I’m a ____ who helps ____ with ____ (and why that blank is so damn hard to fill)

When somebody freezes up trying to tell me what their business does, it’s almost never because they don’t know. It’s because they know too much.

I do a fair bit of advising, some of it through our local SBDC, a lot of it one-on-one with clients here at DigiSavvy. Different industries, different stages, same moment every single time. I ask, “So what does your business actually do?” and I watch a perfectly competent person turn into a deer in headlights.

They do fifteen things. They’re good at twelve of them. They enjoy maybe four. And when I ask them to describe the business, all fifteen come spilling out at once, in no particular order, usually starting with the one that makes the least money. (I’ve done this myself, for the record. I’m not narrating from a mountaintop here, I’m a recovering generalist.)

The freeze

Here’s what’s actually happening in that pause. Narrowing feels like loss. The second you say “I help dentists,” some panicky part of your brain insists you just fired every non-dentist on the planet. So you keep the menu wide; the diner menu the size of a phone book — because a wide menu feels safe.

It isn’t safe. It’s just blurry. And a blurry business is hard to refer to, hard to remember, and hard to charge well for, because nobody’s quite sure what they’re actually buying.

There’s an old Bruce Lee line: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” That’s positioning in a sentence. The market doesn’t reward the widest menu. It rewards the one kick. Put another way, it’s easier to position a business that does one thing one-hundred-percent better than any other business, as opposed to a business that does everything maybe one or two percent better.

It all comes down to one sentence

When I sit with folks on this, I bring it all the way back to a single fill-in-the-blank:

I help ______ with ______.

That’s it. Who you help, and what you help them with. I borrowed the bones of this from Jonathan Stark, who’s done more clear thinking on positioning for service businesses than just about anyone I’ve read. He calls the full version a Laser-Focused Positioning Statement, and it goes like this:

I’m a [DISCIPLINE] who helps [TARGET MARKET] with [EXPENSIVE PROBLEM]. Unlike my competitors, [UNIQUE DIFFERENCE].

Read that third blank again — expensive problem. Not “websites.” Not “coaching.” Not your discipline. The expensive, painful, keeping-them-up-at-night problem your work actually solves. Your discipline is just how you fix it. The buyer only cares about where it’s hurting.

And that last sentence — “unlike my competitors” — is where you get to plant a flag. I’m not just a specialist, I’m a board-certified specialist in this one specific thing. That’s how you stop being a commodity. Specialists get the call, get trusted faster, and get to set the price.

The part where everybody chickens out

Now here’s the catch, and it’s a big one. People hear all this, nod along, agree completely… and then they still can’t commit.

So they hedge. They write a statement that tries to keep all fifteen doors cracked open, and what falls out is this soupy, hyphenated mush — “I’m a holistic growth partner helping mission-driven organizations unlock scalable outcomes.” What in the hell are you supposed to do with that? Nobody reads it and thinks, “Ah, this is the person I need to call.” (Stark has a sharp breakdown of the most common ways these go sideways if you want to spot your own draft in the lineup.)

The hedge feels responsible. It’s actually the most expensive thing you can do, because a statement that points at everyone points at no one.

Get uncomfortably specific

So my one piece of advice, the thing I lean on people hardest about: go deeper than feels comfortable. Then go a little deeper than that.

It’s brutal. Stark says people have literally started crying during this exercise, and I believe him, because I’ve watched the wobble happen in real time. Picking one thing means grieving the things you’re setting down. That part’s real, and I won’t pretend it isn’t. But on the other side of that discomfort is the easiest version of your business you will ever get to run.

Because once the blanks are filled — really filled, not hedged — everything downstream gets easier. Your marketing starts writing itself. Your services pages stop sounding like everyone else’s. You can answer “so what do you do?” at a party without breaking a sweat. You speak about your work with the kind of confidence that only shows up when you actually know who it’s for.

That’s the whole prize. Not a clever tagline. Confidence, and a business that’s finally legible to the people you most want to reach.

A tool to help you do the thing

I’ll be straight with you: this is genuinely hard to do alone, because you’re standing too close to your own business to see it. So I built something to walk you through it, one blank at a time.

It lives at advisor.digisavvy.dev. Right now it’s free — I just ask for your email, because of course I do — and it’ll take you through the whole process step by step. Budget about 45 minutes and a little willingness to be uncomfortable. You’ll come out the other end with a positioning statement that actually says something.

We did this to our own business, too. Narrowing down who we say yes to was the single best filter we ever added, and it shapes how we work top to bottom. So I’m not selling you a medicine I haven’t swallowed myself.

Go fill in the blanks. Get specific enough to scare yourself a little. Then keep grinding — it gets so much easier from here.