Solo entrepreneurs often do way too many things solo.
Just because you’re the one delivering the service, does not mean you should be trying to build your business by yourself.
Positioning – like other foundational elements of your business – is crazy hard to do on your own.
Here are 3 ways doing your own positioning is making things harder for you and impeding your business growth:
1️⃣ You’re trying to do the impossible.
As the saying goes: You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.
Unless you know some secret magical tricks, it’s impossible for you to get a clear and objective outside view of your business from within it.
Even if you’re just getting started, and no matter how similar to you your right-fit clients might be, you’re seeing your business from a very personal and specific vantage point…as the founder.
Positioning is about helping your best clients – who are outside the bottle – understand how you’re the best choice for what they need and value.
If you’re not getting an outside perspective, you’re probably making the wrong assumptions about what matters most to the clients you want to work with.
2️⃣ You’re constantly changing directions.
There’s an episode of Mad Men, where Peggy – the copy chief at the ad agency – is second-guessing the idea for a client pitch.
She calls her art director, Stan, and tells him she doesn’t like the idea. She says, “We both know there’s a better idea.“
And he replies, “There’s always a better idea.”
When we are left to our own devices, we’ll often question any choices we’ve made.
There’s no one to keep us from perpetually chasing another option.
One day you decide that you want to be the only done-with-you tax advisor for dentist office managers in your area. And a few weeks later you think that done-with-you tax advising for any local business would be better.
You have to stick with a choice long enough to see if it’s the right one for you and your business.
That’s really hard because it takes time. At least 3 months, usually more.
When you work with someone else to do your positioning, you’re more likely to stick with it because you’ve gone through a specific process. A process where you’ve explored a variety of choices before landing on the position you choose.
3️⃣ You don’t get specific and deep enough.
I’m currently doing research for an upcoming positioning workshop. My clients’ answers to the pre-workshop questions were the inspiration for today’s email.
They are experts at what they do and they have hundreds and hundreds of really happy customers. But they still can’t easily explain exactly what their customers value most about working with them.
Their answers are from their perspective (see #1).
And until we go through the positioning process, there’s no way for them to deeply understand their clients’ perspectives and perceptions.
I ask the questions to see where they think they are. To serve as a jumping-off point.
Even when you’re able to go deeper on your own, it’s hard to be as specific as you need to be to define effective positioning.
That’s why they hired me. They understand the value of what we can accomplish together vs. them trying to do it on their own.
And now, there’s something I have to confess.
I didn’t get help for my positioning until about a month ago. 🤦♀️
This email is a cautionary tale.
I thought I could figure it out on my own.
I made things way harder than they needed to be.
Even though I know better.
And I help my clients not fall into the same traps.
You’ll make your own mistakes but you can avoid falling too deeply into many of these traps when you get help and an outside perspective.