You can’t afford to ignore customer empowerment.
In the You Economy, you are not only empowered as a producer but as a consumer. You have access to methods of consumption we could only dream about 5 years ago.
Hello, AirBnB, Etsy, Kayak, the rapid expansion of Amazon, etc…
An un/welcomed side effect of the diversity of consumptive choice is a movement towards “vendor relationship management.” In many ways, consumers want to have less to do with the businesses that serve them. They want to extract the most value for their money in relation to the least hassle from the company. They want to break free from producers & providers that see them only as targets and not people with choice.
…big business continues to believe that a free market is one in which customers get to choose their captors. Choosing among AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon for your new smartphone is like choosing where you’d like to live under house arrest. It’s why marketers still talk about customers as “targets” they can “acquire,” “control,” “manage” and “lock in,” as if they were cattle.
— Doc Searls, The Wall Street Journal (emphasis added)
In this system of commerce, customer choice is the holy grail for consumers. No contract phone? Sign me up. Pay as you go internet? Done. A la carte menus? Order away! Comparison shopping right from your phone? Don’t mind if I do!
The commercial culture emerging now makes it easier & easier for a customer to only do business with you when you’re the one with the best deal or the most convenient offering. The ease with which you can satisfy your every whim makes it that much more difficult for a business to make inroads in customer loyalty.
Microbusinesses, on the other hand, tend to enjoy a great deal of customer loyalty. Microbusinesses have an easier time delivering personalized service, adjusting to trends, and communicating a great vision. They can connect personally with their customers because personal tends to be the only thing they know.
But it would be foolish for microbusinesses to dismiss the customer empowerment trend as only applying to big business. Already, flash sales, group discount buying, and freelancer sales sites like Fiverr.com are making it easier for people to buy from microbusinesses without establishing any kind of relationship.
Now, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’ve spoken out in favor of introducing mass media customers to the diversity of microbusiness through leveraged buying before.
But this new era of commerce means that micro businesses can’t take their customer loyalty for granted.
To loyalty-proof your business, consider these opportunities for development:
Mutual Respect
Customers deserve to be empowered. And so do you. It’s hard to create a mutually respectful relationship between consumer & producer when you, as a business owner, don’t respect yourself.
Too often I see business owners allowing themselves to be trampled over in the name of fostering loyalty & positive relationships with their customers. If your prices, policies, and customer expectations don’t create an environment that fosters respect, you’ll feel taken advantage of and your customers still won’t feel any loyalty to you.
On the flip side, remember that customer service doesn’t stop at serving customers well. Your marketing, product offerings, and principles should also be signs of respect for the customers you serve.
Quality & Value
Microbusiness owners must give customers a reason to talk about their products and use them on a regular basis. You might choose to serve customers who want the highest quality money can buy… or you might choose to serve customers with the highest quality they can afford.
But delivering on quality & value is not a place to skimp when it comes to fostering loyalty. Think that’s obvious? Think again. I see many business owners trying to cut corners – not to defraud their customers – but just to make the business work. Delivering quality & value, relative to the expectations of your customers, needs to be the starting place for your business, not the variable.
Do you think that a customer who hears “This call brought to you by Free Conference Call” is thinking brand loyalty? And do you think that the customer who receives her purchase in a plastic grocery bag is thinking “return purchase?”
Microbusiness owners have a huge advantage here. The measure of quality & value varies between customer segments. Big businesses can’t account for this variety – but you can. Consider your customer – and your customer alone – when discerning how you can hit the quality & value ball out of the park.
Need & Desire Anticipation
The baseline for business is responding to customer needs. Businesses that develop real loyalty over time anticipate customer needs.
Think critically about where each of your products or offerings leaves your customers. What’s next? What questions would a customer have after using your product or service? What else might they like to buy from you? How can you complement their experience of their first purchase?
Those questions apply as equally to a life coach as they do a master cookie baker. If your customers love your chocolate chip hazelnut cookie, maybe they would love that lavender rosemary morsel you’ve been experimenting with. Part of your job as an entrepreneur is anticipating what your customers would love next.
When your customers feel like you’re reading their minds, they’re much more likely to come back for more.
This is actually where the greatest customer-brand relationships are forged. If you, as a business, are anticipating my needs and meeting them before I express them, I will feel like I have a relationship with you – whether you are an individual or a Fortune 50 company.
Brand loyalty is the exception now, not the rule. Customer empowerment will only become a greater & greater part of the way people do business – on either side of the transaction.
Make your business exceptional.
What would it take to have the most loyal customers in your niche? Figure that out & go do that.
The Case for Building a Bigger Business
You’re an individual.
You do your own thing. Your way.
Having a me-myself-and-I business makes sense to you: no committees, no compromise, no commitment, ultimate control.
But could you be short-changing your purpose & greater ambition to ignore the power of a team?
