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Anyone with money. Anyone who is willing to pay. Anyone that needs our thing. How do you reach to this specific anyone? If you can’t come up with a very clear specific description of who this “anyone” is, it’ll be hard for them to know you’re talking about them. For them to know of you. For them to recommend you to more like them. At the end of the day, anyone is no-one.
In diving, when you’re overwhelmed, you stop everything. Then, you breath. Assess. Decide. Same is in business. While everything seems urgent, you can only do so much. So stop, breath, assess, decide. And to get to that decision, you’ve already thought of a few ways to go about it.
Just as a band starts playing in a house, to small gigs, to more small gigs... all the way to stadiums with thousands of people. It's the same with decisions. The more controlled, low-impact, and low-risk decisions you make, the easier it is to see the patterns to move upwards. It's simpler to stir the wheel and correct direction with small decisions, than to shift everything from one decision. Quantity over quality first, quality over quantity then.
The way to choose better is by choosing more often. The way you decide better is by deciding more often. Practice. Quantity beats quality. It lets you make decisions that train your judgment. You won’t ever have all good decisions. Yet making a decision (even a shit one) can let you stir the boat and correct direction. Waiting for it to disappear won’t fix it.
Not only products. Also ideas. It's working around your ideas and offerings to present them in a different way. What's the impact it can have? It can lead to buy-in from decision-makers. It can shift how your brand is perceived. It can bring in marginal revenue. It can also bring new revenue in orders of magnitude (selling the same thing for a way higher new price). However, it's not about charging more only for the sake of charging more. It's about bringing (and articulating) more of what...
Reach is not what will deliver you change. Just because you’re in contact with more people, it doesn't mean your results will shift and/or improve. Hope is not a tactic. You have to be selective and make the hard choices, so that you can focus. Once focused, getting in front of the right people gets simpler (and easier). Instead of the big fish in the big pond, you get to be the big fish in the small pond.
Set your costs, then your price. Build a brand, then your customers. Set the metric, then the result. We have it backwards. Pricing: find the value, then set a price, then figure out what makes sense for you to charge for that price. Brand: design your customers, they’ll build your brand. And you’ll find the red thread on all of those brands, to make a cohesive one. Metrics: figure out what you want as the outcome. Then think of the result, then the measurement. The metric is the measurement...
Markup and cost-plus are not the only ways Pricing doesn’t get to be built up from the ground up. (And it's not math either). It’s not about how much something costs you and how much more you want to make. It doesn’t have to do anything with how much you know, how much time you spent learning your craft, how much effort you put into, or how much you think you deserve. It has to do with how much of the value (what’s important to your customers) they find reasonable for them to pay —and be...
Or is it? While revenue is important, it’s the wrong thing to measure to know if your business is doing well and can go a level up. It doesn’t require a rocket scientist to know that more revenue than costs makes profit. Yet revenue is the thing that can make you miss the mark. What happens if you're underpriced and leaving lots of money on the table? What happens if your costs are hidden and you're bleeding dry? Revenue is a vanity metric.
"You break things." I was told that. And it's been the best compliment EVER. Yes. You do, too. Breaking things.- Seeing how things are (the usual way, how it's been always done) and moving them to do something new. Intentionally. Moving people to think different. To be uncomfortable. To push boundaries. To do bigger. To feel vulnerable. That's how you stand out. You break things. Break things.