Diane GardnerFounder, Adept Business Solutions · Profit First Professional

Focus on the heart of your organization

29 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:29

In this solo coaching segment, the speaker revisits the 80/20 principle, this time concentrating on the client side of a business. He presents a matrix that categorises a company’s top 20 customers and maps the mix of offerings they purchase across three profitability tiers: loss‑making (negative profit), break‑even/middle (low or neutral profit), and high‑value (profitable) products. For each tier he outlines a specific intervention: (1) confront top clients buying loss‑making items and guide them toward sustainable offerings; (2) educate clients in the middle tier to upgrade to more profitable solutions; and (3) concentrate resources on the “heart” of the organization where the best customers purchase the best, most profitable products. The overall message is to identify and nurture the profitable core while managing or reshaping unprofitable client‑offering combinations.

Chapters

A couple weeks ago, I shared with you a matrix, the 80/20 rule, and 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 gotta tell your customers, we love working with you 'cause 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 'cause great customers buying things that you're losing money on, um, 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. Um, 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. This one is education up to better offerings. And here is the heart of your organization. We wanna concentrate our energy.