Determining Your Target Market: 6 Ways You’ve Probably Not Considered–Part 3

Today, we’re moving to the 3rd post in a 6-part series designed to help you determine whom you should be leading. I expect this will be enlightening and helpful to even the most successful service entrepreneurs.

 3. Who are YOU? BE your market.

Richard Branson was featured yet again in Entrepreneur Magazine, June 2012, and was quoted as saying, “All startups should be thinking, ‘What frustrates me [as a customer] and how can I make it better? It might be a small…or…a big thing, but…if they think like that, they’re likely to build a very successful business.”

The most relevant piece to our discussion is this: he spoke of the fact that he has always been his own customer. Everything he ever created, from Virgin Records to Virgin Airlines and everything in between and after, came from his own need. And he credits “being his own  customer” to his success.

This has now become a topic of conversation between me and my clients who go through my 7-session private program, The Powerhouse Method, looking to build a highly-marketable, one-of-a-kind business. The first order of business is to determine whom they will be serving. To aid in this extremely (for most) challenging act, I tell them what Branson advises: You should be your market. But the converse is equally true: your market should be you. Either who you once were, or who you are now. Do not try marketing to a group you are not. Branson never did. Help those with the same needs you had once upon a time. If you’re frustrated now by how things are being done in your field–close the gap with an innovation and then sell it to others just like you with that need.

When you are your market, and your market is you, you secure one of the most important factors of success in business: credibility. They will listen to you because you are them and have an answer relevant to them. It means you will communicate (i.e. sell) to them like no one else because you speak their language and understand them at a deep level. It means you will design “urgently wanted” programs and products that nail their needs and desires because you know them so intimately.

I have always been my market, and as a result, every one of my programs through the years has knocked it out of the park. I have also always sold quite easily (once I overcame my issues with selling), because I created content *I* would have wanted and that my market (me, in an earlier time) wants and needs.

So, in trying to decide who your market is, look no further than your own mirror.

Preface of New Ebook, “One-of-a-Kind”

I am very excited to be introducing my new ebook next week! One of a Kind: The Powerhouse Strategy for Standing Out and Leading the Way With Your Business.

I will be doing an interview call with Therese Skelly on Thursday May 3rd, so if you want an early bird copy of the book, go check out what I’ll be sharing with her!

Until then, here is the preface of the book…

 

PREFACE:

In fifth grade, we were given, “antiestablishmentarian,” as a spelling word. Now, I don’t know how it was defined for us—what eleven year-old understands the “establishment”? But I instantly knew how to spell it and I instantly understood (and felt affinity for) its meaning. Its official definition is: “viewing a nation’s or society’s power structure as corrupt, repressive, exploitive or unjust,” but its common use definition is, “The practice of being anti or against most everything that was established as the norm (marriage, government and laws, and most obviously war).”

 The year before, I had lopped off the “E” from the front of my given name, despite having been named after my father’s favorite sister who had been killed in a car accident—so perhaps I raised my hand in class and asked my fifth grade teacher if I was an antiestablishmentarian—and perhaps she nodded. The moment of dawning.

Or perhaps I spoke up and told Mrs. Patterson that when I was in my mother’s belly, my father had left his congregation and family to march for civil rights in Mississippi with Martin Luther King. “Is my father an antiestablishmentarian?” I may have asked. Or, I may have waved my hand again, even then eager to ruffle feathers in that post-Vietnam War world, and told the class how one of my brothers had dropped his weight dramatically to avoid the draft and that another had taken to the road at fifteen for a three-month solo bike-riding odyssey. “Are my brothers antiestablishmentarians, too?” If so, I can picture Mrs. Patterson smiling tightly and even nervously and acknowledging, yes, your family is antiestablishmentarian.

So, I come by the practice of going against—if not being against–established norms honestly, and have a long track record of living my life that way. In high school, Shakespeare moved me when I first heard, “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Indeed, I named my first business, a coaching business, Living True. And in college, I first read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance essay and fell in love with his quote that sums up all I believe, “Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.”

You cannot separate this life-long practice of going against the established norm from anything I think, say, or do—including, most especially, how I have shaped my business and how I conduct it. Every single program I have created from the inception of my entrepreneurial career over ten years ago with a coaching business–is different from anything else you’ll find out there. And today, I help my clients shape programs that are different from anything else out there.

I know that to be successful in business and life, we must pull away from external authorities–the established norm—and plug into our internal authority…no matter how unpopular we may be for it. That is our place of freedom, and I stand for every human being living in that freedom—and I cannot help but help my clients get there as one-of-a-kind, stand-apart leaders who lead the way.

And so I write this book for you. To help you claim that freedom that is your birthright and to give you some direction in making your business one-of-a-kind. It must be, you know. Not just because every business must be differentiated, but because you are here on a special mission—to lead the way–and you cannot do it by being like everyone else. You must leave the pack to fulfill your purpose!

In this book, I am going to guide you through the steps to leaving behind the established norm, to going where there is no path so you leave a trail.

I welcome you to the land of the antiestablishmentarians!

To the land of the free, the brave, and the successful.

� 2011-14 Inspired Leaders Academy. All Rights Reserved.