How Scarcity Can Turn Your Business into a Desirable "Boutique"

One piece of commonly accepted wisdom among the entrepreneurship expert crowd is that you have to “earn” a sale by asking for it. They spend a mess of time talking about a bunch of crap that effectively boils down to asking people to, “buy my stuff”.

That’s one way of getting a sale and if we’re being honest, it’s the most prevalent way. You talk about something you do, explain the problem it solves, list the benefits and then tell the person how they can buy it.

It turns selling into an “event”.

But that’s not the only way to sell things and I’d argue that it’s not even the best way much of the time.

Don’t get me wrong — there are times when you’ve just got to make the offer and tell people how to take you up on it. One of the biggest failings that I see with some people is that they never make an offer at all for anything and are afraid to try and sell to their audience.

People who never ask for the sale are usually poor and frustrated.

Limiting Your Availability and Controlling Supply

However, I’m a much bigger fan of a different type of selling that we used when we ran our content business and it’s a method that never really gets talked about — we were intentionally scarce.

Let me wrap a caveat around this…

I’m not saying we did “scarcity-based” selling because I hate that model — there are no fake pressure tactics where we said for a limited time there are four places left and then they’ll be gone forever.

That’s not what I’m talking about at all.

Our content service was just… well… “scarce”.

We didn’t talk much about it with clients, we didn’t do ANY promotion at all and we never were never out actively selling — I can’t remember a time when we were asked to produce any kind of “quote” or proposal.

The Power of Referrals

We got 95% of our business from existing client referrals and the rest came from someone reaching out to me personally and saying, “Hey, I heard through the grapevine that you have a content business…”

In 2015, we took down our dedicated website for the content business, so the only marketing channel is was literally word of mouth.

When clients referred to what our content service did, they’d often describe it as “boutique” which I kind of liked because it allowed us to be choosy about who we worked with and how we choose to do business.

Don’t get me wrong, we always had a bunch of transactional-type clients that we’d had for years who bought things like article rewrites and some basic SEO-type content, but the bespoke stuff is where we tended to focus.

The great thing about this “scarce” approach is that by the time the person reached out to talk to me about their requirements, they’d already self-qualified to a large extent. The conversation was never about whether or not they’d hire us, but whether we did the type of work they were looking for, how much it would cost and if we had the capacity to turn it around in the timeframe they’d like.

I’d say about 75% of those conversations went nowhere.

Being Selective About Who You Work With

The majority would come down to the fact we didn’t do what they wanted or they were looking for content in a market we didn’t serve.

The next highest impediment to coming to an arrangement was whether we had the capacity to deliver in the timeframe they’d like — most times, these clients were looking for something unrealistic in a short period of time because they’d been left in the lurch.

Interestingly, a good portion of those people would approach us with future projects and we’d eventually end up working together.

The final hurdle was price but generally speaking, because of the “boutique” and “intentionally scarce” approach, people who reached out to us weren’t what I would consider “value buyers”.

This model worked for us, but there were some downsides.

You don’t really start out like this, you have to kind of grow into it over time. When you’re starting a business from the ground up, you need to be willing to take on some crap work and get the turnover happening so that you build your momentum.

This model also has a pretty limited ceiling financially — when you’re not out there promoting what you do, your market potential is inherently limited.

The Limits are Mostly Imaginary

That said our content business was always limited by supply more than potential and there are PLENTY of multi-billion dollar “boutique” hedge funds and big law firms that only accept new clients by referrals, so “limited” is relative.

It’s also not a great model if you want to be “interwebz” famous. If you’re looking to build a huge profile or personal brand by establishing yourself as a “big hitter” in your market, then being low-key and boutique isn’t conducive to that.

You never saw me appearing in “round-up posts” talking about the latest trends in a bunch of topics but I knew that we were WAAAAAY more successful than 80% of the people who seemed to be in every single industry promotional collaboration.

The bottom line is, this kind of “intentionally scarce” and low-key approach can work for you, but you have to be willing to go down that path and fully commit to it.

When you get it right, it’s a great way to run your business.