How Specializing in a Single Niche Can Grow Your Business

Larry Roberts [00:00:09]:

What is happening, everybody? I'm Larry Roberts.

Sara Lohse [00:00:12]:

And I'm Sara Lohse. And this is Branded, your comprehensive guide to creative branding.

Larry Roberts [00:00:16]:

And on this episode of the podcast, we are gonna go deep. We've got a guest with us today that really specializes in. Well, that's kind of redundancy there, but he specializes in deep specialization. Word for specialized that I should have used there. I don't know. But anyways, Corey Quinn is joining us today. We're going to talk about deep specialization and how you can set yourself apart from some of your competition by really focusing on what you're doing. And then we may steer the conversation to.

Larry Roberts [00:00:46]:

We might get a little salesy somewhere in the conversation as well. And I'm pretty excited about that concept. So, Corey, thank you so much for joining us.

Corey Quinn [00:00:53]:

Larry, Sara, I am excited to be here.

Larry Roberts [00:00:56]:

I can tell.

Sara Lohse [00:00:58]:

We're excited to have you here.

Corey Quinn [00:00:59]:

I've had my coffee already, as you can tell.

Sara Lohse [00:01:02]:

Oh, I haven't. This might be a problem.

Larry Roberts [00:01:05]:

I'll lift.

Corey Quinn [00:01:05]:

I'll lift the energy in the room here.

Larry Roberts [00:01:07]:

I'm right there with you, Cory. I'm on monster number two. So we're in.

Sara Lohse [00:01:10]:

Goodness. All right, y'all. Y'all cover this. I'm gonna go nap in the back.

Corey Quinn [00:01:14]:

Yeah.

Sara Lohse [00:01:15]:

This is so fine.

Larry Roberts [00:01:18]:

So, Corey, tell us, man, what. Talk to us about deep specialization. I mean, when we were. When we found each other on pod match, which once again, Sara and I are the Alex Sanfilippo fan club. We love pod match. We love Alex and what he's built there. So we found you there and felt it was a good match for the show. And I really was intrigued by deep specialization.

Larry Roberts [00:01:36]:

Help me understand the concept.

Corey Quinn [00:01:38]:

Sure. Well, the idea of niching down or specializing isn't new in the world of business. Fairly common. A lot of people talk about it. However, what I've noticed over the years and in my experience and working with agencies and my clients is that a lot of people focus on identifying a specialization based on the things like how big is the market, how much money could I potentially make? Like, what's the revenue opportunity? Which is great, and it should be a part of the equation. But the thing that they miss is a critical one, which is they lack an understanding of, do I actually care about these people? Do I care about an audience or a niche? Right. Most people just look at a spreadsheet and they say, well, yeah, dentists. There's a lot of dentists out there.

Corey Quinn [00:02:21]:

Let's target them. But they forget the fact that in order to be successful today. You have to actually have empathy for this audience. You have to actually care about them in the long run. That is what equals success.

Larry Roberts [00:02:34]:

Yeah, I love that take because there's so many opportunities that are out there that I've looked at, and I thought, yeah, but can I do that? For three, 5710 years, there's podcasts that I've started that have gone two, three episodes, and I'm like, I can't, I can't even envision talking about this anymore. This is not going to work for me. But it's such an opportunity to build a big show in this particular niche. So it's very easy to follow in that trap.

Sara Lohse [00:03:00]:

No, I feel like even, just like in the two years I've been in business, I've changed my specialization so many times because I get tired of it and I just kind of flip flop whenever I find something new that I'm interested in. So definitely I need to find that thing. Help me find the thing.

Corey Quinn [00:03:19]:

Yeah. And I think you bring up a really good point, which is that the empathy and the care goes both ways. You actually have to care about the audience, but then at the same time, you have to, it has to drive you as a founder. Right. Not only do you, let's call, let's call it dentists. I'm not sure if you guys are targeting dentists. I doubt it. But let's just say, for example, if.

Sara Lohse [00:03:38]:

A dentist wants a podcast, come on over.

