The Joy of Six

Creating these six lists could lead to increased success for your organization

A long time ago here at LaBov & Beyond world headquarters, we had a problem. Things were getting too complicated, what we were doing wasn't as fun, and profits were down. We were busy, but it felt like we were in a constant battle.

We gathered our top people at the time and asked them to create a separate list for each of the following:

  1. Favorite clients
  2. Least favorite clients
  3. Most profitable clients
  4. Least profitable clients
  5. Clients who appreciated us
  6. Clients who didn't appreciate us

When we finished, we didn’t truly have six lists—it was actually more like two. On one list, we had clients who were our favorites (1), were profitable (3) and appreciated us (5). On the other list, we had the clients who were not favorites (2), were not profitable (4) and didn't appreciate us (6).

This was a pretty fascinating experiment, to say the least. Such fascination was short-lived, however, when we noticed that list No. 2 was much longer than list No. 1. To make matters more confounding, we couldn’t exactly figure out what made the clients on list No. 1 "good.”

When you have the time, hopefully today, create your six lists—see if you get the same results. Here's what to do after you make your lists:

First, identify what the "good" clients have in common. In our case, those clients all sold through sales channels such as dealers or distributors. That became our agency's niche—same as it is today. We haven't wavered from it since.

Second, do the math. If you cease working with the "bad" clients, what will happen? Ideally, you'll have more time to spend on the good ones and will lose little to no profit saying goodbye to them.

If that's the case, start severing relationships with those clients in the most expedient way you can. Do it, of course, with respect to them. But don't be surprised if it's not a big deal to them—after all, they weren't all that knocked out by your company, apparently.

If you see this through, you’ve likely identified your company’s niche, and you’ll have more time to focus on getting clients that fit it. What could be better?

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