Last week I was interviewed for the Fabulous Fempreneurship podcast and one of the questions was about the major mistakes coaches make when positioning.

And not picking a niche is one of them.

I LOVE to watch these cooking challenged where the cooks have to make something great from weird ingredients.

So, there’s this guy – one of the youngest – I’d call him the rebel of the group – always a bit different, bandana around his head and cheeky.

He has a lot of wins in the show and might just leave it being the winner.

Today is a major selection day – and failing means leaving.

So, when the ingredients for each cook are revealed his combination is ludicrous – I wouldn’t even know where to start.

You can tell his wheels are churning but then his eyes lighten up.

Everyone is scrambling to the pantry and fridge.

Our young rebel commits to three different variations for his dish.

And I can see the same surprise and mild shock on the judges’ faces that overcomes me!

Isn’t it hard enough to excel with his forced-selection?

He’s cooking and arranging feverishly…

Gone is his cheekiness and you can tell he’s outright stressed.

And when the bell rings… his third variation is not ready!

Over and out – not just was his presentation subpar. His variations were supposed to work together and now they couldn’t.

He has to leave the show, losing the chance to win 100K.

Interviewed later on he concedes that his inability to make a choice for 1 of the 3 variations was a mistake.

You might ask yourself why I’m sharing this story…

Last week I was interviewed for the Fabulous Fempreneurship podcast and one of the questions was about the major mistakes entrepreneurs make when it comes to positioning.

And not picking a niche is one of them.

And this is exactly what this young cook did – he had a great idea how to orchestrate the difficult selection, but then he had more and wanted to do them all.

If he had settled for the best variation, he might have very well won this round or even the whole contest.

#1 – It’s really hard to build a solid foundation and marketing assets that convert – because talking to everybody is talking to nobody

When you yourself are not clear about who you serve and what you do for your clients, you won’t be able to talk to their burning problems.

You won’t know them intimately enough to use their words and basically be in their heads so that you can address the pain points that move them to make a decision to work with you.

#2 – You will be in constant decision mode, which gets pretty exhausting after a while

Imagine you are on a party and someone asks you what you do. If you are catering to very different people you will try to decide which of your “what I do statements” will be the right one. This takes away from your enthusiasm, often that statement then comes a bit tentatively to see if there is a reaction from the other person.

But this way it will be hard to convince anyone that this is what you are living and breathing for.

#3 – Real excellence comes with time and experience, and when jumping between options this takes a lot longer

After I helped her niche down one of my clients told me, that she just reads about the topics she chose as her fields of excellence and doesn’t bother to read as widely as she did before – not in depth. When I asked her if she had more free time due to that, she laughed and said “no, not really, now I’m just reading more on my main topics and can go much deeper”.

This will make her a sought-after expert in her fields, don’t you think?

And together with a clear and compelling communication this will make marketing a lot easier.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash