I’ve lived through several economic downturns, and no matter where I lived or what business I ran, I noticed the same pattern: when economic conditions tighten, two practitioners can live on the same street and operate in completely different economies.
One freezes, postpones new work, and either shuts down marketing or doubles down and shouts even louder to the widest possible audience. This owner waits for someone else to declare it’s safe to move.
The other doesn’t wait for better conditions. They get more specific about the people who still have a problem they can solve, and about the problems those people will still pay to have solved.
“The economy” is a weather report. Useful. Incomplete. And a terrible operating system for a practice. This second group is resilient, and doesn’t rely on often-wrong forecasts; they focus on the individuals in front of them. They identify who is still stuck and still looking for someone who understands exactly what they’re dealing with.
Your Economy Is Not “The Economy.”
There are two words you’ll hear on a loop during volatile years: Economy, as in the economy is contracting, and Everyone, as in everyone has stopped spending.
“Economies” are local, often industry-specific, and personal. “Everyone” is a crowd no one can actually point to.
The media and their concerned readers use these two words to explain why they’re suffering in a downturn. And the response is understandable: Hide, run for cover, and wait it out.
Safety in a downturn isn’t about making yourself smaller until you disappear. It’s saying what you really mean, so clearly and directly that the people you solve problems for can easily see you have what they need.
But retreat isn’t just a problem during a downturn; it shows up in lots of ways that slow growth and block impact, even in a good economy.
The Language Gap Few Understand
Some might say, “Well, an expert has only mastered their own subject. They are not experts at marketing and selling, and that’s why they struggle.” True, and they also haven’t built a body of work or a practice to become marketers.
Their struggle isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a language problem.
They have plenty to say; they’re just saying it the same way everyone else does, and often using abstract, insider language that doesn’t land with the people who need them.
A cardiologist, a health coach, and a functional medicine practitioner can all use the same three sentences to describe what they do. That’s not positioning. That’s noise.
Thirty years of clinical judgment compresses into a services page that looks like nine other practitioners in the same city. The person who actually needs that specific thing you do lands on your page, scans it, and moves on — not because they weren’t interested, but because nothing told them to stop.
When The Market Grows Louder, You Don’t Have To
Mass marketing often looks a lot like a street market. Stalls are packed shoulder to shoulder, merchants shout over each other, and most shoppers move quickly past without stopping.
In a downturn, that street market just turns up the volume.
Experts who keep growing in any economy don’t try to be heard over the street’s chaos. One more voice disappears into the noise.
The market grows louder and more chaotic because more people shout the same things as everyone else, more often, to the same diminishing result. When that doesn’t move the needle, they’ll double down with bigger signs, shoving someone into the center of the street with a megaphone. More volume, still nothing a shopper can recognize and stop for.
You don’t have to leave the street market. Build a stall the right person can walk up to — someone who already knows what’s wrong and is scanning for the practitioner who deals with exactly that. Your sign clearly names that, and they stop because it’s theirs. Everyone else keeps calling out into the traffic. You are talking to the person who has already slowed down.
A downturn doesn’t erase demand for what you know. It concentrates it.
What Specific Looks Like in Practice
A coach lost in the street market might say, “Identify your passion, find the courage to pursue your dreams, and finally change your habits.”
That may all be true. It’s also what anyone could say.
A more specific version: “Discover the underlying cause of your emotional eating and break free from the one food you’ve been trying to stop eating for ten years.”
A functional medicine practitioner does the same thing with: “I find the root cause of your illness, not just mask the symptoms.”
Every second clinic claims something similar. A more specific version: “Solve your digestive problems with the only clinic in the area doing this kind of gut and microbiome testing.”
Neither example is particularly narrow. They’re just more specific than most competitors—and that gap is usually enough to stop the right person.
Precision takes it even further.
What Creating Your Own Economy Really Means
When I talk about creating your own economy, I’m not talking about positive thinking or ignoring inflation, insurers, fear, or the news. I mean refusing to let a national story become the instructions for your local practice.
Clients and patients don’t stop looking for help when money gets tight; they get more selective about who they trust with their problems.
Practitioners who only watch the headlines call it a slowdown. The ones still picking up the phone hear something more useful: The person calling isn’t just shopping. They’re stuck on whatever it is they still can’t get past, and they’re looking for someone who can name it.
People under pressure don’t shop for services. They want to know that someone has actually looked at their specific situation and can tell them what to do next. The practitioner who can do that doesn’t have to compete on price.
The Gap Isn’t Experience
The experts I work with now aren’t starting from scratch. They have decades of cases, pattern recognition, and hard-won judgment.
What they can’t always see is how to communicate the work so a person outside their field can recognize themselves and know what to do next.
