Before your “Who” there was You.

For those of your that are just getting started in business or thinking about running a business contrary to popular belief, your journey does not start with your “Who”, it starts with you.

Before you can define who you are going to serve you first need to define who you are and what you want. That seems to be the hardest part for a lot of people.  So feel better because you aren’t alone.

Even people that have existing businesses come back to this question, who they are and what they are meant to do.  For some people, we have an entire list of things we want to accomplish and businesses we want to build and our strength becomes our weakness.  The fact that we are good at multiple things and can serve multiple markets can be a hindrance to getting started.

There are two things here:

1. You need to get started.
2. You need two choose.

The sooner you do both of these the better off you are.  Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis.

If you have multiple products or services or you can sell the same product/service to different groups of people, pick one.  Pick the one that you would like to work with most and/or the one group of people you can get the most results for.

BEING A BUSINESS OWNER MEANS YOU NEED TO MAKE DECISIONS.

Being a business owner requires making decisions.  In this day and age with time moving faster and faster, the ability to make decisions quickly can make all the difference in the world.  The difference between a 6 figure a year business or a 7 figure year business.  The difference between being successful or having a failure due to missing the boat in the market place.

With the Internet, everything about starting a business became much easier.  You can reach people all over the world, you can design a product and have it dropped shipped.  You no longer need your own warehouse.  You don’t need a large chunk fo change to get started (unless you are in a brick & mortar industry like manufacturing or apparel), those industries still have pretty high start up costs.

But for someone to sell on Amazon (which a whole lot of people are doing) or to sell classes or services online, it is easier and cheaper than ever before.  But it is also more crowded, overgrown and harder to stand out.  Which is why you need to differentiate yourself.

Some products or services are commodities (think screws, twisty ties or payroll services) but other services are highly differentiated (coaching, training, & classes) and some are in between (legal services, CPA firms, etc.

DIFFERENTIATING YOURSELF IN THE MARKET PLACE IS KEY TO SUCCESS

People need to know who you are.   People do business with people.  This is very true in the service industry.  For a product based company, it is much easier to simply create a product that has nothing to do with you, but yet it still does,  Most of us aren’t going to create or sell product that we don’t like or don’t use.  At least I hope not.  Most people create a product because they wanted to use it or because they saw a need for it that the current market place was not filling.  (Richard Branson and Sara Blakely, anyone?).

Now if you partner up with someone is the company and it’s value and personality going to be a blend of the two of you.  Or after a couple margaritas you create an outlandish version of you.  The cool thing is you can create anything you want.  But to make it successful it should be something you like and will stick with through the building months or years.

So, sit down and do an honest assessment about what you want and what you can do to change other peoples lives and then build a company around that.

If you are absolutely stuck and don’t know where to start, come join my “Design My Life, Design My Biz” Challenge starting October 5th.  The sign up will be up on Monday Sept. 21.

Until next time,

Peace, Love & Prosperity,

Deborah