Dave WordenTriumph Business Solutions · Founder

Focus on the heart of your organization

29 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:29

In this presentation, the speaker revisits a previously introduced 80/20 matrix that links a company’s top 20% of clients to its product offerings. He visualizes three tiers of offerings: loss‑making (negative profitability), break‑even or modestly profitable (the “middle mix”), and high‑margin products. By mapping the top clients onto these tiers, he shows how to diagnose where the organization’s “heart” lies – the intersection of best customers buying the best products. For each mismatch he proposes specific interventions: a hard conversation to move loss‑making customers toward sustainable offerings, educational efforts to lift middle‑mix purchases to higher‑margin options, and a strategic focus on nurturing the high‑value core. The overall message is to concentrate energy on the profitable core while systematically upgrading or phasing out unprofitable client‑offering combinations.

Chapters

A couple weeks ago, I shared with you a matrix, the 8020 rule. How it applies to not just your clients but also your offering. And you got to understand where the heart is. We're going to go back to it. Got a new graphic. I'm starting from scratch here. And we're just going to look at the client side, your best clients. This is your top 20 clients. These are the ones we want to evaluate and we talked about the offering. Well, these clients can buy any mix of offerings they could buy here, which is your low. Actually not even low. It's your loss offerings. These are the things where you lose money. So it's negative income or negative profitability. When your best customers are buying this, there's an intervention. You got to tell your customers, we love working with you because you're a great customer. What you're buying is not sustainable for us. We have other offerings. See if you can move them up. This is a real challenge because great customers buying things that you're losing money on may not be a great customer after all. The next scenario, I call this the middle mix. And the middle mix is your offerings here that generate some profitability. Sometimes they're kind of break even. These are okay, we have to elevate them up through education. And the highest level is your best products are being bought by your best customers. That's where the money is. This again is the heart of your organization and where you need to love upon these customers. So this one is a real hard conversation with them or yourself. They this one is education up to better offerings. And here is the heart of your organization. We want to concentrate our energy.