“I can’t market until I have a signature offer.”
This is one of the big myths that the Entrepreneurial Casino tells us.
Yes, you must have a point of view of the problem you solve for your clients.
Yes, you should have an idea of how you’ll want to solve that problem.
But exactly how it works? Exactly the tools you’ll need, the steps you’ll go through, the lens that you’ll see their problems or your work through?
You can’t know that when you start.
When I started my business, I fell for this myth too.
I bought the courses promising to help you build your “signature offer” or “flagship course”.
“It’s your million-dollar product, ready to scale! Just follow the formula!”
So I did.
I built what I thought was the right offer. I gave it a clever name, wrestled with the specific details of the offer, made a pitch deck to send to potential clients, and put it on my website.
And…it did not work. For me OR for my clients.
I launched my “Fractional Chief of Staff” offer and it was kind of a mess.
- Too much formal structure, based on my corporate days, for the clients I was aiming to work with.
- Under-priced for what I was delivering time-wise, but over-priced based on the clients I was attempting to serve.
- Heavy on the features (what’s included), and light on the benefits (what actually happens to the business).
- Zero perspective. Like, you could have just plopped in any Fractional COO/Chief of Staff/EOS Integrator and the delivery would have been similar.
So of course it didn’t sell. It didn’t reflect what the clients in front of me actually needed. And worse, I wasn’t talking to the clients who would most benefit from that sort of offer, as I wasn’t in those rooms yet.
Thankfully, as it was a service and not a course, I didn’t spend months filming videos or pouring cash into a funnel. But I still wasted time trying to perfect something I hadn’t practiced. (And if this happened to you, I’m truly sorry.)
I had to learn that your signature offer isn’t something you can design in a vacuum in advance.
Your package emerges—after practice, after patterns, after you narrow in on the people it’s a fit for.
I now call this the Offer-First Trap—where you build the package before you’ve tested your tools, figured out who you’re really here to serve, and seen what you actually need to get results.
Let’s borrow a metaphor from my husband’s world: golf.
So you want to hit par on a course.
You might be a great athlete. You might watch all the right videos. You might study the course layout, and have the best gear.
But until you step up and play—hole by hole—you won’t know:
- which clubs you actually need
- where you tend to overshoot or undershoot
- how the wind messes with your swing
- or whether you even like the course you’re on (because I thought all courses were kind of the same. Alas, they are not!)
You’re probably going to land in the rough, hit a bunker, or rack up a few double bogeys along the way.
Making those mistakes while you play the course? That’s how you get the intel you need to improve your offer so you can standardize it (and potentially productize it).
Practicing your offer repeatedly before you fully lock it down is also a great way to figure out if it's an offer you want to deliver. In my first few years, I thought I wanted to be a Fractional COO for $500K+ service businesses. But once I started working with those clients, I realized the fit wasn’t right.
Not only was the pace and price somewhat off, the business model in general didn’t give me the creative autonomy I wanted to keep writing and exploring business foundations.
So I tested and tried other formats and people to work with. Turns out, I love my $30/month membership WAY more than $5K/month Fractional COO work, I just needed a few years (and a few thousand people on my email list) to make the money work.
That’s where the real offer emerged: through patterns and personas.
As I worked with more clients, I saw very clear patterns:
- The presenting issues that kept showing up
- The questions that surface again and again
- The arc of change people go through when they work with you
- The common places they got stuck or stall out
- The tools and touchpoints that actually move things forward
These patterns start to reveal your persona—the segment of your audience who consistently gets results from your work. The ones who click with your way of teaching, service, or community. The ones who are ready for the kind of transformation you offer.
And then, the elements of my signature offer(s) emerged, because my clients needed them:
- I built the Deeper Systems Assessment to show clients their roadmap and document progress over time.
- I created the Roots to Fruits Metrics Tracker because my clients—and I—needed to see what was actually happening in the business that preceded revenue.
- I adjusted programs, added co-working sessions, rewrote my curriculum because I continued to deepen my knowledge of who I worked with and what they needed.
Once you know the patterns and the persona, that’s when your offer becomes signature.
I started out simply solving problems. Then I began seeing patterns, and creating frameworks, tools and processes to better serve my clients and get them more value.
And once I had those patterns, the systems to build became concrete, and who I serve best (and who I no longer work with) became clear.
So if you’re feeling pressured to package your brilliance into the perfect offer before you’ve had enough real reps—take the pressure off.
Do the work. Watch for the patterns. Listen to your people.
Your signature offer isn’t a starting point. Honestly? The specifics of my offers change every few months anyway, because I keep maturing as a consultant and educator.
But you’ll see what emerges when your practice meets a real need—for a real group of people—with tools that actually work.
Then, you’re more than welcome to build a “signature offer”. Because it will actually be signature.