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| Found Money by Mike Wagner |
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Imagine walking into your office one morning and finding $10,000 sitting on your desk. Not a bad way to start the day!
How about coming back from lunch expecting an afternoon of “putting out fires” in your organization when your assistant stops by to give you the mail. Opening the first envelope you find an unexpected check for $200,000! Suddenly the rest of the afternoon is looking much, much better.
How does this happen? By winning the lottery? Waiting for a long-lost relative to pass away and leave you a huge sum of money?
The answer is more in your control than you think. It involves choosing the “right customer” for your company. Period.
In hundreds of meetings with business owners, CEOs and management teams I am continually surprised that the vast majority of companies never even talk about their “portfolio of customers – let alone purposefully picked the right one.
The right customer (what we refer to as the Sweet-Spot Customer) helps you focus everyone to create a financially viable, operationally feasible and desirable organization.
Choosing your Sweet-Spot Customer has an instant impact. You feel it. Your fellow managers feel it. Suddenly you have the focus around which to operationalize your business. You see more than some customers you like and some you don’t. You discover you’ve been wasting precious resources chasing the wrong customers.
The $10,000 and $200,000 figures mentioned earlier represent real dollars instantly discovered by clients the day they decided on their Sweet-Spot Customer.
One owner realized they were spending at least $10,000 every year on trade shows their Sweet-Spot Customer never attended.
Another CEO discovered he was spending $200,000 on two sales people tasked with selling to the wrong customer. That expense went away on the day the company focused their resources on attracting and serving their Sweet-Spot Customer.
Decide on your Sweet-Spot Customer and find the money waiting to be found in your organization.