Every person on the planet has a set of life experiences the combination of which are totally unique to them. One exciting implication of this is that these idiosyncratic traits can be leveraged toward starting an equally unique business! That’s exactly what we will be talking about in today’s episode: how to find the right business for you – exclusively you – to start. Today we will all be purposefully catching a severe case of special snowflake syndrome, except the good kind! In our session, we lay out three exercises that you can follow along with intended to help you find the business that nobody else would be better suited to start than you. The first is how to discover your hidden expertise using life experiences, unique traits, and technical skills. Next, we show you how to make your potential competitors irrelevant by determining the intersection between your unique traits and their provision of value to a market. Our last exercise will be a guide on how to optimize the business you have come up with for growth and profitability by using what we call the profit grid. The only thing these, as yet undiscovered, businesses need in order to exist and be launched into the world is you, so grab the worksheets, and tune in today to get started!
Key Points From This Episode:
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What makes a successful business? Creating value for your customer.
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The idea that education does not matter: your life experience forms your unique service.
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Exercise 1: discovering your hidden expertise to make a successful business and add value.
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How to fill up the three expertise columns: life experiences, unique traits, and technical skills.
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Being ahead of the curve and not following trends; how to create a lasting business.
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Three ‘I’s in any area of business: innovators, imitators, and and idiots (latecomers).
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Making competitors irrelevant by finding your intersection of value (exercise two).
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The more you refine your unique experiences, less likely there is that competition exists.
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Empathy and trust that gets built with your niche after determining it.
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How Michael’s music/marketing background helped him start 12South.
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Finding 10 unique intersections by combining dissimilar column items from the first list.
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Assessing the meaning a combination has for you by whether they spark joy after being read.
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Exercise three: using the profit grid to optimize growth and profitability of your new business.
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An X and Y axis depicting cost of product versus amount of people in the market.
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Four quadrants defined by the axes: expensive luxury items, the danger zone, and more.
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A reminder not to serve a niched audience that is also poor.
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Placing ideas from exercise two in their appropriate places in the grid.
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Scalability versus costs; product versus service-based businesses.
Tweetables:
“We can name a number of legendary figures who didn’t do that well in formal education.” — @whatsPaulUpTo [0:11:20]
“No one else in the world has the exact same combination of life experiences as you.” — @whatsPaulUpTo [0:14:47]
“When I initially started the agency, it was me coming from a place of empathy having been an artist, knowing that there was this giant need to help artists understand their business.” — @michaelshoup [0:17:16]
“If we really tried, we might be able to find a great niche of underwater basket weavers but the downside here would be you would never make your money back because it is low priced.” — @michaelshoup [0:26:11]