What To Do If You’ve Outgrown Your Current Business (Or Want To) ~ Part 4

I’ve noticed many clients and peers feeling like either they’ve outgrown their current business in some way, or some next level of expression is wanting to make its way through that will require shifts in their business. 

Since there’s momentum in the current business, it can seem daunting to know where to start to bring yourself and your business into alignment with your next level of expression. This series is designed to help make that shift easier.

In Part 1, I provided an overview of my five-step process for catching your business up with who you’ve become, or shifting it to align and keep pace with who you’re becoming next.  

In Part 2, we dove more deeply into how to ensure your business is in full alignment with who YOU truly are at the deepest level. There’s no business strategy that will compensate for not having this foundation solid! 

In Part 3, we covered how to ensure that you are actually serving the right people. If your client base is not defined specifically and narrowly enough, or isn’t truly in alignment with you, that will directly affect your results. 

My intent so far in this series has been to demonstrate that there are fundamental building blocks in your business, each one building on the one before it. The more steps you take in your business-building activities, the further off-target you become if you’re not making sure that each step is in alignment as you go.

Today, we look at the next two steps in this evaluation and refinement process: Your Message and Your Offerings.

If you’ve discovered through this exploration that you’ve had to make an adjustment to your target audience, then of course it follows that your message will also need to shift in order for you to be able to reach that tribe most effectively.

Let’s look again at the specific example we used in Part 3 to help make this tangible: Say you’ve been marketing yourself as a fitness trainer who helps people get into shape.

You read Part 3 of this series about your tribe and did the exercise which helped you get a lot more specific and narrow about which clients you most like to work with, and which ones get the fastest and best results in working with you. That turned out to be new moms who want to get their pre-baby bodies back.

That’s soooo much more clear and specific than marketing to a broad group of people who want to get in shape! As a result, it allows you to do all kinds of cool stuff to make your message more clear and powerful. Some examples include:

• Being able to craft your message such that it addresses the specific problems that new moms face with their weight and their bodies after they’ve had their babies, and what they want instead
• Using specific images on your web site and other marketing materials that speak to that group of people
• Spreading the word in specific places where new moms hang out
• Setting up a referral program that inspires people to spread the word to anyone they know who is a new mom facing weight and fitness issues (it’s so much easier for them to spread the word when you’re specific about who your clients are)

And those are just a few examples off the top of my head-the possibilities are endless! Hopefully you can see how much more powerful your message becomes when you align it with a specifically and narrowly defined client group.

The same, of course, happens with your offerings. The more specific and well-matched your client group becomes, the more your offerings can be tailored to meet their needs.

Once you know you’re serving new moms who want their pre-baby bodies back (and not everyone in the world who’d like to get into shape), you can design programs that meet their specific needs, and the challenges they face:

• Personal training that incorporates the baby into the training (since new moms can’t go far without them)
• Private training that has you come to their house and show them how to exercise with simple props at home instead of them having to go to the gym, which is hard for them to do
• Group training programs that allow new moms who may be craving adult company to get together and work out in community, share challenges, and encourage each other
• A specialty training program to help them heal and strengthen muscles compromised after C-section

Notice how each of these different idea solves a very particular problem for this group of women. You become the go-to expert, and have more clients than you can handle, if you get really good at serving this particular group, and getting the word out to your perfect clients!

So…know yourself and know your tribe, and all of a sudden your message and your offerings fall into line in a way they couldn’t before. Your business is catching up with who you are and who you most want to become, and, in turn, producing far more powerful results.

Now it’s your turn: How might your message and your offerings come into better alignment with you and your most aligned clients? 

Photo: Jon Coupland