---
title: Market Positioning
summary: The most expensive mistake in business is being unclear about who you serve and why they choose you.
est_minutes: 18
sort: 1
---

Welcome to Module 2.1.

If you finish this module and do one thing, write down a 30-word statement that says who you serve, what they get, and why you specifically, you will have done more for your business in 90 minutes than 95% of operators do in 5 years.

Let me explain why.

**The Problem**

Most operators think their growth problem is a marketing problem. So they spend money trying to fix it with more advertising, more posting, more outreach, more channels.

But marketing only amplifies what is already true about a business. If the positioning is vague, the marketing is vague. You're just paying to reach more people with a confused message.

The fix isn't more marketing. The fix is being unambiguously clear about four things, in order:

1. What **category** the buyer thinks you belong to
2. Which **customer** within that category you commit to being unbeatable for
3. Who the buyer compares you to, your real **competitor**, which is usually not the obvious one
4. The single sentence the buyer should remember about you, your **compass**

Category. Customer. Competitor. Compass. The four C's of positioning.

We are going to walk through each one, in that order. Because each one builds on the one before it.

**Decision 1: Category**

You do not get to choose the category your buyer puts you in.

You only get to choose whether you fight it or fit it.

Example. You're a high-end residential remodeling business. You think you're in the category "design-build firm." Your buyer thinks you're in the category "contractor." Those are different categories with different buying processes, different price expectations, and completely different competitive sets.

If you market as a design-build firm but the buyer is shopping you as a contractor, you will lose every time on price. Because contractors are commodities. Design-build firms are not.

So your first decision is: what category does the buyer **actually** put you in when they first encounter you? Not what you wish. What they actually do.

There are only two correct responses:

**Option A** — Fight the category. Reframe what you do so the buyer puts you in a different category from the start. This is expensive. It takes years. But the position is defensible.

**Option B** — Fit the category. Accept the category. Then dominate a specific niche within it.

Most operators should choose Option B. Option A is for businesses with capital, time, and a category that genuinely needs to be redefined.

The Workbook will walk you through which of these is right for your business.

**Decision 2: Customer**

Within your category, you cannot be unbeatable for everyone.

That's not an inspirational statement. That's math.

Every customer segment has different needs, different decision processes, different price tolerances. Trying to serve all of them well means serving none of them excellently. And in most categories, the buyer who needs you most will pay more, but only if they think you are built specifically for them.

This module's exercise: pick the segment within your category where you have the most unfair advantage. That's the segment you are going to commit to being unbeatable for. Everyone else, you accept as occasional revenue but stop optimizing for.

The unfair-advantage test:

1. Do you understand this segment's problem at a deeper level than your competitors do?
2. Do you have the operational capacity to serve them better than your competitors do?
3. Will this segment pay a premium for the depth you offer?

If you can answer yes to all three for one specific segment, that's your target. If you can't, you have research to do before you can position.

The Workbook walks you through the segment audit using your existing customer base. We are going to find your unfair-advantage segment by looking at who has already paid you the most relative to what it cost to serve them.

**Decision 3: Competitor**

Your competitor is rarely who you think it is.

Most operators name their obvious competitor, another business that does roughly the same thing they do. But buyers rarely compare two businesses head-to-head. They usually compare you to one of three things:

**Competitor 1 — The cheap alternative.** The lowest-friction, lowest-price option. Sometimes a competitor. More often a downgraded version of the work.

**Competitor 2 — The status quo.** Doing nothing at all. This is your most common competitor and most operators ignore it entirely.

**Competitor 3 — The in-house option.** Some buyers consider hiring or assigning the work to existing staff instead of buying it from anyone.

Your positioning has to address all three. Not just the obvious peer competitor.

A real-world example. A bookkeeping firm thought their competitor was other bookkeeping firms. They priced and positioned against them. Their actual competitor was the founder doing their own books at midnight on a Sunday. The "status quo" of doing it themselves. Once they repositioned to attack the status quo, "the cost of doing your own books isn't the bookkeeping. It's the decisions you won't make because you don't have the numbers in time", their close rate doubled. They never changed their price.

The Workbook will walk you through identifying all three of your competitors and writing the positioning that addresses each.

**Decision 4: Compass**

The fourth decision is the one most operators never think about.

What is the single sentence the buyer should remember about you 30 days after the conversation?

Not your tagline. Not your slogan. The buyer's internal description of you, when they describe you to someone else.

The way you find out what that sentence is, today, is to ask three of your best customers. Word-for-word: "When you described us to a friend, what did you say?"

You will get three answers. They will be inconsistent. That's the data you needed. Because if your three best customers describe you three different ways, that means your positioning has not yet landed even with the people who already pay you.

The goal of this module's exercise is to produce a 30-word statement that all three of your best customers would recognize, accept, and use to describe you.

Not what marketing wants you to say. What the buyer would say.

That's your compass.

**The 30-Word Statement**

Here is the structure of the 30-word positioning statement you will write in this module.

> "We help [target customer] [achieve specific outcome] without [common painful path] by [your unique mechanism]."

Six elements:

- **Target customer** — specific. Not "business owners." Not "small businesses." Concrete enough that someone could point to a real person.
- **Specific outcome** — measurable, time-bound if possible.
- **Common painful path** — what the buyer is trying to avoid by working with you.
- **Unique mechanism** — what you do that no one else does the same way.

The Operator Positioning Canvas tool will walk you through writing this statement in 6 passes. Your first attempt will be too vague. Your second will be too clever. Your third will start to feel real. By the sixth pass, you will have something that survives the test of being said out loud to a stranger.

**What To Do Right Now**

Three things, in this order:

1. **Open the Workbook.** Complete Section A (Category Decision). It takes about 15 minutes if you go honestly.
2. **Open the Positioning Canvas tool.** Start your first 30-word draft. Don't try to make it good. Just make it real.
3. **Reserve 90 minutes this week** to complete the rest of the Workbook. Set it on your calendar before you close this module.

Then come back and take the quiz.

Module 2.1 takeaway: Positioning isn't a marketing tactic. It's the decision that makes every other marketing decision either easier or impossible. Get this one right and everything downstream gets cheaper.

I'll see you in Module 2.2, Customer Intelligence, where we go deeper into the segment you just identified.
