Your Ideal Client Isn’t Who You Think

Most boutique consultancies pretend their Ideal Client Profile (ICP) is a choice: pick a segment, polish a tagline, declare your niche. In the early years, that’s not how it works. You don’t choose your ICP. Your ICP chooses you.

Whatever your website says, your pipeline tells the truth. It shows where trust already lives and who sees you as a low‑risk partner. That pull beats copy every time.

Founders sense this before they can name it. “Strange” inbound. Mismatched asks. Proposals landing in places you didn’t aim at. You think it’s a messaging problem or weak top‑of‑funnel. Usually it’s simpler: early‑stage boutiques drift toward their Demonstrated ICP - the segment that shows up, moves fast, and buys with minimal friction.

Until you see the drift, every attempt to “fix” your positioning, pricing, or offers has a high chance of failure. This essay is about noticing that force, and deciding what to do with it.

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When Your CRM Contradicts Your Positioning

At 11:42 a.m. on a quiet Wednesday, Nadia stared at her CRM with the same feeling she used to get before performance reviews: a knot of “I think I know what’s coming.”

Her firm was a “strategic growth partner for mid‑market SaaS.” The website said it. The deck said it. The social posts said it. She had repeated the sentence so many times that it felt like a fact.

Her last 10 opportunities in the CRM suggested otherwise.

• Pre‑seed startup: “Help us prioritize our roadmap.”
• 35‑person e‑commerce agency: “Can you run a client retention workshop?”
• Manufacturing firm via a referral: “We need implementation support.”
• One SaaS lead - but for ops execution, not strategy.

The sting wasn’t the variety. It was the speed. The “ICP” SaaS leads were slow and cautious. The non-ICP ones were quick and easy - the smoothest conversations she’d had all quarter.

She scrolled and thought, “Why does my pipeline look nothing like my positioning?”

Nothing was “wrong.” She was experiencing what every early‑stage boutique eventually faces.

Her desired ICP (who she wanted) and declared ICP (who she said she served) were being overridden by something stronger: Market gravity - the market’s pull toward where she already has trust.

The pipeline wasn’t broken. It was just revealing an inconvenient truth.

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In The Early Years, The Market Picks You

Most founders define their ICP aspirationally:

• “This industry seems interesting.”
• “These are the clients I want to work with.”
• “The margins look good here.”
• “I want to be known for X.”

Early on, it doesn’t work like that.

If you’re a founder‑led consultancy in the low six figures, still building traction and service‑market fit, your real ICP isn’t the one you choose. It’s the one that chooses you.

You get chosen by market gravity - the invisible force created by:

• Your past roles
• Your most recent wins
• Your existing relationships
• Your early social proof
• Your first handful of referrals
• The problems you’re known for solving
• The work people trust you to do right now

Market gravity brings one type of buyer toward you faster than the rest.

This is not fatalistic. It’s simply a recognition of how the first 12–36 months look like for most founder-led consultancies: Market gravity > website copy. Your pipeline mirrors where you’re currently trusted.

It’s also why founders feel stuck: climbing toward one buyer while the market quietly tugs elsewhere.

To resolve the tension, you need to see the three ICPs you’re already operating with.

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Your Three ICPs (Desired, Declared, Demonstrated)

Every boutique consultancy has three ICPs, whether they realize it or not:

• Desired ICP: Who you want to serve (founders’ preference).
• Declared ICP: Who you say you serve (in your positioning and messaging).
• Demonstrated ICP: Who actually inquires, moves fast, and hires your services.

This last one is the product of gravity. It's the segment where:

• Buyers already trust you.
• Referrals originate.
• Conversations feel “too easy.”
• Approval friction is low.
• Speed is high.

You don’t invent your Demonstrated ICP. You discover it by reading what the market is already doing. Quick heuristic: look at pipeline % by segment, win rate, and sales cycle. If all three point to the same segment, that’s gravity.

This is the part founders typically miss. They spend months shaping wonderful messaging around their Desired ICP, while the Demonstrated ICP lives somewhere else entirely.

