In  Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide, John spends some time discussing the importance of identifying your ideal customer. He gives great tips for examining your customer base to find your ideal customer going about finding more like them.

In the past week I have spoken to three people who are preparing to start a new business. Each expressed concern about not having a current customer base to interview for this step. If you are in this situation, I want to reassure you that you are in an ideal position if you are thinking of defining your ideal customer before you start your business.

You see, many people start a business because they know how to do something. One of the biggest concerns for the owner of a new business is cash flow, so the tendency is to take one any work (almost) that is related to what we are good and someone will pay us for. Over time, we end up with a diverse set of clients, all with different needs.

For example, let’s saying the “something” we are good at is preparing taxes. We start by preparing tax returns for individuals, partnerships, and businesses. We may handle payroll taxes for some businesses. Maybe we have a client or two that need estate tax planning services.

We may very well end up with a profitable tax practice even though we built it by “accident” (it just happened) rather than by design. But if we have designs to take our practice to the next level, we can run into several problems:

• if we are perceived as generalists, we will forced to compete based on price. This is particularly true in industries that typically charge an hourly rate for their services
• work from our “non-ideal” clients can keep us so busy that when an ideal client does come along, we don’t have the capacity to serve them
• when we “do everything” our marketing message becomes generic and we sound like everyone else who claims to do what we do
• the chicken and the egg problem of business development – we can’t add capacity (staff) until we have more clients and we can’t spend time looking for new business until we get someone to help us do all the work

This situation is why the steps that John describes in his book are so important. In our scenario, if we want to take the business to the next level, we need to step back and take a long hard look at who it is we really want to work with. Discover who really appreciates the work we do. Then we need to weed out the clients that don’t fit that profile and look for new clients who do fit the profile.

Now imagine if we had gone through this process of determining who we want to work with and what problem that particular group faces that we are going to solve for them. Our marketing would certainly be easier. We would get more qualified referrals. We would have fewer “problem” clients – the ones who don’t respect our time or staff, etc. 

So if you are just starting your business, rather than interviewing existing clients, find people who look like your ideal client profile and interview them. I recommend that you interview two groups of people.

The first group are those folks who are getting ready to buy products and\or services similar to what you will offer. Find out what their concerns are. What is it they are really buying. It’s usually not the service, but relief from some sort of fear or pain. It may also be to get pleasure.

The second group of people you should try to interview are those who have recently completed a purchase of the products and services you will offer. Find out what they liked about the process, what they hated, what they wish they had known before they made the purchase, etc.

Use this knowledge to refine you Ideal Customer Profile, and your Remarkable Difference before you start your business and give yourself the extra edge to succeed.