How to design a business around your beliefs and stand out in a competitive marketplace
Learn how to leverage your interests and uniqueness to build a business that your customers love.
Your beliefs are the foundation of your business
When you embark on a self-directed career path and build a business around yourself, your set of beliefs becomes your driving force and direction.
I have helped clients to build one-person businesses which have begun by tapping into their own backstory and using this backstory as motivation to create the changes they want to see in the world. It’s their very own north star, and essentially company vision statement.
Here’s a snapshot of some one-person businesses in action right now at The Ask:
Fixing the educational gap in SaaS companies for non tech folk
Teaching sewing and creating a community around it, as a cure for loneliness
Empowering women to build their leadership in male dominated industries
Informing workers of their employment rights
Educating female founders on how to identify solutions to their digital product
Giving poets the platform their work needs to thrive
Coaching for employees whose mindset is impacting their performance
My hope for you, reader, is that your own north star guides your decisions, and provides meaning and direction. Sure, you CAN choose a market opportunity for your business based purely on where the financial opportunities seem to lie. But rarely is that a recipe for lasting success.
Entrepreneurship is not for the fainthearted — it requires leaving job-security behind and can at times, be a real emotional rollercoaster.
But those who choose this path are tapping into their innate sense of purpose on a daily basis, something that psychologists have linked to having a higher quality of life. Therefore, this calling is often a greater force than the challenges that entrepreneurship brings with it. Having a guiding mission and set of beliefs will help you to stay the course when things get tricky in business (which they will).
Answering questions of your beliefs, missions, values is often perceived as the ‘fluff’ separate from getting down and dirty into the real ‘business’. So many skip past it, but trust me, the longer you spend in this reflection stage the more ‘right’ your business will feel and the easier that decisions will be for you to make.
I’ve been coaching a client who runs an agency turning over £1m+ and has been incredibly successful. However, they shared that they wished they’d done this work at the start of their journey, seeing the importance of it now on hiring, strategy and growth. Copy and pasting mission statements from others is not the answer here. Instead, we’re doing the introspection and answering these questions looking back.
“It’s better to follow your own path however imperfectly than to follow someone else’s perfectly.”
— Bhagavad Gita
If you’re at the start of your journey, do this work at the very beginning.
What I’ve learned is that there are four true currencies that help a business succeed.
Those are:
Time
Money
Influence
Audience
For most one-person business owners, they can’t compete on time (it’s just them!) or money (being self-funded). But their competitive advantage CAN be on influence and audience growth. Doing work around your beliefs is what will fuel the amount of influence you can have, and the audience you can build as a result.
Building around your beliefs entails answering three core questions: what makes you different, how you want to build your business around that, and how you’ll share your message.
I’ll cover each of these three areas in this post.
Know what makes you different
Everyone has faced challenges in life. That’s part and parcel of the human experience.
Getting inspiration and motivation from these challenges is how we’re meant to process them and use this as fodder for the betterment of the world around us. A self-healing journey in the process.
The reason we have certain values and beliefs in life is because of the sources of friction we’ve had to experience ourselves. So look within – there are your beliefs found in the personal challenges you’ve overcome and therefore care about and want to prevent others from experiencing.
There will be clues all around you of this, like receipts, in your conversations, notepads, and your purchases. What are you obsessed with, curious about, or more focused on than others? Answering these questions is part of what I call your ‘Unique Contribution’ and I’ve got a five step guide to finding yours here.
The directions and focus my clients have chosen are not accidental decisions – they were born out of a personal awareness of an injustice or challenge – and this passion and care shines through in the work as a result.
If you’ve answered what makes you different, you can build your business around it.
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Design your you-business model
The way you should design your business model is by filtering that which makes you different and using it to determine what your business looks like, by matching it to the external marketplace and your prospective customers’ needs.
By virtue of being different, you can’t be for everyone. You’ll have to choose a focus and a direction in which your difference can be celebrated and recognised in all of its sheer talent and brilliance.
Anyone suggesting you don’t need to niche down might not be running a one-person business that has to compete on these terms.
But if you are, it's your job is to get up close and personal with your target customer (no, actual stalking, please) and to figure out how to be the perfect fit for them and their particular needs.
So, don’t just be an operations consultant. You want to be known as the swiss army knife operations consultant who can be dropped into a fast moving company about to raise their next round of funding. Don’t be a marketer but a marketeer for ethical brands who want to establish their true green credentials, not ‘green wash’.
A recent client with a product strategy skillset is focusing on female founders who have funding. This skillset could be applied to any customer group. But by taking a narrow slice of the market means being able to know it inside out. Knowing more about the needs of this group means being able to offer an unrivaled service, in return.
Don’t just choose a lane, choose a cycle lane.
Your beliefs and your ways of doing business should not be the carbon-copy of every one of your competitors. Rather, they should influence the WAY that you do something i.e. your personality, your approach, or your style.
Your creative eye or customer care or your straight talking approach is why clients and customers choose you over everyone else.
