Why and How to Identify Your Primary Customer

The Small business show episode 347 for Wednesday, September 29, 2021 greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here@business show.co where the verb of the day is small businessing. Sponsors for this episode include ladderlife.com SBS and banknovo.com SBS. We will talk more in detail about why you want to visit those URLs, other than the fact that that's our job is with our sponsorships anyway. That's our job is to encourage you to visit the URLs, to visit the sites and learn more. Whether you choose to use their products or buy is between you and them, but we'd love it if you visit those URLs ladderlife.com SBS banknova.com SBS we share the details about that, but you can get your free business banking account in just 10 minutes@banknova.com SBS and ladderlife.com SBS it's going to let you figure out to see if you're instantly approved for term life insurance. So we'll talk more about how that all works in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. Sorry for giggling during your intro there. I just love hearing that small business as a verb and I love the fact that we are just empowered to change the English language into make things the way they really are. Because we know that the term small business is a verb, right?

Language is an evolution and it is reflective of the times, right? I mean, if we go back, we get upset when words change meaning in our lifetimes, right? Sometimes not all words like small businessing, I like that. Although that wasn't a word before we made it one, you know. But like the fact that we now don't have a word that means what literally used to mean. That's somewhat upsetting to someone who grew up at a time when literally meant what it used to mean. It doesn't mean that anymore. It's how it is. It has evolved. It is, it is a term of emphasis as opposed to a term. One, one, one word that I hope we preserve is unique. When I hear people say something is, and I've been guilty of this too. Certainly, certainly present company is not excluded. At least not at least not me. When I hear somebody say that something is extremely unique or very unique or somewhat unique, there's no degrees of uniqueness, right? This is a binary term. It is either unique or it is not unique. And I hope that we don't lose what that means. Because I think it's an important word to have.

It is definitely as it reflects on your business as well, is your business unique?

And yeah. What does that mean?

What makes it special? And we're going to talk about that on the show today. A little bit.

A little bit. In my small businessing efforts, Shannon, I had the crazy idea that it's time to sell one of my companies. Now, to be clear, it's not any of the companies that I talk about on the show. It is the one that I very specifically don't talk about. And the only reason I don't talk about what we do is that my partners and they have their reasons and I fully respect them. My partners in that business do not have not wanted to be publicly associated with the business for some risks that certainly nothing. There's no legal risks.

Yeah.

But just there's some things that they would rather not be associated with. If it were up to me, I would have been talking about this for the last three and a half years. And as you know, Shannon, I have been with you. They have asked me not to talk about it on the show. And other than stroking my own ego, perhaps I have no valid reason to talk about it on the show. So I'm happy to go with what my partners have asked. It's it like it costs me nothing. However, once it. There may come a time soon where it's actually okay for me to talk about and share what this business is and does and all those things. And it's because it's at a point where I think it might be time to sell it. And it, it's a young business. It's three and a half years old. That's about the youngest that you could sell a business with any real hope of getting its true value. I'm finding as I'm going down this path. But we've grown it to a point. It has grown really quite well. We've gotten it to a point where I know the three of us partners and more specifically, I know myself, I think we have a great risk of not continuing its growth trajectory. And it can grow. And so the decision is either do we bring someone else in to run it for us or do we. Do we sell it to someone who will run it, you know, for themselves? And so we've been having this conversation for probably about six months, which I highly recommend you have with your partners before the time comes. Right. Like, this is an important, evolving conversation. But we're all of the opinion that, let's see, let's let's, let's head down the path as though we're going to sell it. But, and this is a super important lesson that the first time I learned it was with you, Shannon. We learned it together. I don't want to say that you had to teach it to me. We were, we were there. We learned it together. Never, ever detach from the business until the check clears.

Indeed.

