Me You Me You

Are you still with me?
Here’s where we are.

• We have claimed that one businesslike thing we love doing.
• We know why doing what we love is good business thinking.
• We have thought through an explicit description of our ideal customer — that one person who loves what we do.
• We’ve used that description to move outward to the group of like-minded customers who will also love what we do.

We started inside our hearts and looked inside the hearts and heads of our ideal customers, as best we could . . . hopefully we’ll keep doing both. It’s not a spreadsheet. It’s personal, from me to you, to me, and back to you again.

Now that we’re used to that, we can work on the most basic decision model. Every decision that follows will have this model as a test.

Here we go. We started building it sometime last week.

Building an Outrageously Solid, Customer-Centered Model

the model that we’re building will test future decisions about a specific business. To do that we need to define the business by building these four parts.

• An explicit description of the customer and the niche market he or she would be part of — The group will be relational and easy to describe The goal is to crawl inside the customer’s head and to feel his or her needs before he or she does.
• A company named for the customer — will fit and appeal to the ideal customer “Call it what it is,” a wise man once said to me. A customer can find us more easily when we let them see who we are.
• A tagline that does its job — will state what you promise and deliver It’s a promise that explains the value we offer to the people we want to serve.
• A “do” statement — will be a few-word answer to “What do you do? This answer becomes easier to get to once we’ve reached the answers to the first three parts.

All parts work as a whole to define the business from view of the ideal customer. When all parts are defined together, this definition becomes the touchstone to which all future questions and definitions can be tested and verfied.

Does what I’m about to do fit within this model to make the business stronger, clearer, and more real to my ideal customer . . . or does what I’m considering weaken my plan and fogs up my message?

Use the model to be sure that future decisions support how we’ve defined the company.

What do you see here so far? What questions do you have?

More is coming I promise.

Next: The tagline

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Is your business stuck? Check out the Start-up Strategy Package. Work with Liz!!

Related
To follow the entire series: Liz Strauss’ Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.