Whether you are thinking about starting a business, you’ve just started a business, or you’ve got a business that just isn’t producing enough sales you probably share a common challenge.

When most people think about starting a business the first thing they do is look for a product or service to sell.  While that may sound logical it actually sets you up for an ongoing challenge that you could easily avoid.

Have you ever noticed how new businesses seem to be a little confusing?  It seems like this is especially true in service businesses.  Every time you talk to them or hear them talking to others they are talking about their expertise in yet another area.  It lessens their credibility when they do that.

No one can be an “expert” in every area in a given body of knowledge.  You know when I earned my bachelors in chemistry we were required to study the 4 main areas of study in the subject matter: analytical, organic, inorganic, and biochemistry.  The body of knowledge in each area of study is so huge that you can’t even proclaim expertise in an area of study.  Rather you become an expert in one small aspect of that body of knowledge.

It’s no different in any industry.  So when you are a tax expert one day, a criminal trial lawyer another, and an estate planner on yet another it leaves your audience confused.  They logically respect that while an attorney can legally do any of those things it isn’t likely that you would want a tax expert as your criminal trial lawyer unless the charges were tax related.

Andrea Stenberg wrote a very interesting article about branding and how the beer company Dos Equis approached branding to increase their sales.  Good stuff.

However, as I read the article I realized that the big challenge in branding for most small businesses is less about the concept of branding and more about the fact that they have no clue what they want to be known for.

This challenge happens for good reason.  You don’t know what you want to be known for because you started your business based on a product or service.  That’s backward.

When starting a business the best way to figure out what business you want to be in is to first:

• find out what people are already looking to buy
• find out who is selling them that
• then figure out how you can set your business apart from the competition as “the” source for getting that

Once you know that you can then identify the product or service that does that and build your business around solving that problem, getting that result, or achieving that outcome.  THE PROBLEM is the starting point.  THE MARKET is the starting point NOT the product or service.

When you build a business around serving the needs of a hungry audience you can screw up and still not fail because you have a large market filled with ready buyers who are willing to cut you some slack because you produce the goods.

You set yourself up to pull the string rather than trying to push the string.  You avoid dealing with all the knots you get when you try to approach things the wrong way.

Yet another example of how some commonly held beliefs are wrong.  I talk about more of these ideas and how to overcome the challenges that result in a video I made recently.

Coach Cheryl

Do it Yourself

Do it with a Little Help

Do it with Guidance

photo credit: singsing_sky

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under business coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

• No Related Post