While others are out on the walkway, shoving leaflets and samples into weary shoppers’ hands and shouting louder, adding to the noise, these practitioners step back behind the counter. A shopper can easily tell their stall from the one beside it.
These practitioners stopped asking how to reach more people and started asking: “Who is still trying to solve this, and how do I become the unmistakable answer?”
Stop trying to be available to all and become necessary to a few.
Create Your Own Economy By Being Precise
You create your own economy by becoming the precise answer to a problem that doesn’t disappear no matter how bad the headlines get.
Precision isn’t a sales tactic you add once and move on. It’s how you shape the body of work you already have until the right person can tell, without asking, what you do, who it’s for, and how to begin.
Skip this precision, and your work is just another voice on the walkway.
You don’t control rates, insurers, or the news cycle. You do control who you serve and how precisely you talk about the problem you solve.
In a downturn, this precision becomes your economy. Vague practitioners feel the squeeze first. Specific ones don’t.
A Precision Practice Rests on Three Things
None of the following change with the economy. They’re important in good times and bad. What changes in a downturn is that you’ll feel it immediately if you haven’t worked them out.
- You know exactly who you’re for and what keeps them stuck, not roughly or in a general category, but the specific people still calling and the specific thing they can’t get past on their own.
- You can clearly state what you deliver without hedging it into something nobody can hold onto.
- You offer a clear first step the right person can take without asking what happens next.
The next three sections take each one further.
Create Your Own Economy By Defining the Problem
Start by uncovering the precise who and the precise problem. The usual advice is to scan the market for opportunities. That sends an expert hunting outside the building for something they already own.
Start with your body of work.
Your best people are already showing you where they get stuck, or they hire someone who looks qualified and still can’t get them over the hurdle.
That hurdle is the real work. It’s usually a smaller piece of what you know how to do – and it doesn’t go away when the economy tightens.
Nice-to-have offers fade first. The problems people can’t get past on their own, the hard call, the risk, the pain, the “who am I now,” the skill they still don’t have- those stay.
The Honest Questions That Come Before the Marketing
The question is not “What do I have that someone might pay for?” You already know you have value. The questions are:
- Where do your best clients get stuck even after they have hired someone like you?
- Which part of your expertise removes the ways people get stuck?
- Which part of what you publish lands with peers and does nothing for the person who actually needs to hire you?
If you can’t answer those, the marketing isn’t the problem. You haven’t finished figuring out what you’re actually for. Keep writing. You just won’t reach the person who needs to hire you until those answers are in the work.
Create Your Own Economy by Communicating the Value
Most expert writing is addressed to a committee that isn’t in the room. It’s written to prove the writer is qualified, not to help someone recognize they’ve found the person they’ve been looking for.
Careful, hedged writing that survives peer review works on campus. The person searching for help at 11 pm isn’t on campus—she’s at a kitchen table trying to figure out whether you offer a solution.
That searcher wants to know if you actually understand what she’s carrying — and hedged language tells her you don’t understand, or just won’t say.
Taking your work out of the language of your training isn’t dumbing it down. It’s putting it into the language of the person with the problem—someone who is often afraid to ask the real question in public because they’re not sure how to name it yet.
If you can clearly name it for them, without hedging it away, that’s what stops the scroll.
Most experts already know what they want to say. Stop writing for the person who might push back. Write for the person who needs the answer.
Create Your Own Economy by Building a Doorway
This is where most expert advice goes off the rails.
At this point in the conversation, old paradigm marketing starts talking about “closing,” which sounds like becoming the salesman they went into practice to avoid.
This is a foundational tenet of Flow Marketing: Experts who build content doorways invite the right people to step through.
In that street market, your doorway is the step from the walkway to your counter. Your sign names who the stall is for, and the first step is obvious. The right person slows down and steps up. You don’t have to lure them off the street.
That’s not a sales tactic; It’s what happens when they recognize the problem you’ve named as their own, and the language you use says so.
The work is to stop standing in the stadium with a sign, and instead give specific people a way into your specific work.
A Four-Question Precision Test
Before you rethink your positioning, run what you have now through this test.
Confusion is a street market problem, and precision is the doorway. The experts who thrive in a downturn are not the ones who get louder. They are the ones who get more focused and more precise about exactly who they serve.
- If your homepage could belong to ten competitors, it’s not precise.
- If the person you most want to work with has to infer whether you’re right for them, it’s not precise.
- If your offer needs a booming economy to feel urgent, it’s not precise.
- If you are adding more content because fewer people are buying, you are using volume to compensate for message confusion.
The economy will keep speaking in bold headlines. You don’t have to answer in the same way.
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