Half a business model

How’s this for an idea?

My local football (or soccer) club, Halifax Town, play in the fifth tier of English football.

The players are young guys and some care about fashion.

On the pitch they each wear the club kit.

But on Saturday morning, when they’re travelling to the match, they don’t.

Is there an opportunity here for a personal stylist?

Someone who curates and customises outfits for these footballers to wear when travelling to the game. The stylist works with one player—others like what he’s wearing. They ask where he got the outfit, and he tells them about the stylist, and they become a second client.

At some point, those players transfer to a new club, take the stylist with them, and business moves beyond Halifax.

Is this a bad idea?

Yeah, it stinks. Here are the headline stinkers:

1. English teams have a club-tracksuit-only policy on match days, so players are prohibited from wearing their own clothes to games.
2. Even if they could wear their fashion to matches, who would see them travel in this outfit other than their teammates? They arrive at an empty stadium three hours before kickoff. Few of the 1,500 people attending the match are waiting to greet the players.
3. The guys at this level earn around £1,000 per week, which means this business model won’t work. Any of those players who care enough to spend a decent chunk of their wages on fashion will be spending it on fashion items. There’s nothing left to pay a stylist..

The reality, though, is…

This is a great idea, and that was the wrong audience

Tom Marchitelli runs a custom menswear business called Gentleman’s Playbook. He’s worked with 500 clients, most of whom are athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL, or MBA.

Image source​

“In his role as personal designer, stylist and tailor, Marchitelli handpicks entire wardrobes for a clientele which includes Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. During the different pre-seasons across the United States’ various leagues, Marchitelli is rarely in one city for long. As well as working on a lookbook of outfits for specific events, the majority of his work centres around personalising entire collections of tunnel fits for the athletes he works with.” Caoimhe O’Neil, The Athletic

Marchitelli has built a thriving consulting business using the same dumb idea I shared at the start of this article—although in his case, it’s not dumb.

Here are three key reasons why it works:

1. Athletes in US sports can wear what they want to games.
2. Tunnel fits are real– the outfits sportsmen and women wear on arrival to the game. These players have enormous social followings, often a personal photographer who comes with them to take shots and share them across Instagram and TikTok.
3. The average annual salary of an NFL player is around $850k, but their average earnings through sponsorships and publicity is approximately $2 million. Not only do these athletes have the budgets to pay a premium for the Undisputed Authority of stylists, but the majority of their earnings comes through image, so it pays to look good and get noticed.

Here’s a pattern I’ve noticed amongst the top consultants in any field

The Undisputed Authorities serve an audience who:

• Already recognise the problem as articulated by the consultant.
• Already recognise the problem is a roadblock to reaching their desired destination.
• Already recognise the rewards of reaching their destination outweigh the cost of solving the problem.
• Have the budget to work with the person most likely to help people like them solve the problem.

Often, the significance of the audience gets lost

I’m in a handful of Slack communities and I can think of at least three positioning experts struggling to make a living.

They hold up April Dunford as evidence that there’s demand for positioning services, and they’re frustrated:

“How come she can make 7-figures per year doing this, and I’m struggling to land $30k this year?”

April Dunford is the Undisputed Authority in her niche, and that’s a significant factor in her success. Among the people she serves, she’s viewed as the best at what she does.

But there’s one crucial factor often missed.

April Dunford serves B2B SaaS founders who already recognise they have a positioning problem

That positioning problem means one of two things to them:

1. They’re burning through money and will go out of business in 12 months if they don’t turn things around.
2. They have traction, but it’s sales-led, and their positioning is confusing. If they nail their positioning, inbound opportunities will increase, sales will be easier to make, and they will likely increase exit value 10X.

In either scenario, they have $60,000 to spend to solve this problem, and if they solve it, the destination is worth far more than that investment.

Those positioning experts I mentioned in the Slack groups are missing that point.

They’re selling tunnel fits to Halifax FC.

And while there is a proven demand for tunnel-fit stylists, it’s proven with a specific audience.

The point being, analysing (and replicating) parts of a business model, without considering how it works as a whole, is a fool’s errand.

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