Your Helping Business

Why
You need to be clear on the reason WHY you are starting this business, why you want to do it and why your potential market might engage with you. The first thing to do, if you’ve not already completed it is to work through the Business Vision Workbook and the follow up Coaching session (available separately).

If you haven’t done so yet you ought to take a look at a short TED Talk Video by Simon Sinek called ‘Start With Why’. It’s available for you Here

Now this is important, very important, crucial to the success of your business.

The reason for starting your business, the reason why, must be entirely consistent with your personal vision of the life you would love to live.

It’s not sufficient just to create a business that simply funds a personal vision or passion, or worse, is inconsistent with what you personally would love to do with your life.

To ‘generate income’, or to stop you from needing to be employed by someone else just isn’t enough and I cannot emphasise this too strongly.

Ideally what you do as a business should be part of what you love to do in ‘life’ – part of your ‘lifestyle’, part of Who You Are.

Clarity – Confidence – Certainty

If you’re not clear on your personal life vision, then return to the Personal Vision Workbook (available separately) or book a coaching call to help you get clear.

Oh, and remember; if there are any ‘significant others’ who will, or may be affected by, or involved in your business in any way, you have to make sure that it is consistent with their personal vision as well!

Don’t make assumptions about this, check it out, have a ‘board meeting’ and get agreement from everyone involved or affected.

If you don’t do this, it will cost you – one way or another – believe me!

The next thing to look at is how clear, confident and certain you are about how the business is going to work, how it will operate and how you will ‘deliver’ your services.

How much time will it take? What are the logistics? And so on. This will be covered in more detail later.

How the business operates is part of your overall business strategy which will be outlined in your Business Plan.
It’s the who, what, where, why and how of your business.

At this stage, well before you hit the ‘go’ button you need clarity of vision about all this and the end result or outcome of operating your business.

The outcome is effectively what you get from operating your business and it can be expressed in many ways, including financial benefit, but also pleasure, sense of achievement, fulfilment and other things.

Although you’ll set specific goals as you go along, you should, at this stage, have a clear idea of the interim and ‘end’ results of running and owning your own personal business.

If you don’t, then it’s something you need to work on using the Personal Business Creation System before you go much further.

Your expected outcome should be realistic in the short term but in the long term it should express what you really want rather than being restrained by what you might think, at this stage, is practical.

One thing to note here is that if your vision of the outcome and purpose is not clear then you could be creating a ‘monster’ that gets out of hand and consumes you in one way or another.

This is the opposite of what most people think, which is that businesses inevitably ‘fail’ if they go ‘wrong’ but sometimes they succeed beyond all expectation and turn into a Frankenstein like creation!

Purpose

You need clarity on the purpose of your business.

This is different to the outcome and is related to the benefits the business provides.

As you will have read in “What They Don’t Tell You About Starting a Business” there are many definitions of the purpose of a business – most looking from the inside out.

You will need to look from the outside in and get clear on, not necessarily the products or services it provides, but on the benefits it provides, and how and to whom it provides them.

As the word implies, a ‘benefit’ is a ‘good-fit’ with something that somebody wants, not necessarily what they, or you, believe they need.

The classic example is that people don’t really want to buy a drill; they want the hole that the drill provides. So, when they buy a drill the benefit is not the drill (as the manufacturer would probably see it) but the hole!

Your business will provide benefits – to you and your clients – and if it doesn’t, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Because if your business doesn’t provide distinct benefits to your target market – your potential purchasers, then you don’t have a business.

No benefits = no purchasers = no income

The only benefit to you then might be an enjoyable but expensive hobby!

You have to consider who, besides yourself, it benefits, and in what way. We’ll look at that in more detail in the next chapter.

Mission

Before you start, you should consider and be clear on your ‘mission’ in business and be able to encapsulate what your business is all about and the benefits it provides (and to whom) in a few words.

But don’t make the mistake of ‘scripting’ some sort of corporate style ‘mission statement’ that you read out or repeat parrot fashion when people ask you what you do or what your business does.

You need to have this ‘mission’ so clearly embedded in your mind that you can just talk about it enthusiastically without any ‘notes’.

Some people call this an ‘elevator pitch’ or a ‘60 second presentation’.

The thing is that you must be able to describe what you and your business are all about in between 7 and 12 seconds (which is longer than you think) whenever you encounter someone who asks what you do – and quite often that happens unexpectedly, when you’re not ‘prepared’!

Core Values

You need to build your personal core values into your business core values. They should be essentially the same but you may wish to include some additional material or variations.