Take-Home Message: We all like to feel special, connected, seen, relevant, and important. Accomplish this with your business, and never work another day.
Writer’s Note: These are my personal reflections upon completing Chapter 8 of Ash Ambirge’s You Don’t Need A Job, You Need Guts.
Let’s do a quick experiment.
Tell me about the first time you fell in love. Think about how you felt. What did the object of your affections say or do to make you feel the way you did? How did you respond? Contemplate on that for a moment.
I recently reflected on one of my own personal love stories: with writing (See For The Love of Words). I became enamored, nay consumed in my love affair with words and written language as a means of reaffirming my identity. It allowed me to discover things about myself–and it still does each time I make love with the words. It makes me feel relevant in this great big world.
Now, your experience with your loved one, or “soul mate,” if you’ve found him/her, is likely a much more passionate affair. It probably reaches much more deeply into your soul, reaffirming your identity, bringing out the best in you, and complementing your worldview in a way that brings you immense delight.
What else?
Now, imagine if you could develop a business model that made someone feel all of those things.
This is a good marketing example of a simple product whose message captures this concept.
The goal of this thought experiment is to think about this individual whom would be the likely consumer of your product or idea. It’s to think about the characteristics your product or service can offer to reaffirm what he or she already knows about himself or herself, and saturating this product or service with that message.
Business, after all, does not exist simply to provide things people need. It’s about giving people what they want, when they want it, where they want it, and at a price they can afford. But, it’s still deeper than that, too. It’s about providing something that does more than its intended use. It’s about adding value to lives.
So, when you can identify this individual, your intended consumer, and find out what makes him or her tick, you can begin to feel out what things reaffirm his or her identity. In so doing, you create the opportunity to add new, meaningful value to their lives through your product or service.
Once you’ve done this, you no longer have to sell anything. You merely have to be the friend who introduces two perfectly compatible people, and then let the magic happen on its own.
Business is about people. But not all people, it’s about finding THE people, the ones who can benefit most from what you’re offering and crafting the entire business to make them feel seen, relevant, important, and whole.
Here are the questions Ash posed which spurred my thoughts on these matters:
And so I ask you now: Who’s your business soulmate? Who’s the person doing the searching? What are their unique perspectives, ideas, and opinions as it relates to your thing? And, most importantly, what will you say to them that they’ll hear?– Ash Ambirge, You Don’t Need A Job, You Need Guts
So, who is your business soulmate?