So, so we have a plan B that we are very excited about, the hiring of a CEO and those sorts of things. And, and, and so, but it's like, well, let's find out what plan A would, would look like. And if that makes sense to us, then we will do that. And if it doesn't, then we have a. We have a plan B that we are very excited about. Now, we haven't tried this plan B. That plan B could fail spectacularly, but we're excited about it. So that if and when a sale doesn't happen and we're at the very early stages here, so that, that is more than likely that going to be the outcome that we're not just dejected and, and completely, you know, at a loss for what to do next. We already know what to do next. And I can't, I can't stress enough how important that part of this process is for us and also for you. Because if you detach, the buyer will take advantage of you. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day as I've been trying to get advice about this, and it's a friend who has sold his businesses a few times and bought many businesses in the course of it. And he said, oh, yeah, he says what I like to do with buyers or with sellers when I'm the buyer, he says, I start asking them the question, what are you planning on doing with the money and really getting them committed to the other side of the transaction. Yeah.

Brilliant persuasion right there.

I mean, like, like, like really brilliant persuasion. Yes.

You're doing, you know, you're doing to them what you don't want someone to do to you. You don't want to have that in your head what you're going to do because you don't want to be emotionally committed.

No. At all. No. It has to be all about the deal. And so to that end, this business is not in any of the markets that I've spent my life in. And so, I don't know, like the top three buyers. Right. You know, and not necessarily that that would be the smart way to go. I don't think it would be in fact, but I don't know them anyway. There haven't been, like, conferences to attend because it's been, you know, most of this has been throughout a pandemic, you know, and, and so I just don't know who to talk with. But I think that's a benefit here because it's forcing me. And I've already had some conversations with some M and A firms, and the trick is finding the right M and A firm for us, you know, in, in this market at our size and, you know, we're not huge, so got to find somebody that's okay with that and eager to work with us, you know, and, and, and that's been interesting. We started that last week. And did you use an M and A firm when you sold any of your businesses, Shannon?

No, we were fortunate, you know, with this last one that we got approached.

Okay. Yeah.

And there's a whole, you know, I love this concept that you should always be thinking about selling your business tomorrow.

Right.

Because it, it really makes you run your business in a much.

Oh, yeah.

And detailed method that you could open your books to anybody. And you don't have to say, oh, well, we haven't done that.

But. Oh, yeah, no, we, we. And, and with this business, that's what we've been doing all the way through. It's super clean. We don't, we didn't, you know, we've all got other things that we do. So even those sort of allowable. But, but asterisk things like does it make sense to run a car through the business or do you have your, you know, something that might fall on the line between business and personal expenses and those sorts of things. We have none of those in this business.

That's good because that's often what, you know, a business broker or an M and a firm, they help. The first thing they do.

Yeah.

Is help you restate your financials to reflect, you know, a more accurate picture of what's going on with the business by taking those kinds of things out. So the more clean your, your financials are, the easier time you're going to have.

Yeah. No. And, and we've been running this business certainly for the last year as though we're going to sell it. And yeah, it may be not quite the last year, but certainly the last six months. And so, like I said, we've kept it clean. It's been interesting working. You know, I've got one M and A firm. In fact, it's someone that we interviewed on the show, Bob Grewall from Seapoint. Yep, that's right. I reached out to him since we knew him. I. We're still trying to figure out if his firm is the right one for our market, but certainly the size of our business and that sort of thing is there. And, and he actually had some great news that he shared with me that I. I think is okay for me to share here. They just entered the Fortune 500, which is a pretty. I know. Like, he was like, I don't like to make a big deal out of it. I'm like, dude, you should make a big deal out of that. That's a big deal. Yeah. And so. So I've been, you know, working with him and, and learning a lot. Even just in the first. I mean, we're at such an early stage where, you know, it's. It's just the first.

Great guy, though, because he's a skeptic, right?

Yeah.

And he's not going to tell because a lot of these Eminem and I M and A folks, and I've talked to a few, you know, they tend to pump you up because they see lots of fees down the road.

Right.

And tell you maybe your business is in a little bit more demand than maybe it is. But he's.

He's had this. He's been the opposite so far.

That's what you want. I think that's good. It's like, well, realistically this and that and, and, you know, he. Even just the conversations I had with him, he helped me understand, here's what's in demand, here's what's not.

Yeah.

You know, so if your business has these aspects of it that's in demand, if your business does these kinds of things. Not so much.

Not so much.

I learned a lot just from, you know, speaking with him, you know, a handful of times.

