Recognition for Your Work: Part Three – Getting Recognition in your Niche

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Recognition for Your Work – Part Two – Getting Recognition from your Peers

As a Portfolio Executive, I recommend that you become very sophisticated about narrowing down the initial niche in which you work. Consider what is your best niche based on the company life stage, headcount, geography, and sector. As you build your expertise in a niche, you can get recognition from your niche as the go-to person around a particular narrow segment.

Getting Started

How do you start to get recognition in your niche? In some ways, it’s very similar to the kind of recognition you get more generally in the previous articles I’ve discussed. Still, I would suggest that you develop a solid viewpoint about what’s happening in your niche. It needs to be a point of view slightly different from the generally accepted wisdom. Find something that will just create a little bit of an edge. Your point of view can be expressed in how you communicate on LinkedIn when you speak at events associated with your niche, if you do podcasts or blogs, and how you communicate with people as you find new clients and build visibility.

My Problem of Being Distinctive

I faced a real risk that I became positioned as a work style coach. If you go onto the internet and look for work style coaches, there are hundreds and probably thousands of work style coaches. I don’t want to be identified as work style coach. Indeed, I actively avoid being styled as a coach. I’ve chosen to narrow down on a particular niche. The specific niche is enabling people in full-time, salaried employment to transition to a Portfolio Executive work style. Even that, from my point of view, needs to be more distinctive. I need to have a point of view that creates an edge in the market and informs all my communication with that market. I need a point of view that, in effect, creates a distinctive brand. I have developed two threads to that point of view. Over time, they have started giving me a different voice and attracting certain types of people who relate to my niche.

My first point of view has been about transitioning from a working life of slavery, toil, and fear to a working life of freedom and joy and the capacity to love more of what you do and more of the people you do it with.

The second point of view is to develop a campaigning edge around the scourge of ageism. Ageism is particularly relevant to the people I want to work with because the people I want to work with are typically in their second-half careers, post-forty-five. If you are in this group, you’re starting to see some of the impacts of ageism. This gives me two distinctives in my niche, and I find people directly approach me because of these two positions.

Your Distinctive View

What could be a distinctive point of view that you could bring to the table? What is the story about the world in which you operate that you would like to express so you have more recognition in your niche? Developing a manifesto is one of the tools I use to help people think about this. Please have a look at my article on creating a manifesto. An alternative approach is to focus on your passions. It may be that the passion you choose has nothing to do with the professional skill you’re bringing. If your passion is for rugby, then perhaps the way that you create a distinctive voice is to express your passion for rugby. Talk about how you bring your understanding and insights about rugby into your professional work. Perhaps you have a passion for the theatre. Can you draw on your passion for the theatre, tell stories, and then relate them to your work? Taking that passion and taking it into your brand will be extremely powerful. I remember talking to a Portfolio Executive with a picture of a speedboat on his LinkedIn profile. As I started talking to him, I could see his love for operating in speedboats; he competed in speedboat competitions. It created an exciting, distinctive, personal brand for him in the market. Still, he hadn’t gone to the next step; he hadn’t related his experiences of being in a professional speedboat team. He was drawing on his professional expertise to get sponsorship for his team. He could have been the speedboat FD, or he could have been the speedboat sales director; he could have used that passion to create an attractive, distinctive brand within what he was doing.

Make your Passions Count

Whether your passion is around a cause (for me, that’s ageism), or whether it’s around a particular set of values (moving into freedom and joy and offering more love), or whether it’s around a specific passion for sport or culture, use your passion to build a distinctive voice within your niche.

Could you be identified as the speedboat X or the rugby-loving Y. You will start to attract and engage with people who share your passion? Others will recognise how you bring extra to everything you do as a passionate person. You get insights into how you see your work from that area of passion. Even as a sole practitioner, you can build a robust recognition of your work in your niche.