Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
Business is Personal
Show Notes
For business owners and especially small business owners – business is personal.
Our personal lives flow into business and vice versa. For many business owners, there is little or no distinction. Whether that is a good thing or not, depends on your perspective and whether you actually have a personal life at all.
Successful Businesses
Let’s start with the positives.
To run a successful business, it needs to be personal; you need to care about your customers and your team. People do business with people. Your business personality counts and attracts or repels your potential customers and that is a good thing.
We all have our own styles and we gravitate to people we like, people who are often like us.
Because business is personal we do our best work and we own our mistakes. Think about the difference in customer service you get from the owner of the business, a smaller run family business and compare that with a big chain or franchise. Generally, the owner/operator or small business is streets ahead.
Making it personal means that you can be flexible and go out of your way to help people, give them the extra service and care. Often, big businesses are constrained by policies and “that’s now how it’s done” to be able to give great service.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
In business, as in life, things change and move on. What was once exceptional is now barely popular. Structured sales calls where people were almost coherst into buying was the normal and best practice, where now it is unacceptable sales behaviour.
With the world getting smaller, buyers can do their research and be well informed about your products and services and often have 100’s of potential suppliers to buy from. What makes you different from the other … “You”.
That is why Story is the buzz word at the moment. Your business has to be personal. Your customers want to know you. We no longer want to deal with faceless brands. Why stock photos often get less engagement than photos without people in them at all.
“Be yourself, everyone else is already taken” ~Oscar Wilde
At the heart of all businesses should be human connection that is why we have gravitated to social media in droves. Video, lives, selfies, they are all ways we can make a connection to other people and quickly.
