The Business Drift: Why Narrowing Your Niche Feels So Exposing
Twenty-odd years ago I wrote my first course, for real estate agents, on mould. The whole thing came down to one idea: mould is never the problem. It's the symptom. No mould without moisture, so the only real question is where that moisture's coming from... simple.
What I remember more than the content is the fear. I'd built something. Now I had to put it in front of people and find out if it was worth their time.
Two patches of mould can look similar. The mould won't tell you where the moisture is coming from, you need to use your own skills and wisdom for that.
A business works the same way. Two businesses can look equally fine from the outside, and that tells you nothing about which one's actually drifted from the woman who built it. Working that out takes the same thing, your own skills and wisdom, not what's visible on the surface. A wall with nothing visibly wrong on it.
I call that gap the drift .
Not a break. Just a business that kept building toward whatever was easiest to sell, while the woman running it kept changing.
Ask "does anything look wrong" and the answer's no. Ask "does this still fit" and you get somewhere, a less comfortable question, which is why most people skip it.
This time round, that caught me out. I've done this before. I know what I'm doing. And still, with a business sharper than it's ever been, I found myself doing the thing I warn other women about: wondering if I'd gone too narrow, if I was about to exclude people who could benefit, if the safer move was to soften the edges before anyone saw it.
(Small aside: this hit days before I ran a workshop on exactly this decision. Helping women through the fear of narrowing their focus, then feeling it myself the week before. The fear doesn't check whether you've got a framework for it.)
The wide version already worked. That's what made it hard.
By wide, I mean I served anyone who asked for help, rather than being focused on the specific work I did and didn't do. Some of that was fear, plain and simple: I had a team to support, and if we didn't take on everything that came through the door, what would we do instead? What if there wasn't enough work at all?
That version of my business wasn't failing, though. No crisis, no dropped income, nobody telling me to change. Staying broad was the easier, more sensible thing to do.
Which is exactly why it took so long. When a business already works, there's no outside urgency. The only evidence is internal: a version of yourself the business no longer describes. Harder to act on than something that's visibly not working, because nobody else can see it. Most days, neither can you.
Narrowing looks like a marketing decision from the outside. From the inside, it's admitting the wide version worked partly by not asking too much of you.
"I help anyone" never has to answer whether it's still honest. Something specific has nowhere left to hide that question .
Nobody was making me do this. That's exactly why it felt so exposed.
No outside evidence to lean on, no crisis to point to. Just an internal decision, and the fear that comes with one.
You're the only one who knows the current version doesn't fit anymore. That's lonelier than being told to change. It isn't a sign you've got it wrong.
I didn't talk myself out of my first course twenty years ago. I'm not talking myself out of this either. Staying the course wasn't confidence.
It was deciding the fear wasn't a reliable narrator, and going ahead anyway.
If you're in the middle of this right now
You've worked out who you serve and why. You're standing at the edge of making that public. The wobble doesn't mean you've got it wrong. It might just mean nobody's forcing you to do this, which is exactly why it counts.
This is the first piece of what I call Anchor : reconnecting with who you are now, before you touch anything else. If narrowing your focus is what's keeping you up, I run a live workshop on it a few times a year: two hours, twenty places, no replay. Worth checking when the next one's on.
