The struggle of balancing a generalist business and new specialized business.
As I’ve been niching down, some things have been going exactly as I had hoped.
But other things… not so much.
Let me tell you what I hoped would happen with my generalist business after I created my new niche branch of my agency.
My Ideal Vision
If you asked me ideally what my business would have looked like now, I’d tell you that in my mind, my generalist agency would just kind of continue on as it had been before I specialized.
I hoped that through referrals and word of mouth, we’d still be getting an ample number of leads. I don’t want to spend a ton of time on business development for general work, I would just love a few good website projects every month to kind of just… come to us.
Aren’t I funny?
What I’ve found instead is that building business, finding clients, prospecting, nurturing leads… it just doesn’t happen on its own. At least it never has for me (which is one of the reasons I am working to differentiate by niching down).
Since I’m no longer as actively networking or doing the lead-generation activities that I used to to bring in website projects, it’s been a lot slower than I imagined on the generalist side.
I wanted to share openly today the struggle of time, effort, and balance in my generalist vs niche sales efforts.
Do I Need to Fix It… Or Not?
The issues with bringing in generalist leads have really cast doubt for me on how I’m spending my time.
I have the huge itch to redesign my generalist agency website to try to position it to bring in more appointments for me.
My brain is spinning: “There’s something wrong with the messaging here. If I sat down for two days and re-wrote and redesigned the whole thing, it would start bringing in more leads. I’M SURE.”
But—Is that time well spent? Is spending time on my generalist site a backwards move? I’d really rather put all my effort into growing my niche business.
Fear says I need to spend time there because lead gen just isn’t working out like I thought it would.
So spend time trying to boost the generalist sales effort, or double down to bring in more niche leads? I’m having a lot of fun doing my niche marketing, so my heart says to stay focused there, as scary as it is. We’ll see what wins (and, if you have any thoughts, comment below!)
Perhaps your website doesn’t need a complete redesign – maybe just some messaging tweaks to drive more appointments?
Could be! I’ll take a quick look over and see what I could do that might be faster. I’m just dying to redesign it, so every time I look at it, I see 50 things I want to change. ????
First off I want to say that I have no idea on how to run a web design agency. But I’m working on promoting my own specialized design services, and am going through something similar – so I have a few thoughts.
I think approaching potential customers could be a good use of your time, or getting someone on board to do it for you. Customers who need your specialized service might not know about you. Yet. Sending them a message: Hey, I took a look at your website, here’s our report on how it could be improved so that it would generate more business for you, let us know if you want our help, we’re happy to help.
Website redesign might feel like it solves the problem, but it doesn’t bring the right people to you. Once the right people are coming to your site, then it makes sense to adjust the messaging (if needed).
Karri, thank you so much for this idea! Such a good point that a website redesign doesn’t necessarily bring in the right clients anyway…