This step will provide the you the valuable information you’ll base all your next steps on. This will equip you to calculate your strategic position to target the right people with the right message. 

If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.

Understand your ideal client’s immediate goals for the projects you’re asked to help with, as well as the strategic aspirations those projects contribute to. Awareness of the full stack of results you’re helping achieve helps you accurately pitch higher value outcomes instead of their component services.

Understanding your client’s actual requirements – rather than the prescriptive steps that are often briefed – can help you use your expertise to propose more helpful solutions for bigger problems, a greater range of problems, or the same problem in different circumstances.

Discovering the frustrations of your ideal clients gives you immediate opportunities to offer your expertise and helps shape your strategy to ensure it's both in demand and profitable.

in the previous step, you gained valuable insight into your ideal clients, their aspirations, and most important problems. In this step, you’ll match, list, and prioritize those insights to calculate how to position your unique expertise and achieve your plan. This will equip for the next step to accurately craft your headline message to get their attention.

If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.

Solving problems important enough to people with the resources and authority to solve, is a foundation for ensuring your work is invested in a profitable path.

Your insight into your ideal client and the challenges they face in achieving their goals should inform a long-list of problems you can help solve.

A key imperative for your clients is solving their customers’ problems. Focusing on how they do this aligns you with their ultimate incentive.

Your clients are also incentivized to gain a competitive advantage – or even just remain competitive – through reducing cost, time, and complexity.

Your list of things you do uniquely, expertly, and want to do more.

It’s easy to take for granted that your considerable experience and professional perspective is actually your unique expertise. The approach you’ve developed through years of practice, evolved to overcome problems and work in diverse circumstances, and refined out the inefficiencies. The direction you implement naturally, and are surprised isn’t common practice. What you find yourself explaining to others who want to emulate your approach. Your unique expertise is your competitive advantage, and what this series focuses on building into a focused business and movement.

A great exercise is to think ahead five years and consider what Future You wishes you’d committed to and invested in making your primary service, because that’s what you’re spending all your time doing.

A critical step is ensuring your expert solution to your ideal client’s problem will actually move you forward.

While it’s great to find connections between what you do well and what people need done, it’s important to ensure it will be profitable for you and help you achieve your plan.

Also, when gaining insight into your clients and calculating your strategic position, it’s not unusual to discover opportunities that are promising enough to warrant reviewing your plan. The earlier you decide on your plan, the more focused and productive your work in these steps will be.

Basics to consider include business model alignment, competition and commoditization, profitability, set-up and resource requirements.

Many obviously great ideas have long been commoditized, relying on massive scale to overcome slim margins to be profitable, or expensed as a loss leader for profitable opportunities. These can be less effective to bootstrap, requiring significant capital to sustain.

Providing efficiencies through your expertise, group purchasing to supply all your clients, and effective automation including AI, can combine with the value of your expertise to put you ahead and increase your profitability.

With your position calculated in the previous step, you know who to target on which problem and how you help solve it. In this step, you’ll use this information to craft your headline message to get their attention. In the next step, you’ll expand on this message with value principles that retain their attention and engage them further.

If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.

Standing out to your ideal client means out-competing the other 9,999 messages they’re exposed to daily, and you’ll probably have a couple of seconds to do it. Don’t waste an opportunity with a message that’s more complex than it needs to be. An effective message gets the attention of your ideal client, and interest them enough to read the next thing; not tell the entire story. Relevance, brevity, and language are the three elements of an effective headline message.

Your audience will want a good reason to choose you over your competition – or take action at all – so your headline message will need to include a benefit that’s relevant for them. Insights on your ideal client’s aspirations and problems, and where they overlap with your unique expertise, should drive this decision. While it can be tempting to list features here, an aspirational benefit is proven to usually work better, so save the features list for later in this framework.

Your headline message should be written to work independently – as well as get your audience to stick around to read the next piece of information – because a large percentage of readers won’t read any further. To ensure the exposure you get is not wasted, your message should encourage action. Framing your benefit in active language including verbs and imperatives is proven to prompt more action.

In the previous step, you nurtured your network into a community supporting and endorsing you. Your work to simplify your expertise has given you valuable insight into what you want to focus on and the best people to work with, and developed a pipeline of opportunities. This step will help you evaluate those opportunities for alignment with, and contribution to your decided direction, and ensure they move you forward, compounding your success.

If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.