How to Use Your 9 to 5 Job to Find Your Niche
Finding a niche that’s right under your nose.
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One of the most common questions to starting a business is, ‘How do I identify my niche?’
You might have heard the holy grail of a profitable niche is the intersection of:
- What you’re good at doing
- What you love doing
- What the market will pay you for
Finding this intersection is a process and continues to evolve on your entrepreneurial journey.
It’s not something you’ll know at first, so allow it to continually evolve as you grow and discover new things about yourself and what people need and want.
If you work full-time, you can use your job to help identify your niche.
I always find it useful to see examples of how other people are applying what they’re learning in real time, so I thought I’d share how I used my 9 to 5 job to identify my niche.
What you’re good at doing
Do you know what you’re good at doing in your job?
Throughout my career, I’ve often been involved with writing.
Whether that’s writing company policies, emails, or reports, I’m always writing something.
Colleagues would ask me to vet their emails.
Bosses would ask me to prepare their presentation slides or do posters or emails to be sent out to employees.
When I started conducting leadership training in the workplace, participants would share in their evaluation forms that they found the trainer (aka me) engaging. They were surprised they could stay awake for the entire duration of the training.
Some managers would come up to me to let me know they enjoyed the session and how impressed they were with my confidence.
They tell me I should conduct more of these training and briefing sessions.
Some would say, ‘You’re not the typical HR person’ — whatever that meant.
I don’t say these to toot my own horn but to give you examples of how you need to pay attention to the feedback you’re receiving at work.