Think of the three ICPs as circles. Misalignment creates predictable problems:

• If desired ≠ demonstrated, you feel frustrated by “poor-fit” leads.
• If declared ≠ demonstrated, your messaging confuses even good buyers.
• If desired ≠ declared, you become unreferrable.
• If all three differ, you get busy with the wrong work and don’t know why.

Ideally the circles overlap. That overlap is your Aligned ICP: aspirations viable, messaging resonant, market saying “yes.” More often, overlap is tiny and the circles drift.

Start by seeing your Demonstrated ICP. It’s the first step to closing the gap.

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Why We Misread Market Gravity (Three Blind Spots)

Even experienced consultants misread market gravity and struggle to understand why they drift away from their desired ICP. Three blind spots show up over and over.

The first one is expertise bias. Founders assume clients choose them for the depth of their knowledge. But early-stage buyers optimize for urgency and risk mitigation. Familiarity. Reputation within their network. Expertise matters only after these conditions are satisfied.

The second one is messaging overconfidence. We think positioning reshapes demand quickly. Early on, your strongest signal is history, not copy: past roles, wins, existing relationships. That’s what decides who trusts you first.

The last blind spot happens because of personal preferences. Most founders confuse the segment they enjoy serving with the segment that actually finds them relevant. They are rarely the same in the first handful of years of your consultancy.

These blind spots make it easy to misread the signals your pipeline sends.

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Four Signals That Reveal Your True ICP

Instead of starting with an aspirational ICP, boutiques are better served by discovering the segment that already sees them as obvious.

You can analyze your last 20-30 conversations and look at these four signals:

1. Who shows up repeatedly: Your repeated inbound patterns are rarely random. It’s reputation leaking through networks. Who sends you opportunities? From which industries?
2. Who moves fastest: I like to think that speed = relevance × trust. Look closer at the deals that moved fast with little follow up.
3. What type of problem they associate with you: Buyers tell you who you are by what they ask for. Are buyers turning to you for transformation? Implementation? Enablement? Firefighter support? Coaching?
4. What altitude they expect from you: At what level do buyers engage you?  If strategy leads keep asking for execution, your market sees you as operators. If operators ask for strategy, they see you as advisors.

Together, these four signals are gravity made visible. The results are usually quite clear. But if signals conflict, choose the segment where speed × win rate × CLV looks best.

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The Cost of Fighting Gravity (A Mini Case)

A boutique I worked with declared they served mid-market SaaS. But the market pull mostly came from specialist, creative agencies. We aligned to the Demonstrated ICP. Here’s the before/after:

Before alignment (Declared ICP = mid-market SaaS)

• Win rate: 12%
• ACV: €8,000
• Founder hours per project: 30+
• Estimated founder yield: €266/hour
• Approval friction: high
• Sales cycle: 90-130 days

After alignment (Demonstrated ICP = specialist agencies)

• Win rate: 38%
• ACV: €28,000
• Founder hours per project: 18
• Founder yield: €1,000+/hour
• Approval friction: low
• Sales cycle: 30-50 days

We changed several things at once - messaging, offering mix, and target segment - but most of the lift came from aligning with their Demonstrated ICP. We simply stopped fighting gravity.

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When Your Pipeline Lies

Before I show you how to identify ICP misalignment (and how to fix it), it’s worth mentioning that not every pattern reflects market truth. Three distortions can warp your read.

First, we often see channel bias when your leads and opportunities are coming from one place. LinkedIn followers may not match referral intros. Newsletter subscribers may not match event attendees. A single channel often attracts a skewed persona. You can correct by segmenting the last 20-30 opportunities by source channel before analyzing.

Second, early stage consultancies are forced to work with noisy, low-volume data. Five leads from one big client’s network doesn’t necessarily mean you have proof of pull from that sector. Early data can tilt your results toward specific market segments or problems. Correct by waiting for 20+ conversations or weighting results by CLV.

Another thing we can’t ignored are the distortions due to founders’ limited bandwith. When you are overloaded with delivery, inbound dries up - not due to lack of demand but lack of responsiveness. One way to correct for this is simply by recalibrating based on how responsive you were that month.

