The Recipe for Success: Finding My Niche with Find Your Yum

WHAT IS UP READER! My name is Carlie Lara Wallace, but many people refer to me as “The Energizer Bunny” due to my frequent spurts of energy and love of all things movement! I am a follower of Jesus Christ, wife to my best friend Blake Wallace, an SMU Alumni, and the proud business owner of Find Your Yum Restaurant Marketing LLC. I’m also crazy into the show Survivor and hope to be on the show one day… I’ve applied 3 times!

I love a lot of things, but only one of these things I turned into a business… and maybe you can too!

I hope you can sense from my personal description that I love a challenge and building a business while being an incredibly engaged college student was definitely that: a challenge. A lot of people have asked me how I got to where I am today; in fact, I also ask myself that a lot too! But the funny thing I recognize every time is that the answer is not that I just chose the right major or went to the right school, though that definitely helped or played a role. But rather, I am where I am today because of my crazy obsession with making my favorite restaurants known. And I turned this obsession into a successful career by finding my niche in the wide business market.

I recently graduated from SMU with a degree in Business Management, and while I do manage my business, when I describe what I do for work, that is not what I say. Therefore, the completion of this degree was only one of the crucial steps I took in finding my niche. 

But before we get into what my niche is or how I found it, let’s talk about what a niche is.

So, what is a niche? And why is it so important?

To explain this, I want to pose this question: Let’s say you find out that you need a life-saving heart surgery. Do you want just a general practitioner to conduct your procedure or a cardiac surgeon?

Obviously, you would choose the cardiac surgeon. They are the specialists; they are the ones who spent decades learning and practicing the exact movements needed to save your life. You want them!

I’m no surgeon, but here are the steps I took in turning a wide passion into a narrow specialty.

Throughout my childhood, I had a unique fascination with how food brought people together. I remembered all of the wonderful times my family and friends would gather at a restaurant... and the many times we were almost kicked out because of how loud we were laughing!

Here is my journey to finding my own niche:

STEP 1. Discovering the Passion: Realizing the love I have for restaurants would translate into a career path.

From brainstorming restaurants I wanted to open, to becoming what I like to call ‘an amateur food critic’, to studying menu design, throughout my high school years, my passion only grew. When my junior year came around and the college selection process began, it took a little searching before I came across an article describing how Dallas has “the most restaurants per capita,” leading me to apply and be accepted at SMU. (And I received a lot of scholarship money!) So, no culinary school for me, but a traditional college education would be the route I get into restaurants; I would not be the chef, but there is a lot more to a restaurant than that.

STEP 2. Identifying the Opportunity: Recognizing the gap in restaurant marketing and how I want to be in restaurants, but I’m not doing the cooking!

When realizing that restaurants are what I want to do, I physically put myself in an area flourishing with them. However, SMU didn’t have a restaurant studies degree program (I wish), so what would I study? I thought it would be cool to open a restaurant one day, so I decided on a degree in business management.

It is also very important to note that before even coming to SMU, I found myself finishing high school online due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Also during this time, due to the mandatory lockdowns, many of my favorite local restaurants began going out of business. I could not stand by and do nothing while this tragic event was happening, so I decided to start a blog on Instagram specifically to promote the local businesses in my hometown with some free social media marketing!

During my time at SMU, I became known as that girl who knew a lot about restaurants from always talking about my blog, to what restaurants I was going to try next, and I even landed an SMU Dining internship specifically in its marketing department. I also landed an internship in Spain to do some consulting work for a local vegan restaurant (a challenge since the Spanish diet mostly consists of meat and cheese!)

STEP 3. Building the Skillset: Gaining valuable experience through school, my blog, and hands-on experience!

Reader, pause and think. What is the thing in your life that you always wish you had more time for? Maybe there is a market niche you could tap into.

I had a passion like none other, and I was quickly adding more and more skills to my tool belt! Not long after restaurants started calling ME to come in and market their food!

While working in the industry, I began to realize that many chefs open restaurants not because they are good at marketing, but because they make great food. That created an opportunity gap for. What if I could do the marketing for them?

BOOM. A business, and while I’ll spare you, dear reader, on the other logistics of starting a business, I do find it necessary to inform you that I even went further in narrowing down my business to find my niche; I specialized even further so that I am not just another marketing agency in Dallas... I went from general marketing to specializing in social media marketing and influencer marketing for my restaurant clients. That’s where the newest generations get their news, so I want to meet them there. That is, I adjusted my niche to fit the market. 

STEP 4. Narrowing the Focus: Refining my niche further by specializing in social media and influencer marketing specifically for restaurants, where I could make the most impact!

(And who knows? Maybe Find Your Yum Restaurant Marketing LLC might specialize in something else in the future in case social media as we know it becomes less and less popular!)

Adaptability is key.

Now, let’s recap in a very visible way what my specialization process looked like: 

• My passion for restaurants turned into a desire to be on the management team of restaurants. I wanted to manage the marketing efforts!

• From wanting to manage all of the marketing efforts for restaurants, I decided to find a marketing sector that is booming right now. I would get really good at managing the social media marketing efforts for restaurants.

This may look way too specialized on paper, but believe me it worked.

And now it’s your turn! Let’s think about it together: College offers you a holistic education, but they make you choose a major, a degree of study. This can be the first step in finding your niche. Let’s say you decide to study finance. When it comes to electives or your higher-level course selection, can you narrow these choices down based on whether you would eventually work in the fields of public or personal accounts? If you go the personal accounts route, do you have a passion for retirement accounts, investments, or maybe some estate planning? Imagine this, you could become the go-to expert for personal financial retirement advice in Dallas. The same can be said for a trade or apprenticeship, too! You could become the specialist in your area when it comes to wedding-day hair for women with medium-length hair! 

Keep digging when you think you’ve gone deep enough! It’s a process of adding, yet eliminating.

Still don’t know where to start? Try filling this Venn Diagram out. I don’t believe that you should do a job you have absolutely no interest in. Make a list of things you actually like; they exist because there’s a career there! I also believe that you should tap into your strengths in life, rather than focusing on your weaknesses. What are things you have a gift for doing? I firmly believe that there is at least one thing that you are both good at and believe in.

This is your starting point. Now, can you narrow it down even further?

Reader, whether you are looking to start your own business or stand out among the masses of job applicants, I believe your next course of action would best be found by doing this tedious process of specialization: finding your niche. 

Especially as an entrepreneur in an already busy city, you have to offer something different, dare I say, niche, to stand out and survive. To me, this is the make-or-break step. 

Finally, I would love to be your cheerleader along in this process! Here’s how you can find me:

• @carlielara on Instagram

• Email: carlie@findyouryum.info 

• My Website: www.findyouryum.info