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.