But, you know, the thing that I can share, and I will share more as. As slash. Also, if this process continues and it may die at any point in time, I want to point out, but I will share more as I learn, you know, as we're going forward with this. But, you know, the things. If you're thinking about this with your business, the things, the first things that an M and A firm, and I presume even just a savvy business, who's going to acquire you without the use of a firm, the first things they're going to want are your three years of financials, you know, P Ls and balance sheets, which are pretty easy to pull together. And then also what they call the trailing 12 months or the TTM, and that's monthly P&L for the past 12 months so that they can see trajectories. They're looking. I mean, obviously with most of these firms, they're going to work on a sales commission, a success fee, as some of them call it. And, you know, they want to figure out what a fair price, but also the best fair price is for your business. And so they want to look for trends. They also want to look for any problems or anomalies so that when they start marketing it, it's their name on the line. But also they want to have the answers to the questions that buyers are going to ask right away. They don't want it. They don't want it to come up and have them be surprised. So. Yeah, but it's been a. It's been a fascinating thing. Even just this first, you know, week of. Of. Of exploring this in a. In a more serious way. Yeah.

It'll be hearing about it as it, as it evolves. You're certain, if nothing else, you. It will be a great learning process.

I've already learned. I mean, it's like what I know now is way better than what I knew a week ago. Even if, like, nothing else happens going forward, it prepares me for the next one, and it prepares me for creating the next business.

Yeah.

So that I. Right. So that, like, if you can. If you know what this process looks like, and you and I went through it with, with deals on the web, we didn't get all the way to the end, but we did some of it. But even that experience has. Has been extremely valuable, and that was a failure every time. Yeah. But knowing what they wanted from us then helped me organize this business from day one to be something that was clean and, you know, easily explainable and all of that stuff, and it's paying off in spades right now. So. Yeah, I don't know. It's. It's been fun. Yeah, I'm excited, too. It's been fun. I need to make sure I keep focus on, you know, my actual day jobs. You know, I mean, my day jobs are for me, but still, they need to get done, so. Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. That's cool.

It is cool.

Good stuff, man.

Hey, I want to. I want to take a minute. What, What? I want to take a minute and talk about our sponsors. What are we going to talk about today?

So we're going to talk about finding the right customers for your business and first and foremost, identifying what your primary customer is. That. What's the demographic, what Are they looking for? What do they value? And are you putting your resources where your primary customers are?

Building an avatar, you might say, of your perfect customer?

Yeah, you got it. That's what we're going to talk about.

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Yeah, let's do it. I'm going to use the term primary customer. So this is, I like that avatar type thing where you know, this person, you're going to focus most of your efforts on who's going to hopefully generate the most of your profits and help build your business. And the first question to ask is, have you identified who your primary customer is with your business? And I want to talk about why it's so important how to do it. And one of the biggest things is if you don't know who that primary customer is, as I mentioned before, the sponsor break is you may be wasting resources trying to go after somebody else. And it's, you know, as business owners, I think it's easy to fall into the trap of, well, we just want to appeal to as many customers as possible. But that, that's, I don't think that's the best way to do it. Yes, you want, you want to find those customers, but who is really making, you know, the money for your business, Right? And so let's talk about that. The biggest thing it's going to help you do once we identify who these people are, is it's going to help guide your investments. You know, where are you spending your advertising dollars, your human resources that are limited, you know, where your people, your technology, what are your budgets allocated to? They all should be focused around this primary customer. A good example is if you're, you know, the low price leader. If, you know, we talk about not competing on price, but there's a lot of businesses that are very successful competing on price. Most of their budgeting income and investment goes into logistics, into the back end. Because if you're going to make a profit on being the lowest price, you better have it figured out on the back end and be lean and mean so you can see that profit hit your bottom line.

Yeah. So that your, your margins aren't just razor thin. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

Yeah. If you're going to compete on price, you have to beat your competitors on logistics. I think that's a factor.

Look at it, look at Amazon. You see, you can argue they, they've.

Done it right.

