Podcast: How To Accelerate Your Business By Picking a Niche

Margarida: So tell us about yourself, who you are and what do you do, Shaz?

Shaz: Okay, my name is Shaz, when people ask me, what do I do I say I’m a designer, but I think I’m a lot more than that now where the business is. So my day to day is building the business in terms of systems, development, working with the team and speaking to new clients and thinking about the next move.

Where I come from, I would say I was born into a family of design. I’m the baby of the family and my brother’s 10 years older than me. So when I was growing up, I was immersed in design whilst my brothers were designing by hand when computers didn’t exist, I saw it growing up and when they were leaving home to go to university, I was quite a child and I was playing with their tools.

One day, my brothers caught me using their equipment without their permission and they saw that I was actually imitating what they were doing and they allowed me to carry using their tools.

Margarida: Wow.

Shaz: So by the time I reached 15, 16, I could do the sort of things they were doing and they encouraged me. So when I reached 18, I came up with the idea of opening my own company, Digimax and I was in a maths class at the age of 17 and I came up with the name Digimax, which at the time I thought would stand for digital design, maximum effect.

Margarida: Oh, I love it.

Shaz: And I drew the D that we use today in a maths class. So at that time I had no idea what I was doing. I just thought, “Hey, I like designing and I’m going to start designing” and then I went to university, I did a BSC in eCommerce, which was internet and business related.

Margarida: Okay.

Shaz: And in the background, I used my student loan to do up my parents’ garage, my shed at home, so I could move out of my parents’ bedroom, where I had a small desk in the corner, it was a really small house. I worked by the window and then I used my student loan to build this shed where I could get my own private space.

As soon as I finished my uni lectures, I was quite boring, I didn’t hang out much. I used to go back and I started designing for these clients, where I had private projects. One of them was my driving instructor, so he swapped lessons with me to teach me driving, and I designed his website at the time. So I was really enjoying it and it didn’t feel like business, it felt like doing something I loved.

Margarida: That’s the secret.

Shaz: Yeah, that’s the secret. That’s where the journey began in the shed.

Margarida: And how have you started your business because now I’m very curious, because you had this idea of starting your own business when you were like 16, 17.

Shaz: Yes.

Margarida: So when actually, how have you started the business?

Shaz: Well, a friend of a friend at school recommended his uncle to use me and I designed some stuff and then he said, “Can you invoice me?” and I said, “What’s that?” and he said, “Well, I can’t pay you until you give me an invoice.” I got really frightened, like I’d done something wrong, that I should have this paperwork and I might be doing something illegal.

Then I looked into it, I called an accountant from Yellow Pages. I was actually a bit shy; I didn’t used to ask many questions to my family in case of, “Focus on your studies.” I used to do this all in private. The accountant said, “You’ve got to go form a limited company.” So in 2003, that’s when I formed Digimax so you can look on Companies House, that’s when I started.

Margarida: That moment was when you literally started.

Shaz: Officially.

Margarida: When someone for asked for an invoice?

Shaz: Yes. Yes.

Margarida: Oh, brilliant.

Shaz: He was quite kind, because when I started stuttering, he said, “Okay okay, look, I’ll make it easy for you” but he said, “Next time I need an invoice” and I said, “Yeah.”

Margarida: How did you decide you wanted to work exclusively with dental practises?

Shaz: Really good question. So it’s hard to answer that without giving you a bit of background.

The background is, so I started working from my garage and I didn’t really understand business. I knew business was you offer something; you get payment in return. So as my work started to get noticed, more and more people would contact me more and more jobs I would say yes to and everything was a fun project, because people were trusting me and I’d see my work in print and outside, so it was super exciting, I could show off to my friends.

But then what would happen was, that there was so much work came in, that I was working from sometimes 6 in the morning, till 2 in the morning the next day, in the garage in isolation and this went on for… and I thought, this is what business is, you’ve got to do the work, right, so I was working.

Margarida: Alone.

Shaz: Alone, as a young person, trying to do my university at the same time and I was in isolation, working in these four walls in the back of a garden, nonstop and I thought, “This is what I have to do to build a business, because you can’t let people down, you can’t say no” and I work with solicitors, estate agents, cleaners, every industry you could think of and then when my brother saw that, he doesn’t look too healthy, I looked tired, I wasn’t myself, the passion was going.

