"Pick a niche" is the most repeated advice in this business. Everybody nods at it. Then year one shows up and you take the chiropractor, the food truck, and your cousin's band, because the invoice cleared. Picking a niche was never the hard part. You could name one in ten seconds right now. The hard part is turning down a check that doesn't fit while rent is due. So most of us quietly stay general and call it staying flexible. Here's what that costs. Every new industry is a first project again. New research, new angles, new objections, new reporting. If learning a fresh industry eats 15 unbilled hours, three of them in year one is 45 hours you donated. Swap in your own number. Nothing compounds, because nothing repeats. Going the other way has a bill too. Pick wrong in month two and you are eight months into an industry you can't stand. Scroll the feed and you only get one of those stories. Plenty of "I niched down and tripled my revenue." Almost nobody posts the niche they picked and quietly abandoned. So I want to break that pattern today. No "it depends on your market." No "do both." Both of those are free to say. Pick one, then tell me what it cost you. 𝐘𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞: 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐨𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐲 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥? 𝐏𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐢𝐭.

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. --Mary Oliver Rip May

Alright, DE fam. Grab your coffee. This one's long because I want you to run it today on a real business, not nod along and forget it by Wednesday. There's a one-page template at the end. Steal it. Today's tactic: a 25-minute audit of any local business's Google Business Profile using nothing but public data, that ends in a one-page gap list you can send cold. Most of you are still opening conversations with "I'd love to chat about your marketing sometime." That's not an offer. That's a request for a favor from a stranger. Let's fix that. 𝗙𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁, 𝗟𝗲𝘁'𝘀 𝗞𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗮 𝗕𝗮𝗱 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 The assumption is that you need access before you can say anything useful. You don't. Here's the thing. Every single input that decides whether a plumber shows up in the map pack is public. The business name. The primary category. The hours. The photos. The review count, the review dates, the responses. The posts. The Q&A. The website it points to. All of it is sitting there right now, visible from your kitchen table, because it's visible to his customers. That is the entire purpose of the profile. You're not hacking anything. You're standing on the sidewalk looking at the storefront. Now the other bad version of this, and this one's more common in our world. Most "free audits" are an automated PDF with a score out of 100 and a red bar chart. Subject line: "Your business is invisible online!" The owner opens it, sees a 43, and feels insulted by a robot he's never met. That's not an audit. It's a form letter with his name merged into it, and he can smell it in four seconds. A gap list is a different animal. Five things, in his language, with what each one is costing him. One page. No score. No logo on every corner. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 Run your own numbers on this one. Say it takes you 25 minutes per business once you've got the rhythm. Twelve gap lists is five hours of your week. If three of those twelve take the call, and one of the three buys a $500 profile optimization, that five hours paid you about $100 an hour.

I acquired a thing and I'm sharing it with you all... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N8NM8kYC_WGI2njBF2YRQWiRmqwZ-wMjqOuogfnATCo/edit?usp=sharing