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25 Ways to Love What You Do So That the Money Follows

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Do What You Love — Love What You Do

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Often I work with service professionals to focus their businesses. We identify their unique value proposition — what they bring that no one else can. In that way, we develop a service that they love offering and their clients love too.

Doing what we love can’t be infatuation. After the first congratulations about our new job, other folks might care, but they have their own work to do. They won’t be paying attention to whether we love what we’re doing. Many will take for granted that we’ll get over that that “love thing” in a week or two. Yeah, we need to keep the love alive on our own.

They say, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” I might suggest that it could work better to say

“If you want the money to follow, do what you love and love every bit of what you do.”

25 Ways to Love What You Do So That the Money Follows

It’s the love that gets us up in the morning. On some days, it takes gut-wrenching love to keep us going. Start each morning with these 25 ways to love what you do, and success with be always in view.

  1. Love your clients and everything they care about, even when they’re unreasonable.

  2. Love thinking things through so that they don’t have to worry at all.

  3. Love the clients who change their mind more often than they change their underwear.

  4. Love promoting your work so that folks can find you.

  5. Love the fact that you’re always learning, mostly by doing things wrong.

  6. Love the challenge of figuring out how to pay the rent.

  7. Love the hours you’re working, and working, and working.

  8. Love the accomplishment that makes your client look like a hero.

  9. Love the calls from people who think you have free time to talk to them.

  10. Love that you solve problems before clients even see them.

  11. Love the clients who offer you a chance to learn.

  12. Love that you can sneak in a nap or a movie break now and then.

  13. Love your successes and your failures.

  14. Love the 13-foot commute to your computer.

  15. Love the folks who love you, but don’t “get” what you’re doing.

  16. Love everyone who offers you a chance to show what you can do.

  17. Love the folks who get paid vacations while you wish for a free minute.

  18. Love the chance to be your own boss working for clients who hire you.

  19. Love the chance to do work for free to build your portfolio.

  20. Love the chance to get intimate with your credit card number.

  21. Love deciding for yourself which clients are not a good match for you.

  22. Love meetings when folks wish they could leave the building with you.

  23. Love the feeling of being slightly out of control.

  24. Love that you’re adding your unique value.

  25. Love going to sleep tired, knowing you’ve been doing what you love.

We all define love and success differently. Yet is seems that success comes more easily when we full-out do what we love and love every part of what we do.

What’s your experience with doing what you love? Has it really been easy for you?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz to focus in on what doing you love to do!!
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

Three Steps to a Killer Tagline that Customers Pass On to Others with Enthusiasm

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The Decision Model

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Back to business . . .

We’re on the way to Building an Outrageously Solid, Customer-Centered Model to Test All Business Decisions. What we’re going for is to define the business by building these four parts.

  • An explicit description of our customer and the niche market he or she represents
  • A company name and identity that fits and appeals to that ideal customer
  • A tagline that states what we promise and deliver
  • A “do line” that answers “What do you do?” in a few words

My version might look something like this:
Ideal customer: Thinking businesses and entrepreneurs who understand that relationships are crucial to success
Company name: Successful-Blog
Tagline: You’re only a stranger once.
Do line: I show businesses how to make irresistible products and services that attract fiercely loyal customer-fans.

What’s packed in that definition? Let’s concentrate on the tagline for now.

Three Steps to a Killer Tagline that Customers Pass On

A tagline is brand statement. It’s what we want folks to remember about us — the perception and reality of who we are rolled together in a few words. Nike said, “Just do it.” Burger King said, “Have it your way.” Verizon knew we were all saying, “Can you hear me now?” Think on the businesses you know. How many taglines can you remember? My point exactly.

A killer tagline is not just one that we remember. It resonates. We find something we recognize, something we identify with inside the words. That’s why we wear a “Just Do It!” t-shirt.

Killer taglines describe something about who or where customers want to be.

Here are three steps to a killer tagline that customers pass on.

  1. Make a promise that benefits the customer.
    Do you remember ever saying, “But you promised. . . .”?

    Promises are things we don’t usually forget.

    If you want folks to remember a tagline, make a promise. Make it a promise that your customers will care about. That means the promise has to offer something for THEM.

    Make your promise about what you will do for them. What one thing will you deliver without fail. What need will you fill? What can your customers count on you to do over and over again?

    I want to work with thinking businesses that care about relationships. My tagline promises they’ll learn ways to establish long-lasting relationships with a community of customers they want.

  2. Say it simply, out loud, and often.

    Powerful taglines don’t waste words. The longest example I gave has only five. Five words make it easy to understand, remember, and repeat. Five words means that there’s nothing hidden, no small print, no “take backs,” no thing to worry about. Five words means that you have through what you’re promising and that you know it well enough to say it in five words. Can you use six? Sure, but be certain that you need every one.

