This blog’s about think business and you probably wondered why the previous posts were mostly referring to self-development issues? When people think of becoming entrepreneurs and intend to start their own businesses, their primary goal is to make money. They begin hunting business ideas and opportunities that can make money in the fastest and less risky way possible. They think the easiest way to succeed fast in business is to copy. Copying what other people are successfully doing seems to be the less risky option. Why invent the wheel when it is already invented? Especially when people don’t have experience in business, they consider copying as the best way to start ‘safely’. But statistics tell us that it is riskier to go in business on the same path as others than to go in our unique way. Out of ten new businesses, nine fail in the first five years. Most failing businesses are the so-called ‘me-too’ businesses, start-ups that went with the trend and tried to replicate ‘what’s working’. Why does it happen? It happens just because markets are permanently evolving fields. When a new business becomes successful, it makes a difference in the market; people start to buy the new thing (product or service) and the reward the business owners get reaches the highest level. Always the successful innovative businesses are those ‘skimming the market’. Then, inspired by their success, a lot of other businesses emerge in the same market in the quest for big profits. But what happens with the B2B services? The only "non-unique" business model could have smaller number of failure. For example, if you have a video production services or corporate photography which help other businesses with gain their wellness, they would survive in their own way. What happens next? The first two-three coming on the market will start to share the new market and the big profits with the first one, while a lot of others trying to copy the model will get the rest. As many as they are, as less as they will get. When you’re in the first three businesses coming on a new market you have the chance to succeed provided you know to effectively manage your business. In general, customers cannot retain more than three suppliers for the same type of product or service. The rest of the suppliers don’t matter to them. That’s why a lot of new businesses die before knowing what had happened to them despite they had done what the most successful on the market were doing! If you’re part of ‘the rest’, in order to survive you need to come up with something different and, meantime, relevant for your customers to notice you and offer you a place in their already information crowded minds. Here comes into the picture of what business strategists call ‘the unique selling proposition that they consider all the new businesses should have to be able to profitable succeed on the market. Without something to differentiate your business from others operating in the same market, you don’t have many chances to get a reasonable market slice. Customers will notice you and give you their attention if you succeed to tell them a different story about your product or about the way you are delivering your product on the market. And if they will like it and your story will make sense to them, they will give you credit and will start to buy from you. Knowing that many entrepreneurs get mad desperately searching for the uniqueness to be attached to their business. They go after any idea which can look genuine, compose weird marketing messages just to be noticed, and do whatever tips and tricks they can to make people look at their offerings. Most of them are, however, still unsuccessful. They get frustrated and don’t understand why following strategists’ advice they are still struggling to survive. The reason why they fail stays in the relevance their offering and their message have in the eyes of their potential customers. You cannot be unique by just simulating uniqueness. Searching for uniqueness outside yourself and your business is the worst way to proceed. The uniqueness of a business comes only from the uniqueness of its entrepreneur.The good news is that we all are unique. Even if we don’t know which our particular touch is, it exists inside us. We shouldn’t search it outside us adopting and adapting other people’s ideas.
‘Fake it until you make it’ doesn’t work. Just forget about that! Getting inspiration from others can stimulate our imagination and can help us find our uniqueness, but remember you’ll never become unique, you already are unique! So, is there a way to get to your uniqueness and to harness it in your business? Definitely yes. You can. But, you should start with firstly knowing yourself. You need to work on your life purpose and your life vision first, and then to think about the most appropriate business for you to be in. Answer this question: why this business? If your business is the expression of your deeper inclinations, you won’t have to struggle to find its ‘unique selling proposition’. It will be revealed to you once you will start putting on the paper your business proposal and plan. Your business should be the place where you’re using your brain and your natural gifts to their fullest. What you need to do is to: 1. Determine your life purpose (the why), find a vision for your life, and reveal and harness your natural gifts. 2. Work on yourself to develop your natural gifts and to build the right skills for setting the foundation of your business. In short, you have to learn to do something very good and then to learn to efficiently sell it to interested people.
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