There’s a common misconception that Cressey Sports Performance (CSP) is the product of a business plan that clearly articulated an objective of capturing market share specifically in the baseball niche from day one. It isn’t.
I finished a one-year full-time MBA program less than 8-weeks prior to us starting our business. Every week for that entire school year, I was reminded that roughly half of all new businesses fail. This fact was not lost on me, so when we opened our doors for business we were more concerned with collecting any money we could get our hands on than we were with collecting it from a specific subsegment of the population.
Sometimes the best thing you can do in your pursuit to identify a niche is to put your head down and work. Work with as many different types of athletes as possible. Work on collecting all of the experience you can with a broad array of injury histories. Work on building your network. Work on identifying your own strengths. Just work.
If you prioritize accumulating opportunities to learn during the early stages of your business and then double down on those that you find to be particularly interesting, the niche thing is likely to figure itself out.
And remember, if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by a lack of direction getting started, you can take comfort in knowing that CSP was a business without an identity for nearly six months before firmly settling on targeting a specific underserved population. In fact, we didn’t even get our website live until day 93…oops.