What Your Business Can Learn from Stanley's Tumblers

I didn't see myself ever writing this sentence - but in this episode we're discussing Stanley's tumblers. More to the point, what our businesses can learn from their decision to change their customer base almost overnight.

Yup, tumblers.

Those magical vessels that somehow keep your coffee hot enough to melt your worries (and your face, if you're not careful).

We're using Stanley's story to share some serious strategy insight on how to shake up your business client base.

Ever feel like your ideal client is playing a game of hide and seek and you're always "it"?

Well, not anymore!

I'm dishing out a spell worthy of one of my beloved Harry Potter books which will protect your future when your ideal client morphs into a whole new fantastic beast!

We're talking big, bold, brass band boldness to lead in your field.

None of that wishy-washy, 'maybe I kinda know my stuff' attitude.

Nope, you'll be owning your new market position like Cillian owned his Oppenheimer Oscar!

And fear? Pfft. What fear?

We're kicking that straight to the curb.

We're going to embrace this change like it's a fluffy kitten and evolve our niche with the grace of a gazillionaire entrepreneur (which, by the way, you're totally on your way to becoming if you stick with me, delightful weenie!)

By the end of this episode, you'll be so in tune with your ideal client, you'll be finishing each other's sentences during your sales calls.

Actually, don't do that.

Because you'd be contradicting the advice I gave you in this episode:

So, what are you waiting for?

Click play, and let's make your business pop in its new market place!

Timestamped Summary:

00:00-02:01: The story of Stanley's tumblers and their remarkable sales growth.

02:01-08:39: Signs that your ideal client or niche is ready to change and how to approach it.

08:39-22:14: Embracing the audacious mindset to be a leading expert with a new lucrative client base.

Your next steps after listening

Realizing it's time to work with me? Book your free intial strategy call with me - weeniecast.com/strategycall

Get more support in your ADHD entrepreneur life by joining my hyperfocus community! - https://weeniecast.com/hyperfocus

Wanna get this content earlier, and totally unbleeped? Subscribe to the Apple Podcasts premium version of this show - https://weeniecast.com/winners

Want to just buy me a coffee in return for some helpful insight? Thank you! Here's where you can do that - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katiethecoach

Mentioned in this episode:

Katie's May Birthday challenge

Clients can't hire you if they don't know you exist... Which is why it's SO important to post content to Social Media. Consistently. But that's easier said than done... To learn how to post consistently, you have to DO consistently. Which is why I've created the 31 Day Challenge- to hold your feet to the fire so you can create content, post, and finally attract your ideal clients to you, rather than chase them down...

Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. In this episode, I'm going to explain what

your business can learn from Stanley's Tumblers. Hi, I'm

Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weenie

cast. If you've ever

walked by a construction site, I guarantee you you've seen a certain kind

of thermos, and it's metal and it's green

and it's made by this company called Stan. And Stanley's been around

for forever. My dad was a carpenter, and I'm

sure we have them in my parents'house kicking around somewhere.

They were often sold in hardware stores and really

rough and tumble areas. I'm sure Home Depot has them. They

have a very long history of being like the working

man's thermos. They keep your coffee hot, they keep your water

cold, and I think you can also put poop in it because a liquid

is a liquid, right?

Stanley has gone through kind of a shift lately

because they created a tumblr

that went wild with the

Pinterest moms who want, like, a big thing of water with a

straw. They shifted their ideal client. Essentially, they made a ton

of money doing it. Stanley. The company used to make

$70,000 a year. And in the last four

years, after coming out with what they call the quencher,

the thermos that has the straw on the top, kind of like what you see

every soccer mom walking around with.

They grew their market share to

750,000,000 in four years.

In 2019, they brought in 73 million.

In 2021, they brought in

194,000,000. It's

insane. And why am I bringing this up? I'm not telling them.

I promise I don't get kickbacks. If you want to go buy one, buy

one. If you don't, don't worry, I'm not going to pressure you either way. But

I bring it up to make a point that your ideal client is going to

change. It's a natural progression for companies that are paying

attention to how their products are being used and how their

services are being sought out. Stanley, the company

absolutely could have just stuck with their market share, could have just stuck with the

construction guys and their thermoses and said, you know what?

That's it. We're not interested in growing into any other markets.

