You will produce a one-page profile and two personas that you will use to build every list in this course.
By now you probably have notes in three places: the three piles from lesson 1.1, a couple of personas from lesson 1.2, and a list of triggers from lesson 1.3. Notes in three places do not get used. On a busy Tuesday afternoon, when you have forty minutes to build a call list, you need one page you can glance at and act on.
This exercise turns your notes into that page. It takes about twenty-five minutes, and every list you build for the rest of this course starts from it.
Start at the top of the page with the traits a good-fit account or household shares. Keep only the ones visible from outside. Your sorting from lesson 1.1 gives you the raw material: what did your clone pile have that your avoid pile lacked? Look for things like size, sector, life stage and recent changes.
Aim for four to six traits. Fewer than four and the profile is too loose to tell you who to skip. More than six and almost nobody fits.
Here is how Mei, the bookkeeper, filled in her top section:
Food and beverage business in Singapore, two to five outlets Founder still runs the business day to day Already uses a cloud accounting tool, but nobody in-house knows it well No full-time finance staff Growing: a new outlet opened or planned in the last twelve months
Every line is something Mei can check from a company website, a LinkedIn page, a job ad or a walk past the shopfront. "Values good bookkeeping" would not make the list, because she cannot see it until she is sitting across from them.
The middle of the page holds the two personas you wrote in lesson 1.2, cut down to what fits. For each one, write the role, the problem in their words, and their main fear. Keep the full half-page versions in your notes; on this page you only need enough to jog your memory before a call.
Mei's middle section reads like this. The founder: "I never know if we actually made money this month", and fears paying for help that still leaves her doing the work. The co-founder or partner who signs off the money: "Why do we need another monthly cost?", and fears a contract that is hard to leave.
Notice that the problem is in quotation marks. Those are real phrases her clients used. When she writes a first line for an email in module 4, she will start from them.
The bottom of the page has two short lists. First, five trigger events, each with the place you would see it. Mei's include a new outlet (seen on social media and in lease news), a job ad for an accounts executive (on job portals), a founder posting about a funding round or bank loan, a bad month of reviews mentioning wrong change or missing orders, and a co-founder leaving.
Second, three warning signs of a poor fit. These come mostly from your avoid pile. Mei's are: a single stall whose main question is price, a business that wants year-end accounts done in a week with no records kept, and an owner who says the last three bookkeepers were all useless. Warning signs do not mean you refuse the business. They mean you do not go looking for it, and you ask harder questions before you commit time.
Darren, the adviser, ends up with a very different page from the same steps. His traits are about life stage and work: aged roughly 27 to 35, married or about to be, first child on the way or under two, salaried with a few years in their career. His triggers are a wedding, a pregnancy announcement, key collection for a first home and a new job. His warning signs include friends who would buy only as a favour, the pattern that lapsed in his first year.
If you cannot find anyone who matches your profile, it will never fill a call list, so the last step tests it. Write down ten real people or companies who fit every trait on your page, and next to each, note the trigger or trait that put them there.
For Mei, that means ten actual cafe groups she can name, with a note like "opened a fourth outlet in March" or "hiring an accounts executive". For Darren, it means ten people from his contacts, alumni group or LinkedIn who fit, with notes like "first child born last month".
Ten came easily? Good. Stuck at four? Then the profile is too narrow for your market, and you widen one trait and try again. Mei might change "two to five outlets" to "two to eight". Darren might widen the age range or include couples planning a child. Change only one trait per round, so you know which one was holding you back.
If you find fifty names in ten minutes, the opposite may be true. Check whether a trait is doing any work at all. A trait that every business in Singapore shares is not narrowing anything.
When you are done you have a single page with three bands: four to six outside-visible traits on top, two personas in the middle with their words and fears, and five triggers plus three warning signs at the bottom. Next to or under it sits a list of ten names, each with a reason. You can read the whole thing in under a minute.
Treat it as version one. You will change it after module 2 shows which sources produce people who fit, and again after module 7 shows who actually buys. The activity below asks you to build the page and the list of ten now, so the next module has something to work from.
Complete the one-page profile template and list ten real names that fit it, with the trigger or trait that put each on the list.
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