The Impact of Niche Entrepreneurship: A Conversation with Sam Kwak

Unlock the true potential of niche entrepreneurship with our outstanding guest - real estate entrepreneur, investor, YouTuber, author, and the founder of the Accelerated Business Banking Concept, Sam Kwak. Sam's journey from starting a real estate investing education business to creating a thriving YouTube channel and catapulting other entrepreneurs to the seven-figure mark is nothing short of inspiring. His emphasis on understanding your industry, finding your niche, and aligning your business with your passions are some of the golden nuggets you won't want to miss.

Delve deeper into the conversation as Sam explores the power of social media in niche business development and shares his unique insights into niche marketing. His valuable advice on understanding customer needs and creating products to cater to these needs is a practical guide for anyone looking to level up their business. With a wealth of knowledge from launching multiple six and seven-figure companies and helping over 1,800 homeowners find a path to financial freedom, Sam has much to offer in this exciting episode. To connect with Sam, you can find him @samkwak on LinkedIn or @samkwakofficial on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.   

To connect with Olivet’s Entrepreneurship Program, contact Program Director, Chris Perez at caperez2@olivet.edu.

To learn more about other entrepreneurship opportunities and the McGraw School of Business’s very own Createur Conference and Pitch Competition, go to Createur.Olivet.edu.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This week, Sam Kwak is joining us to discuss the practices an entrepreneur can take to find their niche.

Speaker 2: 0:07

Where faith and business meet. This is Creator, Episode 6.

Speaker 1: 0:19

Hello everyone. This week, carly and I are thrilled to have the other member of the dynamic duo known as the Kwak Brothers. Just a few episodes ago we had Daniel and today we have Sam Kwak with us.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Yes, sam is a real estate entrepreneur, investor, youtuber, author and the founder of the Accelerated Business Banking Concept. Since 2016, sam and his brother, daniel have been teaching concepts and strategies related to real estate, investing and finance. In his real estate career, sam was involved in over $5 million of real estate investments and transactions. With the Accelerated Banking Concept, he's helped over 1,800 homeowners find a path to financial freedom and peace. Sam has also launched multiple six and seven-figure companies related to real estate. Today, he's passionate about helping every American family unlock the secrets to financial freedom and peace, but, most importantly, he's a husband, a father and a Christ follower. Sam, thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker 3: 1:25

Thank you for having me, guys.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Of course. So, sam, when an entrepreneur is just starting out, the concept of finding your niche is going to come up quite a bit. Could you maybe just explain a little bit first what is a niche for some of our listeners who may not know and then share how, through your experiences in entrepreneurship, you've taken your passions and your interests and found your niche?

Speaker 3: 1:54

So a niche or niche, depending on how you want to say it potato, potato is basically the most simplest way I can explain it is what specific specialization or specialized solution or product you're involved in in your industry. So for me, I'm in the finance industry, but, more specifically, if I'm going to niche down even from that, it's then real estate, and I'm even niched down even more into real estate where I have a very specific coaching and consulting within the real estate space. So, yeah, so niche is something that it's more to me. I think it's more than just a topic or a specialized subject or field, but it's really like what specific problem are you solving for a very specific set of people out there that is ready and wanting to do business with you?

Speaker 1: 2:54

Yeah, what strategies or research methods do you recommend to find your niche? Obviously you found kind of that real estate niche right, and so how did you find that? How was that something that came up as kind of a passion for you?

Speaker 3: 3:07

Yeah, so great question and I'll kind of go back to a little bit of my story and I'll pause throughout so that you guys have the opportunity to ask questions. So back when I was in all of that this is 2013-14, I began my journey actually in business actually a completely different niche. So I was in a music entertainment business and then I was inspired by a book and a couple of friends and relationship I met. That long story short got me interested in getting to getting into real estate. Real estate investing is more specifically. So when I got invested, interested in real estate investing, I started doing a lot of the research and working, growing and when start looking to figure out how to break in to my real estate investing world. I'll speak more so on some of the more active businesses that we have going on right now. So fast, fast forward. I know I want to get into real estate. You know real estate investing has kind of been my, my world.