Because I was just like a machine, working, I didn’t know how to stop. So my brother said, “You need to get your first employee” and I had all the reservations, he won’t be able to do it like me, how I’m going to afford it, so I was going through all that exercise. Cut a long story short, all these years I was working for all these different industries, and one thing I found, that I wasn’t the best at any industry. There was lots of people in every industry, competition was everywhere as time went on, more and more people had software, like Photoshop and InDesign they were learning to design with broadband.

Margarida: Yeah.

Shaz: Everyone became a designer. So the competition went up for me.

Margarida: So how did you make yourself different?

Shaz: This is the thing, I could always put out good design and every time a business owner contacted me, I could connect with them very easily, because I understood business very quickly, it came to me naturally. But I found every client needed to speak to me, I had to be in control of everything, which meant I couldn’t grow.

I remember once a company who had a cake business, they contacted me and they sent an email to me as well as 12 other companies for a quote and I thought, “Oh, this looks like a good opportunity, this company is in Central London.” I spent four hours working on a proposal, calling them, meeting them, talking to them and I realised they’re doing this with 12 other companies and there’s nothing making me stand out. I’m just another company and the cheapest quote sometimes wins and lots of things I told myself and I found I was wasting so much time in all these processes and never winning all the time.

Margarida: Yeah.

Shaz: I wanted my time to go into winning and I realised that you can’t carry on this way, when you’re good. I wanted to be the best and I realised that specialising is going to be the way I can be the best and grow the team so then we can hone in on and dissect every single part of the business and the learning, so when someone calls my company, we are experts in just that one industry and that’s when the penny dropped from me in 2017, not long ago.

Margarida: So just three years ago, basically.

Shaz: Just three years ago, where I actually got fed up. I stood up in my office and I said, “From today, we are only going to sector” and we fired in a nice way, all non-dental clients and we said, “You’re going to have to find another agency, because this is not working.”

Margarida: Why a dental practise? Why this niche? Why this market?

Shaz: Great question. During my journey I had in 2007, I got a dental practise client for the time and I thought, “Oh, this is going to be just like promoting anything else I’ve done.” I was super over confident and I did all this work for this client and it kind of failed, because before I would design something and it was just about getting the client to approve a design that they like.

But dentistry is a very different type of service, because dentistry is not about saying, “Hey, we’ll clean your teeth or we will give you an implant.” It was about promoting the outcome, how someone feels.

Margarida: The results.

Shaz: The results.

Margarida: The aesthetic of your mouth.

Shaz: Yes. The confidence that you get.

Margarida: So they had different requests for you, I’m assuming?

Shaz: It almost felt like I had to be a dentist to understand dental marketing and when I did this leaflet for a dental practise and it was a promotion, get dental implants for £999, I used bold colours, there was red in it, which has connotations to blood and all these things aren’t allowed and it’s bold, it was just horrible.

At the time, I didn’t realise it. So he printed 10,000 leaflets, distributed it and he called me up and I can remember, I was almost going to cry, he said, “What have you done? We’ve not had one call. We’ve had 4 complaints.” I can’t remember exactly what he said, because I was so shocked at the time and I said, “Doctor.” I’m not going to tell you, his name. “Doctor, blah, blah can you just give me some of your time? Can I just sit with you in the practise and follow you around?”

Margarida: Yeah.

Shaz: I wanted to learn from this mistake just because I didn’t want to let anyone down and he gave me a lot of time and that’s when I really started to understand dentistry as a profession and when I started to overcome the problems that I faced with this project, I got a lot of satisfaction from it. I found that there weren’t really any agencies that understood dentistry the way I was going to start understanding it. So our dental clients in the background started to grow and in 2012 I formed a separate trading name, which was Digimax Dental.

Margarida: Ah.

Shaz: So we always had Digimax and Digimax Dental, running side by side. But I found that no one really knew about Digimax Dental because our attention was divided. So in 2017, when I really thought I cannot be handling everything, I had a 3 year old daughter, so that changed my perspective on life. I thought I can’t constantly be at work, I need some time for life, I thought that’s it, we’re going to specialise in one thing and we’re going to be the best in the world at this.

Margarida: Right.

Shaz: And that’s what we set out to do.

Margarida: Let’s go a bit more technical, now. What’s a niche market?

Shaz: For me, a niche is one specific sector, a type of industry, where you can just focus your efforts on and grow your knowledge in that sector. Niche for me, is one very, very focused area.

Margarida: Okay and the more laser focused you are on a niche, the easier it’s to succeed. Do you agree? What’s your thoughts on it?

Shaz: I agree completely, a hundred percent. You said laser focused and that’s what you need to be.

