In my last post I talked about the importance of Finding Your Sweet Spot for Business Growth. Today I’m going to take a deeper dive into two elements of your Sweet Spot: Your Top Clients and Your Unique Offering, and how identifying them can generate explosive growth.

“A lot of people go into business and immediately try to copy the other guy. …. When you stop looking at the other guy and start focusing on how you can easily offer something truly unique, something your best customers really want…you stop being a follower in competition with everyone else. You become a leader.” Mike Michalowicz, The Pumpkin Plan

The most important thing to remember when determining your Unique Offering is that it is completely tied to your Top Clients.

If you try to define each of these areas separately from each other, you will inevitably experience a situation where you are shouting from the roof tops about your wonderful unique product, but nobody seems to care.

What we have learned from six years of Pumpkin Planning businesses is that the first step in defining your Unique Offering is to define your Top Clients. Once you define who you want to attract, you will match your Unique Offering to what your Top Clients most want and need from you, in a UNIQUE way that your Top Clients will notice and appreciate.

If this seems a little confusing and chicken-and-egg like, never fear. We’ve figured out just how to figure it all out!

When I first met Andrea Walker of Smartly Organized eight years ago, she was just starting up her professional organizing business. Andrea is a master organizer. She can organize just about anything, from your office files to your garage. And that’s exactly what she was doing, working with anyone who needed organizational help in any area they needed.

After a few years, Andrea confided in me that while her business was doing fine, she was feeling dissatisfied with her growth. In her words, she wasn’t busy enough. And she couldn’t predict when and from where her next client would come. She was still doing all of the work herself, despite her vision to grow a company with teams of organizers working multiple jobs at a time.

I started talking to Andrea about identifying her Top Clients and narrowing down her target market.

She didn’t think that would be possible, as she had so many different kinds of clients and they were ALL good clients.  I suggested that we do the Client Assessment Chart together, to see if we could figure out her Top Clients. We listed her clients in revenue order, and then started grading them on how much she liked working with them, who paid quickly, who referred other clients, etc.

A profile of Andrea’s best clients quickly began to emerge. They were mostly busy families and individuals, working professionals, who were in some stage of moving. They were either preparing their home for sale, getting ready to move, packing up, or unpacking and getting settled into a new home. Andrea loved the project management and staging aspect of working with families getting ready to move, and thrived on the idea of getting these things done fast and efficiently for her clients. Bingo! Andrea now had a clearly defined target audience.

Once she understood who her best clients were, her Unique Offering followed.

She was able to talk to her Top Clients about their needs, and learned that her clients felt overwhelmed and stressed by the moving process, pressed for time but longing to get back to their normal routine, to focus on their families and their lives.

In 2015 Andrea made the leap and refocused her business and all of her marketing materials on busy families who are moving out of and/or into a new home. No more general organizing of anything under the sun for anyone who happened to need help.

Her new tagline became Smartly Organized: The Smartest Move You’ll Ever Make. Her Unique Offering focused on providing a smooth and easy move for her clients. Knowing that getting back to normal life quickly was important to her clients, she developed offerings like the 1 Day Unpack, where she and her team get you unpacked and organized, with pictures hanging on the walls, and your book on your night stand, in one day. No living with boxes everywhere for weeks or months after your move.

When Andrea launched her new website, www.SmartlyOrganized.com, in 2015, what happened next was almost miraculous. People she knew, and other professional organizers, started commenting that they didn’t know that Andrea specialized in moving. While it felt a little strange to her to “limit” her client base, she jumped in and owned the change.

Almost overnight, the clients began to flow in. Andrea had started to develop relationships with realtors, and the referrals were streaming from that source as well. People were also finding her on the internet, which had never happened before.

Over the past three years, Andrea has gone from “I’m not busy enough” to “I can’t hire people to help me fast enough.” She has gone from a solo business owner to a business with teams of independent contractors who can get you organized and packed, or unpacked and organized, anywhere in the U.S., and even some countries outside of the U.S. In 2017, a client moving to Japan flew Andrea to Tokyo to help her get settled in her new apartment there, while Andrea’s team back in the U.S. continued to manage their other client projects.

Since identifying her Top Clients and Unique Offering, and rebranding in 2015, Andrea has tripled her revenues, and more than quadrupled her net income.

The moral of the story, if you can define who your Top Clients are, and then match your Unique Offering to what they most want and need from you, you will naturally attract more and more Top Clients just like them.

Would you like help figuring out who YOUR Top Clients are, and what YOUR Unique Offering is?

Click here to Find a Strategist.

Would you love to work with small business owners to drive explosive growth and build thriving businesses like Andrea’s?

Click through to learn about our Pumpkin Plan Strategist Certification Program.