Niche Down to Stand Out: The Secret to Thriving in a Crowded Market

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor. Here are another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Nicky Billou. He is an author and the founder of the eCircle Academy. Welcome, Nicky.

Speaker3: Lee, thanks for having me on the show. It’s an honor to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Why don’t we start with the circle? Tell us a little bit about eCircle Academy. How are you serving, folks?

Speaker3: So, Lea, we serve entrepreneurs, in particular those that are executive coaches, consultants and thought leaders. These tend to be heart driven men and women that are really, really good at what they do. But they may not necessarily be spectacular Our salespeople are spectacular marketers and brands, and in fact, a lot of these folks might be a little bit stuck inside of growing their business. And what we do, how we serve them is a we help them get mentally unstuck. So they believe in themselves and they believe they can go forward. So we really encourage them to believe in themselves and be we show them how to be effective at selling from the heart. Are you selling in such a way where you don’t feel like you need to take a shower afterwards and see how to go from being invisible to visible in your market space?

Lee Kantor: So let’s. Do you mind if we dive in a little bit here and kind of give some advice and thoughts to our listeners when it comes to this? Because I agree with you 100%. I mean, I can’t tell you how many people tell me. I’m just tired of being this best kept secret. How do you kind of reframe your marketing or what you’re doing in order to have people want to do business with you, instead of you having to kind of constantly be evangelizing and educating and selling people to what you do.

Speaker3: Well, that’s a great question. You know, um, it’s been said you can’t read the label from the inside of the bottle. Have you ever heard that phrase before?

Lee Kantor: Li yes.

Speaker3: So a lot of folks. Right? Really need someone to act as a pair of eyes to help them see what they don’t see. Okay. So a lot of folks that come into business, they’re they’re loathe to specialize and to niche down, you know what I’m saying? They want to, like, cast a wide net. They go, I don’t want to miss out on anything. But the problem is, if you try to be all things to all people, you’re going to be nothing to nobody. Let me tell you a quick story. I had this client. His name was Dan. He’s a fitness trainer and coach. Dan was a good guy. The kind of guy you’d want your sister to date. Okay. Just a super spectacular human being. And he was a good trainer. But what he wasn’t was a good business person because he only had seven clients and he wasn’t charging him very much like 25 bucks an hour at the time. He was making on a good month, $1,200 a month in the city of Toronto. Now, Toronto was the New York City of Canada. I’m sure you can appreciate the $1,200 a month doesn’t go very far in Toronto, just like it wouldn’t in New York, right?

Lee Kantor: Sure.

Speaker3: So Dan comes to see me because he’d heard that I’d helped some people. And the first thing that we did when we got together is I said, Dan, so tell me, who do you help? And he said to me, Nicky, I can help anybody with any health problem. I don’t want to miss out and I’m really good at it. I can help them lose weight. I can help them add muscle. I can help them get ready for events like weddings. And I’m like, hold on, stop. Dan, you’re trying to be all things to all people. He said, yeah, I guess you’re right. So I said, you need to specialize. You need to niche. Then he made the second mistake. He said, okay, I think I’m going to go after doctors. And I’m like, why doctors? He said, well, my dad’s a doctor and I love my dad. I said, okay, that part’s nice, but why else? He said, well, doctors make a lot of money and I’m going after the money. I need to make money. And here’s another thing a lot of folks do. They think they need to just go after markets that have a lot of money. Not necessarily markets they’re passionate about serving. And I told them, damn, this isn’t going to work. That vibe is going to turn people off.

Speaker3: He said, no, man, I gotta try this. So he did. A couple of months he got like two clients and I came over to him and I said to him, Danny, it’s not working. We need to do something else. He said, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right. Niche, niche, niche. Okay, I got a cardiologist, I go, cardiologist. Where’d that come from? He says, well, they make more money than doctors. I’m like, Dan, you’re doubling down on stupid. Don’t do that. He didn’t listen. He did it. He got no clients, no cardiologist. But what he did do serendipitously through the intervention of the good Lord, is he met a man who was a Paralympic athlete who lost a leg in a childhood accident. Now he was really, really able to help this guy. And the two of them connected. Just like peas and carrots from the great movie Forrest Gump. And he helped this guy win some medals at major international competitions. He comes back to me and he says to me, Niki, he’s kind of sheepish. I’m so sorry. You know, I should have listened to you. I owe you an apology. You owe me an apology, man. He said, no, no, no, I do. You know, you told me not to go after the money and that that wasn’t going to work.