Margarida: Okay.

Shaz: I don’t feel you can be, “Oh yeah let’s try this with estate agents or let’s try this with restaurants.” You’ve got to be laser focused. You do one thing; one niche and you give it all your effort.

Margarida: So you learn everything you can about your clients, right? And then you start to become specialists, an expert on that market, because I’m assuming you know all their needs, all their issues, all their wishes, how they want to be seen in the market. I’m assuming, you know all of these.

Shaz: Absolutely. So that’s where the learning begins. To be fully loved by that niche, you need to understand what are their pain points, what’s hurting them the most, what problems can you solve for them and really using their terminology, right?

Every niche has their own terminology, their own meanings, okay. I’m sure if I really tried, I could pretend to be a dentist, that’s how much I know about the dental sector itself. You’ve got to know their pain points, but I think that’s not enough, okay. The learning’s there and you learn and it’s almost a bit obvious, you’ve got to understand the niche. But there are some key things that we’ve allowed to become popular in our niche at some point, knowing the niche, but no one knows you.

Margarida: Do you want to share them with us?

Shaz: Absolutely. So, well I knew niche for a long time and whenever we got a project, it was easy but getting known in that niche is a big part of succeeding in that niche. So every niche has some key players within it, any niche you can think of, property, whatever, there are going to be a circle of people that know each other that everyone knows. So my focus was always doing work for the best people in that niche and if you do their work, that it’s almost an endorsement.

So I always made an effort to really take exceptional care for the people who’ve done great in that sector, so that when they endorse you, when others look at you, like, “Oh, you’ve done work for that person they’ve got really high standards, you must be good.”

Margarida: Okay. 

Shaz: So I did that and I built some beautiful friendships off the back of that.

Margarida: Good.

Shaz: And you’ve got to be real by the way. Yeah, you’ve got to be completely real. Your goal has got to be, not to try and take, your goal is going to be to give. So in giving, you build these real relationships, real friendships, where it all comes naturally.

If you start emailing these people, “Hey, I’d love to work with you” that’s not how you date, right? You get to know people and people do business with people. So I never used to send that cold email, then if I did try once or twice, I got no response.

Margarida: Okay.

Shaz: So I was where these people were, I know them, I got to understand them. A lot of them even came to my wedding, that’s the sort of friendships we developed.

Margarida: Oh. Okay. Interesting, and what do you think are key strategies to find a business niche? Passion, right?

Shaz: Yeah.

Margarida: Finding the right markets? What’s the key strategies?

Shaz: I stumbled upon this niche because I saw a problem point. I think being acutely aware of when you’re going about your business or if you are looking to start a business, to see what problems a niche might have with whatever service it is that you might be looking to offer.

So I think that’s a really good way of trying to bridge that gap but then going one step above and really offering things that no other company can really offer. I know it sounds cliched, but it really is that, trying to offer something that no one else can offer as good as you can offer and then being able to communicate that.

So I took a lot of inspiration from Apple, the Apple watch, yeah? 180 plus features, but they don’t load at least 180 features, hoping one of them connects with you. They hit you with the first 4 or 5 big points and then once you are reeled in, then you can deliver the rest of the things, why you should buy that watch.

So that’s how we connect our business, we’ve got hundreds of things to say about how we are great. But if you start just saying them, no one’s listening, no one’s investing that time anymore. So you’ve got to be very good at communicating, what separates you.

Margarida: Okay, understood. So I’m assuming you tried to build a bridge in between your uniqueness and their pain.

Shaz: Yes.

Margarida: What do you do that it differentiates you from the others and connect with their pains?

Shaz: Absolutely.

Margarida: Your clients’ pains, issues, yeah. Okay.

Shaz: Yeah. That’s part of it.

Margarida: Very interesting. Very, very interesting, and I love it that you mentioned just Apple, because I’ve watched a video, I can’t remember the author about the why in the business.

Shaz: Yes.

Margarida: And he mentions Apple, exactly. He says, “Apple is this world success, because they build their business from the why, through the how, to the what.”

Shaz: Yes.

Margarida: And not the other way around. So they have people first feel connected with them by the why and then they explain how do they do it, and then the what’s the object.

Shaz: I think that’s so beautiful.

Margarida: Very, very.

Shaz: To be honest, we do that in our business a lot. There’s so much that we do behind the scenes that our clients don’t know about, because the why is so strong. So when I do team training, I tell my team, “Why are we designing this website?”