Speaker 3: 4:13

One thing I did and I'll point this out and I know specifically for your guys's audience is I spent a lot of time learning and researching and really getting intimate with the industry and the not just of an ocular but also like who are the people that are part of the industry who are the typical profile for people that succeed in real estate. And I got to learn a lot about the industry and how it works and how money is made. So really just understanding from like a 50,000 feet overview of your industry and also understanding what are the sub industries that are also within the real estate investing world, right. So like in real estate investing, specifically, there's the subset or in this topic niche, and like fixing and flipping houses or something called wholesaling or another, be buying holds, so buying long-term rentals and holding on to them for recurring income. So just understanding that kind of helps you map out what are some different possibilities. And at first you may kind of want to have your hands on different things, right, and kind of get a little flavor test of different subsets within your industry, right. I mean, it's like don't be like, hey, I want to try real estate and I want to try like culinary, I want to try restaurant Like. Yeah, like in the very beginning stages maybe, but I think you should, at least at this stage, have some idea as far as what gravitates. You know what allows you to kind of turn on your passion. So, yeah, just have an idea Once you have a new industry and you're like I love real estate, or I love travel, or I love food, or I love fitness, and then, within that subset, understand what other subsets are there in there and try them out. And that's exactly what I did and I realized and I think, halfway through kind of growing my real estate investing business is that I love and my specialty is in marketing marketing, sales and I got even more specialized in doing that and we can talk about this in another day. But like knowing what your strengths are and then hiring people out, just so that everyone around you is complimenting your strength. But in terms of a niche, yeah, really in the first two, three years was a lot of experimenting, figuring out what works and what does it, and I'll get to kind of exactly how I found, or how actually the niche found me, instead of the other way around. So that's initially what I would do, just to get the process started of understanding what niches are out there, what subset.

Speaker 3: 6:54

There's really a really good book. I would suggest everyone read it. It's called Blue Ocean and, yes, it's understanding like, and so it's basically understanding like what your industry looks like and what are the subsets that are there? Like, subniches are there in the industry. But the whole concept of Blue Ocean is what subset of your industry has not been have been discovered yet? Right, like the whole.

Speaker 3: 7:23

Like I'll give an example like the whole keto diet thing right, that didn't exist 20 years ago. Right, no one really knew about this keto thing was Very few people knew about it. And so in the book Blue Ocean, people would say, oh yeah, keto diet 20 years ago would have been a Blue Ocean. Because everyone else back in the day was just like hey, just eat less, right, and then more and more, these fitness gurus came out and say, hey, this is the keto diet, this is the best thing in the world, you know, but you gotta, all of you should be on a keto diet. Now, like, keto is kind of becoming more of a red ocean where it's been a little bit more saturated. There's a lot more people in the keto diet world, not saying it's bad or a good thing, but so, yeah, like, just really being really intimate with that in the initial kind of stages of your business and building your business will at least help you, just be aware. I think that that's probably the biggest thing.

Speaker 2: 8:18

To add a little bit as well. You know how do you actually, when do you decide that you are committed to that niche or niche, or is there a room to test it out before you actually commit? You know how long would you say you have, or when do you realize that it's time to actually start. You know, maybe switching gears if things don't seem to be working out right.

Speaker 3: 8:49

Yeah, that's a great question. So I mentioned earlier that my niche chose me right.

Speaker 2: 8:55

Right.

Speaker 3: 8:55

It's this. You know, I didn't choose the entrepreneurial life, the entrepreneurial life chose me cliche saying, but I mean honestly. There's some truth in that because initially I got into this business the real estate investing business, you know, obviously I do my own real estate investing and, like you mentioned, carly, in my bio, I've done some transactions in the past. Over time I started getting niched into the education side of it. So people were asking hey, how do you like, how did you do what you do? Like, can you teach me? So a lot of it comes from. You really have to pay attention to what people are saying around you, cause and this is also true, like in the world of social media, which I'll get to in a sec but like people was around me were like, hey, sam, whatever you did there, like you need to teach me how to do it. And they even offered like I'll even pay you or pay for your time for me to sit and for you to show me how you did what you did. And that's kind of what like, how kick, what kick started our, our real estate investing education business, as well as consulting business, was people just asking about that? So that kind of started out and we started getting traction in it. We actually launched our own education company back in 2019. And we started out with this really broad kind of very general type of education, like we were pretty much teaching everything and everything, anything or everything and but even step before that, like we were, we started our YouTube channel actually, funny enough, in the dorm room at all of that and we started our YouTube channel was just literally a smartphone, a whiteboard, and that was it.

Speaker 3: 10:35

So one of the things that I did, and how my current niche and I got basically married, how my niche found me, was that I started just publishing videos within my industry. So I was talking about real estate topics, real estate investing, finance, investments in general, but I also had a very clear guardrail of like, hey, this is like X, y, z are the things that I'm not going to talk about. I'm just going to focus on A, b and C, and pretty much my only motivation at the time wasn't to like, find more people or to get subscribers or anything like that. It was just like I was really passionate about what I was talking about. It's just my enthusiasm for like, oh my gosh, like this is awesome, and I started sharing that on YouTube and I think I think about, I want to say, 20 videos in 20 or 30 videos in one of the videos was like also blew up, and that video was titled how to Pay Off your Mortgage in 5 to 7 years. And when I say blew up, it meant I meant like it gained like 200,000, 200,000 views in like in like two months, right, and I'm like, oh, this is cool, like this has never happened before. And I'm like, oh, this is interesting. So I started making more videos about it. Right, it's a whole concept like, hey, if they like to give more right.

