There’s three kinds of value a business can deliver:
You can Fix, Prevent, or Improve.
When something in the world or business of our client is failing, we can offer to fix it.
If there’s an immediate, painful problem, you need to offer your buyer a fast, practical solution.
Then there’s Prevention, where there’s fear or a threat, because of a current or future risk.
Disruption in the marketplace, changing laws or treaties or algorithms…
For that kind of client, you use trusted, reliable, proven solutions. You solidify what’s going well, and remove bottlenecks and obstacles.
And then there’s Improvement, where you help your client go from good to great – you upgrade things.
Here, you bring knowledge, skills and creative thinking, in order to identify assets to be leveraged, and you bring them together to take a client to a level they couldn’t have reached on their own.
The reason I’m sharing this, is because it’s a handy model for choosing what to work on in your own business as well.
Often, we double down on trying to fix something that’s failing, hoping that once we’re done, life will be good.
Which may be the right choice, but what if you’d ignore the failing part for the moment, and instead we first improve something that’s already working?
There’s things in your business that are working well, that if you were to push forward on them, might end up working awesomely terrifically well.
And sometimes, it just make more sense to let something that’s broken be broken, and maximise on something that’s already pretty good.
(Especially if you know, in your heart of hearts, that you’re going to procrastinate the hell out of the fixing you say you need to do anyway.)
Sometimes, it’s better to do what will work, rather than do what you tell yourself would be right.
And if the thing you want to improve, is the number of qualified prospects who say yes to your offer, then I made this for you.
Cheers,
Martin