Solo entrepreneurship is all the rage. Its romantic notion of location independence, sky-high profit margins, and ultimate flexibility is alluring. Solo entrepreneurship might even look like your only option if you’re bootstrapping a brand new business: if you can’t even pay yourself, how are you going to share profit with someone else?
At World Domination Summit last weekend, Chris Brogan issued a challenge:
If we are this powerful as individuals, how much more powerful might be we be together?
Chris wasn’t just spouting platitudes. This was a legitimate world domination strategy.
If your purpose is bigger than you (as it should be) and aimed at serving your customers (as it must be), then doesn’t it stand to reason that building a business that’s limited in scope by its very makeup is a problem?
Yes, small can be beautiful. Yes, flexibility is liberating.
I’m not suggesting that your goal should be to create the next Google or Apple. Although, if it is, that’s great! Your goal should be to build the business that makes your purpose a reality.
The question isn’t whether being a “solopreneur” is the right way to go. Is anyone else sick of that word? The question is…
What does the business that will make my purpose a reality look like?
It might be a small, long distance team. It might be a group of friend huddled around a kitchen table. It might be an office or studio at a co-working space. It might be a store front.
Your business might require employees. It might require a team of contractors. It might even require a business partner or a team of co-founders.
But thinking you’re in this alone – and, even worse, romanticizing this notion – is the wrong way to go.
The people who are doing the great things with their businesses are harnessing their networks, the power of paid team members, and the beauty of outside expertise. They may look like a solo act but I guarantee, almost without exception, that they are not alone.
My business has been a small team for 2 years now. This Fall, I’m launching a larger business with a bigger team. Oh, the suspense…
The possibilities are what you make them. There are opportunities for collaboration, expansion, and profit all around you.
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PS I’ve got room for 3 more Insight Intensives in August. Get 3-6 months of strategy, ideas, and insight on your business straight from my brain. Click here to learn more & apply.
“This was by far the most important investment I have made in myself and my business so far!”
— Meg Ward, Be More Fear Less
Love scales. Or, why you’re the least important part of your business.
Love scales.
– Danielle LaPorte
Last week, I stated that one reason women are earning less in the Creative Class is that women tend to think in relationships as opposed to scale.
This week, returning from the second annual World Domination Summit, I stand even more firm in this knowledge.
I don’t go to this event for the content. I go to talk to customers, friends, and mentors. And most of the women I talked to – my good friends included – worry about betraying their tribes and coming up short if they were to scale what they offer.
First, what do I mean by scale? Simply, scale is serving as many customers as possible with as little effort on behalf of your business as possible. Serving a group of customers through scale means that your business has an impact on people who you wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.
Scaling leverages your gifts for the greatest good across the broadest channels.
I believe that most microbusinesses require a level of premium, unleveraged work. It could take the form of commission art, couture dresses, one on one coaching, or corporate speaking engagements. But most of those same businesses require a level of leverage to take their impact to scale. The two sides of the equation can and do work hand-in-hand.
One informs the other, improving both.
I woke up on Saturday thinking, “I need a little Danielle LaPorte.” Maybe you’ve had a similar experience? Luckily, I was in a position to remedy that thought. I plopped myself in a chapel pew at during her session.
She began her Q&A session with her brief observations on the conference so far. Her first was the simple but oh-so-delicious statement, “Love scales.” Ah yes, this is why I came. My entrepreneurial musings boiled down into a two word sound bite.
World Domination Summit is a beautiful example of how you can nurture relationships while leveraging your gifts & skills. Chris Guillebeau doesn’t have a relationship with each of the people who bought tickets – all within minutes of them going on sale. But, of course, many people feel like they have relationship with him.
More importantly, their connection to Chris makes connecting to the others at WDS much easier. It’s not the relationship with Chris that makes this event a success; it’s all the other relationships that are spawned by their implicit connection.
Yes, love scales at WDS. It scales at meet ups, conferences, and events. It scales at rock concerts, sidewalk sales, and yoga classes. Love even scales through ebooks, programs, and masterminds.
It’s the intention, process, and values that create the atmosphere that allows love to scale through a business. It’s not a business owner or her work with any individual client.
What holds you back from leveraging your gifts & skills to create more wealth and impact more lives is thinking that your work can’t survive without you & your attention to the client. But that’s what’s really beautiful: you aren’t the important part of the work you’re doing.
Your process – when you discover it, learn it, codify it – is the important part of your work.
It’s your process, the love that you put in it, and the love that your clients generate through it that carries your work, allowing you to scale your business and harvest its riches. It’s the love that your customers discover through each other that carries your work out into the world in new & unexpected ways. It’s the love that is born in a movement of ideas that creates positive change that you yourself could not create on your own.
It’s therefore your duty – as well as a killer earning strategy – to leverage the love & scale your offers.
