Positioning as commercial infrastructure: why "for everyone" costs you margin

The instinct to stay open to everyone is one of the most expensive instincts in a growing business. It feels like caution. Keep the options open, do not turn away good work, let the market tell you where you fit. In practice it does the opposite of caution. Broad positioning erodes your margin, stalls your referrals and leaves your sales team competing on the one thing that is always comparable, which is price. Positioning works less like a line on your website and more like infrastructure: the thing the rest of your commercial activity runs on, and like most infrastructure, you tend to notice it mainly when it is missing.

What Waitrose refuses to stock

Rory Sutherland has an observation about premium supermarkets that is worth sitting with. A shop like Waitrose is defined at least as much by what it refuses to stock as by what it puts on the shelves. The absence of the very cheapest, nastiest version of each product is itself a signal. It tells a certain kind of shopper that someone has already done the filtering for them. You are buying the food, and you are also buying the reassurance that a line was drawn on your behalf before you ever got there.

Most businesses never draw that line. They add. A new service because a good client asked for it. A new sector because a lead came in and the pipeline looked thin that month. A new lower price point to win a deal that was slipping away. Each addition is reasonable on its own, defensible in the moment it was made. Together they produce a business that does a great many things competently and stands for none of them clearly, which is a difficult thing to sell and an even harder thing to refer.

Why breadth turns up in your pricing

When a buyer cannot tell what you specialise in, they are left with one reliable way to compare you against the alternative on their desk. Price. Everything else about you looks roughly the same as everyone else, because "we do a bit of everything, well" is what your three competitors are also saying. You have handed the buyer a spreadsheet comparison and then acted surprised when they treat you like a line on it.

A narrower position changes what is being compared. When a business is visibly built around a particular kind of problem, the buyer stops asking "who is cheapest" and starts asking "who has clearly done this before." Those are different questions, and they support very different prices. The narrowing feels like it should cost you work. Usually it costs you the work you were winning on price and losing money on anyway, and it wins you the work you were previously too generic to be trusted with.

You can read positioning off the refusals

The real artefact of positioning is not the sentence on the homepage. You can read a company's actual position off its refusals: the enquiries it declines, the sectors it has stopped chasing, the price points it will not drop to. The homepage wording sits downstream of those choices. When the choices have genuinely been made, the words more or less write themselves. When they have not, no amount of rewording rescues the page, because there is nothing underneath it to describe.

This is the part that trips up capable leadership teams. They treat positioning as a writing exercise and hand it to whoever is best with words. But the difficulty was never the words. The difficulty is agreeing what the business will stop being available for, and that is a commercial decision with consequences for revenue, for staffing and occasionally for someone's favourite account. It sits above marketing, not inside it.

Why we call it infrastructure

When the position is settled, the business starts to run on it without anyone needing to be in the room. A salesperson knows which enquiries to chase hard and which to hand on politely. The marketing hire can brief a designer without booking a call to check they have understood the business, and a freelancer three steps removed from the founder still produces work that fits, because the thing that makes work fit has been written down where people can find it. The founder stops being the single point of failure for every judgement call, because the judgement was made once rather than remade nervously each time.

A business without that settled position pays for the gap in a currency that never appears on an invoice, which is time. The same decision gets relitigated in meeting after meeting, dressed up each time as something else. A debate about the website. Then a debate about pricing. Then an argument about which trade show is worth a stand this year. Underneath the costumes it is one unmade decision surfacing again and again, and it will keep surfacing until someone makes it properly.

A firm that could not be referred

We worked with a firm that described itself, entirely sincerely, as working with businesses of all sizes across all sectors. Their referral rate had softened over a couple of years and nobody could say quite why the phone rang less. The answer was sitting in that sentence.

A happy client who wants to refer you needs to be able to finish a specific thought: this is who you should call, and this is what for. "All sizes, all sectors" gives them nothing to hold onto, so the referral either never gets made or arrives so vague that it goes nowhere. Once the firm narrowed to the two sectors where it genuinely had depth and a track record, the referrals started describing them accurately, because there was finally something accurate to describe. The work did not get smaller. The description of it got sharper, and sharper descriptions travel.

Positioning earns its keep as the set of decisions everything else stands on, which is why the honest test of it has nothing to do with your website. Look at what you have turned down lately. If you cannot point to an enquiry you declined, a sector you let go, or a price you refused to match, you have described your business rather than positioned it. Describing is comfortable, and it keeps every option open. It also keeps your margin exactly where it is, and keeps your best clients struggling to explain to their friends why they should call you.