Customer growth for service businesses
I help excellent businesses build excellent distribution.
How people find you, choose you, come back, and send their friends.
Built before you pay. You see the finished thing before any money changes hands.
Measured on your numbers. Where we can measure it, my monthly fee stops until your number moves.
Yours to keep. Your domain, hosting and email stay in your name.
Talk it through, or see your own picture in five minutes.
I help excellent businesses build excellent distribution. If you’re watching this video, it’s because you’re on my home page and you can see those words to one or other side. What does it mean? I’m going to explain it here, and I’m going to do it in three parts. Part one, we’re going to talk about what distribution is. Part two, we’re going to talk about why it matters. And part three, we’re going to talk about how you can use the insights from understanding it to ascend the profitability ladder in your business.
So, part one. What is distribution? Here’s a way that we can picture any business. It’s got two parts. Part number one is the offer. This is the thing that you actually do for your customers. In order for a business to be sustainable, your offer has to generate more value for them than the money that they pay you. This has to be there. It is the foundation of every business. But on its own, it is not enough. That’s where part two comes in: distribution.
Distribution is everything that carries your work to the people who need it. In this picture, the height of your offer and the height of your distribution is an indication of its quality. The higher it is, the better the quality. The width of the final diagram is how many people it reaches in the world. And the crowd of people at the top is an indication of the demand there is for your product or service.
So let’s talk about point number two. Why does this matter? There’s a common wisdom. Peter Thiel wrote about it in his book. Everybody says this. It goes something like: an average offer with excellent distribution beats an excellent offer with average distribution, every time. It doesn’t really feel right, but that is, unfortunately, how the world works. So if you have an excellent offer but you’re not thinking about your distribution, you are leaving significant value on the table.
Now let’s talk about part number three: the profitability spiral. Everything we’ve discussed so far has been a snapshot, but we need to think about how this changes over time. So at point number one, you start off with an excellent offer. If you begin to lean into your distribution, you can get to a point where the demand for your offer exceeds the supply. This is what Daniel Priestley calls being oversubscribed.
When you’re oversubscribed, you can do two things. The first one is you can raise your prices, and the second is you can begin to pick and choose the work you’re going to do. Simply by raising your prices and picking and choosing the work you’re going to do, it’s going to allow you to lean into that work even more and generate a better offer, which, if you’re focusing on your distribution, will continue to be oversubscribed. And you can continue to ascend this profitability ladder. Alex Hormozi says that sometimes the path to growth is not through more customers, but better customers.
I help excellent businesses build excellent distribution, so that you can grow your business, earn more money, do better work, and end up working with the people you really want to work with. It sounds overly fantastical and magical, I know. I’m not promising that it’s going to happen in one moment. You can always optimise what you are doing. There’s always the next step, and after that, the next step. You can always be moving in the right direction.
Have a look around the site. If you want to book some time in my calendar, I’d love to hear what you’re working on. Or you can take the Quick Read and get an idea of where you should start working on your distribution, in order to get started.
An average offer with excellent distribution beats an excellent offer with average distribution, every time.
Everyone knows this. The people who act on it are running very profitable businesses.
We are taught that the best work wins. So we pour our time into the work, and almost none into who hears about it.
“If you have an excellent offer but you’re not thinking about your distribution, you are leaving significant value on the table.”
Your problem probably isn’t your website
A website is the front door. It matters. It is also the smallest part of the job.
What decides whether you get the work is everything around the door. Can a stranger find you at nine at night? Do they trust what they see? Does anyone follow up when they don’t call back?
There is a word for all of that. It is distribution
Distribution is everything that carries your work to the people who need it. Most of it is not on your website at all.
Here is your distribution, on one page
Every service business runs on the same parts. How people find you. Why they trust you. How they choose you and pay you. Why they come back and send their friends.
Together, those parts are your distribution. This is what it looks like when you can see all of it at once.
Get Found
A great site nobody sees is a billboard in a jungle.
Earn Trust
They found you. Now they are deciding whether to believe you.
Get Chosen
A visitor with a job to be done, and the small mechanical steps most practices leak at.
Keep & Grow
The profit is in the second sale, and in the money stage nobody systematises.
Hover over any block, or tap it on a phone, to see what it does.
You don’t need half of this
There are seventeen blocks in that picture. Almost nobody needs all of them.
The job is finding the two or three that would actually change your month, and building those.
If something already works, it works. I am not going to replace a system because it looks old.
The 80/20 rule
A few things do most of the work
More than a hundred years ago, an Italian economist called Vilfredo Pareto noticed that most of the land in Italy belonged to a small share of the people.
Decades later, a quality engineer called Joseph Juran saw the same shape in factories. A few causes made most of the problems. He called them the vital few, and he named the idea after Pareto.
