Solopreneurial Marketeer

It’s so easy to dive in. Or spend weeks or months fumbling around in the dark. Then when someone finally asks you – Do you do…? the temptation is to say YES! Then you are under pressure to deliver and to take their money. But what happens afterwards and you found you hated doing that job. It’s not quite what you had in mind? Have you made a terrible mistake going in to business? Do you clock it up to experience and say you’ll never do that again? These 5 success strategies have been designed to help you BEFORE that happens, but it’s not too late if it already has.

Take some time out and review these 5 things from YOUR life experience…before you start a business, before you start a project, before you say yes to an item of work, a reagular job or business opportunity and ALWAYS when you need to reposition yourself in the market.

Natural Ability – what you LOVE to do – the stuff that makes you get up in the morning, puts a smile on your face, makes you feel GREAT! You look forward to it and you find remarkably EASY! The other thing with natural ability is that you don’t have to be particularly good at it (you may be but its non essential – yet), but you love it anyway. If you leverage your natural ability and build a business around this key success factor, you have a very good foundation.

Capability – what you are good at. There’s some things you CAN do. You are good at, but you don’t get the same buzz as the Natural Ability stuff. You may want to increase your capability at the fun stuff in the natural ability section. A good combination of natural ability and capability means you’re on to a winner. You’ve heard the old adage - just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD. I’ve met many people who take their old day job and set-up their first business doing the same thing in their new business. If that’s what you love, that’s great. But lets just check that you aren’t missing something. If you didn’t like the work you did in the last job, then it wont be any more interesting when you are out on your own. When looking at capability don’t just look at what you’ve been doing recently, go back in time if you need to. Look at all you did. If you can find something you enjoyed which you where you where good at you’ll have a better chance of success.

It’s all about uncovering your authentic self. For years I worked in the wrong job and it was only when I started to run my own business that I discovered what I was REALLY capable of I found my authentic self and natural ability shone through.

Credibility – what are you already know for? What can you demonstrate easily? This might include qualifications, a book, a website, a personal connection, a reference or a client testimonial. It could also be the market or industry you have worked in before. All these factors contribute to your credibility. There maybe there is something you did at school that helps build your credibility. My son for example had his first poem published in a book of school poetry at the age of nine. He’s now following a literary career which started when he was nine. It all helps…it all helps build credibility.

Collateral Ability – Remember Natural Ability. Collateral Ability is the ability to leverage any collateral you may have collected along your working, business or private life. It might be physical materials you have created from courses you’ve taken, writings or know-how, products or ideas, photos taken or forms created. If you have created it once, chances are you can recreate it and improve it the second time around. By leverage I mean your ability to reuse anything and everything you can from your experience. Now I not talking about taking the stuff you did for your last employer as legally that is their IP(Intellectual Property), but there may be ideas you were exposed to which you can LEVERAGE (not copy or steal), that can be reformed or recreated or give you a basis in some way, for your new business. That’s Collateral Ability

Visibility – the final success factor is your visibility. This is where you get known for something. Try to keep this down to one thing or an umbrella of things that are congruent.

Things that are, a) true to you, and b) make sense when you put them together

Reviewing these 5 Keys to Success makes doing what we do for a living ‘easy’. If you get up every day and find yourself in ‘flow’ you know you’re doing a lot of the right stuff. You start attracting the right people and experiences.

If you feel you’re hitting your head against a wall, so to speak, every day, you might need to go back to step one and find out where your passion lies. If you feel you’re hitting your head against a wall, so to speak, every day, you might need to go back to step one and find out where your passion lies. It shouldn’t be hard. God didn’t put us on this earth for live or business to be hard.

Reviewing your Collateral

In this market you need to review everything you have ever done and evolve it so you can leverage it into your new business. Your past collateral or body of work should be reviewed to see if it can be reused, remodelled and reapplied in some way. A blank page is always a difficult place to start. If you have something you can use you should look how you can leverage it.

 I’ve been lucky because I ran my own business before. I created a great deal of collateral. I had created procedures, forms, reports, templates, invoices, marketing plans, style guide on using the brand, training materials and even books. Just having a format for creating a document can be time saving in itself and look far more credible than having no format defined. Establishing document standards early in your business not only makes life easier for you because it’s already done for you, it also adds to your credibility because it looks more professional and less ‘thrown together’.

