approach that are different than anyone else out there.
This step will probably take some research. You need to look at your top competitors and gather some competitive intelligence. How do they do things? What kind of services do they offer? What kind of materials do they use?
Once you know the answers to those questions, find an answer to the big question: “How can I do things differently in some way than all of my top competitors that will give me an edge on getting hired over them?”
So, the first “must-have” for a successful educational consulting business is expertise in a niche.
And the three-step formula to achieve the positioning you need is:
- develop expertise,
- niche it, then
- twist it.
Good luck!
