Issue #004
The career experience you keep dismissing
There's a thought most new coaches have somewhere around their third or fourth week of trying to figure out their niche.
It usually sounds something like: "I don't have anything unique to offer. Anyone with real experience already knows what I know."
I've heard some version of this from almost every coach I've spoken with. And every single time, the person saying it is sitting on something genuinely valuable — they just can't see it anymore because they've lived with it too long.
That's familiarity bias. The longer you've had your expertise, the more ordinary it feels. But what feels like common sense to you is hard-won territory for someone else. And that someone else would pay to access it.
One number worth sitting with: coaches with a clearly defined niche charge 3–5x more than generalists. Not because they're better coaches. Because they're speaking to someone specific about something real.
This week, we're getting into how to find that thing.
WHAT’S ON DECK
The Playbook: Why the niche you're avoiding is the one that pays
Real Wins: 10 years of "boring" HR turned into a coaching business
Your Next Move: A 20-minute exercise to find your edge
Steal This: The Information Advantage discovery exercise
Coachstack Connect: Keep your niche message consistent everywhere
YOUR MISSING PIECE
This week we're on Step 1 of the Coaching Flywheel: Clarify Your Focus. Everything downstream — how you attract clients, what you say about your work, what you charge — gets easier once this is solid. And for most new coaches, this is the step that gets skipped entirely.
THE PLAYBOOK
What Is Your Information Advantage?
Your Information Advantage is the accumulated knowledge, experience, and perspective you've built over your career and personal life — the things you understand at a level most people genuinely don't.
It's not a credential. It's not a certification. It's the sum of every role you've held, every challenge you figured out the hard way, every skill you developed out of necessity, and every subject you've kept learning about because you couldn't stop being curious about it.
This is where differentiated coaching businesses are built. Clients don't want a generalist who coaches everyone. They want someone who has been where they are. Specific experience creates specific credibility, and specific credibility is what makes your message resonate with the right people instead of blending into the background noise.
The formula is simple:
Your Coaching Niche = Largest Information Advantage × Highest Genuine Interest
Both variables matter. Expertise makes you credible. Genuine interest makes you sustainable. A niche you can speak to brilliantly but quietly dread thinking about will run out of energy well before it runs out of potential clients. A niche you love but can't speak to with real depth won't attract those clients in the first place.
Your coaching business lives where those two things overlap.
REAL WINS
The HR Director Who Couldn't See What She'd Built
A few months ago I was talking with someone who had spent a decade in HR at a series of early-stage startups. She hadn't chosen the role so much as grown into it — hired as a generalist at a 12-person company, handed the keys to the people function, and spent the next ten years figuring it out across four different organizations as each one scaled.
Hiring, onboarding, culture, performance conversations, founder-employee dynamics. She had built it all from scratch more than once.
Her take on it: "I don't know. It's just HR."
When I asked her what mistakes she kept seeing startup founders make over and over, she didn't pause. She had a list before I finished the question. Specific patterns. Specific moments where things went sideways. Opinions about why it happened and what should have been done instead.
It took maybe 20 minutes of conversation to see it clearly: she had a body of knowledge that first-time startup founders desperately needed, and almost no one was speaking to that audience with the kind of lived credibility she had.
She was dismissing valuable experience that felt routine to her because she had lived it dozens of times across dozens of situations.
Once she saw the distinction, the niche was obvious. She built her practice around helping early-stage startup founders hire and build their first teams without making the expensive mistakes most of them make.
First two paying clients came within six weeks of launch.
TL;DR
Peter's 3 Keys to Remember:
Familiarity bias is real. The longer you've lived with your expertise, the more ordinary it feels—and the more valuable it often is to someone who doesn't have it yet.
Credibility is specific. Generic positioning attracts no one in particular. Coaches with a clear niche charge 3–5x more than generalists because they're speaking to someone specific about something real.
The niche that holds is the one you're still curious about. Expertise gets you in the door. Genuine interest keeps the whole thing running.
STEAL THIS
The 3-Step Exercise to Find Yours
Block 20 minutes. That's all this takes.
Step 1: Inventory Your Knowledge Assets
Two lists. No filter and write it all down. The thing that feels too obvious to include is often the one worth looking at most closely.
Career list: Every job you've held. Every industry you've worked in. Every project that stretched you past what you thought you could do. Every role where you had to figure something out with no manual and no safety net.
Personal interests list: What do you read without anyone asking you to? What do you explain to friends because you've thought about it more than they have? What could you talk about for an hour with no notes, no slides, no prep?
Step 2: Rank by Expertise Level
Go back through both lists and rank them from highest to lowest based on three factors:
Time invested: how many years, how many reps, how many real decisions made
Preparation: Quality of training or mentorship you received along the way
Depth of involvement: were you in the room where it happened, or reading about it afterward?
You're looking for the areas where you're genuinely ahead, not just familiar.
Step 3: Apply the Sustainability Filter
Look at your top-ranked items and ask one honest question: which of these do I actually want to keep learning about?
This is the filter most coaches skip, and it's the one that matters most in the long run. Lack of clarity and consistency in messaging is the single biggest reason early coaching businesses fail — and a niche built around something you've mastered but stopped caring about will produce flat content, hollow conversations, and an eventual decision to start over.
The niche that holds is the one where your depth and your curiosity still overlap.
COACHSTACK CONNECT
Once your niche is clear, the next challenge is presenting it consistently — across your website, your intake process, your client communications. Coachstack's marketing hub is built to keep that presentation cohesive so you're not manually maintaining the same message across five separate tools.
YOUR NEXT MOVE
Set aside 20 minutes to complete the 3-step exercise above. Build the two lists. Rank them. Run the sustainability filter.
Remember that you’re only trying to see what's already there that you've been walking past. So, don’t worry about finding your niche in one sitting just yet.
Once the lists exist, you have something concrete to work with. Next week, we'll get into how to turn your Information Advantage into a niche statement that resonates with the specific clients you actually want to work with.
–
Reply and tell me: What career experience or personal interest do you think holds your biggest Information Advantage?
I read every response. A lot of what ends up in future issues comes directly from what readers share back.
—Peter
P.S. Founding member applications are open. The Signature Build Package gives you a complete, done-for-you coaching business system in 45 days — limited to 3 coaches, and applications close June 1, 2026. Apply here.