Niching down may seem impossible for multi-passionate entrepreneurs, but there are ways to make it work and have a successful business!

The other day, one of my old friends called me and we got chatting.

Her: I saw your post on Facebook recently and thought of calling you. Are you still running your kids’ food company?

Me: Yes, I am.

Her: But all the posts I’ve seen recently are about ADHD – nothing about your antiques store or your traditional wellness venture. Weren’t you also talking about e-commerce coaching before this?

Me: Uh, yes, those ventures are still running. Right now, I’m focused on my ADHD entrepreneurship program.

Her (sounding baffled): How are you running so many businesses at once? Isn’t it too much?

Lately, this has been the course of many conversations I’ve had with people I know. Nearly everyone seems surprised at the number of things I’m doing at the same time. They’re also of the opinion that I’m spreading myself too thin.

I admit, I’ve also asked myself the same question – after all, why am I doing this to myself? Why do I have so many passions and why do I insist on working on each and every one of them?

Now I know the answer; it’s because I’m a multipassionate entrepreneur.

Who is a multipassionate entrepreneur?

As the name suggests, a multipassionate entrepreneur is someone who has multiple interests and includes all of them in their business ventures. They’re often people who are creative, come up with new ideas all the time and have difficulty narrowing down their focus.

Before my ADHD diagnosis, I often wondered why I got bored so easily and why I couldn’t stick to something for long. Now, however, I know that it’s because of the ADHD, which causes me to seek that dopamine hit all the time, moving on to the next shiny thing.

This is not to say that every multipassionate individual has ADHD, or that every entrepreneur with ADHD has multiple passions. It’s just that both these conditions are true for me, and it explains my desperate need to have my fingers in multiple pies at once!

The Story of My Multiple Passions

The first business I ever started was an e-commerce store that sold healthy food for babies and kids. Being my first baby, I was super-excited about growing and scaling it. However, once that was done, I got bored, and my attention shifted to antiques.

Obviously, kids’ food and antiques are entirely different niches, so I started a brand new business for the latter.

Once that was up and running, my attention was directed towards traditional and holistic wellness.

As you can imagine, I created another brand. And another. And another.

In short, my multi-passionate self ended up creating 57 businesses! You can see a full list of everything I started in this PDF, including the ones that failed, succeeded or were abandoned.

At that point, coaching was all the rage, and everyone was doing it. It sounded good, and I decided I wanted to become a coach. As if whatever I was doing so far wasn’t enough!

My Coaching Story

By now, I had quite a bit of experience running successful e-commerce businesses, so I decided to become an e-commerce coach. My target audience was women who had left their jobs after having kids and who were trying to create a source of income.

It was quite exciting in the beginning, and I started with sixty students. However, many of them dropped off due to personal reasons and by the end of the program, only 2-3 were able to have a successful launch.

I changed my branding and my target audience – I would now help existing e-commerce brands scale. I started with group coaching sessions and then moved on to one-on-one consultations.

But it was all getting too much. I had to hire a team to take on more clients, but then I needed more clients to justify the team. I felt like I was going around in circles and ultimately burned out.

My Burnout Story

I realized I couldn’t keep going like this – I needed help. I was itching to start something new, but I didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes. I talked to several coaches and experts, and they all had one thing to say – niche down.

Make a list of your areas of expertise, they said. Then pick one area and focus on niching down.

If only it were that easy!

Niching down was supposed to be this magical thing that would fix everything. Sounds great in theory, and it may actually work for many people.

But not for multipassionate entrepreneurs like me.

ADHD or not, I know that there are many of us out there who are multi-passionate, multiniche or whatever else you like to call it. Niching down isn’t as easy for us as it is for others. This is why we also struggle to blend in with other entrepreneurs who have niched down and are known as experts in their own fields.

Niching Down As A Multipassionate Entrepreneur

Finally, my breakthrough came when I discovered this blog post on niching down by Megan Chalidis.

In her post, Megan talks about the four pillars that drive purchasing decisions for humans: Health, Wealth, Love, and Happiness. She says that every person is driven by one of these motives when they decide to buy anything and it is the job of the entrepreneur to help them achieve that motive or goal.

For that, you have to choose one of these goals to focus on, and then target the people who are driven by it.

Choosing one goal is exactly the kind of thing I struggle with, and I thought it was going to be hard. But surprisingly, it was crystal clear this time.

Money. That was it. That was my goal.

If you look at my story so far, you’ll see that even though all my niches have been varied, my goal has always been to make more money. Or to help others make more money.

Now that I knew what goal to focus on, I had to get my target audience right.

That’s when I realized that I have been targeting people who think and work very differently from the way I do. My target audience had to be people like me, multipassionate, multipotentialate. I could help them make sense of their scattered ideas and use them to bring in a consistent income, even when their attention shifted.

Finally, I was getting somewhere with niching down!

Making it Work as a Multipassionate Entrepreneur

So how do you make Megan’s advice work for you?

Look at your past ventures and see if you can find a common thread. Think about what you seem to be chasing after.

For instance, if you’ve called yourself a keto specialist so far and want to move on to intermittent fasting next, you know that your overarching theme is health. Now figure out your target audience who could benefit from your experience and your expertise and direct your efforts toward them.

As for me, you can check out what I’m up to on my ‘What I’m Doing Now’ page. Yes, I’ll be doing multiple things at once, but they’ll all have the same end goal – making money.

Niching down is a seemingly impossible task for a multipassionate entrepreneur but there is a way to make it work. It requires some introspection and inspection of your past to see a pattern. If you’re wondering how to go about it, I can help; my No Niche Brand is a complete system designed specifically for multi-passionate entrepreneurs who simply can’t just ‘pick one’. Once you figure it out, you’ll be unstoppable!