Speaker3: And you were right. And, um, I can see that now. What I want to do now is I want to help people with missing limbs, because I really know how to help them. He was coming from his heart this time, Lee. And instantly I knew this was a good idea. And Lee, this is in the days before, you know, online marketing in a big way, an online coaching for fitness coaches and trainers. He signed up 400 clients in six weeks on word of mouth alone, 400 clients. That was over a run rate of a million, two a year, over a hundred grand a month. And why did this happen? A he stopped trying to cast his net wide and be all things to all people be. He stopped trying to just go after money, thinking that was the only way to be successful in business and see. He came from his heart, started helping people too badly, needed his help, and nobody else at that time was trying to help people with missing limbs work out. He was the first person to do it, and that’s why he signed up 400 clients in six weeks and started making a run rate of over 100 grand a month.

Lee Kantor: So you mentioned one of the the keys of the, um, kind of making that big of a jump was word of mouth. Um, how do you kind of create processes and scale around something that’s as tenuous as word of mouth?

Speaker3: Well, my friend, you know, it’s interesting that you mentioned that, um, I don’t believe that anybody should rely on just one form of marketing and lead generation. And I can assure you that as Dan’s business moved forward, he didn’t just rely on word of mouth. Um, and when I talk to people, I talk about 11 different channel strategies for generating revenue, referrals and word of mouth is one of the 11. The other one is to do cold outreach. The third is to run ads. The other one is to do podcasts and podcasts guesting. The fourth is to have a a book funnel, and the list goes on and on and on. And over time, Dan did add these other channels to his business. The point of that I’m trying to make with the story, though, is that he went from trying to be only focused on, um, who can pay me the most to being focused on who am I called and passionate about serving the most. And when he started to do that, that’s when the market really recognized his genius and moved forward with them. But if someone’s working with me in our business, we tell them that you have to have a minimum of three channels that you go after clients with, and we’re completely agnostic as to which ones they use, but they do need to use more than one because at any given time, for example, if you you’re counting on Facebook ads and then something like iOS 14 happens, your Facebook ads aren’t going to work as well. So you need multiple strategies.

Lee Kantor: Now, how do you help your clients with maybe the messaging because, you know, you went through your example of the fitness person and he said doctors and his father’s a doctor. I mean, that sounded to me like it was from the heart that he wants to help people like his father. So that wasn’t like a, you know, out of, you know, an insane kind of path. How do you kind of dig down to what is really kind of the, the big why not just the convenient way?

Speaker3: Well, for for Dan, he said that he wanted to help doctors because his dad was a doctor. But the next words out of his mouth is, I want to also help doctors because they got a lot of money And now those two, um, impulses were in competition with each other. Um, what you have to do is you got to first understand what your own zone of genius is, how you can help people. And within that zone of genius, you got to get to the point of who do you enjoy working with the most and why? That’s a question we ask people, and we really have them go deep into answering it before they land on a particular group that they want to help. So if you do that and you’re clear on who you want to help and why, it’s important for you to help them. And the primary reason you’re going after that group isn’t that I think I can make a lot of money from it. I think that’s what’s going to work the best for you, because the buyers of all of these days, they can smell it on somebody if that person is mostly there because they want to get their hand in their wallet.

Lee Kantor: So, um, where does the, uh, circle come in? Like, how does this play a role in your, uh, in your funnel and your the way you serve folks?

Speaker3: Well, like I said, if people are having a hard time leveraging their zone of genius into attracting the right level of clients, the right level of leads, the right level of business, or if they’re having a hard time enrolling people because their enrollment skills aren’t very good. Uh, or if they’re invisible, that’s where we come in. We we.

Lee Kantor: Right. So what is the service you’re providing? Is it a networking service? Is it coaching? Is it like, uh, watch videos?

Speaker3: Yeah, it’s it’s, uh, we have a three day, um, uh, high level mastermind, uh, workshop that we do, uh, four times a year. And we have an ongoing sales accountability, uh, coaching program that is a hybrid of both group coaching and one on one coaching. Um, and, um, we have a year long program that melds both of those together as well. Those are the main offerings we have.

