In this episode, Michelle breaks down why getting stuck with your messaging, product mix, marketing, or niche can be a sign that you skipped an earlier decision.
Why does a business problem suddenly feel impossible right when you think you’ve almost solved it? Usually, the answer isn’t to push harder, but to look a few steps back.
In this episode, Michelle breaks down why getting stuck with your messaging, product mix, marketing, or niche can be a sign that you skipped an earlier decision. She shares how going back to the right question can simplify everything, help you tighten your niche with real data, and make the next steps feel easier.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist, and in the 15-plus years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is far more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy.
Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. And the question we're going to focus on today is one that I don't think anyone really asks out loud, but I hear the feeling behind it all the time. And that question is, what do you do when something in your business starts to feel impossible to solve?
But first, I'm going to set this up by telling you a story that I think will help us relate and understand where I'm getting to. I talk a lot about how I live on Lake Michigan currently, and I love where I live, and I love living on the beach and all the things. What I don't always tell is how that came to be.
And the truth is that I lived in Chicago for most of my life. And after I graduated from business school, I was pretty burned out because I had like gone to business school while also working full time. And I felt like I needed a change.
I needed to get out of Chicago. So I moved to Denver. And pretty quickly, although I loved a lot of things about Denver and being in the mountains and all the things, I realised, though, that it had been a hasty decision and Denver wasn't going to be a permanent fit for me.
So I set out to figure out where I should live. And I figured I should probably do a better job than I had done when I went to Denver because that hadn't worked out right. And as I tried to do a better job of this, it felt like an incredibly hard choice.
Every time I started down a path and I said, oh, I'm going to go to Northwest, I'm going to go to Maine, I'm going to go here, I'm going to go there, it wasn't really grounded in anything. It was just a series of ideas. And every option felt about 75% of the way there.
And then there would be this big, oh, but, right, something is wrong with this, right? Something didn't line up. And it made it pretty obvious that it wasn't the right choice.
And so what I finally realised was that the choice wasn't hard because the options were bad or confusing. It was hard because I was looking at it and way too big of a landscape. And I didn't really have anything guiding the choice, which means sequence over strategy, right?
I had skipped a step. I never had actually defined what mattered most to me. And so I went back and answered that.
And it got clear really fast. I wanted to live on a big body of water again. I missed living in Chicago.
When I lived in Chicago, I lived across the street from the lake, and I missed it. I didn't know yet which body of water I wanted to come back to. I ended up back on Lake Michigan, but that wasn't set at the time.
I just know that I really miss the water. And so that one decision, going back and answering that, not only did it anchor everything, but it narrowed my options. It made me see things really clearly, and it created real differences between the places that I was looking at, and the choice got really easy then.
So why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because in the last couple of weeks, the same thing happened in businesses, at least three separate times that I can think of off the top of my head, and probably more. So I thought, I need to bring it to all of you and point this out.
Because honestly, I get caught in it too. I have been on calls in the last couple of weeks where these examples are coming from. I've been on calls with one-on-one clients thinking, man, I have no idea how we're going to solve this particular issue that we're looking at.
It's feeling hard, right? And I'm just in it. And then I just, my instinct, and I think most people's instincts, especially if you're high achievers, like you just start pushing and pushing, right?
And it's kind of that same feeling that I have with the move, like this should be easy, but I find myself pushing and pushing, and everything has a big but at the end of it. It has a big, wait a minute, we're missing something, and this doesn't actually feel right. It doesn't actually completely line up, but why can't I figure it out?
This question shouldn't be that hard, right? There has to be an answer here, and yet it's starting to feel impossible. And this shows up in a lot of different places in your business, right?
Where you get to that point, if you're trying to figure out your messaging, you're like, oh, boom, nailed it, but yikes, that doesn't fit for some of the audience, right? Or boom, like finally nailed a product mix, but oh boy, what about these people? It shows up where you start getting in these places where you're like, gosh, this should fall into place, and it's just not, right?
And so when something starts to feel impossible, most of us kind of do one of two things. We push harder, or we start wondering like if the whole thing is wrong, like did I screw up like my entire business model, right? And both of those things kind of cost time and energy and confidence, and they just send you spiralling, and that's obviously not productive, but it's also usually not the answer.
The answer is very rarely to keep pushing or to start wondering if like the whole thing is messed up. So let's talk about what the answer actually is, because this is what I want you to remember out of this, and this is an episode for me too, reminding me to remember this, because here's what I always realise and have to come back to, right? This is a little bit of training our brains to remember this.