Margarida: Oh, that’s beautiful.

Shaz: And when we get new team members, usually everyone’s quiet, they let them answer. And they say, “Oh yeah, because they need a website, everyone needs a website these days.” And we say, “No.” And then on the screen, I’ll put up a picture of a client and we see the face and we say, “Because we want this person to succeed and what happens if they succeed?” and we zoom out, we show their wife, we show their child, we show their parents and we show the impact of what success looks like.

So they could have trusted any company, there’s hundreds of companies. They could have trusted anyone, they’ve trusted you. So you’ve got a duty to deliver and when your team buy into that philosophy, they’re not delivering websites anymore.

Margarida: No.

Shaz: They’re delivering a lifestyle.

Margarida: Yes.

Shaz: They’re delivering what their dreams are, we invest into those dreams.

Margarida: I love it.

Shaz: So we’re very careful how we take clients on. But like you said, the why is central to the niche that you’re going to like.

Margarida: So happy. Shaz, what do we need to come see there before we decide to target a small segment of the market?

Shaz: Good question. The size of the market is very important, because there’s no point offering a service to the market, which might be so small or so hard to get access to. It needs to be a sizeable market.

Margarida: Okay.

Shaz: Okay. I think so. It can’t be scuba diving gear supplies only in Devon because there’s going to be a limit to how many of those, you’re going to reach at any one point.

Margarida: Of course.

Shaz: You’ve got to think big, but it’s got to be a big enough market.

Margarida: When you decide to drive your business to a niche market, what have you considered before you made this transition? Okay, you shared with us at three years ago, it was a very transformational period in your life. You had a kid, right?

Shaz: Yes.

Margarida: You had a daughter. So you wanted more time for yourself.

Shaz: Absolutely.

Margarida: But if we focus on the business, what have you considered before you made this move?

Shaz: Okay. With the positives, you’ve got to consider negatives and I don’t want to ignore the negatives as well.

Margarida: Yeah. Okay.

Shaz: When we chose to go down this route, I’ll say, when I, because I got a lot of slack from what’s going to happen, right? What if this doesn’t work out?

Margarida: Okay.

Shaz: The negatives are, if you’ve already got a running business and you suddenly say, “Actually, we’re going to stop this and start this.”

Margarida: Yeah.

Shaz: It’s a risky proposition, because we had to turn down several hundred thousand pounds worth of business. That was just ready on that, all these years, I built up a business and I’m saying no to it anymore, for a gamble of a potential better future for our company.

Margarida: So you kind of learned to say no as well.

Shaz: Yes. A very, very hard thing to do. Yeah, because the team is saying, “But why are we saying no, this is a £10,000 website.” I said, “You’ve got to understand, this is not in line with where we want to go.” So having the confidence to understand that saying no, is going to be much better for you, for your long term. Now I’m only speaking from my experience.

Margarida: Of course.

Shaz: I don’t want to say to anyone listening, I don’t want to them to just stop what you’re doing, whatever. You’ve got to calculate it. So you’ve got to work out negatives or what might happen if you start saying no, because I understand people have got loans, etc. For me, cash flow wasn’t something that I cared about. I actually care about money very little. I care more about outcomes and results and I think the money follows, so that’s one thing I had to consider.

The other positive thing I had to consider, that if we’re going to be stopping non-dental work, we’ve got a lot of mouths to feed right now. To get to that status again, where we’re cash rich, we need to make sure that our work is even better than it’s ever been before, which means building great systems. We have to reinvest in research and development and we need a really strong training programme as well. But most of all, and I think the hardest part of all was, I was very clear on the vision that I want every single dental practise in the country to know who Digimax Dental are.

Whether they use us or not and we don’t work with absolutely everyone, we want to make sure that we’re with clients that are like-minded. I made the goal very easy and the sense of, I said, “I want every single dental practise in the country to know who we are.” So every move I made was centred around that.

If I wrote for a magazine, that was the goal. If I gave an interview, that was the goal. If I was at a show, that was the goal. Notice that keeping to that goal meant that our profile did go up, which means our inquiries have gone up.

Margarida: Of course.

Shaz: Which means now the problem isn’t how much work is coming in, we’ve got waiting list now, because we only do five projects a month. Now, it’s how to make it great and deliver consistent quality. At the start this year, we were officially rated the world’s highest rated dental marketing company. Our competitors are 400% behind our ratings, to even catch up, because we’ve been doing those moves.

Margarida: Wow.

