Reconnect with Your Business Who: Remember Who You Serve

At the beginning of the year, I confronted the reality of hardship that comes along with growing a small business. While sustained growth is absolutely the goal for small businesses, it requires stretching into new administrative skills and learning how to let go of some responsibilities. 

Ultimately, the dream of growth and the actual experience of it are two different things. For a small business owner, this can be somewhat demoralizing. Running the business feels so much more burdensome and complicated than simply serving your clients. As much as you want to have new clients seek you out and choose your service for their needs, dealing with all the systems and administration drags down your ability to reach the right people at the right times and places.

This is compounded by an increasing ratio of clients on your roster who do not really fit your target ideal. As you struggle to serve clients who are not the best match for your skills, you begin to lose focus in your sales and marketing practices while also losing confidence in the value of your service. It used to be so much easier and enjoyable. What happened! 

The Drain of Working with Incompatible Clients 

One of the primary launchpads for a startup service business is that first perfect client. When you work with someone who is just an ideal fit for your service and business style, it bolsters your confidence that this is the exact mission meant for you. You might believe that every experience will be just like that, and you internalize the idea that you can replicate this relationship with every client going forward.

Unfortunately, this tends to be a false expectation. As you expand your marketing budget and attract more clients, you will inevitably begin to work with people who don’t fit that ideal scenario. Whether they are just personally incompatible, do things to make your services harder to deliver, depend on you for skills you don’t offer, or something else, you may feel a bit deflated from that original excitement. It’s not always a matter of perfect vs. terrible clients, either. Some clients are generally fine, but there are little things like lack of communication and feedback, more use of your time than you budgeted, or frequent change requests that make you feel like you aren’t doing your best work.

As the business grows and you find yourself serving far more clients in the two latter categories (not a great fit, or a so-so fit) than in the ideal client category, you feel your energy draining. The natural motivation and drive you once felt to do what you do best is waning, and you have to wonder where you went wrong. Is it your service offer, your pricing, or even your talent? Between the added administrative load you have taken on with business growth and the extra effort it takes to engage with your clients, you may be thinking that this business wasn’t the best idea after all.

Ultimately, the problem is not me, and it’s not my business. The problem is not even those incompatible clients themselves! What is really going on when we experience that energy drain from working with clients who aren’t the best fit for our mission is that we have forgotten our business Who.

Growing Your Client Reach With Focus

The hard truth of growing a business is that it’s impossible to have all perfect clients, but it is possible to consistently reach great clients who you are able to serve well and who remain loyal to your business. When you effectively direct your marketing efforts toward the audience you are best at serving, you will attract clients who are compatible with your mission. Working with the right people will keep you energized, even as you grow the business and stretch those administrative abilities.

When I first brought up recovering from the difficult growing pains in business at the beginning of the year, I reminded you to reconnect with your business Why. Now that you have had some time to reflect on that topic and regroup, I encourage you to focus on your business Who. Who is the person or business that allows you to do exactly what you do best?

If you have never drilled all the way down on a persona for the ideal client you want to work with, start there. A persona is a semi-fictional character who represents your ideal client. If you think about that one perfect client all the way back at the start of your business, your persona most likely has many of that real client’s characteristics. It’s very important to understand key information about the type of person you most want to work with.

Maybe you developed your persona at some point already. You put in the time to discover who you want to attract with all of your marketing activity. How long ago did you create that character? And here is the really important question: Are you still talking to them today?

When a small business expands, a lot of the foundational work that set everything in motion can fall out of focus. As you test out new marketing tactics, change marketing or social media firms, and take on clients who are being referred from your network, your messaging may begin to shift and adapt to new audiences. There is nothing wrong with adapting your message. In fact, you should review and adjust it over time.

But changing your messaging without clear strategy leads to that unbalanced ratio of suboptimal to excellent clients. Take a close look at all of your current marketing. Is it aimed directly at those clients who are not a great fit for your services - or maybe it's unclear who it's aimed toward? If so, you may have just located the main issue.

The fix is straightforward. Reconnect with your Who. 

• Who is the person you most want to help with your service? 

• Who is that great client who is compatible with your style, is responsive to your offer, and energizes you to keep doing your best work?

• Who would you want to help even if you didn’t earn an income from it?

While you are bringing up all the positive features of your best client, also think about what you don’t like about your clients who are not the best fit. What is it about your interactions or deliverables that you don’t enjoy? This can help you be on the lookout in the future when meeting a prospective client.

One way to do this is to create a side by side “This, not That” table where you can list features, motivators, communication styles, values, and other characteristics that you want to work with and that you do not want to work with.

Refocusing On Your Persona Simplifies Your Marketing

The other great benefit of refocusing on your ideal persona is that it will make some decisions about what marketing activities to do (or not do) very clear. There is no shortage of ways to do marketing these days, but too many options often leads us to feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed (the classic case of analysis paralysis).

If you've ever been wondering whether you should start a TikTok account or revamp your website content so that it gets cited in AI-powered chats, you need to go back to who it is you're trying to reach. Is your dream client on TikTok? Are they using AI-services to search for information and answers? Even if so, is that the point in their buyer journey that you want to reach them?

When you review your persona and their journey process the answers to where you should show up become clearer. Marketing chaos occurs when business owers chase every new trend in marketing, making decisions based soley on emotions, rather than rooting a decision in strategy, logic, and creativity.

Refresh Your Clarity on Who You Serve to Attract Better Clients

Remember, all marketing is communication. If you want to serve a certain type of client, that is the person to whom you need to communicate about your business. If you are reaching all the wrong people, your client roster will either dwindle away or get filled with clients who don’t support your Why. When you take the time to regroup and re-focus your marketing so that you are only talking to the right people, your business growth will feel much more effortless and exciting. Everything you do in marketing invites people further into your world. Who do you want inside your space?

If you never fully developed your messaging to reach the right clients, or you started out that way but have lost track of how you used to reach your target audience, it’s not too late to adjust! Chances are, the messaging strategy that will build a relationship with your target audience already exists, but it has just been mixed in with less effective messaging and tactics.

At Marketing to Mission, we help small businesses clarify their marketing message so that it speaks directly to the clients you most want to serve. If your business is growing (or maybe slowing down) with all the wrong clients, reach out to me to talk about how your current clients are coming to you. We can help you get your messaging back in front of your ideal clients.