Corey Quinn [00:03:41]:

Okay. Hey, they probably should have a podcast. They definitely should. Yeah. Right. So as it relates to dentistry, you want to care about that audience, because in today's world, in fact, I'll give you a quick example of what I want to illustrate here. Well, so part of the work I do is I work with agencies and I help them to specialize with deep specialization. And part of the work I do is I interview their clients.

Corey Quinn [00:04:09]:

So I was on a call with a med spa business owner, this wonderful little med spa, family owned, it's up in Oregon, outside of Portland. And this wonderful business owner, she's like her mid forties and she's running her med spa. Her daughter works for them. And what she shared with me is that five times a day she'll get phone calls from agencies who want to sell her their agency services. I know that three times a day she'll get text messages from other agencies trying to get her attention, and then she'll get about 15 emails. And this happens on a daily basis. So this idea of specialization, again, is not new. And a lot of companies are testing the waters, right.

Corey Quinn [00:04:53]:

The challenge that she has is that all of these messages are complete waste of time and complete noise in her world, right? And so the way to break through is not to just focus on, you know, the. The offer that you could sell them or how much money you can make out of this med spa. As an agency founder, it's more about connecting with who they are as a business owner and more importantly, the industry itself. When you are able to communicate that you have some level of intimacy and care and understanding of the med spa industry, all of a sudden the way you communicate is different than all that noise. And that's what's required today to break through.

Sara Lohse [00:05:35]:

When you say specialize in, like, a niche and everything, do you specifically mean a niche on who your audience is? Or do you also mean deep specialization on a very specific offering versus being a more generalist question?

Corey Quinn [00:05:51]:

Yeah. Generally speaking, there's two ways to specialize. Number one, you can specialize in what you do, for instance, SEO or podcast production and promotion, or whatever that flavor is for you. The other way to specialize is in who you serve. For instance, you could serve dentists with, let's say, marketing. And so if you think about it as, remember, like an Etch a sketch, you guys remember what etch a sketch is this little childhood toy where you can kind of use these knobs to kind of move, move these things around. So if you imagine on a vertical axis, you have who you serve, and then what you serve is on the horizontal axis, for example, the further up you go is the more specialized you are in who you serve. And the further to the right you go is the more specialized in what you do.

Corey Quinn [00:06:38]:

Well, from a positioning perspective, you could be extremely well specialized in what you do and who you serve. I do TikTok videos for dentists, or in your case, podcast videos for dentists. So it is a sort of a spectrum that you could focus on a lot of people and do a lot of things for them, or you could do one thing for a very specific audience. The work that I do specifically, Sara, to answer your question, is about who you serve specifically. So the work that I help people to do is to find a specific audience, an industry, a niche, a vertical. And I help them to become a specialist in serving that audience, which I believe is a better strategy in the long term than specializing in what you do.

Larry Roberts [00:07:25]:

So talk to me a little bit more about that. We're talking about an audience, not necessarily a product or a specialization in a particular field. How do we begin to conceptualize specializing a particular audience.

Corey Quinn [00:07:40]:

Sure. Most agency founders, and I speak again to agency founders, that's typically the examples I give, which is true for any business owner, is that they don't want to limit the amount of opportunity that's available to them in the marketplace. They wouldn't want to just say, oh, we're only going to work with dentists, or we're only going to work with H vac companies, or whatever that example is for you.

Larry Roberts [00:08:03]:

Sure.

Corey Quinn [00:08:04]:

But the reality is, is that any agency founder or business founder can, can actually build a very healthy, profitable business by serving a single market. For instance, in the, in the United States, there are about 35,000 plumbing businesses. Okay? If you were able to get 3% of that market as an agency, if you're able to just get 3% of the total plumbers in the US, you could have a seven, even an eight figure agency that has great profit margins. You see the benefit of serving a single market is that you can streamline your operations. You take a lot of the variability out of serving this market because you're doing the same things over and over, and you also become much more intimately, you understand your target audience at a much deeper level. Right. And so all of those factors build into a very sort of healthy, fun to run, profitable business for an agency owner.

