There is a better way to find out who really is your ideal client.
Simply ask the question from a different perspective:
Who am I ideal for?
That way it’s easier to focus on what they want, not what you want.
Reflection is an excellent start for clarifying who your ‘ideal clients’ are. By getting under your own skin to discover your values and preferred behaviours, you’ll uncover some of the values and preferred behaviours of the clients you like to work with, and who like to work with you.
This enables you to take the next step – putting yourself in your client’s shoes and seeing what you do from their perspective.
This will move your thinking from ‘features’ (“we produce accurate accounting information”), to ‘benefits’ (“we make sure you have the information you need to run your business well”).
If you already have clients who love you, you can even ask them why they do, and this will uncover benefits you didn’t even know you delivered (“you listen to me”,”you really get to know me and my business”, “you find me suppliers I can trust”).
The next step is to get to the core of the relationship you create with your clients over time, and for that there is one key question:
Who do you help them to become?
Because all business is about transformation – even accountancy.
Whoever you want as a client, to serve them well, you need to understand them. Empathy is essential.
That’s always hard. Because they are not you. They don’t know what you know, don’t believe what you believe, don’t want what you want.
But you can get a start, by looking at yourself first. What do you know? What do you believe? What do you want? Are you the only one?
Then test what you’ve found with real clients. They’ll soon show you where your assumptions are wrong.
Walmart is a planned economy the size of Sweden. It isn’t a republic or a democracy. It’s a complex, strictly controlled, bureaucratic hierarchy, with the Walton family at the top.
That isn’t what most small business owners want, so for them, hierarchy isn’t such a useful model.
One alternative is to think of a business as a system – “a group of interacting or interrelated entities that form a unified whole.”
And since “the system is what the system does”, it also helps to define what a business system is meant to do.
For most business owners I know, that is to make and keep a promise to customers, employees and community, and in the process make enough money to keep doing it well.
This model of a business is wrong. But it might be more useful for you.
We are told all the time (in words and deeds) that ‘there is no alternative’ to the way our current global economic model works. Communism was a disaster, anarchy would be chaos, revolution would be tragic.
And yet as families, villages, schools, clubs, friends – as ordinary people we happily operate all those alternative models, all the time, without even thinking about it. We even do it inside the ultimate capitalist entity, a business. In fact, capitalism depends on us operating like this.
As David Graeber points out: “we’re all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.”
We’ve worked like this for at least forty thousand years, getting on for two hundred thousand years. Which begs the question. Which model is the exception?
Today is the International Day of the Girl Child.
That might be an understatement.
Go girls!
Yesterday evening I picked up my second ever online grocery order from Greenwich Pier. It was more expensive than buying the same stuff from Ocado, but not eye-wateringly so.
What I bought:
We waited, in the open air for a good 10 minutes before my shopping arrived – far longer than I’ve ever waited at my favourite bugbear, the supermarket checkout – but I didn’t mind. Funny that.
We never buy ‘just stuff’. We buy what we think it means for us. Sometimes what we think it means and what it actually does are the same thing.
And that makes us ‘consumers’ more powerful than we realise.
Good Services principle number 9: A good service is consistent. I like this principle particularly, because consistent doesn’t mean uniform. Your services
There is a whole family of stringed musical instruments that capitalise on resonance.
These instruments have additional ‘sympathetic’ strings, that are never touched, but are tuned to resonate in harmony with the normal strings. So when the instrument is played, a richer, more complex harmony of sound is made – almost as if the player has been given an extra hand.
Your Promise of Value is how your business is tuned. Everything you do, for customers; staff; suppliers, shareholders and the community around you needs to resonate with it.
That way, they become ‘sympathetic strings’ for your Promise, extending your reach and helping to make it truly believable.
Your Promise of Value encompasses how you behave as a business, the benefits you offer prospects and deliver to customers, and the relationships you create with customers over time. In a way, it represents “what the business is here to do”.
As such, it is isn’t only for prospects and customers. A Promise of Value also describes how the founders and their team have decided to fulfill some of their own needs for agency, mastery, autonomy, purpose and community. And as such, it creates a framework around which people who work in it as employees can fit their own fulfillment of those needs.
The ideal for a business is to kill two birds with one stone – so that making and keeping it’s promises to customers simultaneously delivers fulfillment for the people who work in it. But that is hard to achieve (and may not be desirable – where would change come from?)
So as a business you have to accept that not all employees will want the same thing. Some employees will want all these needs fulfilled by work. Others will use what work gives them (perhaps money, mastery) to fulfill other needs (perhaps purpose, community, agency) outside work. That means that offering multiple opportunities for fulfillment that are consistent with your Promise of Value is the key to creating an engaged workforce.
In other words, your Promise of Value is not just for your customers, it’s for your employees too. And both promises need to be kept if you want to succeed as a business.