Speaker 3: 11:48

So I started, like making others videos similar, like answering questions or answering or going a little bit deeper or just any like topics around that specific video I made, and I started getting more views, more views, more views, eventually to where some of these videos hit over a million views. And it was interesting because, as these videos were blowing up and this is like right before I started the education company, too, is I have people email and literally call me out of the blue asking like, hey, can you help me do what you talked about on the YouTube video? And at first I was like this is kind of annoying, like I don't want to be stalked, like what's going on right, and until what? I had this epiphany. I'm like, oh my gosh, like these people are willing to pay me to like tell them more about this, and so like that's ultimately what kickstarted my consulting business and I started to put some restructure in it.

Speaker 3: 12:47

So really, if I'm like to sum it up, I use social media to kind of test my messaging and to test the topics and different things that I was passionate about. So I had, like, if I'm using like phishing analogy, like I put multiple baits and like fishing rods out there right To kind of see like what works really well, what jives. And I love social media for that reason is because you can literally test, kind of like a sample of your product for free, right, and like social media has ton of data, like YouTube especially, gives you a ton of data about your audience, your demographics, you know, just look at your analytics and see like who's like gravitated towards you right. So when I had this video blow up to like million views, I was able to see like the type of people that I was attracting and the demographics, the psychographics, like what other videos are watching as well. And so I was kind of getting an idea like of, okay, like these people, they're older, like 40, 50, 60 years old, and they're watching these other types of videos about retirement and investment, investment.

Speaker 3: 13:53

And then I came to a realization that a lot of these people that liked my video and watched my video and YouTube recommended it, were people looking to retire. They want to prepare for, you know, the ultimate 65 years old retirement age. And so I realized that's my audience, like I need to, that's who I'm talking to. And I felt especially equipped by just the fact that I was talking about it and just the marketing knowledge and just how God wired me. That's who I needed to serve.

Speaker 3: 14:26

And so so part of it was like, like I felt a little bit conflicted because I like I wanted to help everybody, right, like I want to help the 20 year olds, I want to help the 70 year olds, I want to help everybody. But I realized when you try to help everybody and anybody, you won't, you won't attract anybody, right, it's like you're trying to talk to everybody. So I came to the conclusion of, like I got to niche down, I got to get very specific and help these specific people solve a very specific set of problems and honestly, just doing that helped my brother and I cross a seven figure mark in our business and our revenue. So you don't have to like help everybody to be making millions of dollars or in revenue If you can solve a very specific problem like.

Speaker 3: 15:12

I'll give you an example I know a gentleman who sells like a very specific car part and it's literally like the size of your thumb and he's got a billion dollar business Right. Like he just sells his tiny little part and he's got a patent on it and he sells it to all these you know car manufacturers and he's making billions of dollars. So you don't have to again help and serve everybody which in this case it kind of is but like being very specific you actually will be more successful. But going back to my point earlier is, yeah, social media is a phenomenal place to test, but having some intentionality, like looking for like who is the audience that I'm attracting and what is a problem that they have.

Speaker 1: 15:58

Yeah, it's so interesting how you were able to niche down yourself just by kind of flavor profiling, kind of like what you were saying earlier, and ultimately finding your luo ocea and finding kind of what worked best in your case, obviously, niching down almost made the success even greater by operating a little bit smaller in terms of who you're trying to reach.

Speaker 2: 16:23

So, sam, I really like the way you broke that down as well. Looking at you started out, what are you passionate about, actually, and finding something that you really care about? But and people are drawn to something like that when you care deeply about something, people will come and then, after that kind of starting to break things down, see who you can help specifically rather than, as you mentioned, everyone. It's good to start to realize who that target audience really is and who you can help the best, so I really liked that.

Speaker 3: 17:00

Yeah, and honestly, I tell people don't fall in love with your product or even your services. Fall in love with your audience. Right, and the very fact that seeing your audience is this problem is being solved, or at least being on the way of having their problem being solved, to me that's the most refreshing thing on what I do on business side. So, yeah, so, just being hyper focused on your audience and being able to see your audience win and succeed because of what you do, yeah, that's huge. So products and services can come and go right, but your audience will always be there and they may have a different thing or they have different problems that they trust you to solve.

Speaker 3: 17:49

So that's when you kind of start branching out right To different things. Like, for example, I was working with a just helping out another business owner and she had this like a mat floor mat product and I'm like you know your audience will also really love candles, like the type of audience that you serve, like they're like older females, like they don't really love candles. You should like totally bundle that in and so, again, like, the more you focus on the audience, the products will come. Like it's just a matter of figuring out what your audience wants and being very specific about it too.