If you are currently an employee and work for a company you may not be able to a) access such materials or b) have any rights to reuse these materials but what you can do is use them for inspiration, even if you have to recreate them. Take a look at all the training courses you have been on and see if there is anything in there that can be used, either to help you with the back office systems that you’ll need to create for your new business or if there is anything you can adapt for your clients.

Reviewing your Natural Ability

As we discussed previously, it’s important to be your authentic self. We’ll cover congruency in more depth later, but this exercise in reviewing your natural ability is an important one to do. Your natural ability might include such things as being creative, being articulate and enjoying meeting new people; or it might be being great at detail, hating speaking to new people and being great at websites.

Take a moment to look back on your life and look at a few things you have done and ENJOYED doing. This gives you immense insight in to your natural ability. List your top 5 attributes which embrace your natural ability.

1.      ____________________________________________________________________

2.      ____________________________________________________________________

3.      ____________________________________________________________________

4.      ____________________________________________________________________

5.      ____________________________________________________________________

When I started my first business I looked back at one of my previous positions. At one point I came to a cross roads in my career. I had the choice of 2 promotions. One as a Project Manager where I would be responsible for delivery of projects to clients and one as a Business Development manager where I would be responsible for selling and making promises direct to clients. I chose the first role as I thought at least I would be able to deliver on my promises if I controlled the development of the IT systems being built. What I really wanted to do was the Business Development role as I love meeting new people and getting ideas across, but I knew that once the idea was sold, I had no control on the delivery.

When I started my new business I had control of both and I really loved doing business development for my company. My business partner in the new business was someone I had worked with in when I was at the same company. Jillian did business development, but she hated meeting new people and could never understand why they couldn’t understand her ideas. When we came together to start www.homestagers.co.uk , we basically ended up switching roles and we where both able to put our respective natural abilities to work. We made a great complementary team. I was able to go out and meet new people and express the ideas clearly. She was able to keep the back end operations of the business on track and deliver what I needed at the front end. I had absolute trust that she could deliver and she did. She had absolute trust that what I wanted to do, was the right thing. We stayed in business together for 7 years and we are still best of friends.

Play to your natural abilities. It can pay massive dividends. If there is something you don’t like or want to do, reform your business model so you either don’t need it, can partner with someone you trust or your form a strategic alliance with someone who can help you. (See more later on strategic alliances, virtual teams and mastermind groups)

Only do what only you can do. As your business grows this is a key component for success.

You have 3 options:

1.      Remodel your business so you don’t need it

2.      Outsource it and pay someone to do it for you (I’ve done this with both appointments scheduling and bookkeeping)

3.      Partner with someone on a revenue share or barter basis (where you trade skills to help each other).

Another couple of natural abilities I have is being creative, thinking out of the box and coming up with new angles on a problem or situation and I absolutely love public speaking and presenting. It took me a while to realise that I did enjoy presenting. I remember going on a presentations course with one of my previous employers and having the presentation videoed. I really died on my feet. But it was something I really wanted to master and over the years I have done. (more on presentations and public speaking later).

I also remembered that at the age of 10 I was on local radio. My school had been involved with Science 77, an event where schools in the area had an opportunity to showcase some form of science learning. My project was with my friend Wendy (she hated speaking up in class and was painfully shy) I recorded a scene as a bumble bee going about its normal working day. I recorded in effect a voiceover acting out the role of a bee that could talk, in bee speak, about how he collected honey and how the hive worked. It went out on BBC Radio Derby one Saturday evening. Little did I realise then that I would be doing voice-overs and public speaking when I ran my own business some 30 years later. That’s what I mean by natural ability.

What have you done in your childhood or at school that you could apply?

Reviewing your Capability

Remember I said I worked in IT (Information Technology) for 15 years? Then I retrained in interior design, then after I sold my home staging business I created a new marketing business. How did I do that? Why did I do that?

