Codie Sanchez divides businesses into dessert (non-essential, like birthday cakes or life coaching) and oxygen (essential, like emergency plumbing). Test it: if a customer skips your service for 30 days and nothing bad happens, you're dessert. Oxygen businesses print money because customers will pay anything when they need you.
Chapters
The most profitable businesses I've ever owned sell something nobody wants to buy. Let me explain. I call these a dessert business and an oxygen business. So a dessert business, well, they sell something like a birthday cake that some people want. Life coaching, a brand refresh. The customer can put it off forever and nothing really bad happens to the business. So they don't really have a huge budget for it, and it's not that painful to solve. An oxygen business, they sell something people need. Emergency plumbing when a pipe bursts at 2:00 AM, payroll software 40 employees are expecting a check on Friday. But need is only half of it. There's a second piece everybody misses. Here's how it works. An oxygen business, they're gonna find the budget for, and it's super painful. So your test is, what happens to your customer if they buy nothing from you for 30 days? If the honest answer is nothing much, well, you're stuck in here with the dessert. Inconvenient, easy to ignore. Get yourself something in this top right corner, and then you're gonna have people breaking down your door to buy. This is the difference between businesses that print money and those that don't.
