Fear Less, Brand More

It's Not About The Money

January 25, 2022 Season 1 Episode 7
Fear Less, Brand More
It's Not About The Money
Show Notes Transcript

When building and running your business, it's important to understand why you're even doing it.  But often, people will stop at wanting to make more money as their reason for running a business.

Is that really the reason, though?  What will that 6-figure income allow you to do?  What do you hope to get out of it?  Why don't you want to be back in the corporate environment?

I promise, it's not all about wanting more money.

Clearbrand Interview Information 
https://jenniferanastasi.com/services/#clearbrand

A Subito Media production

Jennifer Anastasi:

In today's episode, we're diving into the big branding question, finding your why. Many of my clients know they need to do the work to figure out why they're in business, but they often stop at that. I want to make money. Part of the answer as we're talking about today, there is so much more than. My why is a huge dose of freedom around my time and how I run my business, as well as helping people be less intimidated by the process of branding. Your why is going to be unique and individual to you. So we're going to be talking about how to date down deep. I also have some amazing examples of how some of my clients have been positioned using their why. Once we get past that, I want to make money part of the answer. All right, let's get started. There are a lot of different reasons why people start their own businesses. There are so many different reasons because of what I do, often I will try to get to the heart of why people start their business, because it is one of the most important things that I need to help my clients communicate. There's an exercise that you can do where you keep asking yourself why? And the thought is that if you ask why about five times you get the real answer. It's actually a really fun thing to do with kids sometimes, like they do something crazy and you say, why do you do that? And then go well because of this and then go bowl. Why? And eventually it gets down to some really stupid reason. That's kind of amazing and funny at the same time. Um, can you tell, I have a four year old anyway, so. If you've got this business right, often we like to try to boil it down to the fact of the matter is I started my own business. I've asked all these questions, I've really dug down deep and I've come up with a fact that I want money. Right. I want money. And people will tell me this all the time. There'll be like, I've thought really hard about it and journaled about it. And what it comes down to is I want to make money and I laugh. Because at least in my own experience, that's not true. I thought I started my own business because I wanted to make money, not just because I wanted it to make money, but because I wanted, for me, the freedom that that money was going to provide. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second, but I would have told you, I want to make. The reality of the situation is if you look at how much money I have made over the last three years, and you look at a job that I would have been qualified for, and most likely would have got, had I applied for it. The money that I would've made working for a corporation would have been much higher than the money that I brought into my. My mental health would probably be much better if I worked for a corporation. If I wasn't dealing with all the stress that comes with running your own business, because I am responsible for getting clients for myself, I am responsible for delivering these products to a client. If a mistake is made, the buck stops with me. There's nobody else. I'd go on vacation. My laptop comes with me. I didn't always use to be that way. I was that person who, when I went on vacation, I would say my company is not paying me. The in fact, they're paying me not to be at work right now. And I would leave my laptop at home. I was that person. I don't have the luxury of doing that now, because if one of my clients has a website that goes down, that is 100% in emergency and that is. The buck stops with me. It's my business. It doesn't matter that I'm on a family vacation. My client needs their website back up and running yesterday. So I'm going to have to work on my vacation to make that happen. And that's something that I understand and respect as a business owner. It's something that I knew coming into it because I had the luxury of working for a small to medium sized business before I started my own. I saw the sacrifices that the owner had to make, and I understood what those sacrifices meant. I saw how he never got to take a vacation and I saw her, all those things for me, owning my own business was not really about making money because I could have made more money. If I had taken a corporate job now in the long run, I have much more potential. I will most likely end up making more money, working for myself and having my own business than if I had stayed corporate for the next 20, 30 years of my life. That being said, as of right now, three years in, that's not really the case. So I want to go back to this idea of freedom. So for me, I felt like, well, money offers. And it does because money is just a tool. It all depends on what you spend it on. And for me that meant the freedom of going to pick up my child. If she was sick from school, without there being a lot of drama around that, I didn't want to ask anybody for permission to leave. I didn't want to feel like I was being pulled in two directions. I wanted to be able to focus 100% on my. I wanted the freedom to pick and choose the clients that I worked with. I had worked with a lot of people in my corporate career, coworkers, clients, et cetera, that maybe I would not have chosen to work. For whatever reason, I've worked with some amazing people don't get me wrong, but there were certainly people that I maybe didn't want to work with and didn't have a choice because it was corporate. I didn't have the freedom to choose. And so for me, the freedom to choose my clients was huge. For me. It was the freedom of getting on an initial fit call and outlining my process and having a potential client throw down multiple red flags. And for me never to send the link, to book a clear brand with me and to say, you know what? I don't think we'd be a good fit for each other. That's what that call is intended for. I like the freedom of being able to pick and choose. I also have the freedom of working with some amazing clients that have these incredible