161. Niching Down: Aligning Your Actions With Your Aspirations with Chelsea Stevenson
Niche Down to Flourish
Getting clear on your niche can help your business flourish.
Finding your niche can mean more than honing your service offerings and ideal client avatar. Niching down can help you express your values in your business.
But the way that niching is talked about and taught in the mainstream can become a matter of chasing money and be out of alignment with your values.
Chelsea Stevenson joins Erica for a conversation about what it has really meant to niche down her business and how her values inform all of her business decisions, from the services she offers, to how she attracts her ideal clients.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
How your values inform your niche and the clients you want to reach
How niching down in alignment with your values helps your business thrive
Why niching down has to be about more than demographics
Why you need to go deeper when envisioning your ideal clients
Sustainable Values
Chelsea Stevenson is a professional henna artist, business strategist, and founder of Hennapreneur.
With a focus on value-based branding and sustainability, Chelsea brings passion and intensity to her role as an artist, educator, and mentor. She owns the most celebrated henna boutique in Baltimore, MD, and supports creative entrepreneurs around the world through her online platform. She holds a strong value for building a business that honors and supports your life — not vice versa.
When she isn’t serving her clients and students, you can find Chelsea planning her next getaway or indulging in a shameless Netflix binge with an artisanal tea in hand.
Demographics Are Not Enough
On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Chelsea Stevenson says that when people talk about niche in their businesses, too often, the advice is to “get real specific about your service, but play real safe when it comes to the ideal client.”
Chasing a “safe” demographic avatar means avoiding excluding anyone, going too far, or possibly offending anyone, but it can result in “dealing with people maybe you don’t want to spend your day with.”
By the nature of her work as a henna artist, Chelsea says she was already niche in her services, but she discovered that, in reality, that wasn’t enough to get in front of the kinds of clients she wanted to work with.
“What’s the point of building a business that you really dislike?”
So she chose to shift the framework she’d been taught. “Instead of focusing on the demographics, I began to make a shift in my marketing and in the way that I approach ideal client ideation and niching down.”
By doing a deep dive into psychographics and jobs to be done theory, along with other concepts and aspects of her ideal clients, she found that leaning into niching down her ideal client, and really “getting to know that one single person who you would love to serve every single day…it changes your business entirely.”
Erica says that niche intersects what you do and who you do it for, and that too often, client avatars become “this Frankenstein ideal client that does not exist.”
She continues, “The minute that you go only with demographics, that’s already a problem…that stuff is great for Facebook ads, and there’s a place for it…but if you’re trying to get to a human…then you need to figure out who they are and it needs to go beyond how much money they can put in your pocket.”
Change the Archetypes
Erica says that the ideal client avatar based on demographics is an old archetype taught through the lens of white supremacy that has left many Black entrepreneurs wondering why it didn’t feel right and why it didn’t work for them.
Chelsea adds, “this is not the way that our cultural communities operate…And so of course it’s not going to resonate with us, and especially if we are in the business of serving other Black people specifically.”
Chelsea says that for her, the transition away from thinking strictly in demographics and moving away from that old archetype happened in waves.
She says, “I was always very cognizant and conscientious around who I was doing business with because…I’m very cautious with my energy.”
But when she went full-time with her business in 2014, she chose to get very specific about her niche. At the time, she had a young child and was about to give birth to her second, and “I wanted to also be working with people who understood my own values around motherhood and the importance of having my children nearby me.”
She continues, “in order for me to be able to facilitate this dynamic that I wanted to create, I was…going to have to get real specific about the type of person that I want to work with.
Targeting her business beyond barebones demographics “For me it was a question of aligning my business with my own personal values and with my lifestyle…Your actions have to align with your aspirations.”
When she relaunched her business after moving back to the Baltimore area from Texas, Chelsea got even more specific.
It was “a beautiful opportunity to do it this time and go all the way in and not be so scared about, are there going to be people who look like me, who are going to support me?”
And that support had to be in alignment with her core values.
“I was not willing to continue to compromise what I was building, for my own sanity…What I actually wanted to do was empower my community with an ancestral art that was not lost, but stolen from us in the Middle Passage.”
The safer bet of providing services to primarily white women, “out of fear that they’re the only ones that are going to pay me…it didn’t feel good to me anymore.”
She continues, “It can’t just be aligning the business with the lifestyle. It really has to be aligned with the core value; what do I feel that I’m placed here to do?”
Growth Through Your Values
Chelsea says that niching down based on her values and the kinds of clients she wants to work with has helped her business flourish, but many people are afraid of limiting themselves too much by niching.
“There’s this fear of, if I niche down, I’m gonna limit my ability to grow, or I’m gonna limit my ability to scale.”
She says the opposite is true. “The more specific you are and the more vocal you are about your values, about what you’re here to do through your work…the more authentic you are about that…not only will you address more clients…you’ll also attract better quality clients.”
She adds that niching down has almost eliminated negative client experiences for her. “It just doesn’t happen because we are so aligned at a values level.”
“You can attract better clients that will pay you what you’re looking for, who will value you, who will respect you, and who you will be so excited to work with every single day…This is actually what it takes to grow in a way that feels so empowering and so well aligned.”
Go Deeper
Chelsea’s advice for entrepreneurs seeking to hone their niche is to “go deeper.”
“As soon as you think you know your client, go deeper. You need to be asking more questions; you need to know that person like that back of your hand.”
She says it has to go deeper than brands they buy or where they eat brunch; you need to know “what is it that actually is motivating her when she gets up in the morning and what is keeping her up late at night?”
She continues, “We need to know these things because our work is the means to a greater end…You have to honor the person behind the transaction.”
Ready to Dive Deeper?
To find your niche, you have to know your values. Being clear on this means you can chart a course in your business that prioritizes your values and the impact you want to have.
Being explicit about who you support and how your actions align with that can help your business thrive. If you want support in learning to lead through your values, join us for the Implicit to Explicit Masterclass.
Learn more about leading through your values at pauseontheplay.com/explicit.
Connect with Chelsea Stevenson:
Facebook:@hennapreneur
Instagram:@hennapreneur.official