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To make more money, do as little as possible.

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April’s story of success

Small and local business owners need to choose a very narrow market. When they do, we assure them they will make more money. Here’s a voice mail I got yesterday from one company who went narrow. It’s much more powerful than any theory.

April used to be a solo practitioner. Now she owns a company with a growing number of employees and a business that is exploding. She did it by dropping 99.9% of her potential market and focusing extremely narrowly on only one tiny facet of her market. It happens all the time when we convince companies to focus narrowly. April’s is just one of innumerable stories we hear all the time as we challenge small and local companies to go narrow, not wide.

April used to be a Virtual Assistant, just like thousands of others. And just like thousands of others, all she could say is that she is better than the other thousands, which is what they other thousands would say, too. They all sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Then April decided to stop being a Virtual Assistant to the world like all the other thousands, and started focusing solely on real estate agents.

Narrow and Deep, not Broad and Shallow
But she went even narrower. She took the leap to focus not just on real estate agents, but solely on helping them manage their online services – not the standard SEO or online marketing that thousands do – she doesn’t do that; but just helping them manage their online writing, data and pictures – posting new properties, blogs, data, customer records, potential leads, etc. This is an extremely narrow niche, not just with real estate agents, and not just online, but only a very specific part of the online presence.

This was scary to do, because, as with any really good narrowing down of a business, she was leaving behind 99.9% of the potential customers available to all the other thousands of Virtual Assistants like what she used to be. But as soon as she made the switch last year, she stopped sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher, started making more money and started bringing on real estate agents.

Results Speak Louder Than Words
Soon she had one entire office of 60 real estate agents using her company to administrate their online services, and was bringing on smaller offices as well. She started taking on employees from the thousands of Virtual Assistants out there who had not narrowed their services and were now looking for jobs, and her business has been growing ever since. I got this voice mail from her yesterday:

“I just wanted to let you know how 3to5 Club training is just continuing to change my life. I just decided to meet up with a potential major strategic partner connected to the 60-person real estate office, with much bigger real estate connections. When I explained to him what I’m doing and how I’ve narrowed my business down to only managing online real estate company services, getting that specific – he was so excited he almost did cartwheels. He said, “I don’ t know anyone else doing this. We have to package this for the other offices.

Long story short – he is introducing me to seven other company offices in the next three months. So we will go from having 60 agents to all 560 agents. It’s so great. Honestly, I would not be where I’m at without your wisdom and advice and 3to5 Club’s encouragement and belief in me all this time. It turns out that what we are doing is so specific that it is cutting edge for real estate marketing.

Just wanted to say thank you so much and I hope you have a great weekend.”

Focus, Focus, Focus…
I have NEVER seen a small or local company go narrow and lose money doing it. Never. They always make more money if they stick with it. But I’ve seen more than I can count go out of business by trying to be all things to all people. They rarely make more money. At best they grow their revenue along with their expenses and end up a lot busier, more stuck on the treadmill, with higher revenue but with no more profit. But usually their revenue goes down along with their profit.

Want to make more money? Stop doing everything, and just do one thing. You can do “everything” later, after you build a successful company around one thing.

Stop taking advice from Giant Corporation, Inc.’s story. Take it from April. Do one thing, very narrowly. The more narrow your niche, the more likely you are to make money.

Traditional Branding Isn’t for Small Business

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Raving Fans are your brand.

As we start out, we take cues from Giant Corporation, Inc. that we should develop cool logos, fancy brochures, zippy websites, and catchy copy. But this is a waste of time and money for a lot of small businesses and a huge misdirection of focus. There is a better way for most of us.

A janitorial supply company wrote a response in another blog promoting all this fancy “branding” (to which this blog is a response):

“I think the most important thing you can do to brand your company is to provide superior customer support. Here at CleanItSupply.com we pride ourselves on our customer service. We answer our telephones and respond to customer’s needs immediately. Customer service is what sets us apart for the rest and has customers coming back over and over again!

