There's a moment in every intro call you know you're not sticking the landing on. Someone asks what you do, and you hear yourself start the list. Branding, but also web design. Coaching, but also the course, the workshops, the retreats. Portraits, but also events, but also video.
Somewhere around the third item, their eyes stop tracking. You've noticed. You keep the list anyway, because every item on it is real money, and cutting one feels risky and FOMO-inducing.
I recently completed an analysis of 42 real websites belonging to founders who signed up for the first two sessions of our course, Magnetic Brand. These are people with real expertise in their craft, and the single most repeated pattern on their sites was the sprawling services page: an artist-designer selling six distinct offers, a photographer selling five, a process consultant whose site covers businesses, nonprofits, and government.
Let me be clear about something up front: the founders selling six things are usually good at all six. They don't have a skill problem, they have a communication problem.
They don't have a skill problem, they have a communication problem.
Here's a quick way to understand the communication problem
At a dinner party, when your name comes up, what fills the blank in "call her, she's the one who ___"?
Nobody at that table says "she does branding and web design and custom fonts and prints." They won't remember that and even if they did, it's overwhelming to whomever they are talking to. No, their referral has room for one thing. The gist. If you haven't chosen it, nobody at the table chooses for you. Maybe one of the items jumps out to someone and they call you. Maybe.
So why does "the list" survive?
The list feels safe, and partly it is (every line on it has paid an invoice at some point). Underneath, though, something else is usually going on: as long as everything stays on the menu, no bet has been placed, and no bet can be lost. Here's what that typically means for the people I work with: they define what they do generically ("I'm a photographer") and hope that one of the items on the list stands out.
How to find the one thing.
Don't start with your biggest revenue line, and don't start with the thing you're most certified in. Those are chasing questions (what can I sell, and to whom), and what they produce is a list you have to push. The one thing works the other way: it pulls. It's the thing about you that attracts your ideal client before you've said a word about price, and you find it where two answers intersect: your identity (the work you'd keep if you could only keep one) and what your best clients already say when they recommend you (the attraction that's already working). That pull is what makes a brand magnetic. You already know which one it is. You knew it while you were reading that last paragraph.
What happens when you choose.
The five things you "cut" don't vanish. Existing clients still buy them, and you can still say yes when the right work shows up. What changes is the sentence. You finally give people something short enough to be sticky. The cut isn't the loss of five revenue lines. It's the start of referrals that happen without you in the room.
I had my own version of the list at my escrow company. In the early days, even though we were doing more than $1M a year in revenue and only sold one thing (escrow services), I still rattled off a list hoping that something would stick: "great service," "cutting-edge technology," and so forth. Mine was a list of claims instead of a list of offers, and if you'd asked me which line on it was ours alone, I couldn't have told you. It took me years to see that the list itself was why many of my conversations with prospects ended up going nowhere. A list, of offers or of claims, is what you say when you haven't chosen.