businesses that are making a huge impact in their community. And that's pretty incredible for me to be able to say that I got to play a part in that it's the freedom of being able to work with these amazing impactful brands. For me, I needed the freedom of having a flexible schedule. I love that I'm able to block off. One day every other week to say, I am not touching this time. That is my reward fund for time. That is time that I can spend on myself. However, I want to spend it. It could be business related. It might not be business related. It really depends on the day and where I'm at. I love being able to do that. I never could have done that in a corporate job. I absolutely am obsessed with the idea that I get to pick and choose how I market my business and how I put my messaging out there to the world. I get to pick that I get control over that. I get. Around that nobody is telling me, you have to talk about this. You have to talk about that. You have to post this on Facebook. You have to be on LinkedIn. You have to be on Instagram. There's none of that. I get the freedom to choose. What I do with my marketing, the same way that I have the freedom to choose where I spend my time marketing. I spend a lot of time building relationships. I spend a lot of time networking. I spend a lot of time doing these things. There's so many different ways that you can promote a business. There's so many different ways that you can market yourself as a service provider. There is no one way to do things. It really depends on the business. What's best for that business. And what's best for that business owner. And sometimes even though maybe Facebook would be a fantastic place for you to promote your business. If you can't stand Facebook, that is not a good place. And I love having the freedom of being able to say, I don't want to do that because it makes me uncomfortable. I don't want to do that because I'm an introvert and that's more student to extroverts. I don't want to use this new platform where everything is live, because I don't particularly like doing things like. I don't want to be shooting videos all day. Every day, I would rather do a podcast. There are things like this. I get the freedom to make those choices. As a service provider, you have a lot of different choices and you have a lot of different reasons why you might be in business. But often what I have found is that somebody who is working for themselves, they're not in it for the money. There is something else that's driving them. Another thing that I have found for myself is the type of clients that I have been attracted to. I used to work with just anybody, because that's how you start. You start where you'll work with anybody. And then over time you niche down and the best way to niche down. There's so many different ways. This is not the only way, but what I have found is the best way to niche down is to look at your past clients and to figure out how to better define your best clients. And that's your name? And it's all based on data. It's based on your experience. It's based on people who have already paid you money. That is the best way in my opinion, to niche down. And so when I looked at my past clients and I was trying to find threads of commonality, what I found is that all of the brands that I've worked with, that I have had the best success with were all people who, one of their primary motivation. Was to make an impact on either their local community, maybe a larger community, but they wanted to make an impact with their business. It didn't matter what they did. They wanted to make an impact. I had a hiring specialist who wanted to make an impact in her local community by helping small businesses grow. And so she would help them hire better. So that they could grow their businesses all with the idea of impacting the local economy, because that was really important to her. I had another client who is in the educational space. He wanted to make an impact with family's lives so that their children were getting a better education. I had another client who wanted to make an impact on profession. She was an event planner. She wanted to plan these amazing events for the is professionals. And it didn't matter if it was a corporate event or if it was a personal event, she just wanted to make an impact. She wanted them have a really, really good experience. And what she kept saying was, I don't want them to be stressed. I just want to take all that stress away. She wanted to make a meaningful impact in their life by reducing their. These are not things that you think about when you think about an event planner, when it comes to figuring out why you do what you do. And it is again, so important to do that. So you can articulate that to potential clients because they all want to know your why we're very much attracted to the. It's really important that you try to dig in past the, I want to make money because that is almost never the real reason. It's usually one of the reasons because we all, I think to some extent, want to make money. Money could be one of the reasons we live in a capitalist society. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money. There's nothing wrong with saying I really would like to be successful in the sense that I want to bring in a certain income. There's nothing wrong with that. But typically that is not the only reason. And often we will stop. Once we get to the, I want to make money and people will stop once they get there. Cause they'll say, okay, now I know why I'm doing. The reality is for most people, we could make more money doing something else. There's a reason why you're providing this service. There's a reason why you're doing this thing. And if you can figure that out and communicate it simply and effectively, it's going to help your business. Thanks for listening, finding your why is an important concept for defining your brand? Simon Sinek has a great book called start with why that I'll link to in the show notes. This is one of the main parts of positioning that I help my clients tackle with my clear brand interview. You can learn more about the clear brand and what it can do for your business. On my website, Jennifer anesthesi. Next week. We're talking about how to package your services. Packages are a huge topic, but as my clients know, I like to break them down into more buildable pieces. Make sure you follow this podcast to be notified when the episode goes live. And as always reviews and ratings are always appreciated as they help more people find this podcast until next time.