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 talk, the speaker revisits a matrix that applies the 80/20 rule to both clients and offerings, emphasizing the need to identify the "heart" of the organization. Starting with the client side, the speaker focuses on the top 20 customers and examines the mix of products they purchase. Offerings are classified into three profitability tiers: loss‑making (negative profit), middle (break‑even or modest profit), and best (high profit). For top clients buying loss‑making products, the speaker advises a direct intervention—communicating that while the relationship is valued, the current purchase is unsustainable and suggesting a move to more profitable offerings. For the middle mix, the recommendation is educational upselling to elevate customers to better products. Finally, the optimal scenario—best customers buying the best products—is highlighted as the organization’s heart, where energy and attention should be concentrated. The overall message is to align client relationships with profitable offerings through candid conversations, education, and focused effort.

Chapters

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 gotta understand where the heart is. We're gonna go back to it. Got a new graphic. I'm starting from scratch here, and we're just gonna 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.