Brand/Value Needs to Drive Everything
I had a great meeting with a company yesterday that is considering different options for how to move forward – grow their own sales team, grow their distribution channels, start new projects. As we talked, I kept going back to a couple of key questions:
1) How does this fit with your value/what’s special about your company?
2) How does this option fit with your mission?
Keeping focused on those two questions allowed us to quickly discard some of the options that were under consideration. One option didn’t advance the company’s mission at all – in fact, it would have distracted them from their key objectives. Another option was fear-based; what if our value isn’t good enough to sell our product? – even though their value and story is actually very powerful.
‘Brand’ and ‘value’ have become buzzwords, which sometimes means words lose their value.
Do you know what is the story/the secret sauce/the passion that sets you apart from your competitors? If not, before you do anything else, figure it out!
Then you’ll have a quick measure for any decisions you’re looking at. Does it fit with our value/our brand? If not, don’t get distracted, move on. If it does fit, then you may have a winner, and it’s worth investing more time in looking at whether this decision is a good way to grow your business.
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This is such a challenge for most of us. You have to focus, but you want to grow your business and growth opportunities present themselves all the time. It takes a lot of discipline to pass a good opportunity because it isn’t your core business. The trap I’ve fallen into is to redefine your core business on the fly to something broader so that it includes the opportunity you are looking at. It’s really hard not to say, “Our core business is whatever it is that incorporates that really cool opportunity.”
Thanks for the post.
You’re so right about the discipline needed to say no to ‘good opportunities’. I think this is one of the learnings that comes only through experience. There’s a great post at on startups about the Shiny New Thing temptation particular to entrepreneurs (http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/6739/Entrepreneurs-and-Hey-There-s-A-Shiny-New-Thing.aspx) and I think we all go through it. But getting focussed and saying no is what really leads to building a strong & successful company.