Clarity Precedes Everything Else
Most practices sound like every other practice, and the reasons for that are ordinary, fixable, and rarely about talent.
Most practices sound like every other practice, and the reasons for that are ordinary, fixable, and rarely about talent.
Waiting for the phone to ring You built a good practice and assumed the right words would turn up when needed, the way a spare key turns up in a drawer. They haven't, and that's why the phone rings less than it should. Clarity fixes this before any font or headline gets touched.
A nutritionist's homepage, read last week, opened with a line about passion for health.
So is the Labrador two doors down, hurling itself after a squeezy ball with real conviction.
Neither of them tells you what happens in the room. You know what you do in there.
Your homepage, most likely, does not know either. A homepage that describes the room beats one that describes your feelings about the room.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
Passion is the weather report. Clients want the forecast for their own Thursday.
Somewhere a report rates referral speed for coaches and trainers as extreme, the sort of word usually reserved for flooding.
Hardly any practice has written down how a referral travels from one mouth to another.
So it behaves like weather: dramatic, welcome, and gone before you've thought to put a bucket under it.
You can map the route a referral takes the same way you'd note down a good bus timetable.
Written down, a referral route can be nudged. A mapped referral path earns its keep instead of just turning up, unannounced, like weather.
Clarity gets confused, often, with a nicer typeface or a punchier line across the top of a page.
Clarity is a different animal altogether, and considerably less decorative.
Clarity is one breath: who you help, and what changes for them because you were involved.
Say that sentence out loud and time it.
A sentence that needs two breaths needs another draft. One breath, one client, one change - anything longer is a paragraph wearing a sentence's coat.
Ring the last client you helped and ask why they picked you over the other three websites open in their other tab.
Their answer will not match your homepage.
That mismatch is the whole exercise, laid out on the kitchen table like a bank statement you'd rather not open.
You'll hear something plainer than anything you wrote. What a client says sells better than what you published. Write it down before you forget it, ideally on the back of an envelope, which is where all good marketing plans begin.
Doing your own positioning is a real option, and plenty of practices manage it well.
It works the way a good kitchen knife works: sharpened again and again, not sharpened once in 2019 and left in the drawer.
Bringing in outside eyes is also a real option, because fresh eyes clock the blunt bits you've stopped noticing.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
You've been using the same knife on the same bread for years. A blade sharpened on schedule cuts the bread; a blade sharpened once in 2019 just sits there looking like a knife. You've stopped feeling the drag.
Word-of-mouth carries most of this trade on its back, like a friend who turns up and moves your sofa without being asked.
Nobody writes a card for the sofa-mover. Nobody notes down the method either.
You've had this friend for years and never once asked how they lift the thing. Word-of-mouth deserves a system, the same as any other part of the practice that keeps the lights on.
Word-of-mouth deserves a system, the same as any other part of the practice that keeps the lights on. Otherwise you're grateful, permanently, and no better informed.
A vague practice sounds safe, because nobody's been ruled out.
Everyone shrugs and scrolls on. This is a slower, politer way of losing a client than being told no.
You didn't get rejected. You got closed, softly, like a spare room door, and nobody mentioned it to you.
Precision loses you the wrong clients on purpose, which is the entire point of having a shape at all.
Being for everyone is a slow, well-mannered way of being for absolutely no one.
Pick one sentence before Friday: who you're for, and what changes because of you.
Say it to somebody who's never met you, over a cup of tea if you can manage it.
Watch what they do next.
A nod means you've landed it. A follow-up question means the sentence needs work, and that's useful information, no failure attached. Either way, you'll know more at the end of the cup than you did at the start.
Get the one sentence right, and the referrals stop behaving like weather. Find your positioning clarity
≡