Service Expansion and Customer Focus

eggBrain has recently expanded its services to provide:

1. Animated Flash Banners
2. Data removal and Recovery
3. Data preservation (through HDD extraction and preservation)
   
4. MySQL Database migration from Microsoft Access
5. Wordpress Blogs

Now what does this mean for small businesses in general?  Generally, if you expand your services, you have to be sure that you provide them satisfactorily to your clients.  As of now, eggBrain would like to think of it as a dragnet of sorts where you would publicize your services and catch what you can catch.  But is that the way to go?   eggBrain has read and heard a lot of other experts say that it's important to focus on your prospect profile, market segment and remember what customer are you trying to attract.  At the same time, the business owner/technician is always wondering:  is the business missing a vital customer base?  Isn't any aim of any business to attract ANY customer?

At some point, sure.  But at any given time, you want to qualify your customers.  If currently what you want are customers that have money and can pay and some of your customers aren't...time to find new customers.  Or at least change your services/products to find customers that will pay for what you have.

And this is the dilemma eggBrain is facing.  Currently, eggBrain is has a skillset that satisfies all three of its services:  database, web and PC Support.  But how does it want to market itself?  B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-consumer)?  Or as a freelance service to anybody that will take them for a long project?  Or all?  If eggBrain isn't available a certain way, what does that mean?  Is it a benefit or a liability?

eggBrain's would then pose the following questions to various small businesses:  Have you ever found your business in this situation?  That you want as many types of customers as possible but found it wasn't beneficial?  Did you have to decide that how you conduct your business has to change because your revenues were lacking?  Do YOU think it's a liability to provide focus for one service when you're good at several?

I hope to get some posts on this at any time during the next few years (trust me, I've seen some old posts when searching other blogs that still get replies). 

Compute safe.

-eggBrain