Donna Leyens | The Pumpkin Plan System – 3 Steps to Growth

Pick out your right seed. The right seed is your sweet spot. Your sweet spot is the intersection of three main factors/areas in your business that you should utilize in your operation. These three areas are:

• Your top clients.
• Your unique offering.
• Your systems.

Where these three intersect is your sweet spot on which you should aim to operate your business on.

When one or more of those main factors are missing, symptoms may start to occur in your business. Here are some of the symptoms that may occur:

• You aren’t getting enough clients.
• You’re getting leads but they keep asking that you lower your prices or compare your prices with other competitors.
• You have a lot of paying clients but you’re overworking every day.

When your business starts experiencing these symptoms, it is time that you realign your underlying strategy and finds your sweet spot. Start covering these areas in your business step-by-step to find your business sweet spot:

Step 1: Identify your top clients.

• If your business already has clients, make a list of them in revenue order.
• Identify which you work directly with and how much you like working with them.
• Know how much your clients take up from your time.
• Identify the clients with whom you’re sharing a win-win situation.
• Consider all these factors and decide who are your top clients. Go out and speak to them.
  • Find out what they care about.
  • Ask about their experience with working with your business.
    • What’s the most positive part of that experience?
    • What don’t they like about your business industry?
    • What do they wish that a business like yours would provide to them?
    • In the process, you’ll hear something that’s unique about your business.
    • By talking to your top clients and identifying their similarities, you will also be able to define your own client niche.

Step 2: Identify your unique offering.

• Do not market your business as the best in what it does.
• Transform the answers of your top clients from your interview with them into something that you can use to display your unique characteristic and create your unique offering.
  • Consolidate all the answers of your top clients in a spreadsheet.
  • Highlight the answers and words that came up from different clients.
  • Look for patterns in what your clients are telling you.
  • Ask yourself what your company is good at doing?
  • Look for the match between what you think you’re good at and what your clients want and notice.

• You need to differentiate your business and notice what is unique about it and this is through the following:
  • Pricing
    • Donna doesn’t suggest this for small businesses as it might end up eating all your profit.
    • You may also identify yourself as the one with the highest price that can be part of your branding.

• • Convenience
    • Does your business make it easier in some ways for your clients to consume your products/services?
    • Is there something you can build in your business to make your client’s life more convenient?

• • Quality
    • Aim for A-quality such as being the most advanced technology features, or fastest response time.
    • It is your business quality that distinguishes you from your competitors.

• When you create your Unique Offering Statement, be sure to have these:
  • Identify the people you serve.
  • Identify your offer.
  • Identify what makes your offer different.
  • Include your value.
  • Include why you do it.
  • Speak using your client language.

Step 3: Your systems.

• If you don’t have your systems in place, you are limited by other things that you can do, and you become the bottleneck in your business.
• Start off by establishing your systems that support your sweet spot.
• By getting your systems in place, you are not limited by only having one or two people who perform the tasks in it.
• Donna suggests leaving the business unplugged for four weeks or more as a test. It means your business still run even without you.
  • It will help you see the gaps in your systems and which ones require the most attention.

• Answer these questions when getting your business in place:
  • What work do you want to be doing? What’s your vision for your role in your company?
  • Who are you serving? What needs to be delivered?
  • Which part of the systems you’re doing can be delegated? Which part of the systems you’re doing can be automated?
  • Where do the systems need to be created? What are the most important ones to address first?

• There are two ways in documenting your systems:
  • Do the process, write it down as you go along, record a video, then delegate it to somebody else.
  • Evaluate your systems and start at the end by executing them in a way that will produce the best experience for your customer. Work your way backwards, step by step.

• Systems create freedom and efficiency in your business that leads to your profitability.
• If you like to serve your clients in the best possible way, start establishing your underlying systems.
• Systems also serve as your asset.

System Notes

• Keep in mind that these three main areas are well-interconnected.
• Make sure that when you’re thinking about one of these three main areas, they all go together.
  • Your unique offering needs to match what your top clients want.
  • Your systems must deliver your unique offering and reach your top clients.

• If a piece becomes missing, you might get stuck, so it really is important to connect these three businesses to keep growing.