And yet they didn't. They

noticed when soccer moms. I say soccer moms,

lots of people got these, but it's kind of like the stereotypical Stanley

carrier now. They lobbed onto these tumblers and made it part of their

identity and it paid off. In your business, you're going to

have similar choices to make. What I had to do in my business, for

instance, I've talked about this many times. When I started my business, I started off

as a dating coach for men. Only one guy signed up. The

rest of my clients were women. And out of all of those clients, only one

of the women actually stuck with the dating topic. Everyone else needed to work on

how they were showing up at their job because they had really

boundary setting. They weren't great at asserting themselves. So we ended up

doing a lot of executive coaching and leadership training,

which led me down the road of becoming an

executive coach and a leadership development trainer in the

background. A lot of my coaching friends were like, wait a minute, how are you

getting clients? Because we're really struggling to get clients. And I realized

I had completely taken for granted my whole career in sales and marketing

and how I had kind of accidentally turned it into the system

that worked for me. And when I started showing it to them, it started working

for them and they started referring clients to me for this thing that I wasn't

even selling. And I realized I liked it so much better.

So I evolved my executive coaching and leadership training business

into a business building business because I felt like I was

teaching alchemy. Now after doing that for a couple of years, something

funny, I noticed that most of my clients had

ADHD and they were drawn to me. A because I'm

pretty open about having ADHD and B because I

work in a way that is really friendly to folks. With ADHD, there's

no hard and fast. Here's what you need to do and how you need to

do it and go, and you have to be my way the highway or get

the hell out. My strategist

are customizable to your personality, to

your work style, to the things that you like to do and spend your time

on, with a couple of exceptions, obviously. And that's how

the weaning cast was born. That's how I started

identifying as a business strategist and money mindset coach

for ADHD business owners.

There are a few signs that will pop up for you that will tell you

that your ideal client or your niche is ready to

change or evolve, and we're going to talk about that today. But we're

also going to talk about what is going to be required of you to

actually see it through to the other side because it's

scary to change who you work with. It's scary to get

more defined because you feel like, you're scaring people away.

And sure, sometimes you are. But like

Stanley, our dear friend, with the thermoses and the hot beverages and

the cold beverages, you can choose to stick with the status quo, and

hopefully it'll just stay the same. Or when opportunities

like the soccer moms come a knocking,

you can choose to run with them and hopefully

have a similar surge in business. And fingers

crossed that you jump from something like

73 million to 194,000,000 in two

years. If you do, please let me know. I would

like to invest in your business, but maybe tell me before you surge

so I can really get in with a good share price.

So here are a few of the signs that your ideal client or your

niche is wanting to change naturally.

The first one is your niche is narrowing down

naturally. Now, this is what happened for me. I started getting

a lot of clients who all had ADHD,

or they started working with me because they kind of suspected

that they did, and then they ended up getting diagnosed with it. During our time

together, if there was anyone out there who had a

theory that ADHD is contagious, they'd have a very easy

time coming up with bad evidence

by looking at some of my clientele, because it seems that when

people work with me, they get diagnosed with ADHD. It's not a causation

thing, it's more of a coincidence thing.

I don't cause ADHD in other people is what I'm saying. Okay. Don't come after

me now. I absolutely didn't have to go with the ADHD thing. I could

have just stayed a business strategist for heart centered service providers, which

I still talk a lot about. However, one of the things that

I saw is there were so many ADHD business owners who

are looking for support and not finding

neurodiversity friendly support. Like

myself. I had so many coaches in the beginning years

of my business that were neurotypical who

didn't understand that my brain just worked differently and caused

a lot of shame for me, really slowed me down because

they made how I was working in my own business wrong because it wasn't

their way. And when I started noticing this trend in

my business, that a lot of folks that were maybe ADHD

or definitely ADHD were coming to me, that there was this fear

they had that they were going to be made wrong. And I realized instead of

just having it kind of be an aside of, by the way, I have

ADHD, and you're safe with me to stick this flag

in the ground and say, no, this is an ADHD friendly space.

This is a space designed for people whose brains

work differently, whose brains have always had to

bend like pretzels to fit into the model

that has been handed to them. That's created by neurotypicals. We're not standing for

that anymore. We're creating. That works for you in your business.

Now, this could also happen. Like, for instance, when I said I was dating coach

for men and I got pretty much all female clients. That's

another instance of, like, your niche is kind of

naturally shifting to something else. I've said it before, and I

will say it a gazillion times. Again, picking a niche and

discovering your ideal client is a dance with the universe.

You're never going to find the right dance partner if you just sit on the

sidelines. You have to get up and you have to get on the dance floor,

and you have to dance with the first person. If they're the right

person to dance with, you're going to dance with them all night. Congratulations. There you

go. But if they're wrong, you're going to find your next partner,

and you're going to find your next partner, and then the next partner is going

to find you. It happens on the dance floor, it happens in

your business, but it can't happen if you don't get up and

start dancing. So that's one sign that your

niche or your ideal client is wanting to narrow down

further, is you're just naturally attracting a

subset within your niche.

