The Two Secrets of Achieving Tremendous Success in Your Small Business
If you’re a small business like most of us are, you have limited resources. You can’t be all things to all people. So the first secret is to look for a niche where you can be first or unique, or offer value that other people don’t offer, or find some way to carve out a niche.
Why go and compete and knock your head with all these other 100 other competitors out there? Find an empty blue ocean where you can be the first or the best or add value or come up with an innovative assembly of things that other people haven’t thought of before. That’s where your business opportunity is, and it makes so much sense.
You’re not going to try to invent Coca Cola, right? I mean, that’s been done. Somebody with a market share like that, you’re going to have a really hard time nibbling away that market share. You have to look for something different, and find a niche.
The second secret is that you need to have a coherent strategy. If you find your niche, and have a coherent strategy for exploring the niche, the two go really well together. You need to have that coherent strategy, and then most importantly, execute on your strategy.
Develop a customer persona. What is a customer persona? It’s kind of like the perfect, most ideal customer. The person with whom you have the most fun working. What kind of jobs, what kind of projects make the most money for you? What are the demographics of your perfect customer? What are the psychographics of your perfect customer? One of the things that we look for in terms of psychographics is we look for people that appreciate the work we do. Not just pay for it, but we want people that appreciate the work we do. They understand the impact that we’re having, and they share that with us. It’s really a combination of getting paid but getting paid physically and psychologically through positive feedback.
Find those customers that do those things for you, that pay you but also make you feel good about what you’re doing and encourage you to do more and more of it. That’s a virtuous cycle that will help build your company, and that’s the kind of customer you want to attract. Create your coherent strategy with those customers in mind.