So tell me, what is your process and how could you utilize it to scale your business?
What Men Get that Women Don’t: The Gender Wage Gap in the Creative Class
Thank the heavens, Richard Florida has just released an update to his foundational book, The Rise of the Creative Class.
Not so thankfully, Florida’s research shows that women earn about 40% less than men do in creative class employment.
In my own research, 32.6% of men surveyed earned more than $75,000 per year in their small businesses compared to only 10.6% of women.
I’m sure that many of the cliche reasons for the gender wage gap apply to creative class employment – possibly better than they do for employment as a whole. Women choose creative class employment because it’s flexible, they can work from home, they can work for themselves. They can take a break for children and they can support their partners.
Yawn.
While these may be reasons that women have traditionally earned less than men over time, they are not the reason you are earning less.
You are earning less because your business model is not set up to earn more.
Here’s what men know that women don’t know:
It’s easier to earn the second $50,000 than it is to earn the first $50,000.
In other words, once you’ve earned $50,000, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be earning 6-figures. The difference is that earning 6-figures generally requires leveraging your earning. It means no longer trading time for money. It means understanding what parts of your business can be duplicated over & over again with almost zero effort. It means finding a tipping point again, and again, and again.
Women don’t need to give up flexible hours or time with kids. They need to embrace better business models that are based on value & results, not time & energy.
Women seem to prefer relational transactions. Men seem to prefer transactional relationships.
Go figure.
Relational transactions happen most often in project-based or one-to-one client scenarios. The easy way to develop a relationship is with time, exchange, and getting-to-know-ya. You put your whole heart & soul into the process. Those relationships turn towards a transaction when you have something that fills a need for the other person.
It’s a feel good way to do business. But it’s a slow process. Each customer represents hours of time, loads of money (don’t think your social media use & Skype coffee dates aren’t costing you), and emotional stress waiting for those relationships to convert.
On the other hand, transactional relationships come fast & furious. They utilize scale to generate the revenue that’s needed in the business. Transactional relationships are built on acute needs & impulse purchases.
The difficulty with this model is that it’s difficult to achieve customer loyalty. Once a solution is purchased, there’s often no word from the customer to find out if it’s working or not. And this type of business might leave you scratching your head, wanting more.
You Economy businesses thrive when they find the sweet spot between transactional relationships & relational transactions.
In this sweet spot, customers are directed through an experience of a business that creates a personal investment. They understand that you are doing business with them in mind, that your business is geared to their success, and that you have a vision for how their lives can be better.
Customers are interested in the content you’ve created: articles, audios, videos, images. They devour it. They want more. They interact with you on social media, they hang out at your store, they talk about your products with their friends.
And you listen.
And listen.
And listen.
That’s the secret of a great relationship, right? It’s listening instead of talking. While you’re listening, it’s your job to discern what your new friends are saying. What is troubling them? What is confusing them? How are they feeling? What are they thinking?
Look for the patterns.
The money is in the patterns.
When more than a few people say the same thing over & over again, you’ve got a pattern and an opportunity.
A smart You Economy business will take that pattern and create a solution for it.
When that solution turns out to be the killer app for the pattern your friends are experiencing, they feel like you created it just for them. They feel heard, witnessed, nurtured.
But instead of selling it once, you’ve sold it 100 times.
Leveraged income isn’t outside the customer relationship cycle. It’s an integral part of it. You don’t develop leveraged income opportunities to generate money where before there was none. You develop leveraged income opportunities to solve problems for people you care about, over & over & over again.
If you’re making $10k, $20k, even $50k per year, you’re already solving problems for people one at a time. To make the jump to your dream income, your goal is to solve problems for people 10, 100, even 1000 people at a time.
As an example, I’ve created systems for listening to my new friends all over my business. One pattern that emerged was people asking for new ways to “get the word out” to potential customers. I could wait for these people to come to me as individual business strategy clients. I could have tweaked my services copy entice people based on this need.
Instead, I created a solution, called Marketing ReWired, that solves the problem for my friends over & over again. As a result, it costs less too. And they get the benefit of working through the program with their friends & colleagues.
I could have a business based exclusively on one-on-one business strategy clients. But it would be an average income at best. Instead, I have a business that’s based on creating leveraged solutions to problems that has already generated $100k in sales this year.
Don’t fight your desire to forge & foster relationships with your potential customers. Just realize that you can serve more than one person at a time. In fact, you owe it to your customers to do just that.
That’s the first step to doubling your business earnings and closing the gender wage gap of the creative class.
We’re all in the idea business now.
The fax machine is suffering a long, slow death. The proliferation of home scanners, digital signatures, and cloud computing make it obsolete for any office workers living in the 21st century.
Businesses that were based on making fax machines & their supplies have been forced to pivot, incorporate new products, and evolve with technology.
