Knowing your niche

As a small business owner myself, I’ve always tended to concentrate on other small businesses to work with. When I started my web hosting business back in 1997, I didn’t have a single client who had more than a dozen employees, and that’s how I liked it. I wanted to make sure that I was meeting their needs because I recognized what my own needs were as a small business. Most of them relied heavily on Email and had small web sites to promote their business. Nothing more. As long as spam filtering worked and the systems were reliable, they were all happy campers. I provided, they paid me, I made a profit. I added more servers over time for redundancy, and I did very well at it because I understood the needs of my clients. I didn’t have to understand what their businesses did, I just had to understand where they were coming from in order to give them exactly what they needed and nothing more.

In 2002, I started writing an application called MyFiveYearPlan which would let you enter goals and tasks to complete those goals, chart your progress, send you Email alerts, along with a scheduled time line for completing everything. You could even add family and friends as your support team. I closed it down after running the site for two years at a heavy overhead cost because I didn’t understand the market well enough to promote it. To be honest, I still don’t, and may yet look for someone to buy the software from me, ’cause I still think it’s a fabulous idea. But I had no idea what kinds of people to target this to, and it fell flat on its face.

The point I’m making here is that to succeed, and to succeed well, you need to understand your own strengths, and you need to understand what your clients and customers want and expect from you. If you don’t give them that much, they’ll go elsewhere. Give them too much and you’ll confuse things or run into other issues.

What brought this on this article? A mass Email sent by Home Depot.

I have a Home Depot credit card that I have never once used, and have had it for about 3 years now. I applied for it as I was building my credit here in the US (I’m originally from Canada for those that don’t know) and it helped to boost my rating. One of the ‘perks’ of being a credit holder with them is an occasional marketing Email. I usually move them directly to my ‘ham’ folder without reading them since I live in an apartment and have no need for Home Depot.

Obligatory Mitch Hedberg quote:
I went to the Home Depot, which was unnecessary. I need to go to the Apartment Depot, which is just a big warehouse with a whole lot of people standing around saying, "We don’t have to fix [anything]."

Their mass Email talked of free shipping on tools over $49. Tools, obviously, are probably one of the biggest things that Home Depot sells.

What disappointed me was a link to what else they were shipping for free: computers.

That’s right, boys and girls, Home Depot is in the computer business all of a sudden. Better hurry, their free shipping offer only lasts till the end of August.

I read the Email thinking my favourite 3-letter acronym for "you gotta be kidding me", and clicked on the link. Sure enough, Home Depot has an entire area of their online store dedicated to selling computers.

Now, my dad is a pretty serious woodworker. He was so stinkin’ good at what he did, he got a job teaching college-level industrial woodworking without a teaching degree of any kind, and was well known by name in the community where the college was, because of the community outreach programs he started up. I remember seeing my dad coming out of his wood shop caked in sawdust and literally have to vacuum himself to get it all off. Now, I’ve spent less than half as many years working with computers as my dad has worked with wood, and I’ve cleaned probably a hundred computers over the years — I mean, get out the vacuum cleaner and compressed air and prying keys off of keyboards kind of cleaning — and if there’s one thing that computers don’t do well with, it’s dust.

So why on earth would Home Depot, a place that promotes making a lot of dusty mess, promote high-end computer equipment to the same people who are most likely going to be mass-producing a hundred-pound piles of sawdust? Are they hoping to make money on extended warranties and support plans for cleaning, etc? Or repairs and replacements because dust will choke up and burn out a computer? Not to mention what wood dust will do in a high-temperature environment like a computer case…

And the fact that they’re promoting it as a "back to school" special just sounds that much more ridiculous — Home Depot is not the first store I think of when I think about "back to school" shopping.

Talk about a complete lack of knowledge of your customer base, and attempting to "be all things to all people". Yikes.

Should they sell tools? Definitely. Lumber, yes. Lawn and Garden supplies, yes. Lamps, yes. Plumbing gear, locks, screws, nails, nuts and bolts, stuff that you would use to build or repair your home, absolutely yes.

But computers?