Shaz: So thank you.

Margarida: Well done. I love it. Well done.

Shaz: Thank you.

Margarida: What are the advantages of driving our business into a niche market and of course, the disadvantages.

Shaz: Advantages are that you can make more people responsible for different elements of your production line, whatever that might be, which means that they can be incredible at that 1 or 2 or 3 processes that they handle.

When you’re not niche everyone ends up doing a bit of everything, okay and no one’s phenomenal at anything, and I think that’s why when people complain about customer service in the UK and all of this, it’s because there’s a lot of pressure on people to do lots of things at once.

So one thing I definitely believe in, is don’t get your team to do lots of things at once, get them to do very few things so well that the clients become your marketing tools. So all our work that comes in today, I would say 90% of it that people are raving about us, because that we’ve not experienced this anywhere before and the great thing is, all the designers out there doing a lousy job, not because they’re not nice people and they don’t want to deliver, they just haven’t understood that the client should be at the heart of every that you do. They’re the ones that are going to make your business grow, so we give so much to do them. Sorry, I think I might have off on a tangent.

Margarida: No, it’s okay. You were talking about the advantages, I guess.

Shaz: So the advantages are that any niche that you go into, a lot of the people end up knowing each other. So for example, in the dental sector, even though it’s a big audience, they know each other.

So before, when we went Digimax Dental, if you did work for a fashion designer, it’s very unlikely she’s going to talk to an accountant who’s going to end up using us. Whereas dentists will talk with dentists or restaurant owners might all talk to restaurant owners, they keep a group. So the advantage is, growth can be a lot faster if you’re doing a great job.

The disadvantage is if you are not very good at what you do or you’ve not thought through the systems or you don’t have laser sharp focus and you’re hoping for the best, if you deliver a substandard service or a luke warm service that also spreads. So you don’t want that either, you only get one shot at some of these relationships. So just as well as you can grow really fast, your negative reputation also goes quite far and I’ve seen this happen.

Margarida: But if it happens for good, it happens for bad as well, I guess.

Shaz: Yes, absolutely. So it can go either way, really fast.

Margarida: A niche market is a small segment, weren’t you afraid of missing opportunities, Shaz?

Shaz: I think that’s why I didn’t do it a long time ago because I was afraid and I really should have done it a long time ago. I was afraid all these years to say no to all these clients and I thought business isn’t about saying no, it’s about saying yes, I was learning on the job.

I didn’t go to a business school and actually, ActionCOACH taught me a lot as well about the right way of connecting a business and what a business actually is. Business it isn’t you just working away, a business is a separate entity, it can work on its own.

Brad Sugar is the owner of ActionCOACH, I’m told he has lots and lots and lots of businesses and I thought, “I’ve got one, and it takes over my life am I doing it right?” But I’m not compromising what the clients get for my benefit, I just want to make sure that the systems are put in place for the clients benefit at all times.

But the negatives are definitely that it can be scary to go into a niche, but you’ve got to be so confident that you can outdo the people that are in that marketplace. You’ve got to become completely confident. There’s no space for mediocre players if you’re going to niche, you’ve got to be the best or don’t bother.

Margarida: What advice would you give to a business owner who’s considering work with a niche? What’s the number one advice?

Shaz: Number one advice is make sure you do your competitive research, because there might be people who have already been doing this for so long that it might not actually even be worth you breaking into a niche that you might find difficult to dominate.

To give you an example if you’re thinking, “Hey, I’m going to start doing dental websites.” We’ve been doing this almost 15 years now, right? You’re not going to take us over, ever. So just make sure you know who are in the marketplace and there’s enough niches to be able to enter a niche, but just make sure you do your research.

Margarida: So this is something you’ve done it as well, before going to this niche, you researched your competitors.

Shaz: Absolutely, we always brush shoulders and if they’re listening, they’ll know that we always had a low profile and we just did a bit of work. But when I was ready for it, I knew that we are going to dominate and what we need to do for that. But I could only know that if I knew their weaknesses, what they might be doing wrong, what they need to do better, what we could do better, what our weaknesses are. You can only do that if you know what choices the potential client has. So whatever sector you’re in, you need to know who else they might be able to choose and why they would choose you.

Margarida: Good. Where can people find out more about you?

Shaz: They can follow me on my Instagram, Shaz.Memon is my username. They can go to my website, shazmemon.com and they can follow me on LinkedIn.

Margarida: Okay. Thank you very much Shaz.

Shaz: You’re most welcome.