Larry Roberts [00:09:00]:

Yeah, I love that. Because just the other night, when was it? Not last night, but night before last, I was at a networking event, and I met someone, and we were chatting for, I don't know, about an hour, and he goes, so what's your ideal client? And I sat there for a second. You'd think I'd have an answer for this, right? But I went through this exact same motions. I said, well, really, anybody that has the desire to grow their audience, to grow their influence, to be a thought leader in their niche, to leverage a podcast as part of their marketing campaign.

Corey Quinn [00:09:33]:

Right?

Larry Roberts [00:09:34]:

And it just still, I felt so vague inside, you know, I felt like that was not a clear, concise answer, because I don't want to miss out on the opportunity to start a podcast for a dentist, a plumber, an AI specialist. I don't care who it is. If they want to start a podcast, I want to work with them.

Sara Lohse [00:09:54]:

But target audience is someone ready to give me money.

Corey Quinn [00:10:00]:

So I would, you know, just to build on that. Larry, I think it's not a black and white world, but if you look at an agency or a business that specializes in a specific service, let's say, a platform which is different than, I think, for the case for you guys. But let's just talk about, do you guys remember this platform called vine?

Larry Roberts [00:10:18]:

Oh, yeah.

Sara Lohse [00:10:18]:

Yes.

Larry Roberts [00:10:19]:

Okay.

Sara Lohse [00:10:19]:

I miss vine.

Corey Quinn [00:10:21]:

Yeah, I miss vine, too.

Larry Roberts [00:10:22]:

I was too old for it. I never got into it. I know it, but I was never.

Sara Lohse [00:10:25]:

Yeah, mine walked so TikTok could run.

Corey Quinn [00:10:29]:

Yeah, there you go. So for listeners and viewers, vine is the old version of TikTok. And the challenge is that if you specialize your agency on. We're the agency. We're the vine agency. Well, what happens when vine goes away? Which actually happened, it disappeared. Twitter shut it down or whatever. And so all of a sudden, you have built your entire positioning on a singular platform.

Corey Quinn [00:10:54]:

This is true for businesses that position themselves on, like, we're a HubSpot agency or we are, you know, a salesforce.com implementation company. Well, what if Salesforce changes their business model? All the revenue that you've generated, all the employees you've hired, there's a lot more inherent risk because you're dependent on that platform versus the needs of a dentist. They're always going to have needs for growth. They're not going to understand how to grow their, their dental practice. They're dentists. And so they need an external expert, a specialist who understands their world and can apply the best tools available in the marketplace to their specific situation. That's much more durable in my mind.

Sara Lohse [00:11:35]:

It's funny you say that. We've talked about this a couple of times with people kind of just losing their platform. There's a woman in the podcasting industry that she built, her entire community, her whole client list, everything on an email platform. And the email platform didn't like what she was posting and sending out, so they shut it down. And she lost, like, hundreds of thousands of contacts. She lost her courses, she lost all of her content overnight with no reason and no way to get it back because she specialized in a system that was not hers.

Corey Quinn [00:12:08]:

Well, I'll tie it back to the work you guys do. I think businesses that maybe become, come up on, like, Instagram or LinkedIn or these other channels, you don't, those businesses don't own those channels, algorithm. They don't own the media that LinkedIn decides to promote or not. But when you build your own branded podcast, you own that media that is your media, and you can promote it across all these channels. But it is something, it's an asset that you control and you own, which is why I'm a huge fan of the work you guys do.

Sara Lohse [00:12:39]:

Well, thank you.

Larry Roberts [00:12:40]:

Yeah, definitely appreciate that. One of the other things that comes into play, though. And I, a lot of times when you are specialized in a particular niche or a particular area is, and in my case especially, I'm the red hat guy. And when I'm out networking and I land a client, guess who they want to work with?

Sara Lohse [00:13:00]:

The red hat guy.

Larry Roberts [00:13:01]:

They want to work with the red hat guy, but the red hat guy can't be everywhere and to everything, to everyone. So as someone that does specialize in a particular arena, not saying that's me, but hypothetically speaking, if you're, if you're the founder of that agency, there's, there's times where it can be overwhelming to be the point person for the sales, for the implementation, for all aspects of the business. How can we work around that as well?

