You'll take almost anyone who can pay. The dentist, the trades business, the SaaS start-up, the retailer — if they've got a budget and a pulse, you'll write the proposal. It feels like sensible business. It's actually the reason your marketing message reads like it's for everyone and no one, your pricing is a guess, and your team can't describe your ideal customer in one sentence. You want a business that knows exactly who it's for and wins them easily. Right now, you're built to serve almost anyone — which quietly means you're built to truly delight no one.

“We can help anyone” feels generous. It isn't a strategy, it's the absence of one. Every dollar you spend trying to reach everyone reaches almost no one properly. Big brands never do this — they pick a target so precisely that the rest of the market feels, correctly, like it's for someone else. The fix isn't working harder at the same scattergun approach. It's picking the slice of the market you can actually win, and building everything — message, price, delivery — around winning it.

Venture investors use a simple three-number exercise to size a market before writing a cheque. SME owners can borrow it to decide who to actually chase this year.

One of Kevin's clients, a New Zealand forensics specialist, didn't try to out-market every forensics firm on the planet — the TAM was enormous and irrelevant. The real opportunity was the SOM: partnering with the leading American firm that already dominated the US market, and entering through a door that was already open, instead of building a new one from scratch.

Writing your SOM down doesn't take a workshop. Pick the twenty accounts, in your own database, that look most like your best client, not your newest one. Write the three things they have in common — size, industry, the problem that made them call you in the first place. That short list is your SOM for this year, and everyone in the business, from the person answering the phone to the one writing the proposal, should be able to recite it back to you. When a lead doesn't match it, that's useful information, not a lost opportunity: it's the market telling you where your message is pulling the wrong crowd. Owners who do this exercise properly usually find their real market is smaller, and far more winnable, than the one they've been chasing.

“I catch up with Kevin once a week and it is definitely the highlight of my week. He just sees different opportunities so clearly. I would not have considered the B2C market as an opportunity before working with Kevin and now it is a major focus for us. He has opened up so many new opportunities for us.”

— John Roberts, Co-owner & COO, Oragene

You know all this. You still say yes to the client who's a bad fit, because turning down revenue feels reckless when cash is tight. That's the real execution gap — not a lack of strategy, a lack of nerve to act on one. This isn't for you if you genuinely want to keep taking any client who can pay, no questions asked. That's a legitimate way to run a business. It just isn't the one that builds the asset you're trying to build. Naming your SOM on paper is step one. Having someone who holds you to it when a tempting bad-fit client calls — that's where a coach earns their keep.

If you've never actually written down who your business is for — and isn't for — that's the first thing we fix.