It would be nice to be able to please everyone. To offer the exact product or service to match the spec of each person that comes into contact with your business. And to be able to deliver that product or service at an unrivalled price and with equally unrivalled quality. But it never works like that. The wider you cast your net, the more you sacrifice your ability to deliver a world-beating product or service.
And even worse, the less likely you are to be able to scale your business.
It feels safe to cast our nets wide and attempt to please all prospective customers as then we have a huge market to go after. We should never go hungry. Right?
The reality is that honing your target market down to the smallest possible niche and delivering a handful of services that delight them is the best way to scale your business.
It seems contradictory. But it is true.
Ideally, one target market and one service or product is just the ticket to a highly scalable business.It makes you appear like an expert (fake it til you make it!) if you only deliver a single service. It makes you easy to refer (everyone knows exactly what you do and who/how you can help). It makes marketing both easier and cheaper. Plus you can develop systems to continually refine your service or product delivery to make it even cheaper and faster. All of these factors help you scale up your business.
But you don't have to stay as a single market / single product offering forever. Nail one market and product first, then you can move onto the next. And then the next... Think Amazon - they started out selling only books and then the rest is...errr...history.
Here's a great example of a business separating its offerings into crystal clear business lines:
Oh, and here's another of their service offerings:
You're getting the picture, right? Makes marketing much easier as you can see.
So the challenge for us entrepreneurs is to seek to hone-down our business offerings to match the exact needs of our target market. We can't please everyone. We will inevitably polarise ourselves from wider prospective customers as we seek only to attract our target market. But we can always branch out later. Be brave.
Scaling down (ironically) gives us the best opportunity to scale up.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://businessn2k.com/scale-down-to-scale-up/