They’re not running ads, breathlessly trying to convince people that their fax machines are still worth buying.
Not everything that is made is worth being bought.
Click to tweet it!
We all make stuff. We write books, we produce videos, we cast silver, work wood, code apps.
What differentiates the stuff that people want to buy from the stuff that they don’t?
Need. Need and ideas.
What do people need from you?
What are you constantly being asked about?
What are you constantly offering to help with?
What needs, problem, discomforts do you see all around you?
What change – large or small – would you make in the world if you could?
What do you complain about regularly?
What do you think should be easier, faster, more connected, less unpredictable?
For as “advanced” a society as we have, there is still a mind numbing amount of need all around us. If you choose to make something just because you can, not because someone has need of it, you are closing the door on a big opportunity.
Sure, make you want to make. Just don’t expect it to sell if there is no need for it.
Remember that need comes in all colors. I need jewelry. I need espresso. I need an app that syncs my brainwaves from one device to another. Sure, they’re 1st world problems. But people in the 1st world want to buy plenty.
Don’t over think it when it comes to needs. Respond to (even mild) frustration.
The need fax machines once filled is being filled – better – by other devices & services. Now, the need isn’t just for the transfer of information. There’s an idea that collaboration & personal connection need to be a part of the way we exchange information.
What idea do you want to spread?
Jewelry should help you make a statement. We can redefine commerce for the 21st century. Our digital networks are connected to our human networks. Knitting & crochet can save the world. You can create your own bliss in digital business.
The most memorable and successful businesses today are making products out of ideas. Apple turns unconventional thinking, design, and ease of us into cult computing products. Toms turns the desire to put shoes on 3rd world feet into cult footwear in the 1st world. Lululemon turns active lifestyle into cult workout clothing.
Their ideas are a big part of what makes their products worth buying, at the prices they charge.
Their ideas turn their products into symbols of community, advocacy, and shared-purpose.
I believe that we all have ideas that we want to spread. I believe that we all have frustrations we wish to ease. I believe that we all see problems in our communities and among our friends & family that could use our impact.
Channel those ideas into products that fill needs.
PS Not ready to take your ideas to the world? No problem. There are hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs out there who need you. They need to you make what they design, write what they think, market what they sell, sell what they offer. Align yourself to a company or visionary with a shared purpose and you can use the skills you have without putting your ideas to the test quite yet.
PPS If your business is built on ideas & real needs, you’re in the right place. Make sure you’re subscribed (below) to receive insight & updates on thriving in 21st century business. You are the New Economy.
The Danger of Searching for Your One True Love
I wandered for years wondering if I would “find my passion.” I often worried that I had found it & then let it slip away.
In college, I drifted through different parts of ministry & academia. After college, I research & compared graduate degree programs of all stripes. Even after I decided to strike out on my own, I kept looking for my one true love.
Finally, an idea that filled a need propelled me to action.
Action was the solution.
The danger of looking for your one true love, your one true passion is that there’s an assumption that there is a single purpose to your life and that that single purpose can be be fulfilled by a single interest.
Your passion is not “an interest.”
You have interests – maybe military history, orchids, or gluten-free vegan cookies – and some of those interests may stick with you your whole life. Others come & go. Sometimes your interests cultivate new skills and sometimes they are new skills.
Your interests may be hobbies or you may have incorporated them into your work or career. They may be solitary or things you enjoy with family or friends. You might be categorized or labelled by your interests.
But in the end, your interests do not define you. They are a channel through which you express yourself. Your interests provide focus and context for what drives you.
Your passion is also not “an opportunity.”
No one is coming to knock at your door with your passion packaged in the form of an opportunity, tied with a bow. It’s not a one-night stand that turns into a long-term relationship. In the end, passion creates opportunities; it isn’t defined by them.
So what needs to be discovered when passion feels lost?
Passion is movement. Action. Momentum.
Passion is life force. It’s drive. Ambition.
When you ask how to find your passion you are asking because you’ve either lost – or never had – the drive, action, and momentum that creates the big things you desire.
I know this feeling. It felt equally like settling down and giving up.
It feels comfortable.
But work & action in the midst of passion feels reckless. It feels dangerous. It hurts so good.
When was the last night you stayed up all night because you were so excited by what you were working on? When was the last time your friends had to tell you they wanted to talk about something other than your next big thing? When was the last time you practically vibrated with the anticipation of your “work?”
That’s passion. The tingling in your fingertips, the fizzling in your brain.
Your passion may spring up out of a multitude of interests. Or there may be one source of this drive. But, don’t confuse passion with the interest itself.
When it comes to harnessing passion in a venture, it’s not your interest that is most important. It’s the drive. Don’t worry so much about discovering what drives you as the drive itself.
Get swept up. Follow the current where it wants to take you.
And stop looking for your one true love.