What do you do for your clients?
What you do for your clients is not always immediately obvious from the outside; running a business involves a lot of work, but a lot of it isn’t necessarily done for your clients.
If you have to stop and think about what your outputs and outcomes are, you’re in the right place!
Some businesses produce physical products, but the value you give to your clients can be intangible, ephemeral, or abstract. If you are in a service-based world and aren’t sure what your value is, you’re in the right place.
Exercise 1: badly describe what you do.
Put some words down on the page - they don’t need to be perfect.
Congratulations! You’ve made a start, now we have something to work with.
The tangible stuff you do
You can separate the things your business provides into two categories, we’ll start with outputs. These are the things we do that can be directly measured, e.g. products or services.
Your outputs could be 1:1 sessions, reports, bugs fixed, lines of code, words written, or any number of countable, qualifiable things.
Exercise 2: describe your outputs.
Using your rough description of what you do as a base if needed, define your outputs.
What do you do that can be counted?
The intangible (but meaningful AF) stuff you do
The second category covers your outcomes. These are the long term effects of your work, and they may not be directly observable.
For example, I teach project management skills on request, and my output was “hours training delivered”, the outcome was my client messaging to tell me she was more patient with her children at bedtime because she knew everything was taken care of. I don’t sell peaceful bedtimes, but that is the outcome of my work with her. Outcomes can be FAR bigger than we imagine when we badly summarise our work in quantities and bad descriptions.
This is the POWER of what you do, the magic, the pzazz, the reason you are different from your competitors. You change lives and this is how.
Exercise 3: Describe your outcomes.
What’s the magic feedback you’ve had from clients?
Exercise 4: Put it together.
In very short, you do [output] so that [outcome] - that’s what you really do for your clients! For example:.
Output: A summerhouse, outcome: a place to celebrate your wedding anniversary with your loved ones
Output: a brand photo for a small business owner, outcome: the confidence to be seen and shout about their business to their dream clients
Output: The something you do for the money you receive, outcome: priceless.
Pop your strapline in the comments, I can’t wait to see what you do! If you’re struggling to see the woods for the trees, drop me a line and I’ll help you out!