You’re on a Different Road, I’m in the Milky Way
Forget Positioning—Talk About Potential Instead
This topic was previously covered in one of my weekly newsletters. To get other timely tips, make sure you’re on the list: www.thejilljames.com/newsletter
My good friend Joanna Bloor has this concept she calls The Potentialist: a person who creates space and promise for an unknown future outcome. She recently wrote about why traditional marketing doesn’t work when you’re talking about potential. This resonated with me, as I (along with many of you) are not marketing so much as creating a shared vision of the future with our prospective customers.
I’ve been reworking my pricing and service packages. We’ll be posting that on the website in the next week or two. While I’m great at doing it for other people, for myself, I struggle to put things into tidy, scalable boxes. I remain curious about problems and possibilities. But, it’s hard for a customer to opt-in to a version of a shared future if I keep changing the outlook.
Why It's Hard to Package Potential
Yet future potential stubbornly refuses to conform to the classic, pithy positioning statement. You may be finding that difficult, too.
It turns out, one solution is to give some examples of what you’re doing so people can say, oh, that sounds like a good future state for me, too.
Right now, I have three planning clients who are re-imagining what their businesses will look like in 12-18 months. They’re all at roughly the same phase of business, but once we ask the questions below through the lens of their respective centering principles, we’ll get three very different growth plans.
- What am I offering?
- Are my offerings profitable?
- How much of it do I need to sell?
- How fast do I want to grow?
- Where does this plan break? Who do we need to hire? Where do we need to invest?
- How much should we lean on people versus technology?
- What repeatable processes, automation, and standard operating procedures do we need?
- What benefits programs and policies align with our centering principles and attract the level of people we want?
- How much can I afford to pay myself? What are smart ways to do it, aligned with my wealth goals?
What We’re Doing With Clients
Once we get through all that, some clients decide to stay on and have us help manage their companies for six months or longer on a fractional basis. We keep asking these questions regularly, but we also work on executing the operating and financial strategy. Recently, we’ve:
- Set up lines of credit and high-yield savings accounts
- Developed a six-month wind-down strategy to eliminate debt before closing
- Set up a new LLC and converted it to S-corp status
- Re-planned use of cash for potential tariff impacts
- Onboarded, promoted, and offboarded employees
- Set up group health insurance
- Launched a new product
- Managed a lot of truly boring but necessary compliance
- Changed payroll providers
- Dealt with a European tax situation
- Hired a founder’s kid
- Developed incentive compensation plans
- Evaluated and moved two clients’ 401ks to lower cost, integrated partners
- Supported personal financial planning and tax preparation
- Managed a formal valuation process
- Sourced a lot of attorneys and accountants
- Cried, celebrated, and comforted
If you can tell me what job that is, I accept. I call it “stuff happens, we deal with it.” Because that’s what running a small business is. Some days, we need to pause and regroup, because being an entrepreneur is overwhelming and the challenges do not stop. Sometimes people are throwing flowers, other times they’re throwing rocks.
All this to say, if you can’t land on a positioning statement, I give you permission to stop trying. Say what you’re doing and invite other people to opt in. It’s a sign you’re probably a Potentialist, too.
If you’d like to talk more about things from the list above, grab some time with me this week.
Clients on the Move
Here are some things we’re celebrating this month, born of tears, struggle, and ideas.
Kathleen Stuart launched PUBLIC, a new agency for influencing movement-based public opinion. Their flagship offer is The Narrative Lab for rapid testing of messaging effectiveness and rollout of persuasive campaigns.
Covet & Mane launched Covet Labs and announced its first extension-specific color product, Root Melts. Look for the launch on June 3.
The Skateside is now approved to bring affordable on-campus roller skating and skateboarding camps to schools in Santa Monica, the LA Unified School District, and private schools in Southern California.
MyAfterlight founder Rachel Donnelly published Late To Your Own Funeral, a guide to organizing your wishes and legacy assets.
Alex Carter Asks launched the Ask for More Group, adding four trainers to their roster and expanding offerings in small group coaching and executive presence. In a full-circle moment, one of the AFMG trainers gave a negotiations keynote to ad tech and publishing leaders at Beeler Tech’s spring Base*Camp event.
