“Your customers don’t care about this- look, even your headline says so,” Chris told me. Chris Lema is a WordPress business coach I hired to help work on our organizational structure. The headline on our homepage read, “Stop stressing and free yourself up to focus on what you do best.”

Chris was making the point that our focus on support as a service wasn’t the highest value application of our team. Customers only bought it because they had to. They didn’t care about support, except for in a few moments of pain. They wanted to move on and focus on things that they did care about. Things that were valuable.

When you want to grow your business, you have to figure out how to generate more profit to sustain growth.

One of the routes to generating more profit is to raise pricing. Simply raising pricing often works with no other changes. This is because most pricing is not optimized and we tend to underestimate our own value. However, there is only so much customers are willing to pay for a certain class of product (pricing elasticity.)

To transcend this, you have to change your offer to be categorized as a higher value class of product.

For example, consider beer. There is a ceiling on what you can charge customers for a lager. But once you reformulate as an ale, not much has changed, but now you’re in a premium micro brew category with premium prices.

Don’t confuse this with positioning. We’re not just painting the car with a slightly different slogan. It’s more like instead of hauling around pizzas, we’re transitioning to driving VIPs to the airport. The resources in the business are mostly the same, but we’re reformulating the class of value we create to something greater that we can charge more for.

Chris pointed out that our team has done a lot of high value, high dollar work in the past and now I was employing that team in a low value manner. I was putting us into a category that was highly commoditized by cheap overseas labor.

We’re still in the process of making changes today, but the plan is to shift our messaging to focus on business growth (shocker), through a more effective website. Growth being something that small business entrepreneurs like me care a great deal about.


Featured image The judgement of Midas by Abraham Janssens used under public domain.