Lots of different ways and we'll talk about them a little bit more too. But the more you can narrow down who your primary customer is, the better you can provide them products and services. But you gotta know, you have to know, and your people should know, your employees should know. It's like what type of customer is, you know, and it's harder than it sounds. Like when, with Tech Restore, when we were doing our overnight repairs for laptops and we were one of the first in the country to do this, it didn't take long for us to realize that trying to appeal to a cost conscious customer, that was not the way.

Right.

Because it was expensive to do three way overnight shipping. So we just left that on the ground. It was a premier service, all based on time. And time conscious customers were who we were focused on. And we invested tons of time, energy and money into, you know, taking as much time off and maximizing that time as we could with relationships with carriers, with, you know, spending a ton of cash building a special box that we could put in every van in the US and, you know, just doing that distribution. And that paid off because we were going after customers that were time conscious, not cost conscious.

This is fascinating. I thought I had gone through this process with all of our businesses here and as soon as you started listing traits of customers, it was like, oh my goodness, like, and I won't say the business, although you figured out it's fine, we avoid lazy customers. And I never realized that until this moment. And, and we've tried to work with them and it's too, it's too much hassle because they want us to do all the work for them. Now. That doesn't mean that we want to be lazy and not want to do any of the work. Right? No, but we have, we, we focus on service focused customers, people that want what we are doing. And that's different than lazy customers. Right. Like there's, there's, like there's things that the customer needs to do with your products, especially if you're a B2B, you know, entity. Like, like our companies are here that we focus on customers who want us to do our job so that they can do their job and that and, and if we can go. But I always say to our customers is it's our job to make your job easier. Right. So that doesn't appeal to lazy people because lazy people don't want to do their job. Right. Service focused people want to do their job. But if you can go and take 10% of that and do it here, now they only have to do 90% of their job. They love you forever. It's a, it's a subtle distinction.

Yep. And it is difficult. You know, you have. If you're going to identify this primary customer, which I thoroughly think you should, you're going to wind up ignoring some other types of customers.

Absolutely.

Which is hard and hard to train your people to do. And you're gonna also wind up ignoring or saying no to some opportunities because you're going, you're going to stay focused on your primary customer type.

Right.

So how do you identify these people? I think the first step is really thinking about what's the mission of your, of your small business. You know, what's your story? We talk about story all the time. You know, when you sat down and thought this is what we're going to do, we're going to create this company and we're going to do X those kinds of things. You know, looking at why you started your business in the first place and what type of customer you want to focus on that that can really help you narrow it down. Then you want to list out what are your strengths, you know, what makes you unique, to use that word that you mentioned earlier.

I like it.

Is it speed of service? Is it that you're, you know, your technology is proprietary and so everybody wants that or you know, customers want that. Is it you have incredible customer service or a great brand that people love and love to share on social media and that kind of thing. Identify what those strengths are and then you also want to look at what type of customer has the most profit potential for you. You know, we talked about price. Are you a low price leader that you're focused on frugal buyers or do you make a unique product that you charge a premium for?

Right, right, right.

And yeah, you have to figure this out. And are, or are you selling to end users or are your customers other resellers? And I read an article recently that was really interesting to me. Hbo, the streaming service, you know, they're, they've identified their primary customer and it's not who you probably would think at all. You might think they cater to end users, people like us that watch their content. Or maybe it's the cable and streaming services pump, you know, Internet companies pumping into your house, but it's actually, they've identified that it's filmmakers that are HBO's primary customers and they focus all their resources on bringing new filmmakers to their service. And they, because they know when they get this content that everybody wants to watch, that creates the demand, which in turn pushes the cable providers and the streaming companies to carry hbo and because their customers demand it. So, you know, you got to kind of look at it and it may not be your customer, may not be who you think it is. So.

Makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So once you identify, you go through this exercise, try to get, narrow it down as much as possible who your customer is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to, because then you're going to be able to focus your resources, right? You want to get as close to them as you can so you can understand what they truly value about your business.

Right.

And I think that oftentimes we're surprised. You may think it's one thing, but we need to ask them. You know, we focused, we've, we've identified our primary customer. These are the people that are using our product and service. Now let's go talk to them, right? Have conversations with them and capture that data and find out what they value. Really, really important. You know, if, if your customers, if they really are low priced, frugal primary customer, you want to focus your resources on the back end. Like I talked about your logistics, be sure you can be profitable and still provide that product to them because you know somebody's going to come around and sell it for a nickel less. And the better you are on the back end at distribution, at inventory, at shipping. You know, if you're bringing stuff in from overseas, every bit of that that you become more efficient is going to allow you to offer a better, low price product to your customer.