If you get to a place where it starts to feel impossible, and you're feeling like you need to push, then what I want you to think about is that when you're at that place, that is really the answer, and that difficulty that you're feeling, that impossibility, that why is this so freaking hard, that's a flag, right? That's a red or a green flag, however you want to think about it, if we're thinking optimistic or pessimistic, right? But it's a flag that is reminding you that you have probably skipped something, because that's ultimately the answer.
If things start getting too hard, every time that this has kind of happened to me, whether it's figuring out how to move, or whether it is figuring out a business problem with my one-on-one clients, or even for myself, I have realised that that is a flag that tells me I have skipped something upstream. So sequence over strategy, right? I have skipped something.
I've skipped a decision. I've skipped looking at something earlier that has now come downstream and made it more difficult for me to answer this question. So we've skipped a decision along the way.
We've left something too ambiguous, too open-ended, all of those things, and that's why you get to this point where you're like, oh, gosh, there's not a solution, because every solution that I find doesn't account for one piece of this. That's because you didn't ask the right questions earlier on, right? And so when you feel that way, when you feel like this is impossible, you want to start thinking about the fact that, gosh, did I actually miss something earlier, right?
Because you're not stuck because you can't move, figure out how to move forward. You're stuck because you skipped a question, two questions ago, that you never asked yourself, never decided on, and then the repercussions of that have made things more difficult. And so what I want you to ask in these moments, and what I want you to recognise, right, train your brain to recognise, is that if you're stuck, is the answer to back up two steps and ask a better question, right, and one that is going to help make everything flow.
Same way I went from, I don't know where to live, everything feels like too ambiguous and huge, and I don't even know what I'm doing, and I backed up, and I was like, okay, what's the point here? The point is to get to a big body of water. Okay, now I can flow from that, and I can find an answer from that.
And if you caught episode 60 a couple episodes ago about speed costs you lessons, you heard me talk about this a little bit, right? It's a little bit of the switchback trail, and why steady intentional growth sometimes beats charging straight up the hill, because when we're growing in a steady way, we have time to recognise these moments. When we're going too fast, or when we get to an impossible situation, and it's like, whoa, timeout, gotta back up, because I think that there's something here that I forgot to ask.
And when you are going slow enough, right, that's how you go slow in order to go fast, when you're going slow enough, you can recognise those moments, and you can go and fix them. Now let's start to talk about where you start to see this most commonly, and a couple of examples. And one example is I'm going to use around niching, right, around your ideal customers and niching, because this is where it came up most this week, and honestly, it's where it comes up most often.
We usually get this directive, like right when we're starting our business, that says like you need to niche, you need to be super specific. And people are telling you to do that, like before you've even started your business. And honestly, I don't find that very useful early on, do you have to have some direction as to who your customers are?
Yes, of course. But when people are trying to get you to niche really specifically early on, I don't actually think that's useful. Because when everything else in your model is undefined, and you're trying to figure everything out, like what does niching even mean?
What's good enough, you can make some very arbitrary choices that end up not serving you in the end. So I think you need like a general direction, but you don't need to understand the whole niching thing. On the other hand, I do believe that having an effective customer niche and having that really tight is something that is going to serve you over the long run.
It's not that I'm saying you don't need to niche, you do, but maybe not right away. But here's my but, right? Is that a lot of times, these are moments when you figure that out.
And there's a moment when niching becomes really useful. And it's this moment, right? When you're actually doing the work and you get stuck, oftentimes, you have real information.
Why am I stuck, right? Why does this product mix all of a sudden feel like it's perfect, except for these people? Or why does my messaging feel like it's perfect, except this group of people is not responding to it?
Well, that's a sign that maybe you want to back up and say, hey, like, is this a moment where now I have actual data that I can react to, and I can narrow my niche in a productive way and not just in an arbitrary way that I'm going to randomly choose? That's when a lot of this stuff is happening, is when you get stuck at a point, then there's like, oh, this is an opportunity to better define my model. And that's how it usually comes up, again, is around some of this niching.
So let's talk about kind of where this shows up. And we'll go back to the business levers that I always talk about, right? Where your business needs to be an alignment between your customer segment, how you market and what your product mix is.
Let's talk about an example of this happening within each of those kind of levers, each of those verticals of your business, if you will. Let's start with the customer segment and the situation where you kind of can't nail the message. And again, this is what came up for me a few times over the last few weeks.
