Is Your Cart Before Your Horse?

It turns out that I’ve been lying to you.

Well, okay, maybe not exactly lying. Let’s call it oversimplifying.

For a long time now (years), I’ve been talking about the importance of simply stating what you do when you meet somebody new.

Small firms and solos like us live in a Word of Mouth world; we don’t spend money on advertising or promotion. Everything is referral-based.

So if you want people to understand and remember you – let alone, refer you to others – you have to figure out how to describe your work in a way that is simple, memorable and jargon-free.

(Hint: If your description includes the phrase “leading provider of cross-platform solutions…” please move to the back of the class.)

But don’t worry; all of that is still 100% true.

Here comes the lying, I mean oversimplifying, part: Developing a simple statement like the ones below is really hard:

I’m a business coach who helps foreign-born professionals succeed in U.S. companies.

I’m a mortgage broker specializing in newly divorced women.

I’m a quality assurance consultant; I help biotech companies ensure their products are safe and effective.

It’s hard because it requires boiling down your decades of experience and accomplishment into one lousy sentence.

But that’s not the really hard part.

It’s hard because it demands that you focus your marketing on the solution to a particular problem and/or a particular audience.

Nope. That’s not the really hard part either.

The really hard part is that in order to arrive at a clear, concise, compelling sentence (or two) that describes your work, you need to first settle on what your clear, concise, compelling work is.

In other words, this isn’t a wordplay problem. It’s not about endlessly debating whether to say, “Succeed in U.S. companies…” or “Thrive in U.S. companies…” until you reach the right answer. That’s maybe 10% of the challenge.

The other 90% is in figuring out what part of Planet Earth you intend to dominate and then – and only then – trying to describe that well.

I’ll even go one step further and say that if you’ve been struggling to talk about your work in a way that is simple, distinctive, and interesting, but all you keep coming up with is a bunch of generic blah, blah, it’s likely because you are trying to describe a thing that in and of itself isn’t simple, distinctive and interesting.

No amount of fancy words can describe what isn’t there. (Too zen?)

So how do you solve all this? Three suggestions:

Think about the nonbusiness thing(s) at which you are particularly skilled.

I mean gifted. I mean when situation X occurs, your friends, relatives, volunteer committee co-members, etc., come to you first.Nonbusiness because if it’s happening in your spare time, in the rest of your life, it’s real.Think about it. What can you do easily that other people continually struggle with?

Is it handling interpersonal conflict? Is it your ability to fix mechanical things? Is it the way infants stare at you and, because of your huge, bald head, assume that you are the leader of their planet (that might just be me)?

Identify your natural advantage … and bake it into your business in some way.

Think about where you break ranks with some (or all) of your peers.

A financial planner, for example, who claims to offer “customized, high quality financial solutions that help people sleep well at night,” is a snore. That’s just the definition of financial planning.

But a financial planner who believes that actively managed funds are a rip-off; or that parents should contribute nothing to their children’s college education; or that what matters most in planning for retirement is long term care insurance; well, now that person is starting to separate themselves from the pack in a meaningful way.

Will some people disagree? I guarantee it. In fact, when somebody else in your field who is equally qualified completely disagrees with your point of view, you know you’re onto something useful.

Decide what you’re willing to give up.

Do you want to be viewed as an expert? Do you want to stand out from the pack? Do you want all heads in the room to turn your way the minute anybody even alludes to your specialty?

Well then you need to pick something. And picking something means not picking lots and lots of other somethings.

Look at those three descriptions of actual people from earlier in this article.  They could all be easily broadened – just take the first four or five words of each sentence and chop off the rest.

That would give each of them more theoretical clients. The problem is, I’ve noticed that it’s the actual clients who pay you actual money.

Until you have all the business you want and are literally turning away more, you need a niche. It really is that simple.

Here’s the bottom line. Polishing your “what I do” sentence is important, no doubt about it. That’s what the world uses to label us for future reference.

But writing these words happens at the end of a process, not the beginning. First figure out what makes you different; then focus on how you’re going to talk about it.

Of course, I could be lying to you. It’s happened before.