Lee Kantor: So that’s how the people interact with you. They’re going. They do. They have to go through that first stage of the three day event.

Speaker3: Um, if they want to be part of the year long program. Yes, absolutely. Um, if they just want to do sales account accountability, they can do that on its own.

Lee Kantor: So, uh, so you can do coaching. Like, if you I can triage my situation with one on one coaching. That’s that’s an offering. It’s not. You have to do all of it or none of it.

Speaker3: No, no, it’s not like that. It’s not like that. We we we we have a conversation with each individual and we get clear a are we the best people to help them? And if the answer to that is yes, um, I want to get clear on what their biggest pain point is, what’s their bleeding neck. And based on that, I make a suggestion. And honestly, 50% of the time it really it’s a sales issue. So we bring them into our sales accountability program because we teach them how to sell from the heart, but sell because a lot of folks don’t want to go out there and sell. They try to avoid that. They try to post. They try to, you know, get someone to contact people on LinkedIn for them. They just don’t want to get out there and actually meet people and sell. And that’s what we have to help change their minds on. We’ve got to have their mindset be that sales isn’t some horrible thing. Sales is actually an act of love and an act of service. And by helping people get that straight in their being, that honestly helps a lot of people double, triple, quadruple, even tenfold their business once they’ve got that under control and they understand how to have a sales conversation with someone and how to overcome objections, uh, you know, then the next thing that that usually needs to be tackled is their messaging, because usually their messaging is so, so to week. And that’s where our, our three day, um, uh, thought leader workshop comes into play. The mastermind, because we work very much on helping them get really dialed in really tight with their message, and folks who’ve got a really tight dialed in message and know who they’re helping and what their pain points are. Usually have a much simpler time of growing and scaling their business in our experience.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned that there’s multiple channels to use to grow. It sounds like a lot of your clients are professional service providers of some sort. Um, yes. Do they do they have to include paid, or is there a way to do this without doing any paid advertising?

Speaker3: There is. Absolutely. I’m a big believer in organic. Huge huge believer in organic. Okay. Um, so podcasting is, you know, a low paid way of generating business, as I’m sure you’re aware. Right? Like being both a podcaster and a podcast guest doesn’t involve spending tons of money. Right. I mean, as a podcaster, you could spend 500 a thousand bucks a month on putting out your show, but you could also do it all yourself and not spend that money. The other thing that you can do is to be a podcast guest, and you can use channels like Pod Match, which is how you and I met. And that’s a wonderful way for you to be able to, um, generate leads and sales and clients without spending a lot of money. Right. And cold outreach, let’s face it. You know, good old fashioned calling, emailing, messaging doesn’t cost a lot of money. It just takes a lot of time. Now there’s other channels, right? Like we talk about your warm market network. Your own warm market, a fantastic place for you to reach out for business that’s not going to cost you money. Um, you can go on LinkedIn now.

Speaker3: If you do it yourself, it’s not going to cost you money, but it will cost you time. Uh, if you hire somebody, then that’ll cost you money that’s paid online funnels, obviously, those are paid stages. Now, usually when you go on stages, you have to pay to be on the stage or you do a revenue share. Same with strategic partnerships. Same with affiliates. Right. Um, but there’s channels like books and video channels which are not free, but they’re low, low investment. So you can get a book done without AI today for under $1,000. With AI, you can get a book done for under 100 bucks. So that could be a wonderful way for you to get books in the hands of your ideal clients that talk about the key problems that they have and video channels, you know it’s going to cost a bit of your time. You’re going to have to buy a camera, you’re going to have to buy a good microphone. But that’s pretty much all you have to invest in if you want to get, um, leads, sales and clients from that particular strategy. So I took you through all ten right now.

Lee Kantor: Well, how do how are you seeing the evolution of a lot of this content marketing with the advent of AI and a lot of the Google searches are kind of, uh, diminishing, and then a lot more of the results are AI driven answers.

Speaker3: Well, brother, these days, um, I is evolving so fast, I don’t know that I have a hard and fast answer for you, but I can tell you this. Um. If you are not taking the time to learn about how to use AI in your business, within a year or two, you might be out of business. Completely out of business. Um, we’re using AI to come up with, uh, some ways to generate leads. I am not including it in these channels that I took you through, because we haven’t tested it to the point that we can say, yeah, this works. This is something people can rely on. We’re also using AI to create a lot of the content, um, that we deliver to our clients. And that has been extremely helpful because we’ve gone from spending ten, 15 hours a week on content creation to spending like less than an hour a week on content creation. And there’s been no drop off in the quality of what we’re delivering to people. So that’s where I can be absolutely super stick.

