“Do I need to pick a lane now, or do I need a few more reps first?”
A consultant asked me this last month. He was six months into building his business, with four clients.
He was hearing it from both sides. One camp says niche down or you’ll never get traction. The other says you’re too early to be picky, take the work that comes to you.
Both are right, just not at the same time.
In my experience, we all go through three phases as we grow. How long you are in each phase is completely up to you.
Phase 1: Learn
You don’t know yet what you want to sell or who you want to sell it to. The only way to learn is by selling and delivering. Early on, that means selling whatever the heck you can, to whomever will give you money, until you can replace your previous income.
You might take work that’s a little off profile, you scope custom, your pricing is all over the place. All of that is normal. The whole time, you’re paying attention. Which offers do I like the most? Which types of clients do I like working with the most, and the least? Where’s the true demand? What do I actually enjoy? That last question matters more in a solo business than anywhere else, because you’re part of the offer.
Marketing usually stays narrow in this phase. You focus on direct outreach, referrals, and catching the demand already looking for you in marketplaces like fractional job postings and Upwork.
The trap in this phase is jumping ahead to Phase 2 work. Spending time polishing your website or your methodology feels like progress, but you’d be trying to systematize a pattern you haven’t found yet. Write down your offer and your best guess at who it’s for, then go sell. If it takes more than an afternoon to get started, it’s overkill. Through selling you learn what to sell and who it’s for and can refine it over time.
Phase 2: Focus
Eventually you get to a point where you can extract some patterns from the clients you’ve worked with. You’re also probably sick of the custom everything. That’s when you move into Phase 2, and it’s all about focus.
You get to a place where you can say, okay, I’ve done enough experimenting, and I think I know what I want. Now you commit to something more focused than what you’ve been doing, which means picking the right client, the right offer, and the right model. Then you build a repeatable client acquisition system around that focus.
The raw material already exists. You’ve done the work and you have the results, they’re just scattered across a dozen engagements that each look a little different. The job is deciding where your proactive effort goes. You aim at the center of the bullseye and stop chasing everything outside it.
Focus is also what unlocks additional marketing channels. Referrals, outreach, and sales calls are one-to-one channels. You can adapt your message on the fly based on who’s in front of you, so they work even when your business is broad. Content, SEO, and ads are one-to-many. One message goes out to everyone who sees it, so they only work when your audience is focused enough that one message fits.
The trap in this phase runs in both directions. One is the mirror image of Phase 1’s: still hypothesizing, still saying yes to everything, when the pattern is already sitting there in your client list and you just need to focus now. The other is jumping ahead again and launching too many new offers, audiences, or initiatives at once before you’ve nailed the first one.
Phase 3: Expand
The focus is proven and the client acquisition system is running. Now you add.
There’s a lot of talk among solos about portfolio careers right now, and this is the phase where one can get built. Usually it’s a new offer for the same audience. Sometimes it’s a similar offer for a new audience. One content strategist in the 10x Solo community recently shared how she added $35k of additional revenue this year through teaching and advising in-house content managers, a completely different audience than the clients she consults for.
The trap in this phase is expanding too quickly to too many things before you nail the first expansion opportunity. Each additional offer or audience needs its own repeatable system, which is why the rule is one at a time. Running three to five offers across different audiences is how people stall out. You don’t starve for clients. You drown from going an inch deep and a mile wide.
I feel this pull myself. The next offer on my list, group cohorts, is staying on the shelf until I’m all the way out of Phase 2.
How to tell you’re ready to focus
The readiness signal can show up in two ways.
One is the pattern. You have enough real client experience behind you, usually 12 to 18 months of it, to look at your past work, point at something, and say, I want more of that. This has nothing to do with revenue or client count. Plenty of people have both and still can’t point at the pattern.
The other is exhaustion. Every project gets scoped from scratch, every proposal is different, and every week brings a new kind of job. When you only have a few clients, that’s fine. But as you fill your roster and max out, you start to feel like you’re drowning, and you know you need to focus somewhere just to get your sanity back.
Most of the solos I work with 1:1 are maxed out and feeling the pain of Phase 1 enough to know they need to pick something. Some have begun to spot a pattern, others don’t know what to pick yet. That’s normal. Finding the pattern is a big part of the work we do together. You just need some real work experience to look at.
You can get the timing wrong in both directions. I took too long. It took me 3 years of testing models to figure out where to focus. Other people niche too quickly, on a guess, before they have real client data to prove anything on. You can’t focus on a capability you haven’t built yet.
The choice isn’t permanent either. I’ve focused twice, first to service providers after half of my clients pointed that way, then narrower to solos and fractionals once I saw which clients I enjoyed most and could make the biggest impact for.
Focusing doesn’t mean dropping your current clients
Back to the question the consultant asked me. Moving to Phase 2 isn’t binary, and it doesn’t mean you have to drop your current clients to do it. That’s one of the biggest fears people have about focusing. Instead, you build the focused offer alongside your current one, sell it to everyone new, and eventually graduate or wrap up with the old clients, usually over a couple of quarters.
And just because you focus doesn’t mean you can’t accept inbound and referrals from other audiences. It’s just a matter of where your proactive focus is. If someone outside your target comes to you and wants your core offer as is, sell it to them. You just don’t go looking for more of them, and you don’t build anything custom for them.
Here’s your challenge for the week
List everything you sold in the last twelve months. Skip the client names and list the projects each person was actually buying from you. If you’re early and the list is short, add projects from your in-house years.
Group the projects into types of work. A dozen projects usually collapse down to a handful of patterns.
Sit with one question. Which of those would you want to do ten more times in the next twelve months?
If an answer jumps out, that’s your Phase 2 starting point. If nothing does, you either need a few more reps, or you’re too close to your own work to see the pattern. Auditing your past clients is where I’d start looking for it.
Already focused and thinking about Phase 3? Look at the requests you get that are slightly different from your core. Usually that’s an existing client asking for something else. Sometimes it’s an audience you aren’t targeting, finding you and wanting your core offer. Those requests are your best expansion options.
You never feel ready to focus. You just get tired enough of the alternative.
Keep building,
Garrett
Just for 10x Solo members:
Last Thursday’s workshop: Lee Densmer on the ~$35K teaching revenue stream she built this year. Recording is posted in the Notion library.
This Thursday: Speed Networking + Group Roundtable Discussion. Already on your calendar.
In #asks-and-answers: “What are some ways you’ve learned to get buy-in from non-champion stakeholders quickly?” 4 replies
P.S. When you’re ready, here are two ways I can help you:
Join the 10x Solo community. A private community of full-time B2B solos, fractionals, and small agency owners. Weekly workshops, honest peer feedback, and referrals. Apply here.
Work with me 1:1. For maxed-out consultants, fractionals, and agency owners who want to make more money in less time by refining their business model, offers, and systems. A few spots open at a time. DM me to set up a time to chat.
Have questions or comments about today’s topic? Share them below.
My guess is that's actually where most people quit in Phase 1, they jump ahead to polishing something before the pattern even exists, burn energy on the wrong work, see no results, and give up without ever really testing whether their offer had traction. The trap isn't just wasted time, it's mistaking that busywork for effort and concluding the whole thing doesn't work.
So interesting that selling is an integral part of each of the 3 phases! Only by selling do you move thru these phases.