Corey Quinn [00:13:30]:

Sure. So I have a great story about that. So I come from 17 years in the agency space. The, the first couple years I worked in the agency space, it was, the agency I worked for was launched by the XDev, CEO of MySpace. It's another old timey platform. So MySpace, what's that? No, not Tom. This is Mike Jones, you remember? And so MySpace is like Facebook. You make money from advertisers.

Corey Quinn [00:14:00]:

Well, he left, he left MySpace and he started an agency. Guess who? He knew a lot of advertisers, right? Because he had worked at MySpace. That's just how that business worked. And so he built a beautiful, successful agency based on his network. So I believe at that point, that's how you build a successful business, is you have a charismatic founder that has a huge network of buyers, and you just leverage that. And the challenge is kind of similar to the red hat example, is that that founder is dependent on driving the revenue and driving the engine. Well, I learned that that wasn't always the way that businesses grew, and it wasn't necessarily the best way. The next role I took was as a chief marketing officer at a digital marketing agency called Scorpion.

Corey Quinn [00:14:45]:

And this business was different because they had this six person sales floor. They had a bunch of inbound calls, a bunch of attorneys. They were focused on attorneys. And the salespeople would answer these inbound calls and often do a one call close. But part of the conversation, the sales conversation, didn't include anything about the founder of the agency. The attorneys who were calling into Scorpion didnt care about who the founder was. It wasnt a part of their buying process. What they cared about was working with an expert who understood how to help that law firm, that attorney, to grow their business, their firm.

Corey Quinn [00:15:20]:

So the idea of having a founder as the central part of a business, I think, is really great way to start a business, but it becomes, at a certain point, a bottleneck. Right. And it prevents you from being able to scale, because all of a sudden, all the sales have to come through you, all of the client support has to come through you, and so on and so forth. So one of the ways to escape founder led sales, which is one of the things I talk about, is by specializing in a vertical market, because you could build a brand around, you, are the go to expert. Your firm is a go to expert at solving this specific problem for this specific audience. And when you're able to do that successfully, you're no longer dependent on that founder.

Larry Roberts [00:16:03]:

So it seems this all ties together. So if we have the deep. Excuse me, if we have the deep specialization at the top here for a particular audience in a particular industry. Right. And you have a particular founder, how do you, how do you cross that threshold, though? And I asked this because, you know, a large percentage of our listeners are entrepreneurs that are growing their businesses, and they can easily find themselves in this specific position. I mean, most of the people that we know in this industry, they are their own personal brands. And a lot of the episodes that we have on the branded podcast are all about building personal brands. So help me understand that transition a little bit more, how you go from being that personal brand to an agency type brand.

Corey Quinn [00:16:48]:

Yeah, absolutely. So. Or a founder independent brand. Okay, I'll call that. So there's three things. I'll say there are three things that typically hold a, a founder sort of captive in the sales role. Specifically. One is that they lack a focus on a specific vertical market.

Corey Quinn [00:17:07]:

When you are a generalist and you're serving businesses of all shapes and sizes, what tends to happen is that you have to have much more of a bespoke sales process. If you're talking to manufacturers on one sales call, and then a dentist on the next sales call, and then a retail store down in Ventura Boulevard, as an example, on the next sales call. There is too much of a variety in the sales process. There's too many nuances. So you struggle being able to bring in a salesperson from the street and be able to say, I want you to be able to sell our product or our service to all of these variety of businesses. It's much more difficult to be successful because there's no system behind that. There's too much variety. So the lack of having a focus on a specific vertical market, which, by the way, allows for a lot more repeatability in the sales process.

Larry Roberts [00:17:59]:

Sure.

Corey Quinn [00:17:59]:

That's number one, lack of focus. Number two is having watery positioning. What I mean by that is that most of your buyers and all of our buyers are not technical buyers. For example, in your world, I imagine the people who you're selling to don't understand how to produce necessarily a podcast and haven't done that successfully. They're coming to you as the expert. The challenge is that when a business has watery positioning, it means that your buyer can't meaningfully differentiate you from the 15 other options that they have available to them.