The next sign is you're getting a lot of clients who are

signing up for the thing that you offer and then saying, hey, can

you also do this other thing? This

is the quintessential Stanley example. They

had a solid product that everyone knows

and loves. And once you have a Stanley Thermos and you're in the

Stanley Thermos family, like, once your friend drives over

your Stanley with their pickup truck and squashes it, you're just going to go and

replace your Stanley. But when the soccer moms came a knocking,

said, hey, can you make more of these tumblers that you made once? We love

them. It's a sign that you have a new market

available to you. You have a new service offer that

has a market that's ready to spend money on it. This is

a tricky one because you know how I talk about Candy a lot. I talked

about Candy a little bit in episode 66. It's also about how you can avoid

going to jail with your testimonials. Great episode. I recommend you go check it out.

But Candy Whiteis is basically where you have a bunch of clients who are all

asking you to add different random things onto your service

offering. Now, we want to be very careful around this,

because when you have candy, you get spread way too thin

doing way too many different things. And it's

incredibly hard to continue to deliver

at the level of excellence that you're used to when you're doing

so many different things. But if you find

that like 70% of your clients are saying, hey, can you also do

this one other thing? And it's all the same, that is a

beautiful sign from the universe saying, you need to start

expanding into this area. And if not expand, then maybe create

some partnerships so that you have other service providers who can come in and do

that thing. For instance, I help people build businesses. A

partnership I absolutely could create is bringing in social media

managers who can do that for my clients if my clients were asking for

it. The third sign that your ideal client is

changing is, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep

listening to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel,

squirrel.

The third sign that your ideal client is changing

is, quite frankly, you start out growing them.

I'll use kind of a fun example. So imagine through high school and

college, you became a swim instructor. You were working with kids,

and you really enjoyed showing five year olds

that they didn't necessarily have to drown if they got in the pool, that they

could go underwater and hold their breath and jump back up, and how they could

tread water and do the breaststroke and do the front stroke and do the

backstroke. You gave them this confidence, and it was something

that just lit you up. It was kind of a side job. But as you

progressed in your own swimming career, maybe you were given an opportunity to coach a

swim team, and maybe the swim team was middle schoolers or high

schoolers. And again, your swim career is

progressing. Perhaps there's an opportunity that

opens up the local college. They need someone to coach their swim

team. And eventually, you've completely

outgrown that initial first niche of teaching kids how to

swim. And you're now working with semiprofessional

swimmers on how they can improve their form so that they

can win races. That's a really natural progression of

outgrowing one niche and one ideal client and

growing into the next level. Now, part of this

is it happens naturally, because when you're just starting out,

you have more accessible memories of what it was like to be a beginner. This

is one of the reasons why a lot of the business building programs that are

available in digital form, digital courses, pdfs,

books that are written by people who have multimillion dollar

businesses. Why? They don't actually help people who are just starting out to

start their business. Because the person who created it is too far

along. They don't understand the beginning steps anymore. They're too far away from

it. They forgot a lot of bits. And of course, their

advice is still going to be helpful, but it's not necessarily right for

the person who's just starting out. Something that you want to pay attention

to is where do you feel drawn to work with people? Is it

changing over time? And are you losing touch with

where your clients are in the here and now?

If you're feeling drawn to move forward or if you're losing touch,

those are both signs that you're outgrowing your current client.

This is one of the areas of your business where being a weenie is

going to limit you. Because the only thing that will hold you back is

fear. The fear that if you narrow your niche further, that you're going to

scare too many people away and you're not going to be able to make money.

The fear that you're not qualified enough to do this

other thing, to expand into a new market, to offer a new

service. The fear that if you leave this

niche or this ideal client that you're outgrowing behind, you're never going to

get new business. And really, the thing

that is going to help you get over this

is by just stepping into the audacity to

be a leading expert. Now, when I talk

about having the audacity to be a leading expert, I'm

going to use one example that is kind of fraudy.

But I say this because I know you're

qualified. I know you're good at what you do. I know that you're an expert,

even if you don't see yourself as an expert. So I want you to

imagine like your typical Chad. And Chad just got back from

a three week trip in Italy. Chad is talking

like he is the ambassador to Italy. He's acting

like he knows everything. He's trying to tell you about the local

economy, about the language, about how people dress,

about the food. He's telling you about the wines. He's completely

mispronouncing them, but he's saying them very confidently.

