Episode 37: The CORE Strategy Model - Unlocking Growth with the Right Clients

In this episode of The 7% Club, I introduce The CORE Strategy Model, a powerful framework for scaling your business by focusing on your existing client base.

Many founders waste time on low-value clients while neglecting high-value relationships that drive real business growth. I break down how to strategically evaluate your client portfolio and optimise your offerings for long-term success.

🔹 What CORE Stands For:
✅ Clients – Identify and prioritise high-value, profitable clients
✅ Offers – Align your services with what your best clients truly need
✅ Relationships – Strengthen client relationships to build loyalty and referrals
✅ Expansion – Achieve sustainable business growth through strategic focus

🎯 Key Takeaways:
✔️ How to assess the profitability of your clients and eliminate resource-draining ones
✔️ Why less is more when it comes to the right clients
✔️ The importance of offering premium services to your best clients
✔️ How to nurture strong client relationships for repeat business and referrals

Action Step:
Take 30 minutes this week to review your client base, offers, and pricing, and strengthen your key relationships.

🔔 Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with fellow business owners looking to grow!

Connect

💡 Need help scaling your business from 7 to 8 figures? Get in touch jenny@jennystilwell.com.au

Remember: Better strategy, better business, better life! See you next time!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hi there, this is Jenny Stilwell and welcome to the 7% Club podcast for the 7% of business owners who break through 2 million in sales and for those on track to join this club. If you want to upscale from seven to eight figures, you'll need to make some shifts in how you grow, structure and lead your company because you cannot get to 10 million in the same way that you reached your first one or two million in revenue. This podcast is to help you upscale. In this episode of the 7% Club, I want to talk about the core strategy model. Now, it's just one model for helping you strategically focus on growth, but starting with your existing client base. And the reason I'm doing a podcast on this, it's because I frequently help founders re-evaluate their client strategies. And the common thread is too much time and energy spent on low value clients. In the pursuit of more clients, they frequently neglect the value of the new clients they bring in and can neglect their existing clients. Time and resources can be drained servicing many small clients compared with the returns from servicing less clients. that are high value to your business. The core strategy model will give you a focus on the key elements to help grow your business from your existing client base. So just to start off, what does core stand for? Well, it's about clients, having the right clients. It's about your offer, having the right offer for those clients. It's certainly about relationships and having strong relationships. And if you have all of those three key elements in place, you will get the E, which is expansion. So I'm just going to run through each of these one by one. So with clients, the first thing is to identify your high value clients based on revenue and profitability. make sure you also identify those clients who you enjoy working with and who are a good fit for your business growth goals so high revenue clients are one thing but they also need to be profitable and there are many instances where clients of mine have had you know very high revenue clients but when we look at the numbers and we look at what it actually costs to service those clients we discover unfortunately that whilst being high revenue they're also high cost and low profit. So make sure you have a look at that as well, particularly if you have products in your mix of services. Also with clients, the next thing is to assess where time and resources are being directed, both for you and for your team. And you need to identify those clients that drain resources and cost you money to service. Now, these can be large, high value clients, but invariably they're the lower value, smaller clients. Thank you so much. just always seem to have questions about the most minute detail. And the membership fee was to give them access to information and downloads, all accessible tools to help in their business. And for that very low value each month, that one member took up so much time and energy. It was incredible. And after a Not that long, I decided to ditch that membership program and focus on higher value clients with consulting and other programs. So it's always worth having a look at who's draining your time and effort, both yours and the team. So when you've got that information, use that to fine tune your ideal client profile. Now, it's really important to do this so you can start focusing on adding value to your best existing clients. Use the profile to focus on attracting more of the same type of clients rather than just more of any type or size of clients and that's where we shift from the focus on more to the focus on the right clients. You want to start building up a bigger base of the right type of clients. So In many instances, less is more. So drop those low value clients that aren't the right fit for your business and focus on those higher value ideal clients. Now we look at O, the offer. And this is where you can really grow your business. You need to give your premium clients your best offers and optimize your pricing to match the value provided. and withdraw products and services that were more appropriate for your lower value clients. So as a service provider, I've had clients in other businesses where I might start doing a consulting piece for them looking at some aspect of their business and then they may decide they need to have a strategic plan created for the company for the next couple of years and They might want help with recruiting key people into their organization. They, in the past, have some of them joined my CEO programs. So you might start with one thing, but if you've got the right client that really needs the value that you can deliver, you can really grow the value you give them by growing the offers that you're making specific to what they need and in turn grow your business. And that becomes quite a flow. It's a really nice flow for your business when you have the right clients and you help them grow and you grow your own business. And so the key there is to find out what else you could be doing for your best clients. So as I said, back in the day for one of my businesses, it was a consulting services recruitment because I knew their company, I knew their culture, I knew exactly what they needed in the business. So they turned to me to help for recruitment, even though I'm not a recruiter. And I offered a CEO program. With some of the best clients, I do workshops for their team to help develop their management team further. So if you focus on these clients, you can really build a very strategic value And then the R, relationship. Now this is really interesting because when I map it out with, you know, whether I'm running a workshop or I'm doing one-on-one with a client, we can sometimes look at the relationship with their high-value clients and sometimes it's not as strong as it needs to be. So I'm going to map it out with, you know, So you really need to make sure that the high-value clients have got– you've got a really strong relationship with them. And sometimes that can drift or you can– sometimes take them for granted but you really need to focus on that 100% because you know people buy from people they like you they trust you and making sure that relationship is strong and ongoing is really really important and that also applies to people who refer business to you they may not be clients or they may actually be a lower value client but they're a huge fan and a big supporter of your business so you need to make sure that you look after the relationship with them as well. And the other thing in terms of relationship is from time to time reassess the customer experience and how you build on the relationship with customers at each stage. You know, map out the different points from the point where they first become a client working with you, you know, after maybe six months. What does the onboarding process look like? What How do you follow up on services you're providing? How do you identify additional areas of value that they might need help with? Is your communication working well? Are you following up on everything? So reassessing that customer experience is really important too. So if you've got the right clients and the right offer, being the product or service that they want, and you've got a weak relationship, you're going to have the risk of defection. If you've got the right clients and a really strong relationship, but you launch a new product or service that isn't what they want, you will get silence from these clients. They won't leave, but they won't respond to a new offer that isn't a fit. So that's not going to help build your business and it's certainly not adding any value to them. And if you've got a really strong relationship with the wrong clients, as in they're not your ideal clients, and an offer that would be attractive to the right clients, then you won't sell to the wrong ones. But based on a strong relationship, they may give you referrals to others. So if you're offering something to one of your clients that's definitely not the right fit for that particular offer, you're actually not going to make a sale. But because you've got a strong relationship, they may refer you to someone else. So when you have all of these three elements in place, you'll get the E in the core strategy model. You'll get expansion. Your business will grow if you focus on nurturing the relationships and continuing to deliver value to your best clients. And they will then provide the template for what new client acquisition needs to look like. So you'll be far more strategic in growing your new clients rather than focusing on just more. You'll focus on the right ones. So an action step from this could be just to take half an hour this week to review your client base, the value of your client base, your best clients, your most profitable clients, what your ideal client profile is because that may have changed over time as your business has grown. Have a good look at your offers and your pricing and then assess the strength of your relationships with each. And that will be a fantastic foundation for you to start being very strategic in growing new clients and growing your business. Hope you've liked this and good luck with the exercise. Bye now. That's all for today's episode of the 7% Club. Thank you so much for listening. Better strategy, better business, better life.