🎙️ Unscripted Small Business · Founder Roundup
Should You Try to Please Every Customer?
Because chasing everyone is the fastest way to reach no one.
Every small business owner feels the pull to widen the net — add another service, soften the message, say yes to anyone with a credit card. But the founders we talk to on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast keep arriving at the opposite conclusion: the businesses that win are the ones brave enough to narrow down, get specific, and speak clearly to the people they were built to serve.
Three founders — a gamified-business consultant, a strategy coach, and a marketing-clarity expert — each tackled the same tension from a different angle. Click any name to listen to the full conversation.
The Question: Should You Try to Please Everyone?
Paul Pape — Ride the Dragon of Passion
“Stop trying to please everybody. Stop it. Knock it off. As soon as you try to appeal to everyone, you gray yourself out. Stay true to the passion that you have and the customers you are imploring to are going to be like super fans.”
Paul Pape, creator of the Gamify Business framework, says the instinct to chase everyone is exactly what drains the color out of a business. When founders feel stuck, they branch out and grab more categories — and end up grayed out. His alternative is to ride the dragon of passion: stay true to the thing that started it all, and the right customers become superfans. He pairs that with the Rule of 100: “A hundred consistent people buying from you will make you successful to a point of comfort.” You don’t need a million customers. You don’t even need to scale. A loyal, consistent base — the people who actually love what you do — is enough to build a comfortable, successful business.
Kate Hendrickson — The Strategy Lane
Kate Hendrickson spent over a decade teaching leadership inside a large Chicago consulting firm before bringing those frameworks to trades and service businesses. The most common failure she sees isn’t a lack of effort — it’s too much of it, spread too thin. Owners show up juggling twenty priorities, putting out fires in every direction, never able to tell whether any of it is working. Her prescription is ruthless focus: “Small businesses focus on way too many things. If you can narrow your focus to two or three items and have some data to see if you’re actually moving in the right direction — that is where things get really good.” Pick two or three goals, attach real data to them, and you finally know whether your effort is moving the business or just keeping you busy.
Bruce Ashford — The Ashford Agency
“First impressions are visual. Commitments to buy are message based.”
Bruce Ashford helps nonprofits and small businesses with high-value missions that struggle to grow because their message is unclear. His core fix comes from the StoryBrand framework: the customer is the hero, not your business. Most companies cast themselves as the hero and wonder why the message falls flat. Instead, your business is the guide — brief, credible, empathetic — giving the hero a simple plan. That only works when you stop trying to speak to everyone. Bruce points to the three levels of every customer problem — external, internal, and justice — and shows that naming the deeper layers is what makes even a “boring” product compelling to the specific person who has that problem. Clarity, aimed at the right hero, is what turns a first impression into a commitment to buy.
The Common Thread
Across all three conversations, the message is the same: focus is not a limitation, it’s leverage. Paul says appealing to everyone grays you out, so you should ride your passion and earn superfans. Kate says narrowing to two or three tracked priorities is where things get really good. Bruce says clarity — aimed at a specific hero with a specific problem — is what converts interest into purchase. Trying to please everyone dilutes your message, your strategy, and your identity all at once. Choosing who you’re for is what makes you findable, memorable, and worth committing to.
Want the full conversations? Each name above links to that guest’s episode. For more real talk from founders building across the United States, subscribe to the Unscripted Small Business Podcast.
🎙️ Podcasting as an SEO Service
Want your business found the way our guests are?
We turn real conversations into search-ranking content, backlinks, and authority — done for you, the same way we produce this show.