CleanItSupply.com has it figured out. For a small company the most important “branding” you can do is provide the best service possible and create raving fans.

Where do 95% of all our customers come from? I ask this question almost every time I speak and from the mouths of thousands of business owners → “95% of our future customers come from our existing customers referring them.”

For those under 30, 85% of product discussions are face2face and only 7% are online. The rest are by telephone or email. For those over 30, 92% are face2face and the rest are online, email, and phone. Our customers are talking directly to their FRIENDS, not with strangers or digital friends online. They are telling their FRIENDS what their experience was with us. And 90+% of our customers come from those human, face2face discussions.

So what are we doing going out and buying advertisements and creating fancy brochures and clever tag lines to attract people we’ve never met? The best brand we can build is to

get those who know us, to love us.

When we get big and have more money than time, we can go the fancy ad route.

But for now, focus on being the best in YOUR world and specifically on turning customers into raving fans. That’s the best branding you can do because it’s authentic, it’s really who you are, and it’s targeted at your best opportunity for finding future customers – from your existing ones.

Good on you, CleanItSupply.com!

 

You Don’t Own Your Brand Anymore

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Guess Who Does

If you’re spending a lot of money to develop your brand through advertising or a nifty website, you might want to rethink that. You don’t control your brand anymore, so trying to create or enhance it with slick images and thought-provoking tag lines could just be a waste of valuable time and money resources.

A couple years ago, Sun Microsystems theorized that we are no longer in the technology or information ages, but that we are now in the Participation Age, and that the hallmark of the Participation Age is Sharing.

Nobody likes to be told what to do, so their narrative hasn’t spread widely, but I’ve sure jumped on board – I believe there is no question we’re in the Participation Age, and that the central driving force in our economy is Sharing of ideas, resources, schools of thought, and commingling of those into new products, services, and conversations.

There is nowhere to hide anymore. Information is one of those things that is too easy to share now for anyone to try to keep it to themselves or pretend that one thing is actually another. That’s where the brand problem comes in. If the brand you’re putting in that slick brochure isn’t the same brand the admin, dock worker and VP have in your office, you’re in trouble. The Participation Age will expose you because your customers and employees will be sharing openly and freely about your real brand, the one they experience, not the one you put in that brochure.

So I guess I’m being a little coy in saying you’ve lost control of it; what has really happened is that you’ve lost control of pretending what it is. We can no longer market “family friendly” hot dogs and treat our employees like indentured servants, Who we SAY we are and who we REALLY are had better match up, because if they don’t, the conversation our clients and employees are having on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a dozen other places is going to make the difference glaringly obvious.

Participation comes from Sharing, and Sharing comes from Community. People have more access to information sharing communities than ever before. Iran thought they could control their brand, but Twitter made it impossible – the real brand came out through their “customers” and “employees”.

The best we can do is to influence our brand by 1) creating a community for our clients to talk with others, and us, and 2) being an active part of that conversation. We cannot afford to say “Pay no attention to the man behind the green curtain” as in the Wizard of Oz. Who we are has to match what we do.

We should be actively involved with our customers, letting them know all the great things we do for them and influencing our brand by ensuring they know we’re listening and are working on their behalf. It’s easy to throw stones at the unknown or those at a distance. Companies that know this have come down off their high horse and have joined the Sharing party to actively engage with their customers on a level playing field. And surprise, surprise, these are the companies that are most in touch with what their customers really want from them.

Everyone knows the story of Zappos shoes working themselves into the conversation on Twitter. They didn’t do it just because it was intriguing, but they understand that when people see that the brand they talk about is the same brand they live in their offices, it creates community and connection that is stronger than any slick brochure Zappos could ever put on the street.

What are you doing to make sure you’re in the conversation with your customers and your employees about your brand? They’re already out there sharing it – you might want to get involved and influence what they share.

Start with this question – “What are you buying from me that you don’t even think I know I’m selling?” You’ll make more money in less time with questions like that. And you’ll actually have an impact on the brand that you no longer control.