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The Sweet Spot

So now we're talk about the sweet spot. We're gonna go back to that thing we talked about in the beginning, the most important crucial element of your business. And you're going to see in this diagram here this is what dimes will be talking about. The sweet spot is the path. If you stay on this, this is the path that gets you to your ultimate vision. So once you understand your sweet soft spot and have it, you understand how to make your business successful and sustain success start. So as Mike said when he first started out this morning, if you want to grow a colossal pumpkin, you need a very special seed. If you want to grow colossal business, you also need a very special seed. And that's right here, the sweet spot. And actually, I'm gonna flip to another, less complicated diagram to start because I know this one can look a little overwhelming, and you probably can't necessarily even read all of those words. So as like said and he tried to get you to visualize the three rings Well, h...

ere they are. The sweet spot for your business is the intersection of three crucial areas of your business, your top clients, your unique offering and the ability to systematize or scale your business. That's a slow green area in here. When you have all three of those things than your golden, you can move forward. You can grow your business now. What do I mean by top client? And we're going to dig into this even more in a few minutes. But your top clients are those clients that love you and you love them. They're the clients that if you could, you would clone them over and over and over again. You would fill your business with that client. And what you want to think about when you're thinking about your top client is not just who they are, like, you know Joe Smith. But what is it about that client that makes him such a great client for you? Is it? You know, Mike, Mike mentioned that somebody want his top clients As soon as he engaged him like he would open his mailbox in the Czech would already be there, right, so that maybe something that makes someone a great client for you maybe they refer business to you. Maybe they. They fit in perfectly with your immutable laws. They get you. And the best part is they love what you have to offer, and they want it more and more and more they buy from you. They refer people to you. And when you think about who they are, also think about their demographics. Are they middle aged women? Are they men just out of college? Are they teenagers? You know? How old are they? What kind of life do they live? Are the middle class are the upper class? Are they college educated or do they have advanced degrees? All of these things matter in building a profile of who your top client is, because the more you understand about your top client, the better you can serve them. And this goes for even if you sell some people sell product over the Internet. You may not even ever come face to face with your clients, but that's okay. You can still form a profile of who that ideal client is, what they look like, what their demographics are, what their psychographic sar. What motivates those clients to buy from you. What is it that they care about these are all important in who is your top client. Unique means your unique offering. And we just talked about your immutable laws and we talked about your area of innovation, and we talked about your mission and your purpose. That all wraps up into your unique offering. What makes you and what you have to offer, different from what everybody else has to offer out there. And then the ability to systematize this is key. If you cannot have somebody else produce and deliver your product or service, then you can never grow beyond what you can carry on your own shoulders. You can't work more than 24 hours a day. And if you're working 24 hours a day, I would say there's a problem. So this is Imp. This is particularly difficult for a lot of service providers to figure out how to systematize their business, and we work with a lot of service providers to do just that. But sometimes the answer is you do not. What you're offering right now cannot be systematized, so let's go back to the drawing board and find a way to be able to deliver something that you can offer that's unique to your top clients that can also be produced and delivered without your direct involvement. As Mike said earlier, you want a business that can make you money while you're sleeping, because if you can't, you can never take a vacation. I don't know if any of you know someone like this, like maybe an attorney or an accountant or somebody who has their own business. They get paid by the hour. I personally have people in my life. Never, ever stop working. You go on vacation with them, they're on their computer. I have to work. If I'm not working, I'm not making money. If I'm not making money, I've got four kids in college and two more coming. You know, this is the constant pressure. So if you want to grow that giant, colossal business, we need to be able to systematize. And the good news is we're going to talk about this a lot, and actually, tomorrow we're going to do a whole module on system ization. So So the right now might be thinking to yourselves, Why have two of these? And as the song goes, two out of three ain't