It's true. And efficiency is important no matter what. But you need to make sure that you are not sacrificing customer service in the name of efficiency. And now customer Service can mean different things to different types of customers. The cost conscious customer is probably, but not necessarily going to be understanding of more automated customer service. Right. Whereas you know, as I was talking about before, the people that are service focused and we're going to do 10 of their job for them, that, that's less efficient on our end than automating everything. Right. Like if we need to have humans involved, that's a friction point. But it is one that we've chosen to have. But that means we need to find other places where we can find efficiencies and those sorts of things. So yeah, you have to balance, you have to make sure that you can deliver what your customers want and still be profitable.

And you have to, I think you can be just upfront with those customers and be transparent. You know, it's that old adage, what is it? Speed, quality or price? You know, pick two.

Yeah.

And you can't have all three. And at, @ some price points you can only offer a certain type of service.

Right.

Or a certain level of service. So just be upfront with the customer on that and, and maybe even offer different tiered pricing if they do it. But again, you're expanding things out. You know, if your customer really value, if your primary customer, you've identified that they value service, you need to focus your resources on creating the most incredible experience you can for your customers.

That's it.

It has to be that way, bar none.

That's it. Yeah. Yep.

In. And if your customer really values your expertise, if you're the technology leader or you have some unique bit of tech, you can focus your resources on continually improving your technology. I mean, you can take the example like Google versus Yahoo. And it's not to say that Yahoo hasn't been successful, but along the way Yahoo kind of tried to be all things to all people. Yahoo. Sports, Yahoo. Finance, Entertainment, all this kind of stuff. And it worked when there wasn't a lot of competition, but it didn't work so well anymore, you know, versus Google that, you know, we created the best search ever and they just, you know, doubled down on focusing on technology over and over to continually improve and build upon that technology stack to offer other, other products. But it's a technology that they're really valued, you know, for and they've, they've stuck with that kind of primary customer.

That makes sense. Yeah. No, right. It's obvious. Steve Jobs said, you know, everything's obvious. The trail is obvious when you look back. Yeah, right. But you know, it's being able to see it going forward. And like, like you said earlier in the show, being willing to let the wrong customers, people that aren't your customers, fall off the wayside. That's the hard part really. Like you said, it was hard for your employees. I think it's harder for the business owner. You know, the entrepreneur's mindset is you never say no. Right. And so training yourself bubble up.

You know, what happened where we would always tend to find it is, you know, let's say we were, we had a big shift because we were doing this time conscious primary customer for years. But as that market started to shift and the technology shifted, it changed. So we tech restore became more of a refurbishment business and selling on value.

Right, right.

Trying not to compete on price all the time. But certain customers, they respected that value and they knew that there was a trade off. Okay, I'm gonna buy this iPad that's refurbished for $500 versus one for a thousand or this laptop or whatever you want to, whatever you do.

Sure.

And you could try to explain to them, hey, this is going to have some blemishes or scratches, but it's going to be functional, fully functional. Some cosmetic issues, that kind of thing. Some customers love that and they embraced it. But there were always customer types that would contact us and they wanted that thousand dollar condition for that $500 price. And you know, we would just be very transparent. This is not for you. We suggest you go buy new. And we tried to head that off before they bought from us. We did it on our website. We explained what the conditions meant. We showed pictures of scratches and very transparent, said if you're not happy with these cosmetic issues, here's a link. Go buy a new one. You know, with all due respect. And we would occasionally, more often than we liked, you would have customers that bought it. They call up complaining about cosmetic and we just go, hey, let me just send you a label. You can send it back.

But Jean Louis Gasse. Yeah, here you go.

We really. But we also identify those customers and try to head that off from happening again because that they try to sneak back in and over and over they have a similar experience. So you have to weed those customers out. Because our whole business model shifted to a value based primary customer. Not always the cheapest, but they understood what they were getting. There is a trade off. They're not going to get brand new condition for this, you know, 50 off or 60 or 40 off price.

