In this monologue, Chris Donnelly shares the lesson that trying to serve everyone overwhelms entrepreneurs and limits growth. He recounts how his agency, Verb Brands, started as a generic digital marketing firm competing with thousands of UK agencies, then pivoted to specialize exclusively in luxury brands such as Bugatti, Aston Martin, Harrods, Ritz, and Sunseeker. By focusing on a single customer segment, creating one flagship product that solved that segment’s biggest problem, and mastering a single platform to reach them, the agency grew into a multi‑seven‑figure business and was eventually sold. Donnelly urges listeners to stop being a generalist, pick a specific customer they can serve better than anyone else, build one solution for that customer’s primary pain point, and dominate one platform to deliver it.
Chapters
So if you've ever felt overwhelmed by business advice, it is probably because you're trying to do too much at the same time. And here's the truth that took me years to learn. You can build a multi-seven-figure business around one customer and around one platform. When I first started Verb Brands, my digital marketing agency, I made the mistake of trying to serve everyone. We were a digital marketing agency for any brand that would pay us. And there were 10,000 agencies in the UK doing the exact same thing. And when I was 21, competing against all these other people with loads of experience. I was struggling. And then I noticed something. Two of our best clients, they were luxury brands. They paid more, they stayed longer, and they kept asking for more work. So instead of trying to be everything to everyone, I made a decision. We became the digital marketing agency for luxury brands. And that single decision changed everything. Suddenly we were not competing against 10,000 agencies. We were the only option in a very specific category. We went deep on one type of customer. We understood their problems better than anyone else, and that made us the obvious choice. And by the time that I sold that business 10 years later, we had worked with Bugatti, with Aston Martin, with Harrods, Ritz, and Sunseeker. And not because we were the biggest agency or the most experienced, but because we were the most focused and the best positioned. So here's what I want you to do. Stop trying to serve everyone. Pick one specific customer that you can help better than anyone else. Build one product that solves their biggest problem and master one platform to reach them.