Lee Kantor: So how would you as a, I don’t want to say, a professional podcast guest, but somebody who has a lot of experience as a podcast guest. How do you take one interview like you would maybe with this one we’re doing right now? And then how do you kind of leverage AI to kind of wring out the most value from this content that we’re creating right this second?

Speaker3: Well, we’ve used AI to create reels and put those reels out there from my own podcast. I haven’t used AI for content. For me being on a guest. Primary reason I come on a show, as I said to you before, is I really want to build relationships with audiences and hosts and this is what I think works. This is a little bit of a high tech veneer on a low tech idea back in the day. You know, in the 70s and 80s in the early 90s, a lot of people would generate new relationships by meeting with people having networking lunches and coffees. Podcasting is a new way to do that. In the last three years, I’ve been on over 780 shows, so I’ve developed over 780 new relationships. You may recall before we went on air, one of the questions I asked you is, can we spend a few minutes when we’re done for you and how to get to know each other? And I don’t know how many people have asked you that. And my experience, hardly anybody has ever asked me that when I’ve been the host. But I think that’s missing out on a massive opportunity. You and I have spent ten, 15, 20 minutes getting to know each other a little bit. Be great to end that conversation by having a bit more of a directed conversation about you and what you do and me and what I do, and that’s how relationships get built. That’s what’s been powerful about podcast guesting for me.

Lee Kantor: So any advice for people who want to? Um, I would agree with you 100% that I don’t think that individual professional service providers leverage relationships enough, and they don’t put in the effort to kind of create human to human relationships. They do what you said, I think at the at the top of this was, you know, they want to post and hope and then hope somebody connects with them. And then something magical happens, which I think, as you and I both know, that that’s like a lottery ticket, that the odds of that are are slim to none. For most of the people out there who don’t have a really engaged audience. But building human to human relationships is an old school way that still, I think works in today’s world.

Speaker3: I agree 1,000% 1,000% too few people understand how to do that. Number one piece of advice I give to people is, um, first of all, start being a guest on podcast. You can leverage platforms like Pod match, and if you’re not doing that, you’re missing out, because that’s a great way to meet a lot of great new business people. Secondly, prepare for your appearance. Know what you’re going to say. Answer questions. Have stories. You heard me. I gave you a couple of stories as part of this Fox Talbot story cell. Right? I’m sure you’ve heard this before. Um, and that’s really important for people to understand. And thirdly, for crying out loud, you’re taking 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour to spend time with a host who’s generally a good human being with good intentions, who’s trying to make a difference in the world, who’s a seeker, who’s looking for answers themselves, and who’s almost always a fellow business person. Why would you not take some time to get to know them? You know? So if you do these things, be useful to the audience. Do a good job for the host and spend some time with the host. Hello. This is going to exponentially expand your network work, and too many people today are trying to avoid having human human interaction and hoping that somehow sales magically happen. I got news for you. As of yet, it’s not working that way too well for most people. So why don’t you try it my way? You might be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, get a hold of the book. Finish line thinking how to think and win like a champion. I guess you have several books. The Thought Leader’s Journey, A Fable of Life and the Power of Connecting how to activate Profitable Relations Relationships by serving your network and the Circle Academy. Where should they go? What do they what should they do next to connect with you or somebody on the team?

Speaker3: So to get the books, you just go on Amazon, right? And type in my name, Nikki Blue. I’m the only Nikki Blue in the world that’s pretty easy to find me. Any mistakes there? Um, in terms of connecting with myself or the team. The best way to do that is we offer what’s called a complimentary success call, and you can book that by going to our website Academy. Com slash appointment. So if you’re stuck in your business and you want to get unstuck uh, and in particular, if maybe you’ve lost a little bit of faith, a little bit of hope, a little bit of belief, and you just want someone to get you infused with some of that hope, faith, belief and encouragement. Go to E Circle Academy. Com for appointment and we’ll be happy to do that for you.

Lee Kantor: Well, Nikki, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Speaker3: Lee, thanks for having me on the show. It’s an honor to be here.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.