Creating the Business that is Right for You

 

Pete Gilfillan is one of the most upbeat people you would ever meet.  But it wasn’t always that way.

“In my last position, I was with Terex. I live in Chicago, but the Terex is headquartered in Connecticut and I was on the road 6 days a week and much of the travel was international. With all the travel, I didn’t eat right, didn’t exercise and frankly I was miserable. I was on another long trip and I woke up in the middle of the night.  As I layed there, I could not remember what country I was in.  I realized then I had had enough.

When I got back to Chicago, I told my wife about my decision to leave the corporate world . At first my wife wasn’t keen on the idea. She saw the practical side of staying in corporate (financial security), but I knew I needed to make a change. I quit my job and I started working with a franchise consultant to find a franchise. After a few months, we found Junk King and saw that it was a good fit. I liked that it was a service based business and could be scaled up; such as adding trucks as the business grew and it had little overhead. Later, I started to work with FranChoice, where today I’m one of the top franchise consultants. I really like the way their business model works. There is no cost to individuals (companies pay FranChoice) and it gives me the opportunity to do what I love most, which is to help people find the business that meets their needs.”

The key to finding or creating the right business is to determine what business leverages your unique skill set and matches your passion.  The way to do so by asking good questions of yourself and verifying those answers with those close to you.  Often a business is started from a promising idea without a great deal of thought of how the business can best utilize the skill set of the founder.  We’ll step through the process to find the right business for you.

 

Categorize achievements

The first step is to categorize your achievements.  If you have had success in an area, there is a good probably of having success in that area again.  What have you achieved?  Make an inventory of what you have achieved in your life. In making that inventory of achievements, capture the details via the following questions provided in U R a Brand – Catherine Caputa

• What challenge did you face?
• How did you approach the project in an innovative way?
• Were there any novel solutions or unexpected problems?
• What actions did you take?
• What were the quantitative results? What were the emotional results?
• What did you learn easily that helped solve the problem?

Tom Rath found in his study, detailed in StrengthFinder 2.0 that people who do have the opportunity to focus on their strengths every day are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life in general.

 

Success Came Naturally

Focus on the achievements that almost seemed effortless.  Putting together and executing the actions seemed quite straight forward and natural.  Time flew by as you worked on the tasks.  You weren’t tired at the end of the day, instead you were ready for more.  This is a good indication that this area of work really utilizes your skill and you enjoy it. In addition, to being good at the task(s) you found that deepening your understanding on the topic and learning related skills was easy and fun.  This is a further confirmation this is a strength.

 

Anybody can Learn

Just because your not good at something today, doesn’t mean you can’t be good at it tomorrow.  Always remember, any subject can be learned.  It is all a matter of interest in a subject and desire to master that subject.

Tony Robbins tells a story in his Personal Power II audio series of a young man, we’ll call him John, who was doing very poorly in school; hated school and no matter how many tutors or counselors the young man saw, he couldn’t/wouldn’t learn his school subjects.  His parents were at their wits end.  The parents brought John to Tony to see what he could do.  John sat in the corner with his head down while Tony sat quietly for a few moments.  Tony then asked John if he had any hobbies.  John replied he loved to surf and as Tony asked more questions about surfing, John began to smile and get more animated as he described how he would see a big wave and maneuver the surfboard to catch the wave.  As John got more and more excited, Tony suddenly asked, “How did you learn to surf” and without missing a beat, John replied, I learned to surf by . . .”

 

Leverage All Your Expertise

It is not just your business expertise than can be exploited for a new business.  One way to tell that you have a desirable expertise is that people come to you for advice on how to solve a “problem”. It may be a work issue such as a negotiation of a contract with a vendor or resolving a conflict between two internal teams but neither are in your area of responsibility, but your colleagues realize your expertise.

Or your colleagues may be coming to you for advice that is totally unrelated to work.  They may be coming to you for advice on how to plan a wedding.  Or maybe you have fishing as a hobby and your friends and colleagues are coming to you for advice on the best fishing rod or the best place to fish.

In the case of Lain Erhmann, of Layout a Day, people came to her about her hobby of scrapbooking.  By trade she was a journalist.  She had been writing for major publications for several years, including the Boston Globe and Runner’s World, but when the print journalism market began to contract, she turned to writing about her passion of scrapbooking.  She started to write for a scrap book magazine, first as a free-lance writer and later that morphed into writing her own blog and hosting scrapbook events. The part-time business of writing about her hobby of scrapbooking turned into a full-time business for Lain.  If you are looked upon as an expert in a field you have a potential business.

 

Who is Your Customer?

Now that you have examined your achievements and your expertise, it is time to determine your customer.

Customers can be defined by a demographics such as

• income
• age
• education
• martial status

or a host of other attributes.

At babyboomercashnow.com we identified our audience as someone who is:

• Over the age of 50.
• Worked in corporate for years as a white-collar professional

In addition, there are other characteristics as well.

• Sick of the rat race; of being laid-off.
• Is worried he/she will outlast their retirement money.
• Want to start their own business, but not sure which business; nor how to get started.
• Would like to give back to society.

Another example of a target audience or a niche is Mary Beth Storjohann who is a financial planner for Gen Y (also known as Millennials, those born between 1982 – 2004) and Gen X (born 1965 – 1982) demographic.  She helps them save for retirement, but also on how to save for vacations and other financial needs of life.

Target markets can be identified other ways as well.

Maybe your business caters to  busy professionals (e.g. think home-cooked meals).  People that have the income to pay for hot ready to eat meals but want better nutrition than what is provided by a restaurant.  Providing home-cooked meals could be done in a unique way, such as one that caters to people with allergies to certain foods (e.g. peanut allergy) or gluten-free meals.