Larry Roberts [00:18:33]:

Sure.

Corey Quinn [00:18:33]:

Right. And so as a result of that, you end up competing on price and losing deals to lesser firms. Right. So you have that watery positioning requires the personality, the founder, to step back in to be able to say, but it's me. I'm the red hat guy, you know? You know me. You trust me. Right? So the founder gets pulled right back in. Okay.

Corey Quinn [00:18:52]:

Yeah, that's number two. And then number three is when the founder steps away from the sales motion. Maybe they have a sales resource or. Or whatnot. An SDR. There's no actual strategy to predict, to predictably create pipeline. So that's just a lack of having a good plan and a good strategy. You know, when the founder leaves, there is a vacuum.

Corey Quinn [00:19:14]:

What do we do? I don't know. Well, maybe we do some Facebook ads. It's unknown. So when you have all three of those, the lack of focus, the water repositioning, and just lacking a good strategy, the founder always gets sucked right back in because if they're not selling, the company's not growing.

Sara Lohse [00:19:30]:

You say that and it all makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, when it comes to a personal brand, you kind of want to be more of that, like, personal touch. How do you find that balance? How do you stay a personal brand? Also have people handling some of that. You not lose that piece of it.

Corey Quinn [00:19:52]:

So I have two thoughts on that. Number one is that you don't have to build a massive company. Some agency or some founders want to build a nice boutique business where they are the, you know, they are the brand. And then maybe they have a couple courses, they have a couple programs, and they're fine like this. This is only for those business owners that want to ultimately not be tied to the day to day operations. Are you guys familiar? What's that baseball team that has the funny guy in the yellow suit and the Savannah.

Sara Lohse [00:20:22]:

Savannah bananas.

Corey Quinn [00:20:23]:

Savannah Bananas. There you go. So do you think he's holding all the sales calls? Do you think he's doing all the concession stands. He is a brand. He is able to separate himself operationally from the business. And what he is doing is he's going on stages. He's talking about the principles of success. Right.

Corey Quinn [00:20:44]:

He talks about he becomes the face of the brand. He becomes the attraction and the thing hook, if you will. But he doesn't deliver anything on the back end. So he's been able to figure out how to escape those, those founder led sales. And I think it's partially. Go ahead. Go ahead, Larry.

Larry Roberts [00:21:00]:

Yeah, and a huge fan of Jesse Cole. And I've tried to get him to write the preface of my book. Didn't happen, but he'll get the next one. But, but at the same time, he's leveraged his personal brand to put himself on stages. Well, now he bought a baseball team and he has an operations team behind him that's running that baseball team. And that's where he's not doing the sales. He's got a team on the back end, but he's still that brand. And he has Jesse Cole.

Larry Roberts [00:21:28]:

He's bringing in with his personal brand revenue by speaking on stages and pulling down 50 grand to talk and appearing on these different shows and promoting the personal brand aspect of what he did with the Savannah bananas. And when I look at that, I almost, it almost seems like it's, there's a big differentiator and like a firm line in the sand of being a personal brand and being a business brand. Because Jesse isn't the brand of the savannah bananas, okay? They have their own mascot. They have their own logo. They have their own brand. Sure, Jesse was the driving force behind that, but now his brand, the yellow tux and, and the personal branding side, it seems like there's two totally different business models there and two different plans. So it makes me question, can you be both?

Corey Quinn [00:22:21]:

I think it's interesting. I think it's interesting. I think he's an example of someone who, as you said, who started this savannah bananas. I was able to leverage his personal brand, but now step away from that on an operational perspective. But to your point, he's still building his brand. That is his primary source of revenue, I imagine.

Larry Roberts [00:22:39]:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure the bananas are pulling in tons of cash. So, I mean, I doubt that if he stopped speaking and making his own personal engagements that he'd be hurting in any, any stretch of the imagination. But it just seems like it would be extremely difficult or it seemed like it is extremely difficult. And maybe it seems difficult to me because this is the battle that I'm fighting right now in, like, in real IRL, in real life. You know, I'm trying to build my business on the back end while being a personal brand on the front end. And I don't see. I'm having a difficult time drawing that correlation.

