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Welcome back to The Saintly CEO. Your place for tactical advice on how to run your business with your Catholic Faith front and center.
We’re on a mission to create an army of Catholic business owners who will act as culture crusaders — to bring God back into the culture. Front and center, where He belongs.
In Today’s Email:
News / Updates
Feature Content: Choose Your Niche, Own It, Then Expand
CF Role Model: It’s Cheesy
+6 more Catholic entrepreneurs (Heavenly Hustlers)
Miscellaneous Resources
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News / Updates
🏛️CF Guild Event This Wednesday: Learn how the Big Beautiful Bill’s tax changes affect your business on our CF Guild monthly expert call (Upgrade to a paid membership to attend).
☕ Book Club for Catholic entrepreneurs: I’m hosting a book club for Catholic biz owners. First book is The Pope & The CEO by Andreas Widmer (former bodyguard of Pope St. JPII). On Sep 12th, we’re doing a call with the author to discuss the book. All are welcome — join here.
📖 FREE BOOK: I bought 200 copies of Hormozi’s new book, $100m Money Models. All new paid members of Catholic Founders get a free copy ($30 value) (note: shipping not included). This is your sign to join today.
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Choose Your Niche, Own It, Then Expand
Almost any business can get to $100m a year in top-line revenue. Most don’t make it there because they lack focus.
Don’t let this be you.
For today’s purpose let’s focus on getting to $1m. That’s a big milestone for a lot of business owners starting out.
The key to getting there is staying focused and niching down. When you niche down on one thing, do it really well, your reputation starts to compound. Eventually that compounding goes exponential (see graph).
Don’t Make This Mistake
When starting, most people try to ‘do it all’ for their clients. They will take on any work.
Take a carpenter. When people ask them about what they do, they are afraid to say a niche so instead say they do any sort of carpentry work. If you’re looking to do this the right way, you’ll pick a niche, like finish carpentry for commercial properties.
The “I do it all” carpenter might get calls. But likely the jobs are always different and it will take him longer to develop a specialty. He is all things to all people so in other words he is no one. He doesn’t have a brand. He doesn’t have something he’s known for.
But the finish carpenter who works on commercial projects… now I know exactly when I need to call him.
Why Is Niche Better?
When you have a relatively narrow niche, you are likely one of only a few specialists in your market. This likely makes you a rare find. You’re no longer a commodity. You are a specialist.
Because you’re a specialist, you’re the only one they can find (or one of few). The generalist carpenters who don’t know how to do meticulous fine carpentry will often subcontract you to do this fine carpentry work.
The owners who want someone who knows their niche, will require you to do that portion of work. They will call you.
This means more leverage. Meaning you’re able to charge more. And the customers will expect this so it’s not even a hard sell. The same work for more money means wider margins.
The longer you do this, the better you get. The better you get, the faster you get. The faster you get the more you can get done in a shorter period of time. Again, wider margins.
When you add all this up, it also means happier customers. And happy customers. A good that I’m sure you’d be proud to stand behind.
In short: Niching down differentiates you and leads to a more profitable business.
When to Expand
As you grow, become more well-known, and have a more profitable business, you’ll be tempted to expand. Expand into different skills. Solve some other problem in the chain. But you shouldn’t.
At least not until you get to $1m a year in revenue.
Usually when you reach this point you’ll have enough disposable income to invest in the business in a meaningful way. You’ll also have your brand well established. So trying something new won’t risk confusing people about your offering.
How to Expand
When you expand, do not do something totally unrelated. Ideally your expansion will be a new product to the same customers. Preferably the next problem they’ll need solved after your first service solved their other problem.
The best way I could extend the finished carpenter analogy would be to offer another service to those same commercial customers. Maybe something you turned down in the past because it wasn’t your focus.
Ideally you’d want this new product to be something you can make an even higher margin on because it’s not something you need in order to keep the lights on. Given you’ve just provided them a service they are presumably happy with, you might be able to charge a higher margin than than your normal work.
Alternatively, you could make a partnership with another service provider who would come in after you. Perhaps a furniture maker or decorator. Since it’s the next solution in their problem chain you could easily refer your customers and get some sort of affiliate commission from it.
Again, it’s key not to build another business. You’re trying to keep it in the lines of what you do already—in a scope that you can deliver with the same (or very few new) resources today.
The Virtue of This Approach
Following this approach is also virtuous because you’re choosing to lean into your natural skills and talents from God. You’re able to do the work better because you’re choosing not to get distracted.
Through running a business with good margins, you’re also able to provide for your family and likely have more time with your family and for your spiritual life (ie: daily mass).
Growing your business in an intelligent way is also a good use of your capabilities that God gave you. Keeping the business intentionally small can be the right thing, but also might be a little bit like the man who buried his talents in the ground. When you are diligent about growing the business, you’re demonstrating dedication to excellence.
If you are able to scale it to that $100m level, you’ll have a lot opportunity to support your community, your diocese, and whatever other causes God is calling you to support.
Hopefully I’ve convinced you to pick a niche, own it, and then expand—so that you can build something truly incredible that God can use for His purposes in this world.
God Bless & Happy Building
~Silas Mähner
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Heavenly Hustlers
Looking to meet other ambitious Catholic business owners? You’re in the right place.
Meet today’s Heavenly Hustlers.
🧀Ray and Marie Goldbach founded the Marathon Cheese Corporation in 1952. The business turned into a major employer in the county. They would go on to invest in several other entrepreneurial endeavors. Collectively leading to thousands (my estimate) of jobs in a rural part of Wisconsin (where I live now).
They were also generous by investing back into the community. One such example is the Marathon City Swim center that is still supported by their foundation.
Examples like these are incredible for us to focus on. Founding this business took risk taking and tenacity. Sustaining it took commitment to the mission and employees. Generosity in success took recognizing their gift came from God.
And look at the good they have produced. Hundreds, if not thousands of jobs that sustain an equal number of families.
📜 Thomas Thimons is the founder of MyCatholicWill.com — they are doing a lot of good work helping get Catholics to fill out a will. Something almost no Catholics have done (I know because I used to sell insurance to Catholic families).
🔍 Tom Fitzsimmons runs Prima Solutions Group to help place top silicon valley talent in gov’t and defense sectors. He is also building a spiritual direction product called ByWay App. I think we’re drawing in circles today.
Shout out to Nathan for doing most of my work for me for this week’s issue.
Last week Joe Coleman, Founder of Saint Kolbe Studios came on the pod to discuss trusting in God, and fatherhood as an entreprneuer, among other things.
Hormozi had this banger LinkedIn post that is a good reminder to us. Follow up with your leads immediately.
I highly recommend this book, Profit First for small business owners out there. It will help you actually make a profit every year rather than barely getting by.
Services:
HIRING: Looking to hire top talent that is also bought into your mission and values? Give the guys at Verso Jobs a shout. Joe and his team are incredible at filling jobs accurately and fast. And they won’t break the bank. https://www.versojobs.com/
OFFSHORE TALENT: Hire a Catholic Virtual Assistant through ParacleteVA (email us: dearcfpod@gmail.com)
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