    Talk about your tagline promise often. In other words, repeat your promise out loud. Call attention to it. Let folks know that you stand behind the words. No one does this better than Phil Gerbyshak. He’s the Make It Great! man.

    When we say the words out loud, or write them in a comment box, it tells folks that we use those words with intent. Every time we repeat our tagline, the subtext is “and you can say I promised.”

    Imagine a promise offered that comes with a subtext that says “You won’t be disappointed.” Who wouldn’t want to try that? How many folks wouldn’t talk about it after they did?

  3. Deliver on that promise every time.

    Under promise and over deliver. You’ve heard that before. But don’t back off on what you can do. Be there. Show up. Put your head and heart fully in it. That’s what you’re following your passion to do.

    Nothing beats the feeling of a promise that someone kept. Even better than that is when someone keeps it a second time. That moves a person to a special category of friend.

    When a business delivers on a promise once we’re impressed. When a business makes it their business to keep their promises every time, we give them back our loyalty and our trust. The next guy has a hard time stealing us away from that.

Three simple steps. We’ve known them since we were kids. Make a promise that means something. Say it out loud to show that you mean it. Then deliver without fail.

Who wouldn’t want to tell their friends about service like that?

What do you know about promises that businesses have made to you?

–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.

Building an Outrageously Solid, Customer-Centered Model to Test All Business Decisions

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Me You Me You

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

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.

Me you me you

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.

If You Don't Know What You Love Doing . . .

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It’s Natural

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Here’s how it often works. He says. She says.

I say, “Sure you do. You’re just not seeing it.”

If you’re stuck finding out, sorting out, what you love doing, my experience is that what you love doing is so obvious that you can’t believe it is worth counting. Let me tell you about Martha.

Ah Martha, her desk was like it belonged in a magazine. If she wasn’t in her office, folks thought she was out for the day. Everything had its place, and you could bet it was there. Soft-spoken, gracious Martha had a smile that lit up the department of 32 people and thousands of pages she kept track of. Marha was a sea of calm in a world of publishing paper clutter.

For her performance review. I asked Martha to do a self-appraisal. Martha reached outside herself to find many things that she did well and wrote them up in excellent fashion. All of the qualities I described above were missing.

When I asked her about it, she said, “Oh, anyone can do those things.”

I replied, “No, Martha, folks aren’t nearly as organized as you are, nor are they as calm and gracious.” That turned on her room-lighting smile.

I said “You love organizing things and all of us, don’t you?” Her larger smile told the story.

Martha didn’t see what she loved or her most valuable qualities. She discounted them because they were was something that was a natural talent. We tend to discount what comes naturally to us as not as valuable because we didn’t “earn” it. Yet, Martha’s talents were what kept my department working smoothly and without friction. To this day, I miss her.

She didn’t see it because it was obvious and so natural to her.

Yet everyone else knew how valuable her talents were to them.

Look to Your Second Nature

If you don’t know what you love doing, ask those folks who rely on you. Look at what you do as second nature. Think of those defining qualities and the things that you always do and would be nervous or bummed if you could no longer do them. I can’t imagine Martha not being allowed to organize things.

What can you not imagine yourself not being able to do?

Not long ago when talking with the other founders of SOBCon, I said, “I have to be the keeper of the vision.” I explained it in this way, “it’s not ego. It’s not about control or the name of my blog. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. It’s in my DNA. I can’t NOT do it.”

What’s the thing you can’t NOT do? What’s imprinted on YOUR DNA?

C’mon and say it out loud.

–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.

1.2 WHY Doing What We Love Is Solid Business Thinking

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Not Self-Indulgent, Good Business

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Did I really mean to say the word? Yep.

Love. Not like, enjoy, or get kick out of, but have a passion for, live for, hold in highest esteem. Every person needs a quest, a cause, and a purpose.

That’s right. One — that one simple question.

What businesslike thing do you love doing?

is critical to your business.

Why?
Because it’s how we’re wired as humans. We bring our best to whatever challenge we face. We’re better when we’re inspired by deep feeling. We’ve known that since we were kids.

Any less is inauthentic, second-best, didn’t try, plan b, was absent that day, ho-hum, phone it in, stand in right field and let that pop-fly pass us by instead of saying the game . . . we might as well be out!

There’s a reason that so many folks — on TV, in IT, in academia, in every career — say the same thing. . . . find your passion, do what you love.

They’re not promoting self-indulgence. They’re supporting solid business sense.

WHY Doing What We Love Is Solid Business Thinking

What makes loving our work solid business thinking? Why is it more critical now than before?