Is your industry expertise in real estate; law; medical?  If your expertise is in law, in what part of the law (e.g. patents, international) can you specialize? Can your industry be segmented to a small specialized niche?

Write out the characteristics of your customer in great detail.  It should be 300-500 words. Writing out the details of your customer enables you to craft a solution to the wants and needs of your ideal customer.  As you develop your products and services you will refer often to these characteristics to make sure there is a good fit between the solution and your ideal customer.

Go through a list of questions about your customer as you develop your solution.  What is the income of your ideal customer?  What is their education?  Where do they live (rural, urban)?  Do they live in houses or apartments?  Or are they in their 20’s and still live at home?  What do they do for entertainment?  What is their livelihood?  What are they passionate about?

Maybe your customer is an entrepreneur.  What keeps your ideal customer up at night?  Using your expertise to solve a customer’s pain is a great business.

 

 

Resolving Pain creates Opportunities

To what pain, what problem, can you apply your expertise?  During the housing crisis, many realtors were going out of business.  Houses weren’t selling.  I know of several people that were in the real-estate business that were devastated when the real estate market crashed.  They lost their jobs and their first reaction was to try to find the exact same job in a rapidly shrinking market.

But there were others, realtors, who specialized in pre-foreclosures and foreclosures and they were very busy selling homes.  They leveraged their broad expertise in real estate; accepted the reality of the market changes; rapidly learned the steps of pre-foreclosure and the laws concerning foreclosure; becoming an expert in the process.  Those that adopted to the new reality became successful.  In every crisis, there is the seed of opportunity.

Examine your field of work, where you have years of expertise.  What are the pains in your industry, that if you provided a solution, people would readily buy?  This is where you should focus your attention.

How do you go about finding the pains?  For starters, if it is in your field, you probably already have a good idea of what that pain is since you have spent years in the industry.  But you can also talk to your friends and colleagues in your industry to gather information.  Look at the example above.  What if you were an attorney, especially a real estate attorney?  You could have quickly become an expert in foreclosure law.

 

Resolving Pain (e.g. Developing the Solution)

How do you go about solving your ideal customer’s pain?

Ask people in your target market the following questions.

1. “What task takes you the most time?” Get details on what has to be done, how long it takes and why it must be done.
2. “How do you feel when you do that task?” If the owner hates doing thus task; it tells you their readiness for someone to take away this problem.
3. “What does it cost you to do this task?”  When the customer has put a dollar value on the problem, whether it is an out-of-pocket dollar amount or a cost in time, the customer realizes this problem really cost money.   For example, if it is costing 3 hours a week of time and they make $100 an hour; that is $300 dollars a week or $1200 dollars a month.

Gathering this information and create an inventory of the problems that need to be solved.  Categorized them by type of problem; by and their frequency; by importance or magnitude.  You also should rank how close the problem matches your skill set or interest.  What you’re doing is creating a systematic way to rate problems and determine which one(s) you want to pursue first.

Ideally, you want to focus on problems/tasks that are recurring and not just a one-time occurrence.  Getting a monthly reoccurring income should be the goal for your business, if possible.  This will establish more consistent revenue and will change the focus from a transaction focused business where there is a need to get new customers all the time, to a client focused business (e.g. keeping current customers happy).  John Birch, of The Birch Group, says 80% of his business is with current customers.

It doesn’t matter what the industry is, there are always pains that need to be resolved.  Something always costs time and time is money.  If there is a business case to be made for resolving the pain, you have an opportunity.

 

Add Your Uniqueness

Once you have determined solving this pain is a viable business, you need to add your personality, your uniqueness to the business.  What is it about your skills, your personality, that make you uniquely qualified to solve this problem?

What is it about you that make you a standout in this business?  What is your story?  You should be able to fire off half a dozen reasons as to why you uniquely fit this business and the value you bring to your customers.

The story of Ruckpack

When decorated combat veteran Major Rob Dyer was on tour in Afghanistan, his troops often struggled to recover from arduous missions that required them to stay alert for long hours. Creation of Ruckpack

Dyer saw the need for something that could help the troops get back up to speed, without any negative side effects.  He focused on creating an energy drink that was geared for special operations in the field. Dyer cashed out everything he had and put it into his idea.  “I did it because I believed in the company and where it was going.”  When he approached a bottling company for bottling the drink he was shocked to discover the manufacturing company’s minimum orders was 20,000 bottles. “We’re going to have to go big to make this happen.  We ordered 20,000 bottles based on the belief that it’s going to be a great product.”

Major Dyer was able to do the following:

1. Determined his target market.
2. Was uniquely qualified to create and sell this product.
3. Could leverage his unique story for a product in a crowded field.
4. Validated his product under the extreme conditions of the battlefield.
5. Believed in himself by cashing in his savings.
6. Took bold action by ordering 20,000 bottles.

You have unique skills and a unique story.  Put your uniqueness to work as you build your business.

Action Steps:

1. Write out your ideal customer. Make it as detailed as possible, include age, income, education, location, hobbies, work; anything that will zero in the ideal person.
2. Write out 5 reasons you are uniquely qualified to serve this customer.

 

What obstacles do you face in starting your own business?  Let me know at alan@babyboomercashnow.comBelow is a summary of the links.  I do receive a commission from links when you make a purchase.  I want to say in advance, thank you for buying the books.  They have each, in their own way, helped moved my business forward.

U R a Brand – Catherine Caputa

StrengthFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath

Creation of Ruckpack