Casting a big net

The “small business” bucket is so huge, it’s feels almost pointless using it for targeting the businesses you want to work with.

This is not the first time I’ve soap-boxed about this – about 96% of businesses in Australia fit some unofficial description of “Small Business”.

So when I see invitations to business events like this, it makes me wonder is it a genuine desire to help a certain type of business owner, or is it just a huge net hoping to catch anyone who’ll buy in?

The workshop is titled “Work Smart, Win Big: AI Hacks to Boost Sales & Free Up Your Day”.

(Blacked out the person’s name and location).

I’m not sharing this to throw shade at this person – they’re trying to grow like any of us and likely believe they’re truly helping.

It’s intended as a what-not-to-do because there are so many areas where they could have gotten really specific about who they help, and likely helped them far more than this approach will.

The lack of focus on a business type, person, role, outcome – just about anything – makes me wonder what I’d learn by attending.

Most likely, yet another bunch of general ideas I then have to figure out how to retrofit to my business and my situation, if it even feels like something worth doing, or that I’m not doing already (is A.I. really anyone’s secret weapon?).

Rather than training created specifically for my business type and my situation.

Sure yes, some things apply broadly to everyone.

But if I’m a self-employed designer, I can’t see many commonalities with a plumbing business or accounting firm. Each of those businesses has specific challenges.

If I was working with the person who’s running this workshop, this is what I’d say to them before putting the workshop together:

If your past clients have been (in their words):

• number-crunching accountants
• hands-on tradies or
• creative graphic designers

Don’t try to hit all of them – pick the one you got good results for, and tailor the training specifically to their situation. If possible, speak to more like them to understand if they all have the same challenge (in case your client had a one-off specific challenge that might be uncommon).

Create a training for all 3 if you want… if you got results for all of them and you’re not sure which to focus on, test them.

But the more specific you can get to the person attending, the more likely you can help them.

Drop the “Small Business” angle. Get specific 🙂