If You Want to Get Rich, Build a Power Niche: . . . And a Bundle of Other Utterly Brilliant Marketing & Sales Ideas that Actually Work.

By Bruce M. Stachenfeld

Discover a bold new approach to success in the world of sales and marketing with this practical guide to building your Power Niche.

Bruce M. Stachenfeld is one of the most successful real estate lawyers in one of the toughest markets in the world: New York City. Now he shares the ideas and insights he developed through his own day-to-day experience. In If You Want to Get Rich, Build a Power Niche, Bruce shows you how you can become a superstar marketer or salesperson, whether you’re just starting out, starting a new business, or you’re a seasoned professional looking to improve your performance.

Bruce offers clear, step-by-step advice on how to implement the strategic marketing process of building a Power Niche. His method is based on the principle that ownership in a small niche is dramatically stronger than having little or no ownership in a larger market. If you want to grow your sales and increase your revenue while becoming a valued resource in your industry, you need to build your Power Niche!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642791679

Bruce M. Stachenfeld

Bruce M. Stachenfeld is a creative thinker, visionary and thought leader – all of this within the real estate industry. He is the founder and chairman of one of the top real estate law practices in the world, Adler & Stachenfeld LLP. Bruce is one of the most prodigious real estate rainmakers in the brutally competitive NYC market and is respected as one of the top real estate lawyers in NYC. He has an accomplished 40-year career as a real estate lawyer handling some of the largest and most complex real estate transactions. He is also a marketing guru, speaker, mentor, business advisor, and consultant as well as the author of The Real Estate Philosopher’s® Guide, and If You Want to Get Rich, Build a Power Niche. Bruce is a graduate of Tufts University, Summa Cum Laude, and Harvard Law School. He is also a two-time Ironman finisher which is his greatest personal achievement. Bruce is married to his wife, Ann, and they have two grown daughters. He resides in Chatham, New Jersey.

Book preview

PART I

A QUICK PEEK AT POWER NICHES

Since this book is entitled If You Want To Get Rich, Build A Power Niche, it would be kind of mean-spirited of me for you to have to spend the next sixty pages wondering what it is, and probably jumping ahead to figure it out, so let me give you a quick background. In some places in the book, I want you to really concentrate but not so much here. Just kind of absorb the idea here in a relaxed fashion.

Chapter One

THE POWER NICHE—THE BARE BONES

Let me start right in and explain what the Power Niche is all about.

Basically, marketing comes down to trying to come up with strategies to help the salespeople sell products or services to customers and clients. Most of the time marketers look at a large market and get excited with the theory that if I could only get 1% of the market, we would be really successful. But sadly, unless they are already entrenched in that market, their chance of getting any percentage of that market is remote, so this kind of thinking is a roadmap to failure.

The Power Niche, counterintuitively, turns this thinking on its head.

Instead of being a small fish selling a product or a service in an enormous pond where you have no ability to stand out or command pricing power, you create a much smaller pond where you are the only fish. Since you yourself have created this pond, you can achieve market dominance (i.e., monopoly power) in it and, therefore, you can also achieve pricing power. You then invite customers into your smaller pond. Although there are a lot fewer customers in your smaller pond than there were in the bigger pond, these customers have a higher desire for your product and will eagerly pay a higher price due to your market dominance, since you are effectively the ‘only game’ in that smaller pond.

Of course it isn’t quite that simple—but it isn’t much more complicated either.

Let me make it a lot easier to understand with a metaphor. The Power Niche, and the metaphor, are both counterintuitive but easy to follow at the same time.

Let’s say you are a divorce lawyer. I am deliberately picking an area of the law I don’t do and, happily, have no personal experience with, although I have watched a bunch of divorces of friends and family unfold over the years.

