Know Who You Are and Who Your Customers Are

Excerpt from Bigger Than the Mountains: You Can Achieve Business Success

Each of us has a voice inside of us that tells us who we are and that directs us. Mine has told me since I was a young child that I would write. The same voice has also led me on a path to do a number of other avocations and vocations, even when my loved ones weren’t always supportive or didn’t understand. Part of being able to succeed in business is knowing exactly who you are and what your company is and does.

For some people and businesses, this is a stumbling block. One client I had a few years ago who wanted me to coach him through the start-up of his entrepreneurial endeavors stumbled with this in the extreme. It was like he’d donned protective boots and hat and taken the first ten steps up the mountain only to decide he wasn’t sure about the scenery in that particular space and that maybe a peak on another continent was really where he should be. For a few weeks, we planned a restaurant. But then he got an idea for what he thought was a new kind of high heeled shoe and thought maybe that was the industry he should enter. Then initial research proved his idea wasn’t original so he changed courses to a third, fourth, and fifth idea, all in one year’s time. This not only made him difficult to coach, it made him unable to succeed at anything because he never stuck to anything long enough to see it through.

Another client of mine, a university, was struggling with some of its core functions, such as the assessment of student learning and being able to prove to outsiders what their students learned and were capable of upon graduation. I asked them to return to their mission to see what was important to them, to give them a framework for reporting the information. In the workshop I was leading of a few hundred administrators and faculty members, not a single person could tell me the mission of the university. So we Googled it and found it buried on the university’s website. When I saw it, I wasn’t surprised they didn’t know it as it was more than half a page long. Additionally, we were all shocked to realize the mission of the university had nothing to do with students; they weren’t mentioned once.
It’s almost impossible to succeed in business if your company isn’t clear on what it is and who it serves. Since many of you reading this are founders and CEOs of your own enterprises, you need to be clear on who you are, what you bring to the business (including your strengths and challenges), and why you are doing the business you do.

Take a few moments and answer these questions:
• What is my business’ core function?
• Who does it serve? (Get specific about who your
ideal client or customer is.)
• What need does my business fulfill?
• And how does it do this?
• What makes me uniquely qualified in this endeavor?

#entrepreneurship #freelancecareer #selfawareness #knowthycustomer 

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