And this is where, like, you've picked that audience. And now in relationship marketing terms, you're figuring out how to go borrow that audience, right? How do you get in front of them?
What rooms do you need to be in? What podcasts are you going to be in? How are you going to get in front of that audience?
And then what are you going to say once you get there to productively haunt those people? And here's what might happen, is that you figure out this productive haunting message and you're like, yeah, like, this is a great one. This is really going to resonate with people, like it's going to haunt them in the productive ways that we want it to.
But then you look at a room that you've booked, or you look at the group of people you're going to be in front of. And this is what happened with us where we're like, oh, 75% of the room fits, but yikes, that other 25%, that really doesn't make any sense. These other people are going to be in the room who this doesn't resonate with at all.
Or like this type of buyer behaviour is not going to resonate with these people. And so then this is where you start pushing, you're like, oh boy, gosh, thought we got it. But there's this group who's just not going to resonate with this at all.
And you start to push and you start to think, what are we missing? And it can start to feel impossible. Like, how can we find a productive haunting message that is enough and that has the power but also is going to land with all of these people?
And then you can even start thinking like, are we down the wrong path? Like, did we just totally screw this up? But it's not that.
Again, it's a sign in this case to take a look at your niching and look at, oh, is there a reason that we want to tighten this up? If we're going into a room that only fits 75% of the room, our message only fits 75%, well maybe that 75% is our audience and we don't care about the other 25%. If they're there, fine, but we know that they're not going to be a lead.
We don't need to accommodate them because we've just learned something about our niche that we're going to niche in a little bit more. Or maybe we can find a better room that is 100% of people who are zeroed in on a specific type of niche where that will resonate with them more. And then we understand, okay, there was nothing wrong with the messaging.
What was wrong is that we were trying to pigeonhole the messaging into a room that didn't need it. Or trying to accommodate every single person in a room when maybe 75% accommodation is good enough. But that's going to be an opportunity for us to not go backwards and say, oh my gosh, we have to find a broader message that resonates with more people.
No, that just gets you more generic and makes it harder to productively haunt. Instead, it's an opportunity to say, hey, if we can't find a message that meets everybody in the room, is this actually the correct room? And do we need to accommodate everybody in the room?
Or is this an opportunity for us to better define our niche and say, no, this is our niche and we're going to talk to that person. Same thing can happen with your product mix, right? Product mixes should be relatively elegant and they should be relatively simple, right?
And so when you're looking at what do I offer, there should be a mix that comes together pretty quickly. And if there's not, right, if there's not, if you are trying to figure out how to accommodate every single person that you might encounter and you're thinking, oh gosh, I better have a group version and I better have a one-on-one version. And is there a membership continuity play here?
And all these different things where all of a sudden you're juggling 14 different products. Again, that is a sign where if you start to get frustrated and you're thinking, this is too much stuff that I'm doing. Okay, well, the answer isn't to keep staring at that product mix and figuring out how you're going to magically make a one-on-one offer work when you don't want to do one-on-one or whatever the case may be.
Instead, it's an opportunity to say, why? Why do I need all of these things? Why is this expanding?
And usually the answer is going to be, it's expanding because I'm trying to accommodate too many people. And so now the better question is to go back and niche and take a look at that product mix through the lens of if I served less people, not numerically, but like in terms of a niche, right? In terms of a zero to niche, if I narrowed that in, am I going to have a better opportunity to serve these people?
Because now everything is streamlined. So it's not sitting there and trying to wrestle a magic product mix out of nowhere. Instead, it's like, if the product mix is too hard to figure out, it probably needs I need to back it up and say, who am I actually want to work with?
And when you figure that out, then the product mix magically falls into alignment. Same way the messaging does. And the same thing happens with marketing, right?
Marketing looks really simple. Your relationship marketing should be simple. The same way your product mix should be simple.
It should have a graceful flow to it. It shouldn't be going in 14 different directions. You should be able to understand how you're going to borrow an audience and what message are you going to give to that audience?
And then what are you going to ask them to do after they have gotten to know you? And then how is that going to flow into a sales call? And that should be relatively standardised and graceful flow.
There shouldn't be 14 branches coming off of each of those steps of all the different things that you have to do. But sometimes that's exactly what happens, right? You kind of draw your nice little funnel where you say, great, I'm going to go guest teach and that's how I'm going to borrow an audience.
And from there, I'm going to invite them into a diagnostic call. And from there, it's going to flow into a sales call and you're like, this is fantastic. And then you think, oh boy, but there's all these people who would never be in that room.
