Redefine your ideal customer
After you first hung up your shingle and opened for business, you probably accepted money from nearly everyone that wanted to give it to you. It’s likely that you occasionally strayed from your area of expertise and took some jobs just because you had to make payroll. If you ever want to open another location, buy out a competitor, or replace that old van, you can’t do that if you are earning just enough to pay your current bills. You’ll need to start making some more profit.
Find your most profitable customers
Revenue is vanity. profit is sanity.
By now, you should have served enough customers to get a sense of who your profitable ones are. You should also have many horror stories of absolutely losing your shirt. Were there customers you should have fired? Take some time today to identify and pinpoint those customers that you want to work with over and over. The ones that are willing to pay your fair price for the work you do best.
A great exercise to go through at this point is to redefine your ideal customer so you can focus your operations, systems, efforts, and marketing dollars toward this customer. When scaling, the intent is to know which jobs are in your wheelhouse, repeatable, teachable, and most importantly, profitable.