bad. However, in this case, two out of three is not going to grow you a colossal business. And here's why. Let's say you have a unique offering, something really new and different that can be systematized, but your top clients don't want it. That situation is nobody cares, basically, and you can't sell it. Um, I'll give you some examples. Who here remembers new Coke right with that Successful? No. So I would argue unique. Yes, because it was new. Coke obviously was different than old Coke. Could be systematized. Absolutely. But their top clients Coke fanatics, people who go around drinking Coke all day. They didn't want it. They liked classic Coke as it was renamed Classic Coke. They hated new Coke. OK, bad idea. Here's another one. Has anyone ever heard of Harley Davidson perfume? Think about Harley Davidson top clients and, you know, is that unique? Yeah, it cannot be systematized shore. Harley Davidson. Fanatical top clients didn't want a perfume named Harley Davidson or maybe no perfume at all. The visual is just kind of funny for me. I'll give you one more that I particularly enjoy pick, as in big pens, big disposable lighters, Bic disposable razors. Big disposable underwear again. Unique sister Advisable. Top clients don't care about disposable underwear, so I think you get the point your top clients have toe like have to want it. So let's say you have something that your top clients want. It could be systematized, but it's not unique. We all know what happens then. You become a commodity. People shop on price. If you look just like this person and this person in this person, then they say, Well, how much are you charging? How much do you charge? And they picked the lowest cost provider. This is the biggest reason why you have to have a unique offering. You have to be able to stand out in some way that your top clients care about. Or else you're just getting into, Ah, price price pressure type situation. And the last situation is your top clients. No, I'm sorry. It's unique. Know which one did I miss you down on price pressure? No, I just said that. So top clients. Unique, campy, systematized. Thank you. Okay, So your top clients want it. It's a unique offering, but it can't be systematized. And I talked about this already. then what happens is you can on Lee grow as much as you can handle yourself. So if you have all three, you're in your sweet spot. So what we're going to do now is Well, first, I'd actually like to give you an example, because I know you're probably thinking, Yeah, that's great. But how I figure all this out because that's kind of a lot. So your top client, let me see here. Okay, so here's a replication of that. We're going to actually dig into how to figure out who your top clients are in a minute way. We have a chart that Mike talked about earlier the client assessment truck, and we're going to talk about how you figure it out and how do you replicate them? And we're going to talk about system ization and unique offering later also, and we've talked about unique offering, but I'll give you an example of kind of how the process works because it is a process. It's not something that you wake up in the morning, say I'm going to spend an hour on this and okay, here it is my sweet spot. And as Mike said, it's not. It's not 11 day. Figure it out when you're done, it's a process. So when Mike and I first started prevent this group, we said, Well, we have this great business process based on the pumpkin plan and some other mice got this incredibly creative mind. He comes up with new tools, like on a daily basis every time we come across its his talent, every time we come across an issue or a problem. Oh, I have a great idea for a tool for that and they're great tools. So we started out with the pumpkin plan as our unique offering, and we said, Who is this? Who is this great for? This is great for small business. So we started out saying we served small businesses in the 500,000 $25 million revenue range that are stuck that have plateau owed because we have a great system that can get them out of that plateau. So we had our top clients or who we thought were our top clients because we're just starting out and we had a unique offering and the way we systematized it was, we create. We turned it into a program, and we have, Ah, I don't have it here, but we actually have an action guide. We call it and it's a step by step program and had how you do it. Mike and I can deliver it. Other business coaches can also deliver it. So as we started going along, we started to notice that the clients who were most drawn to us and who we seem to connect the best with were other coaching and consulting companies and made a lot of sense. That's both of our background. You know, Mike has built up more than one consulting company and sold it, and I have a coaching in a business background, and I had my own coaching companies, so made a lot of sense. So now we're focusing on coaching and consulting companies. So we said, Let's let's sit down and do the client assessment chart and figure out who our top clients are, And what we discovered was something a little different than we originally believed. It was not necessarily companies that were of a certain size 500,000 to 5 million in revenue, but actually our top clients were so low business coaches So they were business coaches who had a solo