When Less is More: Optimize Your Offerings | Tory Burch Foundation

Your goal as a business owner is to make your customers’ lives as easy as possible. If your business has too many offerings, you’ve created a potentially stressful situation. Your job is to present products or services that build on one another and fall within your zone of genius. When you approach designing your business this way, you are optimizing your offerings.

How exactly can you approach business optimization? You examine what your company already does well and determine what services or products can be bundled together to create greater value for customers while not creating more work for yourself or your team. The aim is to create processes that are simple, scalable, and repeatable.

Alison Taylor recently returned to our webinar series to teach founders how they can simplify their offerings and better serve the needs of their customers. Taylor is the founder of Augur, a business design and strategy studio where, among other things, she uses her more than 10 years of experience to support clients with a business optimization process that infuses your goals with focus and efficiency. 

How exactly can you approach business optimization? You examine what your company already does well and determine what services or products can be bundled together to create greater value for customers while not creating more work for yourself or your team. The aim is to create processes that are simple, scalable, and repeatable.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF OPTIMIZING?

Optimization gives you the ability to set boundaries to better manage your time, energy and efforts. You don’t need to recreate the wheel every time you take on a new client or launch a new product or service. Focus on what you do best and create a menu of offerings. Narrowing your focus will allow you to dedicate more bandwidth to growth goals, expansion plans, and even better work-life balance efforts. 

WHEN IS THE RIGHT TIME TO OPTIMIZE MY OFFERINGS?

There are several signs that it may be time to become more intentional about your business design. Is your business experiencing a season of change? For example, if you’re in the process of hiring and growing your team, implementing systems and further developing your processes through optimization can help you onboard new hires faster. 

Another great opportunity is after a critical number of paying clients have validated your proof of concept in the market. If you’re pursuing funding via a grant or other investment, you’ll want to be able to prove that you can provide positive, repeatable results. 

Falling in love with your customer’s problem or need, not exactly the solution that you provide, will allow you to…provide the greatest value possible.

LAY THE GROUNDWORK.

Assess what you have before changing your lineup of products or services.

Outline what you’re already doing

Taylor pointed to the business model canvas as a tool to help identify what your company does well and leverage that knowledge toward your goals. It maps out key partners, key resources, value propositions, customer relationships, and more. (For a deep dive, you can watch Taylor’s webinar on the business model canvas). 

Determine your “zone of genius”.

What are the top 3 things your company does best? What are your top selling products? What are your top requested services? The answer to these questions will help you provide tailored solutions to your customer’s needs without becoming a “short-order cook” for every problem, explained Taylor; you’ll learn what’s in your wheelhouse and customers will learn what expertise to rely on you for. This is all part of falling in love with the problem. 

“Falling in love with your customer’s problem or need, not exactly the solution that you provide, will allow you to refine, tweak, or pivot in order to provide the greatest value possible to your customers,” Taylor explained. 

5 STEPS TO REVAMPING YOUR OFFERS.

Once you know what your business does well, what you enjoy doing and what problem you’re solving, you can move on to deciding what products or services to offer. 

Define business and offering models

You should have specific plans or products for customers at varying stages of their journey. Taylor recommended “the DADA Loop” to help determine what needs you want your business to meet: data, analysis, decision, action. On one end of the spectrum, assisting your client in the data collection part of their journey could be very hands-on offering. On the other end, maybe you’re only stepping in once they’ve done all the research themselves and they’re ready to act. Knowing which part of the process you’re most interested in having your company attack will tell you how best to work with clients. For example, if you most like to be in the analysis stage of the DADA loop, then you know to require clients to gather data before they work with you.

This is also a stage when learning which offering bundles are ideal for which clients. An early stage entrepreneur will have different needs than someone who’s been building their business for 5-7 years. Taylor used the analogy of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Someone at an early “breakfast” stage may come to a service provider for a smaller, straightforward offering like a mini quiche. Another business with some traction, or in the “lunch” stage, may need a mini quiche (smaller “breakfast” service) plus a salad option more suited to the challenges they face. The “dinner” in Taylor’s meal analogy will need a larger package that may still incorporate services you offer smaller companies. Knowing what you can do for customers with varying needs allows you to level with potential customers about what you can offer them and how your existing offers can be restructured or repackaged to meet their needs.  

Set quarterly and annual SMART goals

SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Formulate three to five goals for the year ahead that meet each criteria. Then look at each quarter of the year, and develop smaller goals that keep you moving in the direction of those larger achievements. 

Identify and map strategic initiatives to support goals

Strategic initiatives are key to the impact you want your business to make. You’ll want to consider what of your SMART goals each initiative supports, the impact you expect it to have, the resources required to bring that initiative to fruition, the team members who will be involved, and the amount of time you want to allocate for it. 

Prioritize initiatives

Once you know what your strategic initiatives are, it’s important to prioritize what you want to tackle first. Taylor recommended a prioritization matrix, or a ranking system that lines each initiative up for comparison. Using 1 to 5 as your scale, you’ll determine how much impact you expect an initiative to have, how much effort it will take to achieve, how expensive it will be, how much time it will take, and how feasible you consider it to be. Once the points are tallied for each, you’ll know your top priority and what initiatives are lower on the list. 

Experiment, implement, refine, repeat

Your offerings should be specific and data-driven, but that’s what trial and error is all about. Don’t be afraid to take chances as you learn what works best for your trajectory and your customer base. As you go, be sure to update your communication collateral so it’s clear what is available.  

Delegate

Remember, delegation is a form of optimization. Taylor advised that leaders prioritize delegation early for aspects of their business where they aren’t as strong. If doing something yourself is clogging up your processes or you don’t enjoy doing it, it’s time to be honest. It’s not only okay to say “no,” it’s good business sense. “Just because I have the capacity and capabilities of doing things does not mean that I do them,” Taylor said. Being an entrepreneur is hard, but you should only be offering customers services and products that bring you joy to produce. Lean away from whatever feels like a burden and cuts too much into your time. 

Outside of the bubble of your specific industry, the world around you can also impact the initiatives you focus on and the strategies you choose. For example, a fluctuating economy might leave entrepreneurs wanting to assuage the fears of nervous consumers. Taylor acknowledged that the burden may fall on you to work even harder to inform customers about the benefits of your offerings. “The features tell, but the benefits sell,” she said. You might make adjustments along the way such as reduced packaging or price markdowns, but listening to your customer and their needs will be a good guide.

For those who are still in the idea stage of a new business or product launch, Taylor said they can still utilize the key takeaways from this framework. She recommended doing as much “customer discovery” as you can: going to stores and studying people’s buying behavior, attending forums and paying attention to the kinds of questions people are asking. Learn where the gaps are in your market and what you could offer to fill them. “That will help you start to find your sweet spots for where you can make the best transformations, or where you can provide the best service, or where you can provide the best product possible at that stage of business that you’re in,” she said.