Then, in 1975, Juran wrote that he had put the wrong man’s name on it. Pareto had only described who owned the land. The idea that it happens everywhere was Juran’s own. The name stuck anyway, and most people know it as the 80/20 rule.
It does not mean you should pick 20 percent of anything. It means the things that matter are lopsided. A few do most of the work.
Your business works the same way. A few parts bring in most of your customers, and your few are not the same as anyone else’s.
What I actually do
I build the parts that bring customers in, and I connect them so they work as one system. Six things have to happen, in order.
- 1They find youA stranger who needs what you do comes across you, on Google and in the AI assistants people now ask first.
- 2They believe youWhat they land on answers the question they are really asking, which is whether you can be trusted with this.
- 3They choose youBooking you is easy, on a phone, at nine at night, and the enquiry reaches a person who answers it.
- 4They pay youThe quote, the deposit and the invoice all move on time. You never have to chase.
- 5They come backYou stayed in touch, so the next job comes to you too.
- 6They send a friendThey tell the people they know, and those people are the next ones who find you.
Not a package. The assessment says which parts you actually need, and most businesses need two or three.
A free assessment, five minutes
Who this is for
You are excellent at what you do, and you charge what that is worth. The people who have worked with you know it. The trouble is everybody else.
Being excellent is one part of a business. It is not the part that gets you found, or believed, or chosen, or talked about. That is the part I build.
- Your work gets booked, rather than added to a cart.
- You can name your best customer, and you would like ten more like them.
- Nobody in your business wakes up wanting to do marketing.
And who it is not for
- If you sell products online, a shop is a different job, and I am not the right person for it.
- If you want ads run and nothing else, you would be paying me for the smallest part of the problem.
- If you want a prettier website with nothing behind it, a designer will do that faster and cheaper than I will.
I build it first. Then you decide.
You see the finished thing before you pay anything.
If you want it live, you pay a build fee. If you want it kept working, you pay monthly.
Where we can measure, the monthly fee stops until I can show the lift. We agree what we are measuring before I start, using your own numbers.
What it costs
Everything starts with the baseplate, which is the site and the foundations under it. That is $2,500 to build and $250 a month to keep working.
You add only the blocks your business needs. Each one has its own price, and building several at once costs less than building them one at a time.
Every price is on the pricing page. There is nothing to ask for.
The way people search is changing
More people now ask an assistant instead of reading a page of links. The assistant answers with two or three names.
That is a shortlist. You are on it or you are not, and there is no second page to be on.
Here is the part nobody tells you. The assistant reads the same things a careful customer would. Your own pages, your Google profile, your reviews, and what other sites say about you. There is no trick to it. There is a record, and it is either clear or it is not.
That is good news for a business that does real work, because the record can be fixed, and nobody can buy their way past it.
I wrote down everything I know about this
Nearly sixty plain-language guides covering every block in the picture. How a business gets found, trusted, chosen, paid and referred.
They are free and they ask nothing of you. Read them and do it yourself if you like.
Start here: the idea it all runs on
Distribution
The whole system, mapped
The Distribution System
The differentiator
Everyone Has the Same Blocks
I am Shei
I spent twenty two years connecting systems inside big organisations. Then I moved my family to a small town in Nova Scotia and started building my own.
Everything I sell runs on my own business first. The guides, the assessments, the follow-up. You are looking at it.
Questions people ask
Who do you work with?
Owner-run service businesses where one new client is worth real money. Think accountants, mortgage brokers, clinics and consultants. If a new customer is only worth a few dollars, the numbers rarely add up.
Is this just a website?
No. The website is the front door, and it is the smallest part of the job. What brings you work is everything around it. Being found, being trusted, being chosen, and being remembered.
What does it cost?
Every engagement starts with the baseplate. That is $2,500 to build and $250 a month. You add only the blocks your business needs. Every price is published on the pricing page.
How do I know it is working?
We agree one number that matters to you, like new bookings a month. We compare it with your last year, so we only count the real difference. You get a full report at three months.
Can you guarantee I will be booked out?
No, and nobody honestly can. Booked out is the aim. What I am accountable for is one number we agree on before I start. Where your records go back a year, my monthly fee stops if that number has not gone up the way we agreed by month six.
Can you get ChatGPT to recommend me?
I can make it much more likely. Nobody can guarantee it. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something.
What happens first?
We talk. Tell me what you are working on and I will give you a straight read. If it looks like a fit, you run the full assessment, so we are both working from your real numbers. Then I build first, and you decide once you have seen it.
Tell me what you’re working on
Say what you are trying to fix and I will give you a straight read. If it is easier to talk, pick a time that suits you.