practice, and they wanted to systematize. They wanted to be able to scale their business and grow from a solo business practice to be able to stop trading dollars for our and turn into a scalable, thriving seven figure business. That's what they wanted. And we said, Hey, we can do that. We have a unique offering that can help you do that And we will continue to develop that unique offering to really focus in on that market. And we consistent ties it because we have a step by step system that can be followed that doesn't need specifically me or specifically might to deliver it. So that's how we came to our sweet spot. And it was a process. And it was the use of the tools and and starting with a unique offering and refining it, starting with who we thought our top clients were and refining it and continuingly to improve our systems. So at this point, what I'd like to do is call my cup. Come on out my hopping on anybody. All right. So is there anything you want to add to this before we move on to the client assessment chart. Yeah, I I definitely want to put him up from the audience to go into todo. But I do have a question for our live streaming audience and impressive here as any of us expected. A certain top client, certain type of great client that we envision when we started. Now it's someone totally different. All right, Travis, tell me, what was your I mean, for my paintings? I envisioned these really wealthy intellectual people, and it's just my friends and family. Basically. Okay. Is there anyone in that set your your friends and family that you didn't even that you don't know that bought from you. But it's a different demographic. Not really. Okay, okay, yes. So but that's the seedling of something. So he expects very wealthy people and initial people following him or people that have a relationship with him. So maybe it's what they call a relational cell that wealthy people never heard of, you know? But if you are hanging out with certain people, friends and families, the obvious, maybe they start learning about your history and what speaks into your art and start consuming. So maybe you're starting the seedling of Maybe you have to start telling your story and sharing it with people in some kind of relationship outside your family, friends to start salary and the other thing to dio, you know, off the top of your head. What's your favorite thing about my painting? What draws you to this particular painting and try to get a sense of why they why they picked a certain painting and why they buy? And that can also be a common denominator? The why behind why they like your art versus somebody else's. Anyone that are streaming audience get feedback on what they didn't expect. It s easy. Wardrop says yes. The client changed from a state home mom to the working executive, and I just asked her we'd love to hear more. What is it that you dio exactly? Any other feedback? Tell me you didn't expect would be buying from you. Yeah, a target that I never really expected, I guess is the best way to put it is second marriages. I get a lot of brides and groups that are coming in for their second time around. So they have a different view of what they want their wedding to be interest. And in the last 2.5 years, I've just been probably 50% of my clients are actually second weddings. Sex. Very busy. Interesting. Look this up, poop. 911 on things better be really mean that they're saying they expected older people older, rich people to sign up for the pooper scoop service. But they found out that new moms have a definite need for a safe and clean yard. You're saying young Children? Yes, very interesting. E wanted to work with funky, cool, creative businesses, but my clients are mostly politicians and nonprofits. Not very funkier. Cool. We're creative as he expected. Yeah, but inevitably, is these companies that we didn't expect to buy from us. These people, they're our best customers. And there's something that is connecting there. Still a link, and we have to discover it. So I'll take it from here and kind of share one personal story that I like to call someone up. So I went through, uh, this assessment is what we talked about in the beginning. This is the very rudimentary form you sort your clients based upon their names as best you can do it now. We have a large have we become It sells toe thousands of customers. Then this name of the client may not be possible. Maze. Very transactional business. But maybe we could get demographic. Maybe it's elderly people with small yards and moms with big yards or whatever it is, then the revenue would generate from them. The cringe factor. You know, those old people call God. They're they're just so difficult. But the moms, they want me out and they want the pooper scooper service right away. So we do the cringe factor, and then the hourly return wasn't author. I did this for me, too. I'm in the business to we have a consulting practice. But as an author, I create product. The practice sits on the shelves at Barnes and Nobles or the virtual shelves of the Amazon, and I have all this competition coming, so I have to go through the same process for myself. And when I started writing my book, I actually wrote it for people. You, Travis, people coming right out of college, young guys that were starting a business and why I picked that market was because it was me. I