In his book, A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink points out that “high concept” and “high touch” values (design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning) have become as important as linear thinking, detailed analysis, and spreadsheets.

On his blog, Doc Searls recently said this about how business is doing. It was part of an interview with Shel Israel.

In the original website version of Cluetrain, Chris Locke wrote, “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.”
Recognizing a situation and dealing with it, however are two different things. The “dealing” has barely begun.

In this Internet, global economy we deal direct — no middle man. Conversation and relationships matter as much as schedule and budget do.

In plain and simple words, thinking and doing what everyone has thought and done no longer work. Now it’s think and love what we do — That’s the only way to draw customers to us.

Think hard. Thinking alone doesn’t solve every problem. Some problems are human. Some require empathy and finesse. Some situations call for more than intelligent reasoning. Before you talk yourself out of what you love doing . . . think about the reasons we need to bring all of yourself to your business — head and heart.

7 Reasons WHY Doing What We Love is Critical

When we bring all of who we are, full engagement of head and heart, we bring 7 deeper values and higher outcomes to our work.

  1. Complete presence — focus. We’re all there — the all thinking business is no longer sufficient. Computers can’t smile. Computers can’t listen to the spaces between words. People buy what we sell.

  2. Peak performance — productivity. We invest more, do more, go further for the work we love.

  3. Tolerance — perseverance. We have more patience, time, and energy for problem solving when we directly reap the benefits.

  4. Value and Appeal — compelling story. To compete a product or service has to be useful and beautiful. Simple and elegant, for to the adult and the kid in each one of us. Bringing logic and emotion to a business outdistances the world view of logic alone.

  5. Total Differentiation — identity. The uniqueness of our being shines through in concept and execution when we start from what we love.

  6. Fully Invested and Worth Investing In — market value. Rolling all of the above values into one, nothing beats the 360 degree investment of brains, money, and dreams all in the same direction. Any VC worth his or her salt looks for that combination when funding a small business.

  7. Sense of Worth — authority. We value what we earn and what we love.

Can you see why it’s only sense that a strong business is built on doing what we love?

Got questions yet?

Next: 1.3 WHAT IF you don’t know what you love to do?

–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.

No Mission Statement: One Simple Question

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Enough

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Last week a Dawud Miracle and I discussed the problems faced by businesses. We mentioned entrepreneurs, small businesses, even corporations. So much of what came up was not encouragaing — bad messages; bad service; empty offers; no customers; not unique or remarkable; broken promises; clueless and out of focus. Not much most folks would take a risk on.

It’s as if some folks “get,” and the rest don’t get to know.

People rush after productivity tools and use them to further confuse their issues. People wait for customers, and no one comes. They talk about the chances they never got, but that that doesn’t get them. They’re stuck.

Why should anyone be stuck? . . . overwhelmed and out of focus? Why are there problem solvers without problems to solve?

It’s a disconnect. A swiss cheese hole in the available information.

Voices across the Internet say . . . Find your passion. . . . Choose your target market. . . . BUT, they stop there. No one says HOW to do that.

It’s got to be frustrating.

This connector can’t stand to watch problems going unsolved. I’m for breaking OUT of this paradigm starting now — with tools, models, and some basic Inside-Out Thinking.

Inside-Out Thinking

What is Inside-Out Thinking? Plain and simple, it’s starting from you — head and heart — who you are, as a person or as a company. We’re going to the core to find the values on which to build a concrete foundation.

I’m not talking hours parsing words on mission statements that gather dust. Their pretty, but they don’t pay the bills. I’m talking key, core terms that tell about DOING.

Don’t think heaven or humanitarian honors. Forget making money or impressive words.

Please, answer to one simple question.

As a company, as a person,

What businesslike thing do you LOVE doing?

Here’s how to answer that:
Forget any thought of money. Don’t you dare devalue or discount what you love doing. Not sure? STOP. Quiet yourself. Remember your successes. Here’s where to look for them.

  • Look to the future. Three years from now, if a wealthy patron financed you, what would you be doing?
  • Look in the past.
  • Look at last Saturday or the last time you were with friends. What were you doing that might apply?
  • What about your favorite job? What did you love about that?
  • What were you really good at in school?
  • What are you good at? What would you miss if you couldn’t do it?

You get the idea.

If you don’t know how to complete the picture of you. Ask a friend to tell you what you love doing. Ask quite a few. They know. Truth is, so do you. Once you find out what you love doing, that’s when the thinking starts.

I’m getting jazzed about this.

So, go ahead, give it a shot . . . what do YOU love doing?

It’s not hard. It’s just different — there wasn’t a model before. There will be now.

–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.