This week, on Gimbal’s Tip of the Week we are sharing a tip for optimizing your business development strategies from Tea Hoffmann, the Legal Business Development coach inside our Practice Accelerator Membership. Every month, Members get a specialist coaching session in business development, pricing & project management, legal technology or finance & accounting. For the next few weeks, we are going to share our expert coaches’ top tips with you.

So here’s Tea’s top business development tip: know exactly who your ideal client is.

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Your ideal client is not necessarily your typical client right now. It is the person you most want to have as your client. Ask yourself: What is the problem that I am trying to solve and for whom am I trying to solve it?

Once you know who your ideal client is, you can:

• Tailor your services to what your ideal clients need
• Customize your outward messaging to ensure it communicates why YOU are their best choice
• Optimize your business development efforts and your budget
• Attract the type of you work you most want to do for the type of people you most want to work with

Find Your Niche

We recently did a deep dive into this in a Masterclass we taught inside the Membership back in July. The key is to get extremely specific. It is not just, “I’d like to work with people who want to sell their businesses.” That is a good start, but you’ll be more successful if you niche down further:

Maybe it’s, “I serve the owners of family businesses valued at up to $5M, who want to sell their businesses in order to retire.”

But maybe it’s, “I serve first-time entrepreneurs who are ready to exit their start-up businesses.”

These are totally different groups of people. What they need from you may be completely different, and the way you attract them and serve them will also differ.

Take some time over the next week and think about who your ideal clients are. Ask yourself:

• What are their goals?
• What does success look like to them?
• What are their most important pain points?
• Their biggest challenges?
• What is keeping them up at night?

Determine Your Idea Client

We have put together an Ideal Client Worksheet that you can download here to help you determine who your clients should be. It is an excerpt from a workbook inside the Practice Accelerator Membership, so you can get a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in there. And you will see that it is really specific.

You will build a more profitable and fulfilling practice if you know and actively target your ideal clients. If you try to attract everyone to your practice, you may end up attracting no one. Your message will be too general and the systems you put in place won’t necessarily work for the people you most want to attract.

If you can’t design a tailored set of services - you end up taking a much broader, shotgun approach and you run the risk that by trying to satisfy everyone, you don’t satisfy anyone.

Thanks a lot everybody! See you next week.