Larry Roberts [00:23:10]:

And I can't imagine that I'm the only person that's listening or watching this show that's having that same battle. So it's interesting to me. I keep seeing your book behind you. Anyone? Not everyone. How does that tie into everything here? Because if it's anyone, anyone and everyone to me personally, kind of seems synonymous. But maybe I'm not looking at it right.

Corey Quinn [00:23:31]:

Yeah. The point is, it's coming from the. The saying that you could do anything, but you can't do everything.

Larry Roberts [00:23:37]:

Okay?

Corey Quinn [00:23:39]:

Which is all about being specific about what you choose to do. In the case of my book, it is a five step process to go from serving everyone to serving someone specifically. What the title is all about is that you can serve anyone, just not everyone. And so how it all ties together is. Goes back to having a focus in your business, having a target market that you're specifically building your brand around and building your expertise around. And eventually, as a result of that, you are no longer required to be involved because you are not. The reason why people are buying your expertise is, your specialization is. And that speaks louder over time, especially when you're able to show great results.

Corey Quinn [00:24:23]:

That is what people are buying and not necessarily your brand.

Larry Roberts [00:24:27]:

Gotcha. Gotcha.

Sara Lohse [00:24:28]:

It's interesting. So, with my book, I kind of went opposite. So I positioned my book to be for aspiring thought leaders. So I had a target audience in mind, and then I was told by people reading it that, like, no, you need to go broader. This is not just for thought leaders. I had someone from the merchant marine, like, post about it saying, everyone needs to read this. I had people that were, like, nurses and, like, had nothing to do with, like, thought leadership and what I thought my audience was. So I feel like I tried to specialize, and then my special specialty was just like, no, don't do that.

Sara Lohse [00:25:06]:

Just kidding.

Corey Quinn [00:25:08]:

So the way I wrote my book was I actually. I wrote the book for a broader audience, because this is. This problem is not specific to agencies. It's specific to any business. Right. Any small business that's coming up, they're serving too many different types of people. And because I was focused on agencies for my business, I got feedback from my beta readers, people who are reading the book, saying, this is great. But I'd love more examples about like from other agencies because I get what you're saying, but I'd like some examples.

Corey Quinn [00:25:39]:

And as a result of that I realized, hey, I'm not drinking my own Kool Aid. I didn't write a book specifically for a specific reader. And as a result of that, it is a more narrow audience, but it is intended to be very, very hyper relevant and actionable for that audience. By the way, I wrote on the bottom of the book, it says.

Sara Lohse [00:26:03]:

So you have two versions?

Corey Quinn [00:26:06]:

I have one version today, but should I expand into SAS or some other business model? I could use the basis for this book. The cool thing is that the book is based on principles, so it can be applied in any direction.

Sara Lohse [00:26:21]:

Super smart. Now how do you, so we know that we need to pick that niche audience. We need to pick that vertical. How do you pick it?

Corey Quinn [00:26:31]:

Great.

Sara Lohse [00:26:31]:

How do you know which one's right?

Corey Quinn [00:26:33]:

So ideally, you've been in business for a while, you've probably had experiences with a variety of different types of vertical markets. And as a result of that you have an intuition and you probably have some data on what a good client looks like. The data you're looking at is average revenue, lifetime value retention profit. All of those metrics come into play. And so there's a process that you can go through where you stack all your clients based on group them based on the vertical market and just compare and contrast. Like which verticals are the most profitable for us, which ones stay with us the longest, which ones pay us the longest or the most, and which ones refer business to us. So that's sort of a quantitative approach, very left brain. And you also want to look at it from a qualitative perspective.

