If you’ve not thought properly about investing in the business of you recently, now would be a great time to start doing so. It’s about having a renewed focus on what you’re doing business wise, and the way that you’re going about building a sustainable, future-proof business.
Along with year-long and even further afield goals and aspirations, I generally plan my business movements approximately 3-months in advance. Sometimes a little longer, but not much. Everything I do is built on top of my 90-Day Intent Planner mindset, where I focus my goals based around three key elements – sales and marketing, legacy and impact, and finally my own self development.
This is the exact 90-day framework for goal setting (and getting!) that I coach and oversee inside of my coaching groups and programs. Why? It works. That simple.
I believe that every year going forward can and will be the year of building a strong personal brand for yourself, your business and most importantly… those that you serve.
I’ve been saying it for almost a decade at the time of writing – people want to do business with people. Not big brands, or huge companies. Because of this human need, or requirement, we have to plan for the future of our businesses and understand that building our businesses around our personal brands (and vice versa) is a good way to move forward in today’s business climate.
Which leads me to the most important part of building the business of you… relationships.
Build Higher Quality Relationships
I can honestly say that since 2009, when I became properly active online, I’ve made more ‘worthwhile’ friends that I did in the decade before. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I’ve even made a few friends that I know I will remain friends with for the rest of my life!
The business world runs on relationships. People you want to do business with – sell to, market to, those that you need to work for you, and help you on your mission, towards entrepreneurial success. These are the relationships that make the difference.
These are the people that’ll say nice things about you, and talk about your products, services, online content, etc. They’ll do favors for you, and make things happen for you – sometimes for monetary gain, but most of the time, just for the hell of it – because they believe in you.
These relationships help build the collection of people that you need to succeed in today’s business world, more than anything else.
Build Your Community
Marketing star, Seth Godin believes that a tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another… a leader, and an idea.
Boom! There you have it.
If you check out the 1,000 True Fans post over at The Technium blog, you’ll see that the author, Kevin Kelly reports that, and I quote from that article directly, “A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce…”.
Enough said.
Build your tribe.
Build Your Platform
In my book, Rise of the Youpreneur, I talk a lot about content creation and marketing and social media, in regards to building an online brand and then embracing the opportunities that come along thereafter. This is a long-game approach to successfully building the business of you.
Almost every business owner that I’ve coached and helped through this focus as an entrepreneur has seen massive gains, and in a plethora of ways, when it comes to building their personal brand, such as:
Increase in social media followers, and the engagement from those followers.
Email’s coming from people that I’ve NEVER heard from before, asking questions about their businesses and how they can help them.
An increase in coaching clients, strategy calls, product sales, service inquiries… you name it!
I truly believe that the stepping stones I’ve put in place in the last few years alone (even though I’ve been at this for much longer!) are already paying off and will continue to do so.
But here’s the thing, I’ve been building businesses since 2004. It’s only since 2012, when I really started to focus on the personal branding element of my life and career, ultimately investing in the business of Chris, that everything became much easier. And more profitable!
The future is bright. Because, the business of you is the future!
As entrepreneurs we have a thousand ideas a minute and not enough hours in the day to think about ’em!