Speaker 1: 18:24

Yeah, and kind of the same mindset, you know, kind of seeing the problem being solved through the audience. How do you stay flexible and open to new opportunities while also staying true to your niche?

Speaker 3: 18:37

Yeah, great question. So one of the things that all my companies we set is core values, and I know this sounds like some people like to kind of overlook core values, and this is another great book that I also recommend for a read is called Traction by Gino Lickman phenomenal book. So one of the things that we do with core values is, yes, we use that to hire and fire people and determining whether someone in our company is a right fit in terms of culturally. But we also look at the core values from the standpoint of our focus, focal point, for how do we serve and who we are in terms of or who we are to our clients, right? So one of the core values that we have for our consulting business is that we like to be disruptive.

Speaker 3: 19:26

Right, I'm a huge like, I'm a huge freedom guy. Like I have this like little rub on me, like I can't imagine, like not having freedom, and so I want that for people too. Like I want others to have freedom, not from the sense like they could do whatever the heck they want, but like truly being able to be being able to have that freedom of like purpose and relationship and time to truly, you know, respond to the call that you know they have for their life. So, being disruptive, I believe, like I want to challenge the status quo and how this relates to how we stay focused is, as long as we're serving our audience and we know who our audience is and we're staying true to we, are being disruptive and and being freedom oriented and being excellent and doing what we do, then we're doing okay. Like, ultimately, I feel at peace.

Speaker 3: 20:23

As long as we're doing those two things Staying true to ourselves with core values and being focused on our audience, and it really like, whatever product or services we create, as long as it does that right, as long as it's a great reflection of our core values and it solves the problem for our audience, I'm totally cool. So, like, just recently, we we added another product to our offering and it does it does another thing right to help our clients and our customers Solve a very specific problem. So, so yeah, that's ultimately how you stay focused. It's not about the product and services again, it's about the audience and just being very focused on that.

Speaker 2: 21:03

So, sam, this has been such a great discussion, and I wish that time didn't go so fast, but it looks like we are almost out of time. So, as we start to wrap things up, though, we do have to ask you our Quirky question of the week, as we like to call it and Sam we're actually gonna do something a little bit different this week, so let's do a little experiment right.

Speaker 3: 21:25

All right, love it.

Speaker 2: 21:26

We're actually going to ask you the same question we asked your brother and then compare the answers. Okay are you ready for this?

Speaker 1: 21:35

All right, it's doing right Spencer.

Speaker 2: 21:37

What is our question this week?

Speaker 1: 21:38

All right, here's the question if you could have one, the superpower, to help you in your line of work, what would it be and why?

Speaker 3: 21:46

Oh, oh yeah, super car, oh yeah, I just just being able to read people's minds right, cuz, like I mean, this is it sounds like a cop-out answer it's not, but like it really is because, like In business, like the moment, you know what people want, like what their deepest desires are and, in a way, like it all comes down to, like being needed. You know the feeling of needed belonging, you know being liked right, always like basic tenants of like our needs, but like it, if I can figure out like what people want, kind of like what's that? Like the X-Men character, dr.

Speaker 3: 22:26

Xavier right Like if I have that power and just know, like, what people want, and I can create like give it to them Like, yeah, that'd be awesome.

Speaker 2: 22:32

I agree, that would be pretty great.

Speaker 1: 22:34

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, hi, Sam, thank you again so much for taking the time today to explore some some niche marketing with us. Obviously, you found great success in that and we just want to thank you so much for your insight.

Speaker 3: 22:47

Yeah, and thanks guys for having me on and I hope this for those that are listening at it, some like aha moments and and for you to kind of start thinking about whether you're in the early stages of business or your Like a couple years ahead, like kind of allow you to think like okay, like what am I actually doing? Like, am I creating products? Or I mean, am I serving people? And I hope that you know this helps you at least think about how do I, how am I exactly solving? Solving a problem for my people. So but yeah, thanks guys, I had fun and this is great. I hope this Creates a lot of impact for sure.

Speaker 2: 23:19

What a great topic and with a great speaker. And just to let you know From that last question, your brother said that he would want to have a super reading and writing ability to do it at a extra fast pace. Nice and listeners. If you want to connect with Sam, you can actually find him under at Sam clock on LinkedIn or At Sam clock official on Twitter, instagram or Facebook, so go check that out.

Speaker 1: 23:46

That's right, and if you want to connect with all of its entrepreneurship program director, chris Perez, or discover under Entrepreneurship opportunities the program has to offer, such as the McGraw School of Business's very own Creator conference and pitch competition, just go to all olivet. edu slash creator, where faith and business meet. This is the creator podcast. We'll see you later.