How is your business perceived in the market? When you “show up” is it clear who you are and what you have to offer? We find many people just starting out in business; whether as a solopreneur or a small business partnership, have a tendency to want to do too much too soon. For example, if you provide consulting services to the healthcare industry and you tell prospects you can facilitate strategic planning, identify cost reduction opportunities, conduct employee satisfaction surveys, conduct departmental process improvement studies and coach executives, it will be difficult for the prospect to truly understand who you are. And this example doesn’t touch on where you would provide these services: hospitals, physician offices, outpatient facilities or freestanding surgical centers. Sure you can provide all of these services – but who are you and what do you really offer? What are you really good at and hold the most passion for? It’s the difference between going wide or going deep. And going wide is a harder sell.

We often see this in business start-ups (we used a healthcare example, but we find this in other product and service companies). They believe the can do many things and address many markets. And some have the attitude of “why should I deprive anyone of my great products or services.” You shouldn’t do this for three reasons:

1. You don’t have enough time to cover multiple markets

2. You don’t have the resources to cover multiple markets

3. You create brand ambiguity

The purpose of a brand is to be recognized for something in the marketplace: to draw people to you, to create a promise. And this is especially important in our interconnected world where we have the wild west of competition on the Internet. A market niche is important.

Now if you are a big enough business you can provide multiple services to multiple markets. Your brand then becomes a full service company with “one stop shopping”. (But it’s a harder sell if you alone are the full service company!). You could also be a successful generalist in consulting– as long as you are and that your buyers know you are a process consultant.

The temptation is great to go in multiple directions at once. Temptation or not, this is clearly not a good strategy to pursue.

In our Quick Tips this week, using the example of the healthcare consultant above, we will describe how it can be handled.

Copyright 2011 Kubica LaForest Consulting

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2011 at 3:35 am and is filed under Brand Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.