I didn’t want to “DO” IT any more but the knowledge I learnt whilst working in IT helped me do certain things in my first business. I worked as a business analyst for a while, which meant I had to take user requirements and take the concepts to the programmers, the web specialists who actual converted the wants in to something that could work. Although I’m not ‘that technical’ myself I understood enough about how to construct a website, how copy is king and how to get up in the search engine rankings. With that knowledge I managed to get www.homestagers.co.uk to a number one position in www.google.co.uk the only search engine that really counts in my book. The search terms where home stagers, home staging.

Another capability I brought across from the world of IT is the concept of build once: use many times. In IT world this refers to creating a piece of software and with only minor changes, using it for other applications in other industries. I used this method to define services for various markets. I developed a core service and renamed it so it became attractive to other buyers in different markets. I now work with small businesses to help them to do the same. Call it repackaging, repositioning or rebranding in the world of marketing, but I do this based on the build once: use many times method I learnt in the world of IT

I’d also managed an IT support call centre so I knew about ‘the client experience’. So when we started to outsource the appointments line, I was able to create a procedure that defined the caller types and how I wanted them to be handled, to give the potential client the best experience possible.

I had worked in quality in the late 1990’s and had got my department through ISO9001so I knew about department operating procedures, which meant that as I brought staff in to the business I could document how I wanted certain functions to operate and when I came to sell that business, I had something to hand over.

I had worked on creating commercial business cases detailing the benefits of implementing new systems, so I knew how to write my business plan for my business. It was one of the most well thought out business plans my business advisor had ever seen.

But even with all this large company experience, nothing could have prepared me for running a small business. But I learnt quickly. Not only do you have to wear many hats as YOU are the business, but you do things on a smaller scale and you do things differently. You learn very quickly that time is of the essence and that you run with the less than perfect, and refine it later. And that the buck stops with you.

I also knew that when you start something new, in a new area that you need to hang your hat on some form of credibility so you are taken seriously. I knew I needed at least some basic interior design training to get me started. So I went back to college. The program I took then became the minimum requirement for the stagers I trained. No sense in reinventing the wheel.

Then as the clients came, the case studies where written and the visibility and credibility came.

Think about how you can bring your past experiences, knowledge and capability in to your new business. And think about where the gaps are. Then plan to fill the gaps. Sounds like a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) More about that in the next section.

Defining Your Credibility

The one basic rule to learn and then follow every single day is very simple…

Do what you say you are going to do; when you say you are going to do it.

Do it with clients, contacts, people you meet at networking events, enquiries and especially the media.

What I learnt in my first business is that we won the business BECAUSE we responded the fastest not because we charged the least, or had anything particularly superior to our competition, simply because we responded quickly.

I have my own personal credibility rule.

If I could tell you just one thing to do to help your personal credibility, that would be it.

Respond, respond, respond.

I’m a great believer in the power of the Universe and Devine Inspiration. Opportunities come along and must be seized upon. I may wake up with a great idea. That’s Devine Inspiration. Then I get up and ACT upon it. Many people who know me personally know that I’ll send emails out a 3am or I’ll create a newsletter or website at 5am. My greatest work has come as part of Devine Inspiration. Now it’s not to say that you can go to the bank manager with this as a strategy – doesn’t work. And it’s no replacement for your life plan, business plan or marketing plan – but once you have defined the WHAT it is you want to achieve, act on Devine Inspiration to help you with the cursed HOW’s.

Ref: Mike Dooley: CD’s series Infinite Possibilities

The only difference between the person who also had the same idea as you (and that does happen). It happens all the time. In nature – when blue tits where first recorded to peck the tops off milk bottles in the 1960’s, it happened simultaneously in the south and in Scotland.

It’s the same with any idea and especially relevant with business ideas. The number of people I have met how said they had the idea of starting a home staging business but didn’t act on it.

What about innovations. The wind up radio, the bag-less vacuum cleaner? All ideas that many people had at the same time, but only a couple of people ACTED on it.

The best way to grow your credibility is to take some action and follow it though.

That way you can be the first to market or at least you get to market.

ACT: RESPOND:ACT: RESPOND

When it comes to dealing with the media, it’s all the work you’ve put in to your business, your credibility and visibility that has got the phone to ring in the first place. Don’t throw the chance away. Your competitors are just one phone call away.

Ref: The Personal Credibility Factor – Sandy Allgeier

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