As a divorce lawyer, you handle situations in which two married people want to split up. There are all sorts of issues to be dealt with, including how to split up marital assets, what to do with the marital residence, the visitation and other rights and obligations pertaining to the children, and much more. It can be very simple or become extremely complicated. There are not only legal issues but emotions as well. It is the biggest transaction in the lives of the married couple, and everything depends on the outcome. The lawyer’s role is utterly critical.

Now, as a divorce lawyer, you build up expertise representing people in these situations. Over time, you get pretty good at it and maybe even great at it. You have seen an awful lot and you are really good at what is important. This includes getting a good economic deal for your client while at the same time helping your client come away from the process emotionally healthy, as well as at the same time making sure the children and other involved parties are treated well. We will collectively call these the Important Factors. You are great at what you do because you are great at handling the Important Factors for your clients and getting solid and strong results for them.

However, the problem is that every single divorce lawyer—even the ones who are truly awful or worse—claim the same thing. They all tout that they are great at achieving the Important Factors for their clients, whether they are good at it or not. In addition, whether you like it or not, prospective clients, when choosing a divorce lawyer, see a bunch of people all called divorce lawyers and they all look the same because they all tout the same thing, i.e., they all claim to be great at the Important Factors.

The prospective clients, therefore, have no way to make a proper choice that leads them to you for the right reason; namely, that you are really great at the Important Factors. You desperately want to believe that the better you get at the Important Factors, the more clients you will get and the more you can charge. However, this just isn’t reality; it is what you want reality to be. It is downright depressing.

In reality, clients choosing a lawyer have absolutely zero ability to assess whether you or your competition is really better at the Important Factors. Indeed probably 99% of them have never been in a divorce situation before. They then have only a few ways to choose:

A referral—someone, who also has no ability to assess the skillset of the lawyers at achieving the Important Factors, refers the client to a lawyer;

Which lawyer sounds the best at touting her expertise in achieving the Important Factors, i.e., the best salesperson but not necessarily the best lawyer.

Who the client just feels the most comfortable with at a meeting.

And similar ways of choosing, none of which have anything to do with the ability of the lawyer to achieve the Important Factors.

Alas—your true skill at the Important Factors just doesn’t get it done in that rough place called reality.

The reason is that you are trying to sell one thing and your client is trying to buy another thing. Reality and your assessment of reality are diverging.

Most people stick to their version of reality, even when they are repeatedly faced with facts to the contrary. Those who read this book and understand the Power Niche will be able to succeed and succeed dramatically.

So here is an example of a Power Niche. It is deliberately simple and indeed too simple, which is its flaw, but it illustrates exactly how the Power Niche works.

Let’s say you announce that you are going to handle divorces only for women.

Your immediate instinct is probably that this is a terrible idea. I mean you just lost fifty percent of all possible clients, i.e., the men. However, that is because you aren’t thinking the way your clients are thinking. Let me unwrap this a little more.

You, as seller, want to sell your skill with the Important Factors, but what is your client, the woman buyer thinking?

She may be thinking how much she hates men, or at least the man she is married to. She may be afraid that the husband may starve her of funds or not pay child support or otherwise put her in a terrible position. She may be mad that he cheated on her, or alternatively she may have a secret paramour that she is afraid will come out in the proceedings. She may have other personal things to hide that could be terribly embarrassing. Maybe she is afraid she will be embarrassed in her job, or even lose her job, when her husband reveals things she has done wrong. Turning the tables, maybe she wants to use the things that her husband has done wrong to her advantage. She may be potentially furious or terrified or vengeful or remorseful. Please note that I am not making value judgments here; I am just trying get a sense of what the client may be thinking, whether she articulates this or not.

How would she feel about a lawyer who only handles women? Maybe she will want a lawyer who knows how to—sorry to say this—take her husband to the cleaners?

Now as a lawyer, you think this is just dumb, because her desires are included within the Important Factors and realistically you can represent the man or the woman in the divorce just as easily. If you think this way, it is because you are so smart that you outsmart yourself. You aren’t selling what she is buying!

