Someone sent me an email a couple of years ago. Supposedly Colin Powell's Rules For Success. Now, I don't know whether they really are or not, but as I read them, I thought they really should be called "15 Rules For Success In Your Home Business".
So, here they are:
Rule 1 - It Ain't As Bad As You Think, It Will Look Better In The Morning
If there's one experience universal to ALL home-business owners, particularly those running a business on the Internet, it's the occasional feeling that you're just spinning your wheels, and not getting anywhere. The number of people who give up on their businesses just as they approach the brink of success is staggering. So hang in there and remind yourself, when things look bleak, that tomorrow is another day, things really aren't as bad as they seem and things really WILL look better in the morning.
Rule 2 - Get Mad, Then Get Over It
OK, I concede this is more general advice than home-business advice but it applies in your home business just as it does anywhere else. Resentment and unexpressed anger really don't hurt anyone but the person feeling resentful and angry. Have you ever noticed how completely unproductive you are when burdened by resentment and anger? So feel it, express it (constructively) and then move on. As the man said, "get over it".
Rule 3 - Avoid Having Your Ego So Close To Your Position That When Your Position Falls Your Ego Goes With It
Over the course of my career I have, from time to time, met people whose identity and sense of self-worth is so enmeshed in what they do for a living that they literally don't have an identity outside of their work. Because they rely on an external source for their self-esteem and confidence, they find it necessary to continually and relentlessly bolster their personal positions, often at the expense of others, often resorting to political maneuvring in the workplace to maintain and improve their supposed 'status'.
These people are the 'empire builders' you sometimes find in organizations. They jealously guard their power base all the while gathering unto themselves more and more responsibility, beyond the point of being able to do everything they take on.
Because their identity and sense of self-worth depends upon their position within their organization, what happens when their position disappears, such as in a corporate downsizing? It freefalls.
Don't let this happen to you. Remember that you are something separate and distinct from your business. Sure, you can be proud and pleased with your accomplishments but don't define yourself through them. Your self-worth is something that comes from inside your human self, not your business.
Ironically, keeping a professional detachment is more likely to secure the ultimate success of your business. Detachment brings perspective, objectivity and clarity, which helps you make better quality decisions.
Rule 4 - It Can Be Done
Don't allow self-imposed limitations to restrict what you can and will do. You can do anything if you set your mind to it. Well, of course, it must be something that is within your power - you can't just set your mind on growing a third arm, for example. But for anything that is within human power and capability, the saying "where there's a will is a way" is so true.
Get into the discipline of planning your life and where you want it to go. By setting goals and planning the steps that will help you reach them, you can achieve literally anything your heart desires.
Rule 5 - Be Careful What You Choose, You May Get It
Following on from this, it should go without saying that what you set for your goals is something you truly want because if you do practice the discipline of goal setting you will surely get it.
Rule 6 - Don't Let Adverse Facts Stand In The Way Of A Good Decision
Keep your eye on the prize and don't be distracted by what's happening on the sidelines. Sure, you may not have entered the marathon had you known there were going to be 1,000 other runners but does that mean entering the marathon was a bad idea? No.
Make your decisions based on quality information and what's in the best interests of your business. If someone else comes along who represents competition for your business, don't be put off your game. Just run your own race. There's ALWAYS a way to distinguish yourself from your competition.
Rule 7 - You Can't Make Someone Else's Choices
You shouldn't let someone else make yours IGNORE your mother when she tells you you're crazy for chucking in your nice SAFE secure little job to start your own business. Follow your dream, no-one else's.
Rule 8 - Check Small Things
Like the fine print in contracts. Like the URL in that sales letter you've just put the finishing touches on. Like your spelling and punctuation. In other words, pay attention to detail.
Rule 9 - Share Credit
You've heard the saying, "no man is an island". No woman is either. Remember and acknowledge the people who have helped and continue to help you get where you want to go. Acknowledge the achievements of others.
Rule 10 - Remain Calm, Be Careful
Frenzy and recklessness are hardly the prescription for long-term success in your business. In the face of unexpected challenges, unexplained downturns in business or failure to achieve the results expected, recognize that these are just part of the thrust and parry of business life and use a calm, methodical approach to the problem.
Don't just react blindly or chuck away all your hard work and try something completely different unless a thorough, calm and careful investigation convinces you that you are completely off-beam.
