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🎧 This Week’s Growth Lab Podcast

Episode: Bonus Tips to Build your ICP (7:24mins) 👇🏾

95% of Soft FM companies don’t have an ideal client profile.

I know because I ask every owner I meet. The answer is almost always no.

They chase contracts without focus. Whether you run cleaning, waste, grounds maintenance, or multi-service FM—you compete on price because you haven’t defined who you serve best.

The cost: wasted proposals, endless sales cycles, crushed margins, and teams serving clients who don’t value you.

When I joined LITTA’s commercial team, we had the same problem. We won clients, but our pipeline was chaos. We couldn’t predict revenue or scale outbound.

So we built our ICP from scratch using client data.

Result: we identified construction companies, property services, and housing associations as core markets. That ICP became our foundation—why we predict pipeline and revenue quarters ahead.

This framework works whether you sell waste collections, cleaning, or maintenance services. The process is the same. Only the specifics change.

To grow beyond seven figures, you need an ICP. Not a vague idea of “property managers.” A detailed profile that tells you who to target, what to say, and how to win.

Here’s how to build one—even with zero clients.

An ICP is a detailed picture of your perfect client. It defines company attributes:

This isn’t a customer avatar. An ICP identifies companies you serve best. Once you have it, add buyer personas—the people inside those companies.

A sharp ICP focuses your marketing, sales, and delivery. Stop chasing dead-end prospects and position as a specialist, not a price-based generalist.

Without an ICP, you market to everyone—which means you market to no one.

I’ve used this at LITTA and with Growth Lab clients. It works whether you have 100+ clients or zero.

Review your client list. Use 80/20 to find your Top 20—the 20% generating 80% of revenue.

Look at:

Pick 2–3 most relevant. For LITTA: ARR, AOV, monthly bookings.

For cleaning: contract value, payment terms, service frequency.

No clients yet? Skip to Step 3 and use market research. Refine as you win contracts.

Go deeper. Review your Top 20 and find patterns:

We found 70% of our Top 20 were interior fit-out firms. Average client value: £48K annually. Sales cycle: 60 days.

For cleaning, you might find 60% are offices (20K–50K sq ft) with £100K+ budgets and 30-day payment terms.

These patterns build your ICP.

Your best clients hold the most valuable data. Survey or interview to learn:

I built a 14-question survey for LITTA’s Top 20. Response rate: 42%. The insights—around timelines, budget, perceived value—transformed how we position.

Starting out? Interview prospects. Attend industry events. Join LinkedIn groups. Ask questions. Listen more than you talk.

Pull everything into one document:

This becomes your North Star. Every piece of content, every outbound campaign, every proposal—flows from this profile.

Three mistakes:

Everything changes:

That’s the power of a well-defined ICP.

This is a Free/Core Issue. The 1-page summary + 14 question survey template are included with The Growth Lab Pro.

Pro subscribers also get bonus issues, monthly deep dives, and phase recap vaults with templates and scripts you won’t find anywhere else.

👉🏾 Upgrade to The Growth Lab Pro

Your to-do list is lying to you.

The problem isn’t your work ethic. It’s the tool.

To-do lists are infinite. Your day isn’t. That mismatch costs you 8+ hours weekly in missed deadlines, context switching, and mental overhead.

Fix it in 10 minutes:

Open your to-do list. Pick your top 5 tasks for tomorrow. Estimate how long each takes. Add them up.

Move those 5 tasks into your calendar with realistic time blocks:

Block 30–50% of tomorrow as “Buffer Time.” Urgent client calls, proposal rewrites, and fires go here.

No buffer = everything breaks when one meeting runs long.

You stop lying to yourself about capacity. You hit deadlines instead of rescheduling them. You protect the important.

Try it tomorrow. Block 3 tasks. Notice the difference.

I sat in on a commercial team meeting last week about expanding a new service offering.

The numbers told a brutal story: Core services deliver 30–35% gross margin. The new service delivers 16–21%. Worse, clients were already switching to competitors who offered it—which meant the business had to respond or risk losing accounts.

Here’s the tension: The market is sizeable (£1bn+ annually) and the business is doing £420K per year with almost zero effort. But if they aggressively roll it out to existing clients, they risk cannibalising their 30–35% margin core service with a 16–21% margin offering.

This is the principle most businesses miss: Not all revenue growth is profitable growth.

If 20% of your clients switch from a 35% margin service to a 16% margin service, your total gross profit drops—while you work harder to deliver more.

Before you expand into any adjacent service, ask three questions:

Revenue growth without margin discipline isn’t growth. It’s just working harder for less profit.

That’s it for today — short, sharp, actionable.

Here’s to smarter sales 🏗️

— Matt

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