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“Stay in your lane.” We hear it all the time now: in our professional lives, in our personal lives, in our relationships. It’s a saying that advises us to stick to what we know, guides us to specialize instead of generalizing, and encourages us to find a niche market and stick with it. Sounds like good advice, right?
I’m not so sure, actually. When I launched my PR business more than a decade ago, I did just that: I focused on the market segment I knew best and targeted my services only at them. But over the years, I found myself peering curiously into different industries, wondering how my business would change and how I would evolve personally if I pushed myself to try entering new business sectors.
Entrepreneurs have the luxury of trying to keep things fresh and exciting for themselves, and while I certainly have enough challenges in my personal life, it’s amazing how I always seem to invite new challenges into my professional life. I think it’s because it keeps me energized and alert. The world is moving so fast, technology is advancing so rapidly that I feel my business simply must transform in tune with the climate in which it operates.
That’s why this is my new advice to other business owners: Master your lane, yes… but then have some fun on the road, changing lanes and outpacing the competition while having fun crossing multiple highways and byways!
Related: No Referrals, No Problems: 3 Ways to Win Clients in Highly Competitive Industries
Reasons to expand
Entering new markets is not for everyone, it is not suitable for all companies. A specialty cheese shop in Anytown, USA may want to stay exactly where it is, doing exactly what it’s doing. Sure, the store may want to add online sales for long-distance purchases, but their brand is to serve a mostly local clientele with inventory found nowhere else within a 150-mile radius.
But a candle maker that started out focusing exclusively on the home furnishings market may actually consider expanding once home sales stabilize. One of my clients has expanded into the corporate sector, in fact, with a campaign aimed at company retreats and a new line of scented products for relaxation techniques in the office. Its sales increased 17% within the second quarter of entering the enterprise space.
So before you think about ways to expand, consider the reasons you might want to expand in the first place, including:
- You’ve saturated your initial market and are experiencing limited growth potential. I started in a downtown office in a foodie-friendly city, which worked great for my core knowledge base, the food and beverage industry. But after a few years, after submitting my proposal to all the local restaurants and venues I wanted to represent, I found myself at a dead end. From there the logical path arrived at the city’s hotel market.
- The new people you are hiring have additional areas of expertise. As my business grew, so did my staff. And they brought with them industry skills and know-how that go beyond my own. One of my editors, for example, had deep experience in book publishing. I used his background to enter the book promotion market, and before long, the one author I represented turned into two, then three.
- To keep up with current market trends. Some companies can afford to stick to one thing and do it exceptionally well. Others are more vulnerable to variable winds outside. During the pandemic, when people hardly dined out or went on vacation (my niche markets at the time), they they were purchase goods for home consumption and focus on your home bases. This proved to be an opportune time to begin broadening my photography lens to retail brands and real estate.
Related: 4 Honest Truths That Will Make You a Better Boss
How to expand in four starting steps
Once you have the drive and a strong justification to expand into new industries, along with the bandwidth and human resources to do so, here are some tips I’ve followed myself to move my business from a hospitality-based company and on tourism to one that now also includes the financial, technological, well-being and non-profit spheres:
Step 1: Start by targeting adjacent sectors. If, for example, you serve the residential real estate market, probe commercial real estate. If your clients include malls and shopping centers, your expertise will translate well to large event venues, such as sports arenas. The goal is to bring some of your institutional knowledge to the table as you learn the specific details of related fields.
Step no. 2: Attend industry-specific events and conferences. You don’t have to find customers first; a good approach is to simply find a group of people in your target industry who you can network with and from whom you can gain a better and deeper understanding of the field. At a national association meeting I attended, I invited a speaker to lunch who had really impressed me with his presentation and asked him if he would be willing to mentor me. Several months of email exchanges followed, in which he shared valuable information and directed me to the most productive next steps.
Step 3: Don’t expand too quickly. Identify only one or two new areas at a time, then set a goal to establish yourself in this area before trying to cover even more new ground. Like any new terrain, the more you cover it, the more familiar you will become with the territory.
Step 4: In these new industries, initially limit your services. This is the equivalent of dipping your feet in the water to acclimate to the temperature instead of diving headfirst into the depths. An example from my transition journey: I deal with social media; my team knows social media. So when I embarked on my first financial venture, we didn’t have to know the details of titles, liens and collateral right from the start; we just needed to know how to put together an effective social plan for the client that delivered the expected results. In the space of a few months we have learned the language and jargon specific to this sector; the client was more than okay with initially providing us with the appropriate jargon and content ideas for the posts if only we could take this now necessary task off their hands.
Another example: When I first got into tech, I felt a little out of water with my boutique lifestyle background. So I didn’t offer this particular client my full marketing and PR package. I only proposed media relations to start with, and once we demonstrated our ability in this area, our service contract added advertising and publicity functions. In essence, then, the success of your minimum bid deals will be a good litmus test for the rest of your customer transactions.
Related: 7 Empowerment Strategies for Leaders Moving into New Roles
Serving new industries over the past few years has been challenging and sometimes frustrating, but it has also been invigorating and surprisingly fulfilling. Every time I get a client in an area new to me, I feel a sense of accomplishment that I never imagined when I was just starting out and was simply hoping for a half dozen or so clients to keep me afloat.
Moral of the story: You don’t need to limit yourself. When you feel it’s time to reach out, reach out. You’ll never know what you’ll hold onto next, unless you stretch yourself!