🎯 Work Smart Wednesday - August 28, 2024
Some 5-star service examples, Oversaturated vs specific, and a quote from MLK
Work Smart Wednesday
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Here is your weekly dose of Work Smart Wednesday
In these emails I will share with you 3 things to help you work smarter.
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1. 🌟 5-star service examples
A tip I regularly tell clients is: Think beyond a 5-star service.
One of my favourite exercises, and an exercise that often leads to the extremely useful insights among my clients, centres around identifying what we would do if marketing was no longer possible and we had to rely solely on referrals.
What would a 5-star service look like? How about 6-stars?
I first learned about this some years ago in a podcast episode from Masters Of Scale with Reid Hoffman (founder of PayPal and LinkedIn) and Brian Chesky (founder of AirBnb). Here is a quick summary article of the major lessons of that episode written by Reid himself, and further down this email is Brian explaining it in a 2 minute video.
The lesson fundamentally changed how I approached business, and it has gone on to help me and my clients achieve rapid, but fundamentally stable and consistent, growth.
Why am I mentioning this now? How can you do this?
I own another business, an environmental social enterprise called ZeroSmart, that takes me around 1 hour per month to run. My partner mostly runs that business, and it takes her roughly 2 hours per week. Much of the business is automated. One of the main things we do now is tweak and update our existing systems to improve them, and recently we updated our order confirmation email based on one of my favourite examples of a 5-star service: CDBaby.
Despite ZeroSmart being a primarily digital service, and despite our extremely low time inputs, we can still create 5-star+ touchpoints for clients.
By brainstorming what it looks like to deliver something beyond 5-stars, we could identify low-cost things we could do to improve service quality (in this case, simply improving our order confirmation email).
Offering beyond 5-stars was a guiding principle when I helped my client 10x their income in 8 weeks (a social media marketing agency).
It is also something we have implemented with other clients, like Jen (PhD dissertation coach) who now often sends a small gift to new customers, some nice teabags along with a welcome pack. It adds a physical element to a service and has really helped with improving perceived value and referral rates. That ~$7 cost has led to $thousands$ in referrals.
Delivering a 5-star service doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money, it can be as simple as giving regular updates, remembering an important date, or including a tiny gift.
What simple thing could you do today that will help your customers say “Wow!”?
Brian Chesky - designing a 10-star guest experience (2 minutes)
Video with my client, Calvin: How absorbing the lessons on a 5-star service had helped his business (2 minutes)
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2. 📍 Oversaturated vs specific
I was recently at a family gathering and got chatting to my sister-in-law about a business opportunity.
She works as an accountant, and hates it.
However, she is a talented seamstress and designer and would LOVE to do more work around that.
She says there is just one snag: the market is oversaturated.
This is a common objection I hear from people who say they want to start a business. While it is almost never actually the problem - usually people say that to mask a lack of self-confidence in starting their own business - there is a simple fix to the oversaturation problem: specificity.
If you think your market is oversaturated it is only because you're not yet specific enough about who you're helping.
Examples:
Photographer = oversaturated.
Photographer specialising in alternative/rock and metal weddings is wide open.
Food photographer for menus for independent small businesses in your town is likely available.
Pet-memorial/end of life photography is a relatively untapped niche.
Seamstress = saturated
A seamstress who makes custom prom dresses for alternative teens is untapped (and the niche we decided is the best fit for my sister-in-law).
Specialising in historical costume reproduction is an easy market.
Remaking deceased family member’s items into memorial pieces is open.
Adapting clothing for people with disabilities is underserved.
Coaching = saturated
Exit strategy and succession planning coaching for family businesses is untapped.
Coaching local builders to introduce recurring revenue streams is underserved.
Helping parents of neurodivergent children navigate schooling choices has plenty of space.
The more specific you are, the more you can charge. The easier it is to find and talk to your target audience and their specific problems. The easier it is to show relevant examples and proof of results. Everything gets easier, and more lucrative.
Additionally, markets are MUCH bigger than you think and you need far fewer customers than you think. One of my clients is doing more than $400,000 per year with just 3 customers right now (and we are adding 1 new customer per month and have a multi-month waitlist).
So how can you get started with this today?
Firstly, identify target audiences you have some existing knowledge of. Get specific, we can branch out later when we have momentum. Consider your hobbies, skills, working experience, qualification, location, past experiences. You have unique insight that nobody else has and that people will find valuable, you just need to take the time to identify it. I often help people with this exact thing, and we can usually find it together within a single hour-long session.
Second, define your income and time goals. Then reverse engineer how many customers and at what price you would like to target. We can create an offer to match our requirements and the target audience’s needs. This often takes about a week to do properly. When done right, you can start making a decent amount of money within a single month.
My favourite quick test to know whether your audience is specific enough: you should be able to find 10 people who match your target audience profile within 2 minutes using a LinkedIn or Facebook groups search.
Your market isn’t oversaturated, your target market and offer aren’t specific enough. Start to narrow it down today, you will find everything else gets easier.
3. 💡 Quote I'm pondering
"Be a bush if you can't be a tree, if you can't be a highway just be a trail, if you can't be the sun be a star, for it isn't by size that you win or you fail, be the best of whatever you are" - Martin Luther King Jr.
This is a beautiful quote in general and ties in both of my points in this email: adapt to be unique, and strive to deliver quality.
Additionally, as I said to a client recently, don’t compare your day 1 with someone else’s day 100. Maybe you cannot “be a highway” right now, but a trail often grows into something more significant. You don’t have to be the biggest when you start, or even to be classed as successful - success is something different to different people. Be specific when you start, it is easier to capitalise on momentum and it is easier to first build momentum when you’re specific.
That's it! I can't wait to hear what you think. What did you find most useful? What do you want more or less of? Reply to this email now and let me know
Also, if you have anything interesting to share, I want to know about it😊
Have a great week,
John
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