Calmly analyze your situation and use your intelligence to correct the situation. Sometimes a one degree turn of the wheel is all that is required to get back on course, not a completely new rudder.
Rule 11 - Have A Vision, Be Demanding
This rule goes hand in hand with rules 4 and 5. In order to set goals and plan ways to achieve them you must first set your vision. Think big, be brave. There is nothing you can't achieve so make sure your efforts are going to be for something truly worthwhile.
Rule 12 - Don't Take Counsel Of Your Fears Or Naysayers
All of us have moments of self-doubt or even fear when embarking on a journey to an unknown destination. If what you have planned for yourself brings with it feelings of anxiety, nervousness, even fear, pay attention to them but don't take their counsel.
They are symptoms of grand thinking, of stretching beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone. As the book says, feel the fear and do it anyway.
Rule 13 - Perpetual Optimism Is A Force Multiplier
This rule is closely related to rule 1. Believe that things will work out, that they will look better in the morning, that everything's going to be OK. Repeat the words to yourself as a mantra if you must but instill a spirit of indomitable optimism in your outlook and you will attract success into your life.
Rule 14 - Sometimes Being Responsible Means Pissing People Off
You can't please all of the people all of the time so don't waste your time or energy even trying. You have a responsibility to the ultimate success of your business and to your own personal success. If that means you occasionally have to say no to people to stay true to your objectives, do it. If it means you have to alienate some people because they don't personally agree with what you are doing, that's their problem.
In other words, stay focused on your plan. If others don't like it or agree with it, too bad.
Rule 15 - You Never Know What You Can Get Away With Unless You Try
If you don't ask you don't get. And if you don't take you don't get. Leave nothing on the table. If an opportunity comes along, take it. It may not come again. And remember, in chaos there is opportunity. While everyone else is running around like chooks with their heads cut off, you just bring up the rear and clean up on all the opportunities that are just lying there for the taking among the chicken scratch.
Hindsight truly is 20/20, no doubt about it. Perhaps, you're thinking that if you'd known then what you know now, you would have gone a lot further a lot faster. But as with any form of progress, it's the journey, not the destination, that provides the education and creates the experience and, through it, wisdom. And that's something no book can teach you and money can't buy.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Branding Your Business
If you think only big corporate names need to think about things like brand names, think again. Your brand says a lot about you and your business, and that's as true for a one person home-based operation as it is for a multinational conglomerate. In this article we look at how creating a strong brand for your business can help you set yourself apart from the pack and lay the right
foundation for the future growth of your business.
What Is A Brand?
Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and business cards or your business name. It is your corporate identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing your relevance to and credibility with your prospective customers.
Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing with the initials "CK" on them? Perceived value. Perceived value as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high brand awareness.
Now, I'm not saying we all need to rush out and start creating brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us simply don't have the time or other resources necessary. What I am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to dominate your niche.
Why Do I Need To Create My Own Brand?
=> Differentiation
We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived value of your products and services. The main reason for creating your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition. New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based
businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for you.
=> More Effective, Efficient Marketing
Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your sales force (even if that's a sales force of one - you) more effective and efficient.
Imagine if you didn't have to spend the first 50% of your time with a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you? You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than educating your prospects about your business
Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand to your target market automatically transfers to your products and services. So, even when you're advertising your brand, you're indirectly also marketing your products and services.
How Do I Create My Own Brand?
OK, so you're convinced you need to create your own brand. Where on earth do you start?
We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the same time as establishing your relevance to and building credibility with your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself* have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it. If not, you're going to have the devil's own time getting that message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your relevance and credibility.
=> Write A Mission Statement
So, let's start by creating a mission statement. What is the mission of your business? Obviously you're in business to make a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit. What are your core values?
A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their target market. Let's say your business is web hosting. If you're in the market for a web host, what things are important to you? Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not? These things will be highly important to some and less important
to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly relevant to the majority of your target market. Let's settle for our purposes on reliability, price and technical support.
Your mission statement might read something like this: I strive to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support". That's a pretty general statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the
webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement.
Now that you've written your mission statement, you can begin thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to think of your business in these terms. You're a webhosting
provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support.
When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your relevance to your target market and build credibility with that market.
Let's turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand.
