Specificity is not exclusion

by | Jun 12, 2025 | Uncategorized

One of the hardest things for a service provider to do is specialize. This is especially true in marketing agency services.

By being specific about who you serve and what you do for that customer, it may feel like losing out on the potential of things that exist outside of the target.

“But what if someone comes along and doesn’t fit inside that target audience I’m drawing a line around?”

What we’ve learned over time is just this: Specificity is not exclusion.

By being specific about the types of customers you want to attract, the liklihood of finding them increases, and the probability that you’ll do your best work (and like it better) go way up.

Having operated Science and Magic for some years, and working the decade prior in agency services – I figured it was likely time to start taking my own advice. If I look at the clients we’ve worked with over the past 5 years, and who has benefited the most from our work, a pattern starts to emerge.

They’re small businesses (i.e. less than 5 million in revenue). Sometimes family owned, but not always.

The owners are middle aged and older, and are looking toward retirement, thinking:

  • What is a business broker going to think of my operation?
  • How do I streamline things so they can be handed off to someone else?
  • What is my valuation going to be like?
  • Can my kids take over (and effectively replace me?)
  • How can I step back?

Amidst all the tactics that we deploy, the really valuable stuff starts to bubble up:

  • Building sales processes (that can be replicated and scaled)
  • Building attribution methods (that show value in the marketing and sales arm of the business)
  • Executing advertising from a CFO’s point of view

Having said all this, we’re in the early stages of rebuilding our go to market to reflect what we’ve learning in 5 years of business, and I for one am excited about the prospect of specificity. We’ll be retooling our deliverables and operations to be explicitly helpful to small businesses preparing for M&A.

More soon – thanks for reading.

-Andrew