So I better also be posting on LinkedIn or what if they don't sign up for a call with me? And so I better be doing this. And like you add all these branches because you're realising that all of the people you're trying to reach are not in that flow.
And that is not a sign to add all that marketing. That's the wrong thing to do, right? That's the version of pressing.
If you're finding that you have to add all these branches, then that is a signal to you that you have missed a question earlier. And again, it's a niching question, right? You want to go back and say, why would my people need all of these different places?
Why are they spending time in all these different places and I can't just reach them in one place? And who could I just reach in one place, right? If I narrow down this niche, who could I just meet in one place?
Because when I am being dramatic, I am telling people that every marketing branch you develop, every marketing funnel is a business of its own. When you're a small business, it takes so much to keep a marketing funnel going on that every time you kind of build in a new one, then you are actually building a new business that you have to nurture. And that's exhausting.
And again, that's me being dramatic, but also kind of not really. It is that dramatic of a decision to have all these branches going off of your marketing. So instead you want to be thinking, hey, if this is getting too complicated, because I'm realising that in order to accommodate my entire niche as I currently have it defined, I can't just hang out in one or two kinds of rooms.
I have to be doing all these things. That is not a sign to try to be staring at that and figuring out how you're going to manage all those different branches of marketing. That is a sign that you should take a look and say, what's wrong with my niche?
How do I need to narrow it so that I can meet people more efficiently, right? And so like you can notice what happened in all three of these, like the fix was never in the place where it felt stuck. It's never in that place where you're like, oh, how do I fix the messaging or how do I fix the product line?
Or how do I narrow down my marketing? Those things don't need more work. The flag that you want to realise when you're really struggling with a question like that is wait a minute, is there something I could have asked a step or two earlier, usually around your niche and usually around tightening your niche that will allow me to tighten things up so that the place that I'm stuck actually flows through really easily.
So what do I want you to do with this information? First store it, right? I want you to start building some muscle memory around this and remembering to ask this question so that the next time something feels impossible, you can remember that the answer is really to push.
And instead it's to go a couple of steps back. So maybe you put up a sign on your desk or you put up a post-it on your wall behind your computer or something and remind yourself like when I'm stuck, let's pause and let's not like, as you know, my cousins would say, like, let's not get out our Midwestern work ethic and just try to push through it. Let's instead ask a better question, right?
And second, if you are doing things right now that feel like they are too much, if you have a bunch of different marketing channels going on, audit what you're doing right now. Is there anywhere in your business that doesn't feel manageable or that feels like it's this big sticking point? And would it be worth it if you took some time to think about it?
Could you look at that and say, hey, if we go backwards and tighten something up, that would actually clear these things up. So that's what I want you to do with this information is I want you, if there's places you're feeling stuck in the business right now, to ask yourself, could I go back a step or two and ask a better question there, do a better definition there that would allow me to move forward? And how am I going to train my brain to notice these as they come up so I don't get stuck in more confusing situations?
Because there's a few things to hold onto here and things that I want you to remember is that when it gets really hard, that it's usually a sign you skipped a step. I'm going to keep saying that because that's a flag that we want to recognise. We don't want to push harder in those moments.
We want to step back and say, could I have asked something earlier that would have made a difference? And this is mostly going to happen around niching. It can happen around a bunch of different things, but the examples I've seen in the last couple weeks that made me bring this to you were all moments where we had an opportunity to do better niching.
And again, that's a really productive thing to go through with your business, right? It's not the niching that happens when you're guessing before you've ever done anything. The stuff that's powerful is the niching that you do in these moments of real data when you can say, oh gosh, here's an opportunity.
And that's what we look at with sequence over strategy, right? We don't need a better strategy. We don't need to be smarter.
We just need to recognise that, oops, skipped a step. Let's go back in the sequence and find how this can flow much easier. Same thing with my move, right?
I didn't need a better list of cities. Like I just needed to go back and remind myself that I was looking for a big body of water. And from there, everything gets so much easier.
So that's what I'm going to leave you with today. As always, thank you for being here. And if this episode helped you, I would be so grateful if you shared it with someone else that it might help or leave a review.
Both of those things really help us get this information out to more business owners who can use it. And remember, if I can help you with anything, head over to michellewarner.com, jump on the newsletter list or reach out to me and say hello. Let me know how this helped you.
Let me know what I might be able to think about and talk about in episodes coming up. That would be of help for you. And with that, I am going to see you back here in a couple of weeks.