Corey Quinn [00:27:20]:

Who do I like working with? Who does my team enjoy working with the most? If I'm going to fill my business with dentists, and I absolutely hate them, well then I'm not going to have a very happy business, right? And so thinking about who do I care about, who would I love to be involved with? I even call it, it's kind of an identity shift from my perspective. We talked about this idea of deep specialization. When you are targeting, let's say, dentists, I want you to emotionally and from an identity perspective leave your industry, the podcast industry or whatever it is, and you're going to be joining the dental industry. You're now a part of that industry, you're a member of that industry and you're helping it to move forward. Thats really the shift that were looking for in the deep specialization work. But going back to your question, we do the quantitative, then we do the qualitative. Do we like working with them? And then we also look at the market. How big is the opportunity? If were only going to focus on dentists, how many are there out there? And what if were really successful? What does that mean from a revenue perspective and a profit perspective, you use these three steps to really make a high quality decision.

Sara Lohse [00:28:32]:

Now, this may or may not be on topic because I don't know what it is.

Larry Roberts [00:28:36]:

Okay.

Sara Lohse [00:28:38]:

You talk about a 20% list.

Corey Quinn [00:28:41]:

Yeah.

Sara Lohse [00:28:42]:

What does that mean? Is that on topic? I don't know.

Corey Quinn [00:28:45]:

Yeah, that's absolutely on topic. So once you've identified a vertical market, out of the 100% of the businesses that you're targeting, let's call them dentists, because we're using that example, out of the 10,000 dentists in the US, there's probably a lot more. Not all of them are equally going to be good clients for your business. Some are going to be too small, some will be too big, and so on and so forth. So if you look at the. If you think about this concept of the Pareto principle, the 80 20, where 20% of your clients generate 80% of your revenue or profits or retention, we're going to apply that to your target audience. Only 20% of the businesses that are in your target audience, your total addressable market, are going to represent the most opportunity for your business. Chet Holmes wrote about it in his book, the Ultimate Sales Machine, which is called your dream 100.

Corey Quinn [00:29:34]:

Okay. These are the 100 businesses that produce, that provide, have the potential to be your absolute best customers. And so I'm a big fan of less is more, and part of that is going in and applying this Pareto principle to your target audience. Okay, that's number one. And then number two, once you've identified the 20%, I want you to send an amazing gift to them.

Sara Lohse [00:30:03]:

Cookies.

Larry Roberts [00:30:05]:

How did I know that was coming? How did I know that was coming? I knew it. You said it, man. I was like, cookies.

Corey Quinn [00:30:12]:

So the backstory here, there's context here. So when I joined that company, Scorpion, the sales team, we're doing one call, closes with the attorneys. We wanted to grow faster and not just rely on inbounds. And so we decided to go outbound, found a list of attorneys. We found the 20% list, in other words, the best businesses, the best attorneys in that list. And then ahead of a cold call, we would send them gourmet cookies. We'd FedEx it overnight, we bypass the gatekeeper, it goes right to the attorney. And the attorney would open up this FedEx box, take out the scorpion tin of cookies, and have one.

Corey Quinn [00:30:48]:

And if they're not standing up, if they're standing up, they need to hold the wall. Cause the cookies are that good. Like, they're amazingly delicious.

Larry Roberts [00:30:56]:

Ordering some cookies. As soon as we get off this, I'm going to order some of those cookies.

Corey Quinn [00:31:02]:

Whenever I talk about cookies, my son is like, dad, can I get some cookies? In any event, the cookies would end up in the law firm break room, and the law firm staff would be in the break room enjoying the cookies. And everyone's asking, well, who brought the amazing cookies? And someone would say, well, this company scorpion. And then someone else would say, well, who's Scorpion? And eventually, the word scorpion was, like, bouncing off all the walls. And by the time we cold called or called to follow up on the cookies, it went from the traditional, like, you know, the gatekeeper shutting down the call to, you're the ones who sent those amazing cookies.

Larry Roberts [00:31:39]:

The cookie guy.

Corey Quinn [00:31:40]:

Oh, my God, those were so good. Thank you. Let me put you through. Right? And it. Absolutely. So this idea of giving, the action of giving a gift ahead of a cold call, a good gift, allowed us to really scale up the business. We grew from 20 million to 40 million to 150 million, in part to leveraging gifts as a first touch. Well, cookies to start, but other things as well.

Larry Roberts [00:32:06]:

Why didn't we think of that? Sara? It's cookies was the answer the whole time.