=> Describe What You Are Branding
List out your business's key features and characteristics, your competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart from your competition.
Using our webhosting example, you'll focus primarily on the objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost-effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical support.
=> Identify and Describe Your Target Market
Decide whether you want to target lthe entire webhosting community or only a segment of it such as small business websites. Describe your market.
=> List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your
Mission Statement
The key elements from your mission statement were reliability, cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are suggestive of these elements. Let's use Reliable Webhosting for our example. (I don't claim to be a creative genius.)
Don't limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys something about your business. You will find coined names easier to trademark and secure domain names for too - a definite plus!
=> List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement
We'll use: "Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford". I know, I know. You can do much better, I'm sure.
How should use my brandOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND?
=> Create a Logo for Your Brand
Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand awareness.
The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else. Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous with your brand. Instant recognition is what you're going for here, so don't dilute it by using several different logos for different purposes.
=> Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line
Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand will be:
RELIABLE WEBHOSTING
Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price
your small business can afford.
To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations, invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front door of your principal place of business and on your products. And don't forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes. These can be powerful brand reinforcers.
=> Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand
Once you've created your brand, you need to market and promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as you're selling your products and services you also push your brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products and services. And vice versa.
A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider range of products and services when they're developed without having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your job then is to sell your products and services.
foundation for the future growth of your business.
What Is A Brand?
Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and business cards or your business name. It is your corporate identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing your relevance to and credibility with your prospective customers.
Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing with the initials "CK" on them? Perceived value. Perceived value as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high brand awareness.
Now, I'm not saying we all need to rush out and start creating brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us simply don't have the time or other resources necessary. What I am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to dominate your niche.
Why Do I Need To Create My Own Brand?
=> Differentiation
We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived value of your products and services. The main reason for creating your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition. New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based
businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for you.
=> More Effective, Efficient Marketing
Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your sales force (even if that's a sales force of one - you) more effective and efficient.
Imagine if you didn't have to spend the first 50% of your time with a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you? You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than educating your prospects about your business
Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand to your target market automatically transfers to your products and services. So, even when you're advertising your brand, you're indirectly also marketing your products and services.
How Do I Create My Own Brand?
OK, so you're convinced you need to create your own brand. Where on earth do you start?
We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the same time as establishing your relevance to and building credibility with your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself* have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it. If not, you're going to have the devil's own time getting that message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your relevance and credibility.
=> Write A Mission Statement
So, let's start by creating a mission statement. What is the mission of your business? Obviously you're in business to make a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit. What are your core values?
A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their target market. Let's say your business is web hosting. If you're in the market for a web host, what things are important to you? Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not? These things will be highly important to some and less important
to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly relevant to the majority of your target market. Let's settle for our purposes on reliability, price and technical support.
Your mission statement might read something like this: I strive to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support". That's a pretty general statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the
webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement.
Now that you've written your mission statement, you can begin thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to think of your business in these terms. You're a webhosting
provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support.
When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your relevance to your target market and build credibility with that market.
Let's turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand.
=> Describe What You Are Branding
List out your business's key features and characteristics, your competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart from your competition.
Using our webhosting example, you'll focus primarily on the objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost-effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical support.
=> Identify and Describe Your Target Market
Decide whether you want to target lthe entire webhosting community or only a segment of it such as small business websites. Describe your market.
=> List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your
Mission Statement
The key elements from your mission statement were reliability, cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are suggestive of these elements. Let's use Reliable Webhosting for our example. (I don't claim to be a creative genius.)
Don't limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys something about your business. You will find coined names easier to trademark and secure domain names for too - a definite plus!
=> List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement
We'll use: "Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford". I know, I know. You can do much better, I'm sure.
How should use my brandOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND?
=> Create a Logo for Your Brand
Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand awareness.
The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else. Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous with your brand. Instant recognition is what you're going for here, so don't dilute it by using several different logos for different purposes.
=> Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line
Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand will be:
RELIABLE WEBHOSTING
Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price
your small business can afford.
To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations, invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front door of your principal place of business and on your products. And don't forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes. These can be powerful brand reinforcers.
=> Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand
Once you've created your brand, you need to market and promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as you're selling your products and services you also push your brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products and services. And vice versa.
A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider range of products and services when they're developed without having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your job then is to sell your products and services.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)