One of the best ways for a nurse practitioner entrepreneur to succeed is by narrowing in their service line and the patient demographic they want to treat. Providing a very niched service to a niched target market is one of the FASTEST ways to succeed, in addition to a few other items to consider in your “recipe for success.”

Ask very successful entrepreneurs within multiple different markets, disciplines, and specialties and they will agree with the following statement:

Don’t be everything for everybody.

Here is a great example of the above statement that I heard once:

Imagine you opened a tea shop. You know many people like hot tea and other people enjoy cold tea. You don’t want to sell just one or the other because you want to appeal to everyone, but you also are afraid of offering both because it might offend someone who doesn’t like the other one. So, you decide you will combine both types and appeal to everyone! You decide you will only sell warm tea instead. It ends up becoming an utter failure… No one wants warm tea, they just wanted either hot or the cold tea.

Now, this obviously isn’t very realistic, but it gets the following points across very well:

Don’t be everything for everyone.

Don’t try to appeal to everyone.

Be something special to just a few special people. Remember… you don’t need 1000 patients to be successful, you only need 100!

I think you get the point… When it comes to opening a niche side practice, you need to fix a specific need for a specific group of people. This is the essence of dialing in your focus. Far too many nurse practitioners are offering WAY too many services when they start their practice. This leads to analysis paralysis, overload paralysis, and potential failure.

I review nurse practitioner practice websites almost daily and I see this QUITE often… If the services compliment each other, then great, the website flows well and makes sense… but often times they do not. I see practices offering a mixture of totally unrelated services like women’s HRT, sick visits, DOT exams, medical cannabis evaluations, and COVID testing under the same roof. Very little of this is related and it makes the website look messy. It appeals to no one specifically. While this might work if you have a $20,000 a month marketing budget, it probably will not work if you are working with a $500-$1000 a month marketing budget.

Additionally, being everything for everyone makes your practice look like a one stop shop without a SPECIFIC FOCUS. Patients land on it and are confused with what you do specifically. Patients landing on your website have an attention span of 3-5 seconds… If they do not know what you do IMMEDIATELY, then they will likely click off your website within seconds. This is critically important folks.

If you don’t believe me and want to provide a bunch of services, then you must have each service line on its own separate page on your website and advertise EACH ONE independently. Each digital ad should direct the patient to that specific page for that specific service. This is what is called a landing page basically. Trust me on this. But having this many landing page ads will increase your marketing budget. The good news though, is that the world will tell you WHAT THEY WANT, and you will end up just focusing on that particular service that takes off and you will say to yourself “Justin was right…” and nix the rest of your services.

Avoid the wasted effort and time and instead focus on fixing a specific problem for a specific target market OR just provide a specific niche service by itself when you first get started. Stand alone Men’s Health clinics, IV infusion practices, Weight Loss clinics, Ketamine Infusion clinics, Aesthetic practices, and so forth and so forth do VERY well. Utilize a model that has been tested and that WORKS instead of trying to do too many things at one time.

If you get bored and want to do something different, then fine, open another side practice and offer it. I did that and its great to be redundant!

If you want to offer multiple services together, then fine, just make sure they complement each other! The majority of the niche services taught through The Elite Nurse Practitioner courses compliment each other very well for “wellness” type practices. Integrating weight loss and men’s health together works great. Integrating women’s HRT and IV infusion together works great. Offering cosmetic skin care products in an aesthetics practices works great.  Your target market does not really change, you are just providing that market more services that they are interested in. This is fine and encouraged!

But please, do not provide a bunch of non-complimentary services together in your clinic. It really will hamper your success! Offering opioid addiction treatment in your weight loss clinic might not be the best idea… Integrating mobile point of care urine drug test screening into your opioid addiction treatment clinic would work though!

If you want to fail, then be everything for everyone. If you want to succeed, then be something special for a handful of people. It is that simple!