A pipeline is a mirror, but sometimes it is foggy. Those distortions don’t invalidate the idea behind gravity and the three ICPs. They simply require a careful, calibrated reading of the signals.

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The Five-Minute Pipeline Reality Check

In five minutes, you can spot market pull. Look at the last 20 conversations and ask:

1. Which segment appeared more than twice?
2. Who moved with the least approval friction?
3. Where did you win work without needing to over-explain?
4. Who already saw you at the altitude you prefer?
5. Which conversations felt “too easy”?

Where these overlap is your Demonstrated ICP.

It’s rarely the segment you wrote in your business plan.

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How to Resolve ICP Misalignment

What do you do when who you want, who you say, and who you actually serve are different? I’ve seen a division among the boutiques I’ve worked with in the past.

Roughly half of them think the best path is to “embrace gravity”, meaning doubling down on the demonstrated ICP that shows high yield, low friction, and strong pull. You can do that by recentering your offering mix, reviewing your message and content strategy, and refocusing your BD efforts on those kinds of organizations. This is often the fastest path to traction for boutiques under $1M.

Example: A founder serving ‘growth-stage SaaS’ embraced their Demonstrated ICP (specialist agencies) by cutting a low-yield workshop, tightening a diagnostic for agencies, and publishing two pieces tailored to agency pain. Win rate almost doubled in 60 days.

The other half of boutiques ask for my help to transition intentionally. Even if your desired ICP differs from the leads that are naturally approaching you, we can proactively create a plan to create gravity and pull among your aspirational, dream clients. It usually requires you to prune misaligned services and design a transition offer, create new proof points to seed credibility with the new segment, gradually reduce dependency on the old one. This is slower, but strategic.

Example: One client designed a 4-week €9k ‘AI Readiness Diagnostic’ to bridge from generic ops consulting to AI-enabled transformation. It created case points for the Desired ICP while still serving the Demonstrated ICP profitably for cash flow.

But my standard recommendation is actually to open a third door, and create a “dual horizon strategy”: Serve gravity now, and build toward desired ICP over 2 or 3 quarters.

This works because:

• Cash flow stays healthy.
• Proof accumulates.
• Your declared ICP evolves gradually.
• You never fight gravity head-on.

Most clients pick this once they see the Three ICPs clearly.

Example: A firm kept serving its Demonstrated ICP of HR tech vendors while slowly building credibility with mid-market enterprise by: (1) killing one misaligned service, (2) adding one transitional offer, and (3) publishing monthly thought leadership for the new segment. The shift took three quarters.

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The Identity Shock Moment

On this topic, something I don’t see many advisors speaking about is the emotional impact of those early stage findings.

When founders finally map their three ICPs, they realize:

• “The segment I want isn’t the segment that wants me (yet).”
• “My messaging isn’t aligned to who actually hires me.”
• “My pipeline contradicts my self-image.”

And different people react in different ways.

Some founders feel confused. Some feel frustrated. Many feel embarrassed.

Here’s what I tell them: Your Demonstrated ICP is not a problem. It’s simply information. And information gives you choices.

You are not defined by your network, your first clients, or who you attract today. You are informed by it. And once you see that pull clearly, you can make a decision.

Align with it. Evolve it. Use it as a springboard to achieve your preferred positioning. But it all starts with noticing it.

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Clarity As A Requirement

Most boutique consultancies don’t have a lead problem. They have a clarity problem.

They spend years operating with:

• A desired ICP that lives in their imagination.
• A declared ICP that lives on their website.
• A demonstrated ICP hiding in their CRM.
• And the tension between them silently taxing the business.

This is why, when we suspect this might be happening to you, the 60-minute working sessions of our Growth Scans often focus on mapping your last 20-30 conversations. Not to fix the pipeline, but to understand what gravity is already doing - and whether you should embrace it, evolve it, or build beyond it.

Once you see the three ICPs clearly, the sequence is simple: fix offers → recalibrate pricing → refocus BD → then refine messaging.

If there’s one thing I’d like every boutique consultancy founder to take from this essay, that is it: Stop telling the market who you are, and start listening to where it already pulls you.

Founder-led boutiques grow by understanding who the market already believes they are - and then choosing their next move with intention.