On paper you might bring the same credentials as someone else, but in a sales conversation or pitch you’d bring that unique feeling to the table – that ‘je ne sais quoi”.
It’s funny how I was told off in past jobs for being too analytical and asking too many questions – my employer would prefer I kept it schtum(!) -- and now I’ve built a six figure business around asking questions, and being myself.
Remember this for yourself. The external packaging of what you do is one thing, also known as your positioning, but then once you start working with a client, what you actually DO with them is another.
How do you show up to the work, and physically provide the service that you offer? Is there something about your unique contribution that you can leverage, to add a certain dimension to the work you do?
You want to be known for the experience of working with you, and allow that to inform perceptions of your work. When you think you’ve found something unique – how can you turn up the volume on that thing? Go to TOWN with it? Don’t be afraid to throw in bonuses and surprises to go over and above with your client.
From ideation sessions, retreats, accountability, connections and intros to others because you've got a big network… make it an irresistible part of the value you bring to the clients you help. A previous coach invited me and her other 1-1 clients into these live workshops and events all the time, as a bonus, because she absolutely came alive in that environment. As a result, we all got this extra value for money we weren’t expecting, and she probably had longer client relationships in return.
The more you can be known to be the person who does a particular kind of work for a particular group of people in a particular type of way, then the more likely you’ll attract those people to you with ease.
Embracing what makes you YOU, requires ripping up the playbook for ‘success’ and leaning into a business model that’s personally fulfilling.
Take Danny Bent who runs inclusive fitness programmes and became a high profile speaker for brands like the National Geographic and Nike. He is somewhat marmite in that people tend to either love or hate him – down to how he leans into being himself to the nth degree, tiny shorts on stage but the super macho vibe all at once.
Where can you be more… you, and make more money as a result?
Sharing your beliefs and messages to attract the right customers
If you’ve done the hard work to identify who you are, what you stand for and how you help people, now It's time to spread the message and find the people who resonate with this.
To connect with them.
At this stage, try not to let new fads, tech, platforms or shiny object syndrome distract you.
“What’s hot” can work for a limited amount of time, however going “viral” or hoping is not sustainable long term.
It's not about keeping up, it’s about doubling down.
Double down on what you do, what you know, and be more committed to your mission and message than anyone else could be.
You don't need to know everything about your area or field, but you need to know a lot about the specific area in which you've chosen to focus your work and do work that matters to YOU. Subscribe to blogs and influencers and academic journals in your chosen area and be able to riff off the latest and greatest in this sphere.
That is your job.
Don't worry if you don't know everything about the world at large, because your clients and the unique contribution you can bring to the world need you to really know your stuff about your particular field. Everything else pales in comparison to getting into the details of your area of influence and then sharing your beliefs openly and transparently.
From there you'll be able to relax about sales because marketing is doing its job when you are clear about what you stand for and what you believe in.
You can do this through your website, social media, blog, or other marketing channels. The medium is less important than the fact that you will actually do it.
These messages are made more powerfully using storytelling to convey your message and personal experiences that have shaped your business. Your authenticity and vulnerability in sharing your story can create a strong emotional connection with your audience, and they are more likely to engage with your business on a deeper level.
Engage in real conversations, you don’t have to run a community to recreate the feeling of having a community.
Marketing guru Seth Godin says that effective marketing is demonstrating that ‘people like us do things like this’:
Your role is to signal to your customers and your community that you GET them, and can help them because you ARE them. You are in the same tribe and these behaviours are encouraged, expected, and symbols of a shared identity.
A past client, Simon Rodrigues, founder of Technopoly is a great example. He’s serving the LATAM startup community, having recently relocated to Mexico to set up shop there as a consultant and writer. He writes investigative profiles and industry deep dives into the VC/startup landscape, which is adding value to the community by giving his clients (and his prospects) media exposure. He’s also bringing exposure and fresh international perspectives from his startup work in London and the USA. Then, when these local businesses need consulting or communications support, its his consulting they often turn to.
In conclusion
Remember, when you are true to yourself and build your business around your authentic self, the right people will naturally be drawn to you.
Building your business around your beliefs, values, and lived experiences is a powerful strategy that not only leads to personal fulfillment because your business and business model and chosen customers fit you like a glove
But it is also the source of unique perspectives that draws in press, customers and partners who want to work with you. If you don’t spend time digging into these pieces, don’t be surprised if sales and marketing feel like a slog, or you feel like you’re swimming against the tide of a sea of same-ness amongst your competitors.
By tapping into your personal backstory and challenges you've overcome, defining your business based on what makes you unique. Your authenticity becomes your competitive advantage, and you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
This looks like creating intimate conversations with a small group of people and telling the truth. Just as you aren't friends with everyone you also don’t want your business to be for anyone. It’s for a group of people who deserve to hear from you, and who want to hear your version of the truth.
We pay attention to people who share insights based on their understanding of the world, the market, culture, and their take on what’s happening, who give us hope and a way forward .
You can be that for your customers, if you lean heavily into who you are, and what your biggest beliefs and missions in this world are as a result.
