How to Find Your Public Health Consulting Niche

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Today, you're getting new free resources, right? We have our niche worksheet, and listen y'all, if you are confused after this, that worksheet gonna get you right, okay? Number one, I always get people asking me what a niche is, and basically, a niche is like your specialty area, okay? So in public health, or just honestly in anything that you do, the goal is to niche down.

A lot of times when we get public health degrees, we're taught to do everything, right? We do the evaluation, we do the data analysis, we do the program planning.

We do it all, right? Therefore, it's, you know, it's very easy and normal for us to say, "Hey, we do it all, so I can do it all for you," right? But that is not how you win contracts.

That is not how you build your business, right? Being a generalist, okay? You have to start with your, what is your niche in public health, right? And by niche, I mean what services do you actually offer, right? I get a lot of people who may be like, "Oh, I do health equity." All right, well, what does that mean? What do you mean you do health equity? I don't know what that means.

Like, do you do health equity-focused evaluations? Do you do health equity-focused communications development, graphic design? Like, what do you do, actually? What services could you provide to a customer? And I think that we get so caught up with thinking, "Oh, I can do everything in public health," that we forget that, yes, you can do everything, but a client does not want everything for you.

When they are hiring you, 9 times out of 10 they're hiring you for a specific project, whether that be to do an evaluation, to do a focus group, to do some project management, to do, um, a data analysis, to make a dashboard, whatever.

They're hiring you for a specific project, right? And if you put everything on there and they gotta go searching for what, what skills that they actually want, th- you're getting thrown out, because if they skim it and they're not able to find what you actually do and how that benefits them, you're not getting it, okay? So that is one thing that we have to think about.

Now, how do I know my niche, Dr. Dez? Glad you asked, my friends.

[laughs] So the way I always tell people is that, number one, you figure out, what do you actually like to do in public health? That is the number-one thing.

What do you like to do? Maybe you like to do evaluations.

Maybe you love the data analysis.

I am not a data girly.

I say it all the time, I am not a data girl, but maybe you love to do data analysis.

Maybe, you know, research is your thing, right? You can do an environmental scan, a landscape analysis for somebody, put it together in a nice little report.

Maybe that's your thing, right? What is your area that you really enjoy doing, and then what is the area that you're also really good at? And if you don't know, think about what do other people compliment you on, right? Do they compliment you on, or do they come to you for certain things? What do people normally come to you for, right? Really think about those things, and that is the way that you will really kind of figure out, like, okay, here is my area.

Really think about those two things.

What do I like to do, and what am I really good at doing, all right? Because when you start your business, when you start public health consulting, you can do the things that you enjoy doing, right? Especially if you are doing this on the side of your full-time job.

Listen, building your own business is hard.

It's work, okay? This is work.

This is not a quick fix, regardless of what anybody tells you.

Entrepreneurship, business, it is not a quick fix, okay? For anything.

But I will tell you that it is 10 times easier when you are actually doing something that you actually love to do.

I started consulting and doing health equity trainings and, back when, you know, health equity, we could say that word all the time, right? I was doing health equity trainings.

I was doing, um, just overall training development for organizations, right? I was doing, um, project management support for organizations.