I spent almost 20 years in a 9-5 Technology career from 1998-1999 and. 2000-2019. I never once thought of myself as an entrepreneur even though I got started in Real Estate Investing and running a rental business in 2009.
I “started” several business in my head from 2009 to 2019 quite unsuccessfully (I might add!). The ideas came and I did all the work but it never saw the light of the day due to various reasons.
When I started my first “serious” business that I wanted to do full-time, I went through a lot of soul searching to figure out what I REALLY wanted to be when I grew up 🙂
I’m going to try to share some of that knowledge and experiences over the next few weeks in a series I will call “Small Business Owner Learnings”. Please be advised that I’m not marketing-guru or expert and this is just been a process of learning and sometimes trial-and-error figuring out what works best and what doesn’t. Just sharing some of my learnings and hoping it will help someone out there starting off or in a fledging state.
Small Business Owner Learning #1: How to formulate your Brand Identity?
Here are some of the questions I asked myself?
1) What was my purpose in doing this business? (besides monetary)
2) What was going to be unique about it?
3) Who was my target avatar(s) and how would it help them?
Here are some of my learnings here from my own experiences because my target avatar was definitely who I was 10 years ago – inept and inexperienced in investing outside of the stock market but wanting to learn!
So here were my next steps since my target avatar was “former me” and it was fairly easy to relate now
1) What was the primary painpoint I faced when I got started?
2) What did I have to figure out when I was experiencing the same problem?
3) What I wished my experience was instead?
These 3 questions can be used a guide to define your unique approach to solving the problem. It might not resonate with everyone out there but it will resonate with people that think and learn like you and that’s a great starting point! Remember as a person or a brand you’re not shooting for mass appeal but rather to appeal to people you can MOST easily connect with even when the target avatar is not exactly you!
If there’s one thing you should take away from this article it will be – As a business owner, focus on identifying your target audience and solving a problem(s) faced by them. Your success is simply a byproduct of value you provide.” ”
Stay tuned for Learning #2 next Monday!
