Positioning is mostly deciding who you are not for. Pick the customer you actually want, name the specific thing you do better than the shop down the road, and let the rest go. Businesses that compete on price are usually businesses that never made that decision.
Owners resist this because it feels like turning away money. It is, in the short run. What you get back is that the customers who do call already want what you sell, the conversation starts at value rather than at number, and your marketing gets much cheaper because you are no longer trying to appeal to everybody.
How do I find the position?
Look at the jobs you actually enjoyed and made money on. Not the biggest ones. The ones where the customer was reasonable, the work suited your crew, and the margin was fine.
There will be a pattern. A type of property, a type of customer, a type of job, a level of complexity. That pattern is your position and you did not invent it, you discovered it, which is why it will survive contact with reality better than anything workshopped in a meeting.
What does a position actually sound like?
A sentence a customer could repeat. "They do older houses and they are honest about what they find." "They do commercial work and they turn up when they say." "They are the ones who will actually answer the phone."
Note that none of those mention quality, service or value. Every business claims those, which makes them invisible. A position has to be a thing somebody else could plausibly not be.
Want an outside read on your position?
Tell us the last five jobs you enjoyed and made money on. We will tell you what the pattern is, which is usually the position you already have.
Get a free website and marketing auditWhat do I give up?
The jobs that do not fit, and that is the whole cost. Quoting them high to discourage them is the usual half measure, and it works until somebody accepts the high price and now you are doing work you do not want at a price that will not cover the aggravation.
The honest version is to refer them somewhere. That builds a relationship with another business, the customer remembers being treated well, and it takes ten seconds. We do it several times a year and it has sent more work back to us than it has cost.
Does this change the website?
Almost every line of it. The first sentence, the photographs, the projects you choose to show, the prices you publish or do not, the questions you answer.
The clearest signal on a well positioned site is that some visitors bounce quickly and the ones who stay call. That looks like a worse website by traffic and it is a better business, which is why traffic is a poor measure for a local company. We would rather a hundred visitors a month and four calls than a thousand and four.
| On the website | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| First sentence | What you offer | Who it is for and what you do better |
| Photographs | Whatever looked good | The kind of job you want more of |
| Prices | On request | A published floor that screens people |
| Traffic | Higher | Lower, with more of it calling |
What about price?
Publish a floor. It does more positioning work than any tagline, because it tells somebody immediately whether they are in the right place.
We publish ours, $3,500 for a project and $499 a month for a plan, and we lose some inquiries because of it. Every one of those was going to end in an uncomfortable phone call anyway. The people who do call have already decided the number is survivable, and the conversation starts three steps further along than it used to.
How long does this take to work?
The decision takes an afternoon. Living with it takes a year, because the temptation to take the wrong job arrives every time the calendar looks thin, and the first few times you take it.
We have done exactly that. There was a stretch where we took on work outside what we do well because the month looked quiet, and every one of those projects took longer, paid less and taught us nothing. The discipline is the hard part, not the strategy.
Does positioning mean a rebrand?
Almost never. A new logo is the most visible and least useful part of this, and it is where a lot of positioning budgets go to die.
What actually changes is what you say first, which jobs you photograph, which inquiries you chase and which you refer on. A business can hold the same name, the same colors and the same van livery for another decade and completely change its position, because the position lives in the choices rather than in the artwork. We would spend the money on rewriting the service pages and taking photographs of the work you want more of, and we would leave the logo alone unless it is genuinely illegible or embarrassing.
The test
Ask three recent customers why they chose you rather than the other quote. If the answers are all different, or all some version of price and availability, you do not have a position yet. If two of the three say roughly the same specific thing, that is it, and your job is to say it louder rather than to invent something better.
Working this out is the first conversation we have with most clients before anything gets built. It shapes the Growth Engine work, it decides who Database Builder goes after, and it is why our work with professional services firms reads differently from the same work for a trade.