Thursday, January 8, 2009

Finding Your Niche, Part 3

This is the third and final piece about the music store niche, and it really is the first part. One of the things we did in the first few weeks was to find a good guitar teacher with a list of students already and give him a good place to have his students come to and for us to have an opportunity to market to as a matter of course. This turned out to be the smartest of all the things we did. It gave us an immediate market and traffic which gave us great word of mouth advertising.

It was this along with the focus on guitars and the guitar strings. We started the business at the beginning of the 1979-82 recession and with this 1-2-3 punch did $100k in sales the first year. Not bad for starting with so little and three other well established stores already in town. If we would have continued to try to cover the bases with products, there is no way we could have done as well. It pays to carve out your niche and fine tune what your business is. Today we call that clarification. Yes, that is a good word for it.

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