Right. Makes perfect sense, no? Yeah. You have to train your customers and you have to be able to fire Your customers.

Absolutely.

Which is crazy. Yep.

But it'll help you. It'll eliminate headaches. And so I just have a couple more things about this concept. I'd love to hear how you identified your primary customers. Feedbackusinessshow.co.

Yeah. What traits came to mind? What were you yelling and pounding on the steering wheel about when. When we listed our traits, because I know we missed some and I definitely want to flesh out this list. So. Yeah.

And we continually struggle here on the show to identify who our primary customer is. Right. The small business owner. Is it the aspirational person that's sitting in a cubicle listening to us on the way home, trying to get motivated to take the next step? Is it the business owner that's been doing this stuff for years like us? And quite frankly, I really don't know that we've found that out yet.

No, it's hard to know. And it's because everybody has so much to do. We don't hear from you as often as like, other podcasts would because you folks are busy and so you folks are productive. My goodness. I said the B word, Shannon. But, you know, let us know. Feedbackusshow.co. and if you have a moment and you say, gosh, you know, you guys keep saying feedbackusinessshow. Co. I really wish there was a way to contact you via X, whatever X is. If you have a moment and let us know, we will love you forever because we want to remove the friction for you to communicate with us. So how do we do that? What's the key? We'd love to know. It's great.

Last couple things on this topic. If you find, if you really narrow it down and you. You come to the realization you have more than one primary customer, I would consider, you know, developing separate business units within your company with their own resources, their own budgets, financials, so they can focus best on each of those customer types. You know, we learned this. We had our repair business that, you know, we were focused on primary customers that were schools and corporations. And over time, we had made inroads into the parts business so much that a lot of other repair facilities wanted to buy parts from us. And it was very difficult to try to, you know, serve both those customer bases. So we split out the tech restore wholesale business to sell parts, put somebody else in charge of that. They had their own marketing budget, all their own, you know, everything. And it worked out much, much better because you could focus separately on who your primary customer was.

Makes sense. That's really smart.

All of our businesses have Limited resources. You know, once you identify this primary customer, you're going to be able to allocate those resources in a much more strategic way and that's going to bring you more long term, more loyal and more profitable customers to your company. So highly recommend it. Follow through the exercise and find out who your primary customer really is.

Yeah, yeah. And let us know Feedback at Business Show. It's, you know, it's what we do here. So. Yeah.

Good stuff, man.

I don't have anything else for today. Do you have anything else, man?

No, that's it. I'm good. I enjoy talking about this. I'm excited to hear more about your business developments as things move along.

Yeah, I'm eager to see where it goes. I'm not, I'm not spending the money yet. I'm not even paying the taxes yet. So. Yeah, but it'll be, I will learn something. I, and if, you know, it's. As I've discussed with my partners, a sale simply means trading what we expect for ourselves as future profits for a, you know, potential one time payout. Or maybe it's a structured deal where there's a little bit of a. Both. Right. So yeah, you know, yeah, it's. If it works, it's great. If not, we have a plan B that I, I. There will be moments during this where we are more excited about the plan B of keeping it and knowing that, knowing my partners and I, you know, it's, it's, there will be times where it's like, oh man, maybe we shouldn't sell. Maybe we should like just, you know, keep running it and because we have this huge list of things that we haven't done done with the business yet, some of which are almost complete, which I know looks good to a buyer but you know, it also looks good to us.

Yeah.

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just know that I have, I have failed at selling a business at the right time in the past.

Yeah. So timing is important.

It, Absolutely. Well, I mean you said it in our pre show discussion. You said the best time to sell a business is when you don't want to sell it. And, and that's true for a variety of reasons. And so, you know, this feels like the right time to head down this path and figure it out. So we'll see.

That's true.

Yeah, we'll see. You know.

Good, good. Well, we will talk to you next week, folks. Thanks for hanging out with us today.

Absolutely.

Small business for a while.

Make sure to check out banknovo.com SBS ladderlife.com SBS US and keep living that charmed life. See you next week.