How many people do you need to sustain your creative business? I want to introduce the idea of ‘true fans’ as a way of thinking about this.
So often we are led to believe that we should be chasing the big numbers in our businesses, 20k instagram followers, a 10,000 strong email list, a six-figure business, 10k views on our latest reel etc.
But what if we don’t need big numbers to be really successful? What if our numbers can and do look different?
My thinking around this was sparked by a now famous article by Kevin Kelly who estimated that a business who wanted to turnover $100,000 a year and whose true fans would spend $100 a year with them, needed only 1,000 ‘true’ fans. Simple but true.
True fans are those who will buy most anything you do. They totally get what you do, and connect with it because it feels like it’s for them.
They know that it’s useful to them and need very little persuasion to engage and buy. In addition, in most cases unless what you are selling is something they’d rather keep to themselves, they help spread the word about you through their positive experience of you and your products and in time, this creates more true fans for your work.
What really got me going was firstly, the fact that for me, the number is much less than the 1,000 in the original article ( with my current business model, I probably only need 100 or so).
Also, it really connected with my feeling that in order to grow my business and to be who I want to be in the business, my focus should remain on connecting with, understanding and nurturing the right kind of woman that my services are made for and who would benefit from working with me – and that I don’t actually need to find a gazzillion of them.
There is no need to try to take massive leaps with growing my list and reach. Growing it organically is not only easier but BETTER.
See, my business isn’t built on social media ads, crazy complex sales funnels and ‘journeys’. It’s actually built on old fashioned relationship building, being of service and providing great value and content in everything I do. Encouraging and allowing connection between me and you.
I am not saying such marketing techniques are not useful or important, just that for me, there is no point in getting someone on my list to just apply some cookie cutter approach to sales acquisition and see what happens. There is more subtlety and magic involved!
So I want to ask you, how many ‘true fans’ do you think you need?
Based on what you sell, the customer cycle and how long you can retain them, how often they could buy from you, how many true fans do you need to get onboard this year to make your sales target dreams a reality?
Also worth remembering that of course this is a simplistic concept – that’s why it is so attractive 🙂
My true fans might buy most or all the things but some people who are merely ‘fans’ will spend less, but will still spend – and that’s all income too. And that income in turn lessens the number of ‘true’ fans you need. For me, this is a way of thinking differently about the numbers, not getting so hung up on the big ones and focusing much more on nurturing and retaining a smaller group of people.
But to keep it simple – if you were to hit your sales target with true fans only, what would they spend? What do you have available this year that would be of value to them? So what is the potential per client/ customer in sales? And therefore how many fans do you need?
EXAMPLE: If you think your most valuable customers spend £500 a year with you and you want to create a turnover of £80,000, you need 160 of them.
I’d love to know how many fans you need, be it 25 or 1000!