My first foray into building an agency didn't go as well as it could have, and a big part of that was due to the fact that we didn't address positioning early enough. For that matter, things were going so well initially that we didn't even think about positioning:

Year 1, we made mid six figures and grew 151%

Year 2, we grew another 51%

Year 3 was a slight decline, followed by a plateau at that level in year 4.

Year 5 we hit seven figures and grew 136%

Year 6 we plateaued in the low seven figures.

Every plateau came during poor economic conditions, so it was easy to write things off due to external forces, but we knew better. It was clear that we were growing in spite of our positioning, not because of it. And the worst part was that the work we were doing was helping to position our clients as thought leaders in their space, but we weren't doing the work ourselves. We started doing the necessary work, but it was too late - repositioning takes a significant investment of brain space, time, and money - and we were running low on all of those.

Mindsets, Skillsets, Toolsets, Results

To effectively reposition your firm, you need to be able to challenge everything you have done so far, challenge all conventional wisdom and "best practices" and be willing to play the long game. You need brain space to do the work.

It's impossible to think that way if you are dealing with cash flow problems, client firedrills, and a general sense of dread and helplessness. And that is exactly what happens if you wait to do the work until things aren't going well. Yet this is exactly what many boutique firms do. When things are fine financially, positioning doesn't usually get into the conversation. Even when a firm first begins to struggle, most questions and proposed solutions are surface-level tactics - we need more leads; we need better sales decks; we need better proposal templates; our sales process needs work. But only when the struggles become more systemic, do questions about positioning creep in.

But at that point, it's often too late. The best bet is to make the right financial decisions to give the firm the appropriate runway to make the necessary positioning changes. Because positioning isn't just a tagline, or new homepage messaging. It's not a marketing activity. It's a foundational, strategic business activity that impacts every single business function - from operations and delivery to sales and marketing. If positioning doesn't show across all functions, positioning gaps develop that create real financial problems for your firm.

Which brings us to needing time.

Take Your Time

To effectively reposition a firm, requires the founders/partners to:
1️⃣ Identify and agree upon the ICP (ideal client profile)

2️⃣ Extract, synthesize, and package up the necessary IP (intellectual property) into frameworks and methodologies that help ideal clients understand and reframe their core problem.

3️⃣ Reconfigure the service offering and delivery model to deliver on the value promised by the IP.

4️⃣ Map the industry ecosystem, and identify the appropriate centers of influence to evangelize the IP.

5️⃣ Enable the business development team (often the partners) to effectively have conversations about and sell the IP and related services.

All these things require alignment - alignment among partners, alignment among teams - which itself takes time to build and maintain.

Strategizing and documenting your positioning isn't what takes time. I can get a client 90% of the way there in 5 hours. It's the activation work that follows that takes time: actually building out the services and related processes and systems, building the right relationships across the ecosystem, updating the business development process and building out the necessary sales enablement content, and then iteratively tweaking all of these things to really deliver on the positioning promise.

You are generally looking at a minimum of 6 months to do all the work, because in the middle of all this you are still doing work and delivering for existing clients based on existing contracts, systems and processes. And it's often 12 - 18 months before you start seeing significant financial impact because repositioning often requires you to purposefully churn through some of your client base, so you are initially replacing revenue rather than growing it.

It's very hard mentally to make the time to do this work appropriately if you are burned out or neck deep in client work. And if you are having financial difficulty, it's downright impossible from a cash flow perspective.

Find the Right Tool for the Job

You will be tempted to do all the work yourself. It's your business, you are smart, and you have smart people working for you, but there is a very real opportunity cost to doing everything internally - mistakes are costly, pivots are draining, and any delay in an already lengthy process has real financial consequences (e.g. cash flow, profitability, revenue growth).

Also because you are likely not running a positioning or branding firm, you don't know what you don't know, so it's easy to hire the wrong consultant. As I mentioned at the beginning, positioning work is often treated as a marketing exercise with a focus on messaging and visual branding. But those things are actually only two of the outputs of good positioning.

Remember, positioning is how your ideal clients see you, in the market you serve, in relation to competitors. Perception is based not only on marketing messaging. It's based on every single thing your firm does. Your positioning is built centrally around intellectual property (frameworks and methodologies) which are evangelized in the market by your people within relevant groups, and then delivered by your people via services that are built to maximize the value of that IP.

You need to identify the right people for doing this work - both internally and externally. Externally, you will likely need a positioning consultant, or growth consultant with positioning expertise, content development resources (e.g. video producers/editors), and possibly a paid media consultatant or agency to help amplify your message to maximize reach. Internally, you will need to identify people to help develop your strategic narrative, build and optimize your services, execute your new business development strategy, and manage the various external consultants.

It's also critical to note that the entire initiative needs to be led by the chief executive and broader executive team. It absolutely cannot be delegated to the marketing team, or lower level employees. If you are the leader and don't want to do this work, then you really need to revisit your owner's intent - what do you realy want out of your business?

It Might Be Time to Make Tought Decisions

If things are already financially tight, and you can't seem to pull yourself out of the feast and famine cycle, it's probably time to pull the trigger on some of the things you really don't want to do - cost cutting and layoffs.

If you are in this spot, deep down you probably already know this to be the case, but just can't bring yourself to take action. I know I couldn't, and I definitely knew it when I was in this position the first time. If you are anything like I was, you might be tempted to make surface level changes, and make minimal cuts becasue you feel like bad letting people go and because making major cuts makes you feel like a failure. Trust me, you will just be kicking the can down the road.

Remember why you are in this position in the first place, and what you are trying to achieve with the repositioning work. Also remember how long this takes. You need to give yourself a minimum of 6 months of runway, ideally 12. Here are some tactical things to consider:

• Offer discounts for prepayments
• Cut any major conference/event expenses that haven't proven clearly effective in the past
• Change/align incentive-based compensation to the work that needs to be done, once you identify the appropriate internal resources to own the work. Yes, this also means aligning your partner/executive compensation accordingly - remember we aren't delegating this work.
• Cut any non-essential martech and operations software. Much of what you have are likely spot solutions that you can likely live without if you had to.
• Delay any non-essential perks (e.g. team retreats, education/training stipends, etc.), and make bringing them back contingent on delivering the positioning work and meeting the expected/desired financial targets. You can also integrate some of these things with the required work. For example, make your tream retreat focused on doing the positioning work.
• If you need to make personnel cuts, make them deep enough and quick enough to have immediate and significant cash flow impact. Otherwise it's not worth it and future cuts will continue to destroy team morale.

Remember, you are doing all this because you have identified that positioning is the problem, and you don't currently have the brain space, time, and money to get the work done effectively to make the change.

If you want help with this, the Positioning Clarity Intensive is for you. I'll take you through my Positioning De-Risking(TM) framework, which will make your firm the lowest risk choice for your ideal clients. It's half-day small group workshop with 4 of your peers, followed by a 1:1 session with me where we flesh out your positioning activation map.