She may just feel a lot happier with a lawyer who is always on the woman’s side, who understands what she wants and what she feels, who knows all the tricks of the trade on behalf of a woman, and how to avoid trouble. Perhaps she may feel more comfortable with a lawyer who has relationships with women support groups in divorces. Perhaps she may have more trust in a lawyer who understands how a divorce could affect the children. Perhaps she wants to work with a lawyer who could informally refer her to former clients who will speak with her and meet with her, and maybe befriend her in her hour of need and help her out emotionally.

Bottom line is that a large percentage of women, when faced with ten plain old divorce lawyer choices where only one says women only, will pick the lawyer who goes with women only. Not only that, but she will likely be willing to pay more for that lawyer’s expertise.

Getting back to what you—the lawyer/salesperson—thinks. Maybe you think this is just dumb marketing mumbo jumbo—artificially and randomly chopping the market in half; but, what the heck, if it brings in clients, so what? But then—maybe to your surprise—you start to learn that it isn’t mumbo jumbo at all, but starts to morph into something extraordinary and of real value.

As you focus on women only, you get called by all sorts of non-profits, such as ones that focus on battered women, women trapped in marriages they hate, and all sorts of other women-focused situations. Maybe even the police department starts to call you when situations occur. You start getting referrals from these organizations and maybe from psychiatrists and marriage counselors too. Then—to your amazement—you start to realize that there really is a benefit to your clients from focusing on women only. You start to build up all sorts of intellectual capital about what you are doing and how your skillset and contacts can really help your clients. You start to build up an incredible wealth of contacts. You are called to speak at conferences and even start to become a thought leader in this niched area of divorce law. The more you do this, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more useful you become to your clients.

To your surprise, your ability to achieve the Important Factors—for women—increases, as you are able, through your network, to provide both legal and nonlegal advice to women, emotional support, statistical analysis of what women clients can, or should, get, and much more.

Just by twisting the dial of your focus—by getting rid of half of the universe of potential clients—you found yourself in a Power Niche, where you have clients chasing you (instead of the other way around) and can charge as much money as you want for your expertise!

Okay, this is a metaphor and things don’t actually go this well in real life, but you get the picture. Instead of selling yourself as a plain old divorce lawyer, you narrowed yourself down to a lawyer who had deep expertise in a smaller area of the law.

Then—over many divorces on behalf of women—you honed that expertise until you really built and owned this narrower niche. Within this niche, you had power, meaning bargaining power, with the client over the most critical element of price. The client couldn’t just compare you to another divorce lawyer, like the client wanted to do, because you had set things up so there really was no one to compare you to in your smaller (power) niche.

Now before you get too excited, please recognize that there is a major flaw in the example I picked; namely, that it is too big for you to have ownership of this niche, plus there are probably already lawyers doing this, which is another reason you likely can’t have enough ownership of it to have the pricing power you want. For it to really be usable as a true Power Niche, you would probably have to narrow the niche down much more.

But this little story is the essence of what a Power Niche is all about. As I teach you more in the following pages, it is pretty simple:

You pick a narrow area in your industry.

You have to be careful to pick an area—a niche—that isn’t already established, and one where you are the only player in that niche. The niche cannot be too big or too small because if it is too big or too small, it will fail one way or another. It also has to be targeted towards what is important to the persons buying the service or product.

As you do this, you don’t outsmart yourself with your version of reality, but rather live in the mindset of your customer, meaning you focus on what your customer wants to buy rather than what you want to sell. This is the trickiest part, and I will explain more about how to do this later.

Then you learn every single thing in the world about your niche. My catchphrase is that you read, read, read and learn, learn, learn. You do this until you know more than anyone else. Since it is an area you are largely creating out of nothing, this is actually pretty easy to do.

Then you tell everyone you know about it. This includes your mom and dad and everyone you know. You can even use social media here. The more people who know about it, the better. If you talk about what you are doing enough, then all your friends and relatives will start to help you by funneling information to you. They can’t help