In my last article, I revealed to you that small business owners are looking for a coach that can provide “new insights” that will help them build a successful business. They want a coach that can frame those new insights and tie them into new opportunities for the business owner.

We discussed that one major insight coaches can provide to their clients is a simple fact that marketing is NOT an art… it’s a SCIENCE! And just like most things in science, there’s an equation that guides its success. It’s called the Conversion Equation, and it’s made up of four parts… Interrupt, Engage, Educate and Offer.

We then discussed that one of the biggest mistakes I see coaches make every day is they fail to capitalize on the limited amount of one-on-one time they spend with their clients. The coaches I work with tell me they spend that hour providing guidance and direction to their clients. In other words, they spend that precious time giving their clients: information.

Clients do need information, but information on its own is WORTHLESS! It’s the APPLICATION of information that produces results for a business. THAT is what the coach should be spending their time working on with their clients.

One way coaches can provide information WITHOUT investing their one-on-one time is through the use of recorded video coaching and training. This frees them up so they can spend their precious coaching time working with their clients to APPLY that information to their business.

But I also said that the coach must apply the RIGHT information in the RIGHT order. I call this the “recipe” for small business success, and there are 30 fundamentals required to do this successfully.

In today’s article, let me brief you on the first of these critical fundamentals. It’s called the “market-dominating position.” Simply put, this means that EVERY business must differentiate itself from all of its competitors. It must find some way to stand out from the crowd… to separate itself from all others. In other words, it must make itself “unique.”

Let me use a real life example to demonstrate. Several years ago, I worked with a chiropractor. He was just like every other chiropractor – he treated about a dozen different conditions such as back pain, neck pain, Fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, sciatica and so on. Unfortunately, ALL chiropractors are also trained in most of these conditions as well, so there was nothing unique or different about him.

I asked him what he thought made him different, and he responded with several comments. “I love working with my patients, I give them special care and attention, I have the best staff and I provide high-quality card.”

I then asked him if other chiropractors felt the exact same way he did, and could say the exact same things he just said. He had to admit they probably could. So what made him different? In a word… NOTHING! He was floating in a sea of 70,000 “me-too” chiropractors with NO way to differentiate himself. He was also earning $70,000 per year in annual revenue at the time.

I asked him what he was most passionate about, and without hesitation, he said Fibromyalgia sufferers. His mother had Fibromyalgia, and he felt compelled to do all he could to alleviate the tremendous pain these sufferers were enduring. I discovered he had become a specialist in diagnosing and treating Fibromyalgia, so we positioned him as a Fibromyalgia pain relief specialist.

We created a small marketing campaign around this positioning, and in 4 days he generated 137 leads and closed 37 new patients at $2500 each. He invested just $1300 in his marketing and netted $92,500… a 7,100% ROI.

That is the power of having a “market-dominating position.” Make sure as a coach this is the FIRST fundamental you work on with your coaching clients.

In future articles, I’ll continue to reveal these critical fundamentals, and how their application will greatly impact the businesses you coach… both professionally and financially.

So until next time,

Adrian Ulsh