Your Business Wants To Be a Mutant Clover

Bet you didn’t know that your small business wants to be a mutant clover. In fact, it believes it’s destined to be one.

And it’s hoping you’ll see its mutant possibilities and get on board.

Let’s back up for a minute…

You’ve got a great little business. Or a great big banging business. {More than likely it’s something in between.}

And you’ve been feeling for a while that it’s time to get more niche-y.

Every well-nichified business is like a mutant clover. Photo by Benimoto courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

There are bugs to be worked out in your current business model:

Your business is straddling too much territory, or it obliges you to divide your foci disparately, or it’s set up in a way that totally exhausts you.

Or maybe, for some reason, you designed yourself a business that is so far removed from your entrepreneurial sweet spot that you hardly recognize your essential self in it. It’s a construction of who you can be, but you don’t really want to be that person all the time when you’re working.

Possibly it’s time for you to take a serious look at what you really want to do and what people say you’re really good at doing.

You’re ready to uncover the niche of you. The niche of you is the conceptual expression of your calling-set-forth-to-the-world.

Here’s the incomparable Jen Louden on the subject of your calling:

Your calling is something you can’t help but do and that doesn’t mean you recognize it or believe it or like it.

Your calling is not unique – your natural expression of it is.

– “Are You Too Intense?”, Jen Louden, ComfortQueen.com

Got that? You need to be looking at the thing you can’t help doing.

And — get this! — you don’t have to worry about all the other people who are already doing it. Because no one is doing it like you can/will do it.

This is the mutant clover part. It’s an act of nature, just like your inborn gifts and talents and the things you can’t stop doing.

You can avoid this conversation, or you can have it sooner rather than later.

{Confirmation for the perceptive: I’m in this season of examination right now with Abby Kerr Ink. Love, love, love what I get to do and who I get to work with, but sensing I could be even sharper and more delightful if I winnow some things down. So that some other things can open up, big-like.}

Get a piece of paper.

You’re going to write down two headings and then some stuff underneath each one.

The first heading is

What do I really want to offer people?

Underneath that, write down all the things you’d love to help people do, or all the things you’d love to make for people {can be physical or digital goods}. Make sure these are things you’d also want to do if money were no object. {Now that’s a game-changing thought.}

Make your list as long as you want it to be, but I’d consider keeping it on the shorter side. Three things might feel about right.

When you’ve outed yourself on paper {entrepreneurially speaking}, now write the second heading, which is

What do people say I’m really good at?

‘People’ might be your dad, your favorite aunt, or the nice lady who co-ordinates the charity drive you volunteer for each Christmas. But the people who really matter, in this exercise, are probably people whom you have helped with something through your business. A client. A customer. A fellow entrepreneur you’ve chatted with on Skype.

If your business isn’t up and running yet, then this exercise doesn’t quite apply to you, but you can certainly use it as a bellwether for where you’re thinking of heading. In your case, ‘people’ probably means friends, acquaintances, and other creative types who know what you’d like to do and have seen you practice it in some way.

Why should we care what people think we’re good at?

Because usually, others are quicker to identify our shades of brilliance and variations of extra-human excellence than we are. We tend to be receding, crouching creatures like that. We can’t see ourselves because we’re too busy hiding.

Your business wants to come into its full niche-y glory. It wants to be a mutant clover. But it can only do that if you let it.

Are you willing to try this nichifying exercise? If so, let’s talk about your lists in the comments. {Promise I’ll be sharing mine soon, too.}