One of the very easy challenges to run into in any industry is juggling projects from multiple clients at all ends of the size spectrum. It might sound like the easy way out to confine yourself only to one type of client, but that causes you to miss out on entire swaths of the industry that could contribute to your revenue.
Below, we’ll offer you a few tips on how to successfully adapt and scale your shop business so that you can handle clients of any size, as well as multiple simultaneous projects!
Table of contents
- Clearly Establish Your Pricing Tiers
- Streamline Your Workflows by Delegating
- Make Technology Your Partner
- Keep Communication With Customers Flowing
- Learn To Adapt Financially and Legally
- Make Your Brand a Hub for Diverse Services
- In Summary
Clearly establish your pricing tiers
Optimizing your pricing tiers and establishing clear rates for projects of various sizes is one of the best ways to increase your business revenue. If you serve a large range of clients, including both hobbyists and large enterprises, you can’t offer them the same services or products, because they are looking for fundamentally different things.
Start out by building a product hierarchy that delineates exactly what services you offer to which clients, and at what price point. Hobbyist customers will generally prefer low-cost, self-serve products, items that come fixed-spec and out-of-the-box. For mid-sized, prosumer businesses, you’ll want to offer more modular, customizable options at moderate costs. Finally, for enterprise clients, have a price tier focused on higher-cost, bespoke products that come with a high degree of customizability and quality control, and can be shipped at volume.
Streamline your workflows by delegating
Once you start taking a variety of clients, the next thing to do is ensure that you have efficient and streamlined workflows that effectively delegate tasks. Nothing will cripple your shop faster than being unable to handle an influx of projects from various clients, all at different sizes, and with no clear hierarchy or procedure to get them started and finished efficiently. While it might be tempting to take the easy road and sideline smaller projects for your biggest customers, this form of delegation will only get you so far.
Instead of winging your client projects as they come, focus on setting up dedicated lanes of production that cover each size of client. Ideally, your production lanes should not interfere with each other or overlap except in necessary areas. That way, there is little possibility of projects getting mixed up, delayed, or sidelined because of poor workflow management and ineffective communication of lead times.
Make technology your partner
Technology is a crucial tool for businesses in almost every industry these days, and shop businesses are no exception. In manufacturing-heavy arenas, technology is more than just a means of creating products. It serves as vital support to your in-person crews and, essentially, a partner in your success. This means investing in technology and maintaining it effectively is absolutely indispensable when you want to serve clients of different sizes.
Whether you work with tech like CNC routers, sophisticated AI software, or other types of developing systems, always spring for quality when scaling up your operations. You obviously will have a budget to follow, but making that budget do as much work as possible can help you get a leg up on the competition, particularly if your clients will be looking for shops that have the highest-quality tech to support production timelines.
Keep communication with customers flowing
Business-to-business relationships aren’t exactly the same as classic retail customer service, but in a way, customer communication and engagement is just as important for your shop as it is for a retail or online store. When handling high-stakes projects for major clients, you have to be communicative about timelines, volume, shipping, and various other elements of the process, or you run the risk of hurting your reputation.
When done right, customer service can leverage the unbelievable power of word-of-mouth marketing, because your current clients are your greatest spokespeople when it comes to lead generation. Make sure your customer support channels feature multiple pipelines tailored towards different client sizes. Focus on peer-to-peer troubleshooting and fast answers for hobbyists, and dedicated callbacks and rigid documentation for larger enterprises.
Learn to adapt financially and legally
The power of adaptation and flexibility is one of your greatest assets as a shop owner, as it can drive both constant transformation and help you navigate disparate client expectations. Clients at the hobbyist and enterprise levels naturally work differently, and mid-size businesses also have their own operational requirements and restrictions, both financial and legal. As the service provider, you need to be on the same page as every client, understanding their expectations, your legal responsibilities, and whether you can actually meet their needs.
Make sure you rigorously track and monitor all of your financial and legal statements and regulations when working with different clients. This can include loans, payments, terms and conditions, and even regulatory frameworks you have to follow. For large clients, you’ll have to be aware of the need for procurement departments, Purchase Orders (POs), NDAs, and liability insurance, while smaller hobbyist clients will require less rigorous policies.
Make your brand a hub for diverse services
Even if you manage to set up effective workflows, price tiers, and customer communication, it won’t serve you well unless you can market your services effectively and ensure that clients of all sizes know that you can take on work for them. Marketing to hobbyists and small businesses is vastly different from marketing to enterprises, but you can easily do it under a single brand. The key is to effectively lay out your services and guide the ideal customer to them.
To effectively market yourself, focus on optimizing your website to funnel clients to the correct service. Set up pages for every service you offer, whether it’s woodworking, manufacturing, or even acrylic CNC work. Make sure all of those services are clearly displayed on your site menu and that customers can easily navigate to the price tier and project size that pertains to them. Beyond your website, also make sure to build up your presence on social media to grow your audience even more.
In summary
Building a thriving shop business is hard work, but scaling up is easy when you have the proper systems in place! Managing a full slate of clients at all sizes doesn’t have to be daunting if you know that you can effectively delegate work and rely on your technology and marketing to produce a seamless workflow. These tools, outlined in the tips above, are your best means of setting yourself up for success at all ends of the client spectrum!