looked at myself and said, Who can I speak to in my life history? I rewound myself to college that I have relevant information I want to share. So I wrote a book for myself, for customers just like me in earlier part of my life. And what I did was I started going to college is speaking about this and sharing all these different techniques for growing your business. And people weren't responding like I wasn't selling many books and stuff. I wasn't doing well as an author, so I said, I sell harder. We have to be very careful what's called a false positive experience. I start going to Mawr College is I started speaking more Seymour excited about. You can grow your business and start sending a few more books, and that's called a false positive. Where we make a extreme effort, we see a small tick up and then we say, Oh, I gotta make a even Mawr extreme effort. I got exhaust myself, but that's a false positive. What was happening Behind the scenes, which was fascinating. Rising calls from women female entrepreneurs, generally 35 the youngest up to 55 married women were calling me, which is sound very weird is saying that, uh, but I was getting calls from women saying, I read your book, the toilet paper entrepreneur, and the first you call came and I'm like, Why are these people calling me? I wrote it for guys like Travis the young college guys. Thanks, but I can't talk with you. Well, the fourth or fifth call came in and I said, I gotta I gotta ask you why you calling me? And he said, Well, your book, toilet paper entrepreneur, it speaks to me. I said, Well, why? And I started interviewing them in the women, gently. Sort of the same thing. They said I start a business to bring additional income to our family. I married my husband, lost his job, or he's not bringing enough income to support our household. I've decided to stay to go back to work, but I actually want to fulfill a dream of mine and start my own business. So may these women had started a part time business or a start up business to bring in supplemental income some women to bring in the sole source of income they said I got a problem. My husband is a verbal supporter of May and saying Go for it But he's an emotional detractors, saying You're taking the last time we have to start the stupid dream and you're crushing our family. And so my husband has become my worst enemy. Uh, he says he loves that I'm doing this, but he doesn't really mean it. And when I read your book, Mike, they're saying this to me. You were the first male figure to be genuinely supportive of a female entrepreneur because the male, the other male kind of figure, authority the relationship. Their husband is actually a detractor, and now they read the spoken. He said, You didn't pander to me. You came across as genuine and supportive and like your guy that's actually supporting a female entrepreneur in your book was like, Oh, it. Once I discovered that I started attending with permission. Women's events. So much so so much so that I got invited out to a women's retreat of entrepreneur retreat as the only guy figured there, which by the way you learn is very risky position to be in, because when you walk in Interstate 50 or 100 women in a room in your only guy. All the perv alerts go off like, Who's the perv who just came in here? And you gotta say, I'm a speaker and you're here to learn. And then you disarmed that. But what was amazing was this one particular event in the Los Angeles area. After the event, seven women came together and they were gonna do a mastermind share how to grow their businesses. They asked me to attend and share some expertise and said they were going to talk about some personal stuff. Personal challenges will ask you to leave. They forgot I was presenting is really good. We start doing things, they started moving on. The next thing I'm taking notes and they start talking about the personal experiences. It was a magical moment because they forgot. There was a guy in the room and I forgot I was the guy in the room. I became a fly on the wall and it was Problem was powerful thing I ever learned about my core customer. That changed everything for May. They went around. They said they did something like the life beat experience in every person at room and it rattles. May had some form of abuse from a male figure either sexual or physical or verbal abuse from a father or uncle trusted authority. You know, police officer male figure and said, I can't trust men. I can't trust men. So when these female entrepreneurs were coming into a room and you have a a male on the stage, the instant responses, he's a threat. How is he not a threat? And once I realized that I could position myself and learn how to speak to this community that was consuming my offering and modify what I was doing to speak to them properly. Appropriately, And that's what we all need to dio. That's the power of this client assessment. If we really dig into our customer, we really start figuring out where customers get everything you can get beyond just the demographic, get inside their psychographic their mindset, and you'll start learning the nuances of what makes you unique and stand out okay, I want to do my hot first. That would be my first hot seat, but here's and I were having lunch out there. I started picking your brain and you got to come up. So would you mind coming up