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Saying “no” to every interested client outside of your specific niche is pretty fundamental to how I approach building a noticeable, memorable, shareable brand that attracts ideal, premium clients.
But when you first start down this path of being super picky about clients, you will likely experience some sort of “gap” between having a lot of low-value clients you don’t love, and enjoying the ease of having a brand reputation that easily closes high-paying clients.
Many people wonder what to do when they’re in that gap—how to proceed with landing new, ideal clients, while dealing with the fear of not having any clients, and still working with legacy ones.
Well, there’s no easy answer, and no two cases are the same, but there are a few strategies that will help you work through “the gap.”
Focus On The Right Things
I don’t recommend staying super busy with a bunch of clients who are outside of your new focus area. They will slow you down and keep you from doing the necessary work to build your new brand reputation. Instead, you’ll want to evaluate all your existing clients using the 80/20 rule. This means you’re looking for the ones who pay the least and suck up the most time, energy, and enthusiasm so you can decide what to do with them.
Keep only the ones with the least negative impact on your new offering—roughly the top 20 percent. You already have them, you know what you're doing with them, and they're already paying you, so keeping them around is a no-brainer. Then, get rid of everybody else so you can focus on getting clients more aligned with where you’re heading.
When you contact the 80 percent, tell them something like, "I'm shifting my model and here's how I work now." If they hop on board, great! Now you've got a bunch of clients working with you in your ideal way. And if they’re not into your new model and price point, you’ve given them a way to fire themselves by opting out. This can be a tough pill to swallow. Rather than focusing on the loss of cash flow, though, see the bigger picture of how much time you’ve freed up to get better clients who are more aligned with your goals.
I was recently contacted by a “happiness coach,” Leslie Juvin-Acker, who shared her experience of implementing this system immediately after reading my book. Leslie had accumulated 30 active monthly clients after years of work. Once she packaged up her services and offered them to all her clients at new, higher prices (with higher value offered), only three of the thirty came on board with her new offering; the rest thought it was too expensive and left. However, she made more money from those 3 clients than she had with all 30 of her clients! In fact, she made more money in the first week than she had made in an entire month with the old model.
And all of this took her three weeks from idea to implementation. That’s fast; almost instantaneous. And, quite frankly, really amazing. Her gap was quite small, but also, she committed fully to her new model and didn’t let the fear of losing 27 clients deter her. Obviously, if you have no clients and no network, your transition will take longer. But your focus shouldn’t be on how long it takes. Focus, instead, on finding the right people.
Make a Sustained Effort
A lot of people go half way or “kind of” do the work. Then, if it doesn't provide fruit, or it doesn't ‘work’ within a month or two, they email me and say, “It's not working.”
How long you stay in the gap depends a lot on how intensely you work on getting the word out about your new offering. Too often, when things don’t take off right away, people think the gap represents a failure of the niching. But the entire gap is determined by your efforts, not the niche itself.
Instead, blame the lack of effort. There is no question that being focused in your business is the better long term strategy. There's no book, or wealthy entrepreneur, or successful person in the world who says, “My key to success is that I did it for everybody and offered them everything.” The niche is not the reason it's not working. If it’s a niche that you have previous worked with (so you know it’s viable), the problem is usually because you have not gotten your idea into enough people's heads.
People look at the overall timeline without being honest with themselves about their own effort each day. If you do nothing for three weeks, it’s easy to blame the pivoting.
If you were in front of me, I’d ask, “How many events have you gone to? How many people have you called? What else is going on in your life?” There’s so much that derails people early on, be honest with yourself on your how effectively you are spending your time instead of being quick to look at the timeline and say it’s not working.
Work Through the Gap
I get it; cash in hand is attractive. Saying yes to everything seems like the most logical thing to do, especially when you’re struggling a bit. But you have to treat your time exactly like the money you’ve invested. That’s the biggest mindset shift that needs to happen here.
I’m not saying starve yourself. If you need money, figure out ways to bring pieces of your new offer into each project so you can still get value out of it.
For example, a guy in my program packaged up his services to target musicians. Immediately, someone who isn't a musician wanted to hire him. He asked me, “Is it okay to work with him even though he's not a musician?”
I said, “Is he going to pay you your price?”
“Yes.”
“Then it sounds good to me because you're still getting paid. It sounds like he could also be a good referral source. It's not like you're bartering for a future payout. You're still taking him through your process, and that’s valuable for your business, long-term. It might not be in your exact market, but this gives you the chance to practice your process with this guy. So, is he ideal? No. But he still checks a couple of boxes that will add value to what you're doing.”
When deciding where to spend your time—and with whom—remember, we are always looking for multiple value streams. Sometimes the value isn’t money: meeting new people and practicing your pitch, seeing people's reactions, and confidently getting into the flow of talking about your new focus is a high value activity that has nothing to do with money. Just because there wasn't a paycheck at the end of it doesn't mean it wasn't valuable.
Choose Your Path Wisely
Here's the rub: the people who have the hardest time fully committing to their new brand focus are often the same people who are short on experience in that niche.
Obviously, it will take longer to move from consulting with executives to consulting with single moms than if you moved from being an in-house executive strategist to being an executive consultant. That’s why it’s important to base your niche on previous experiences, not just an idea. Without that previous experience, you won’t have enough confidence to stick with it.
So, to recap: Yes, there will be a gap. No, you shouldn’t be scared of it. Yes, you may have to fire some clients (or have them fire themselves). No, your new niche isn’t the problem.
Commit, go full force, and be patient with yourself. Experience (i.e. practice) is where your confidence comes from. Pound the pavement, build that network, and hit it hard. You’ve got this.
