"Pick a niche." It's the most common positioning advice there is. And it almost always means the same thing: pick an audience.
Dentists. SaaS founders. Women in leadership. Family-owned manufacturers. Narrow the who, and the market will find you.
Sometimes that works. Often it just moves the crowd. Now you're one of forty consultants for dentists instead of one of four thousand consultants for everyone.
The problem with audience-only niches
An audience niche tells people who you serve. It says nothing about why you instead of the other people serving them.
And audience niches are easy to copy. Anyone can add "for dentists" to their headline tomorrow. Plenty already have.
There's a second cost. An audience niche ties your business to one market. If that market shifts, or you outgrow it, or you simply get bored, your whole positioning has to be rebuilt.
The other way to niche
You can also niche by how you work.
A method niche says: here's the specific way I solve this problem, and here's why it works when the usual approach doesn't. The audience follows the method. People self-select because the approach fits their situation, not because their industry matches a label.
This is harder to copy. A competitor can borrow your audience in an afternoon. They can't borrow years of pattern recognition built into a named sequence.
It also travels. A method that works for one kind of client often works for adjacent ones. You can expand without starting over.
Signs your method is the real niche
You may already be niched by method without knowing it. Look for these:
Your best clients come from different industries. What they share isn't a sector. It's a situation your method fits.
Clients say "nobody else did it this way." They're describing your approach, not your industry knowledge.
You disagree with the standard playbook. There's a step you skip, a step you add or an order you insist on.
Referrals describe the work, not the field. People say "she's the one who fixes the thing where..." rather than "she works with accountants."
If several of these fit, your differentiation is already in your method. It just isn't in your positioning yet.
Audience still matters
This isn't an argument against knowing who you serve. You still need a clear picture of the people who benefit most.
The point is the order. When method comes first, audience becomes a description of who the method helps. When audience comes first, method becomes an afterthought, and you end up competing on familiarity with an industry.
The strongest positioning has both. A distinct method, aimed at the people it helps most.
Find the method first
This starts in Meaning, the first stage of the Translation Gap Method. Before you can position around a method, you have to see it clearly.
Try this. List your five best client results from the last few years. Ignore what industry each client was in. For each one, write down the problem they came in with and the turning point in the work.
Now look across the list. The industries are probably mixed. The problems and turning points probably aren't. That repeating pattern is your real niche.
Check what your positioning says now
The Positioning Diagnostic shows where your current positioning leans on audience alone and where it breaks for people who've never worked with you.
Anyone can claim your audience. Nobody can claim your method.