Okay. Chad has no problem acting like

he's the leading italian expert in the whole fucking

world. You start talking about Michelangelo, and he's going to start

mansplaining you about the Mona Lisa. If you know anything about art that was not

made by Michelangelo. Chad has a lot of confidence. It's

misplaced, probably compensating for something,

but that's a conversation for another day. What we want to take from

Chad is the audacity he has

to see himself as a leading expert. Now, if

you don't necessarily want to channel your inner Chad, I want you to think about

a four year old wearing a batman shirt. Think about the confidence they walk

into the room with. They think they have.

You know, they may have just gotten Batman shoes that run really,

really fast, and they want you to watch. The thing about having

ADHD is we are constantly crippled by our imposter

syndrome, right? Because we're generalists. We jump

from hobby to hobby, interest to interest. We know a little about a

lot of things. But me, an expert, who am I to

say I'm an expert in anything? Ooh,

that's probably what you're thinking right now. And to you I say, you

got to suck it up, buttercup. You've been doing this for how

long now? One of the reasons we hold ourselves

back from declaring that we are a leading

expert in our respective fields is because we look

around and we see people who've done more than us. If you were to go

and look up in any dictionary the meaning of the word

expert, nowhere in there

does it say someone who has a PhD on a topic.

Nowhere in that definition is it going to say someone who has written at

least 20 books on a topic. It doesn't say that you have

to be the best in the field. It doesn't say that you have to have

your own tv show. It doesn't say that you have to have been interviewed by

Oprah. The definition of an expert is a person who has a

comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of a skill or

a particular area. By that definition, you are an

expert on numerous things. You might be an expert

cook. You might be an expert gardener. You might be an expert

coach. You might be an expert computer programmer.

You don't have to have a PhD or even a degree on

these things to be an expert. And I know it's intimidating

when you look around and you see all these people in these fields who have

all the bells and whistles. I'm a leading expert. But do you know where they

started? They started where you are right now. They had the fucking

audacity to say, you know what? I'm going to step into my

leading expert pants and I'm just going to own it. I'm going to lead

into it, and just start walking around in

them like you belong in them. No one's going to know the

difference. I mean, unless you're a fraud like Chad,

but, I mean, you're probably not. I

don't tend to draw on as many chads as some people might think.

The magical thing, when you embrace the

audacity to be the leading expert and you start really

engaging with your ideal clients in a way that you

can allow it to change, you can allow your niche to

evolve, you end up making a lot more money. Leading

experts, someone who is an expert in a very specific field,

make a lot more money than just generalists. Case in

point, neurosurgeons make a lot more money than just

general practitioner doctors. Very few people have a steady enough

hand to cut into a brain and have it go, well. Many,

many very talented general practitioner doctors

would unalive you if they tried that. Hey, they shake a little

bit. You also open the door to more markets. And I

don't just mean the Stanley example of this, where you're selling

to one market and then you get to add to another. I mean, you can

take over different tiers of the market as you grow

into your expertness. You can roll

out programs that help people who are just starting out. You can

work one on one with the top tier people in your

field. You can launch programs that help everyone. In between,

you have the ability and the authority to be the person that everyone

turns to in this area, and the best result

is that you become the de facto expert. You have to

work less hard to be known as the person people should go

to for help with this thing. I guarantee you there are tumblr

companies out there that are wondering, how are we going to convince

people that we're as good or better than the

Stanley Tumblr? It's a lot of work, but once they figure it

out, once they convince people, once they own that market

share, they're going to have no problem. They're going to be the de facto go

to Tumbler for people who really like their cold drinks cold and their

hot drinks hot. And whenever we talk about

expertiseness, being the leading expert in

something, we tend to think you have to know absolutely everything

in your field. You do not. You

absolutely do not. There are people who

work in the bra industry who might need to know a lot about all the

different kinds of bras and how you construct them and how you manufacture them

and how you market them and all that stuff, right? There are also

people who work strictly in the nipple cover

industry, okay? It's a very small area of the bra

boob industry. All they focus on is

creating little things that just cover your nipples so you can't see them through

your shirt. That's what they're the expert on. They don't have to be an expert

on the greater bra boob industry. They can just be an

expert in nipples. And here is your full permission

to be your own version of that nipple expert.

If you're ready to stop being a weenie and actually run a business that makes

money, then go ahead and book a generate income

strategy call with me by going to

weeniecast.com strategycall.

On this call, we will talk about your goals, your dreams,

and your frustrations in getting there. And if it's a fit

for both of us, then we can talk about different ways to work together.

There are people whose jobs are literally to create boob

tape. This is a job like, there are

engineers and inventors and

manufacturers that literally just make boob tape. And then

what is this? I haven't actually used these. I bought them

and I haven't used them yet. And then

we have. These are called Nippy's skin.

This is someone's job. This is a whole industry.

Whole companies are made around this.

Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.