Sara Lohse [00:32:10]:

See, I tried. I ate them before they got out.

Larry Roberts [00:32:15]:

Cookies.

Sara Lohse [00:32:16]:

They were delicious.

Larry Roberts [00:32:18]:

You know, I got to ask you, though, why was the company called Scorpion?

Corey Quinn [00:32:21]:

Right. Well, I think it was between that and another name. And he was a Scorpio, the founder.

Larry Roberts [00:32:27]:

Oh, okay. All right.

Corey Quinn [00:32:28]:

And at first, I didn't love it, but then it is distinctive, it's visual.

Larry Roberts [00:32:33]:

Right.

Corey Quinn [00:32:35]:

Well, so we originally targeting as clients personal injury attorneys, and that's an aggressive market. Like, they're. They want to be aggressive in marketing approach. So they like that. But when we got into, like, home services and then medical practices, it wasn't the same vibe.

Larry Roberts [00:32:52]:

Wasn't quite as attractive, I'm sure.

Corey Quinn [00:32:54]:

Yeah.

Larry Roberts [00:32:55]:

I mean, scorpions are the one thing I'm probably gonna have nightmares tonight, because scorpions, that's my one biggest fear in my whole life, really, is scorpions. Whatever I have, I've never even been stung by one. I have no idea.

Corey Quinn [00:33:05]:

They just looked around.

Larry Roberts [00:33:08]:

I live in Texas. Yeah.

Corey Quinn [00:33:10]:

Okay.

Larry Roberts [00:33:10]:

I've come across plenty, but I've never been stung by one. But, man, if I see one on tv, it's guaranteed. And now we've talked about it for 30 minutes. So tonight's, I'm getting no sleep tonight.

Sara Lohse [00:33:20]:

It's, if they're under stress, don't they sting themselves to death?

Larry Roberts [00:33:25]:

I've never heard that.

Sara Lohse [00:33:27]:

Yeah, it's like scorpions are, like, really bad under stress, and if you back them into the corner, they'll just sting themselves to death.

Larry Roberts [00:33:32]:

Wow.

Corey Quinn [00:33:33]:

Oh, my God.

Larry Roberts [00:33:33]:

That's. Yeah. Well, that's a great way to wrap. This episode is on a nice positive note.

Sara Lohse [00:33:39]:

Cookies with so much fun facts.

Larry Roberts [00:33:42]:

Cookie was so much lighter. But Corey, I mean, I've been, I've enjoyed the conversation. Honestly. You really brought some practical insight into not only specializing, but also how do we, you know, draw that line from being the brand to being a company? And it can be very, very difficult. And you've really shown some light on some of the struggles there and some of the solutions as well, to positioning yourself accordingly. So really appreciate it.

Corey Quinn [00:34:08]:

Absolutely. Well, thanks again for the opportunity.

Larry Roberts [00:34:10]:

Yeah, man. Tell everybody where they can get ahold of you.

Corey Quinn [00:34:12]:

Yeah. Well, I recommend, if you've been vibing on this topic, I would recommend that you go to anyone, not everyone.com. it's the name of my book. And there you can. For your listeners, your listeners can actually start to listen to the audiobook for free. That's amazing. Direct access to the site, to the book, and, yeah, it's a very actionable book. It's going to give you a lot of insights and tools to help you to escape founder led sales through some of the processes we talked about today.

Sara Lohse [00:34:39]:

Do they need a code or anything for that?

Corey Quinn [00:34:42]:

Nope.

Larry Roberts [00:34:43]:

Awesome.

Corey Quinn [00:34:44]:

Yep.

Larry Roberts [00:34:45]:

For your audience, for your. Yeah. Thank you.

Corey Quinn [00:34:48]:

Thank you.

Larry Roberts [00:34:49]:

Really appreciate you dialing that in. Anyways. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Brandon. If you got some value out of this episode, do us a favor. Hit that subscribe button so we can continue to bring you these amazing episodes each and every week. And with that, I'm Larry Roberts.

Sara Lohse [00:35:04]:

And I'm Sara Lohse. We'll talk to you next week.