Positioning is a subtraction exercise

When people struggle with positioning, they usually try to fix it by adding. Another audience. Another service. Another channel. "I help leaders, teams and individuals, and I also do workshops."

It feels safer. If you serve more people, surely more people will buy?

It works the other way. Every audience you add makes your message weaker for all of them.

Why narrow feels scary, and why it works

Choosing one group feels like closing doors. What if the others would have paid?

But think about it from the buyer's side. Imagine you're a newly promoted head of finance and you find two coaches. One says she helps "leaders reach their potential". The other says she helps "new finance leaders in their first year at the top table". Which one do you call?

The narrow message doesn't lose you the wide market. It wins you the narrow one, and the narrow one is where your first clients come from.

An agency client example

Marco is a client of our agency, mettaCofounder.com, where we run this work with people directly. (It's an agency result, so it shows what the method can do, not what the tool alone will do.)

When he came to us, he described himself as a spiritual coach. He had real experience and real passion, but in his words, he "just couldn't connect them in a way the market understood".

We didn't add anything. We took things away until what was left matched his strongest experience. He repositioned as an innovation leadership coach. Over the following period, his annual revenue went from about €60,000 to about €110,000. His workshop went from 2 sign-ups to 17, at twice the price, through the same channels as before.

Same person. Same skills. A smaller, sharper message.

The exercise

Set aside an hour.

Step 1: List everything. Every audience you serve or could serve. Every service you offer. Every problem you help with.

Step 2: Mark the evidence. Next to each, write down any proof: paid clients, great results, strong reactions. Use your career too. Where do you have real experience?

Step 3: Cut. Keep one audience and one problem. Choose the one with the most evidence and the most energy for you. Cross out everything else. It will hurt a little. That's how you know it's working.

Step 4: Write it down. "I help [one audience] with [one problem] so they can [one result]."

Step 5: Live with it for 90 days. Change your LinkedIn headline. Write your next posts for that one person. Watch who responds.

You're not tattooing it on your arm. You're running an experiment. If it doesn't work after 90 days, you'll have real data to adjust with, which is much better than guessing.

What you don't have to give up

Narrowing your message doesn't mean you can't work with other people. If someone outside your niche finds you and you can help them, help them. You're just not marketing to them.

Your positioning is what you say in public. It doesn't limit who you're allowed to help.