So, you’re fuzzy on who you’re meant to serve?
Let’s create clarity.
I want to introduce a concept that will help you take the first step towards dialing in the type of person you are meant to serve. When you get the initial conditions correct, you will thank yourself down the road when the kinds of people you effortlessly attract match your personality and your intentions.
You’ll flow.
You are meant to serve the kind of person with a certain problem that intersects in these 3 areas:
👨🏻🌾 Who you are
🏆 Your skills and capabilities
🦄 The type of person you love helping
In this article, we’ll deep dive into the types of questions you can ask yourself to more readily understand yourself, your business, and the type of person who would easily get tons of value from what you effortlessly do.
👨🏻🌾 Who you are
Who are you?
Complicated question, surely.
But, if I was in a job interview, and the interviewer asked me, “Who is Renee?” I probably wouldn’t launch into how it all began in 1994, in a hospital room,
No.
“Who are you?” is your professional history, but also mixed with a few personal elements as to why your soul led you down the multiple winding paths it has. The more relevant it is to what you are currently curious/obsessed about, the better.
In addition, no good personal brand is complete without a shit story. In the words of personal branding expert Jessica Zweig, “Your mess is your message.”
Stories about your shame, sadness, heartbreak, and jealousy probably catapulted you into new realms of life where you enjoyed massive growth, realization, and self-actualization (the food into which your personal brand architecture is fed).
Your shit is your friend, your edge, your magic. — Jessica Zweig
A good personal brand should feel like your mess and your magic chunked down into a few core concepts that are easily understood by a normal person breezing by your content on the Interwebs.
Instead of you writing or posting about your love of travel, food, your dog, your business experience, your cheetah-print sneakers, biking, cats, your business failures, your diet journey, your business wins… distill “you” into just 3-4 key concepts.
Why?
It helps your audience understand you at-a-glance by distilling the most relevant aspects of your personality into “brand pillars” (just a fancy term for core brand concepts) that you can reliably create content on.
Your messiness is also where authenticity naturally flows from. Authenticity, from a personal branding perspective, fosters trust, likability, and knowledge of you and your story that can help nurture and pre-qualify leads.
It’s also just freeing.
Who doesn’t want to just be themselves? There is nothing quite like the feeling of confessing to thine’s secrets openly (maybe that’s why the Catholics love confession. I gotta give it to them).
Interestingly, it’s also your messiness that makes you magnetic (we love to attract, not chase, around here, folks). Everyone’s got shame, sadness, and skeletons. The more open you are about the things you are embarrassed about, the more easily digestible your positive message will be with the masses.
What’s your relevant professional (and some personal) history and story?
What’s the “good”?
What’s the “bad”?
🏆 Your skills and capabilities
The right person you are meant to serve has problems that you already have the ability to help them with.
If you want to help people learn how to market self-published nonfiction books to double their qualified leads within 12 months, but you don’t know the first thing about Amazon ads, then it can be helpful to consider finding a more suitable market. However, also consider where you’re headed. If someone has a need, and you don’t have that skill, but you have the means of learning it or hiring someone quickly who does, then consider yourself worthy of helping that person (maybe just charge them less).
Fulfillment in work comes from falling in love with mastering your craft. Give yourself a runway to continue learning your niche, as well as realize that the people you can best help are the ones you can confidently already serve.
Skills and capabilities you can jot down include:
Service-Related Hard Skills, e.g.,
Trading
Media buying
Podcasting
Video creation and editing
Copywriting
Market research
Service-Related Soft Skills, e.g.,
Coaching/Holding Someone to a Standard
Clear & compassionate communicator
Delights
Balances work and fun
Good-to-great maximizer
Business-Related Hard Skills, e.g.,
0-to-Launch Product Creation
Delegating
Hiring contractors from Upwork
Accounting
Paid acquisition
Organic acquisition
Can you think of anything else?
🦄 The type of person you love helping
And finally, the last piece of the puzzle is understanding the kind of person you love to help.
When you help this kind of person, you love it so much that all you want to do is continue helping more people just like them.
We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies. — Walt Disney
All business (and frankly, almost all human-made systems) can be thought of as a feedback loop.
When you execute something super well, and you enjoy putting the time, attention, and energy into creating a wonderful outcome, you will live in a positive feedback loop, or a tailwind. But, if you do something for “just the money,” and everything you do feels like a bore, an extra push, or just the next stepping stone to get to elusive “happiness”, you will live in a negative feedback loop, or a headwind.
Not long ago, when I heard online business gurus talk about “ease,” I thought it meant “not working.”
It took me many years to realize that “ease” is just doing something you would be doing anyway (the projects in your life that make your life a continuous vacation).
When you follow ease, you not only follow your heart’s path, but you also do it for people you love serving (e.g., people who are appreciative of you, pay you well, recommend you to others, have reasonable expectations, etc.). However, even when you’re doing these projects, you still have to consistently record the podcasts, write the articles, host the retreats, conduct the team meetings, etc. It’s just easier than if you were doing something you don’t care that much about.
Before enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water. — The Buddha
In addition to working on your heart’s project, you must do it in the company of the right people, which includes your team and your clients. By doing this, you will enjoy living in a more powerful energy stream that carries you (like a wave carrying you to shore) instead of exhaustively creating the energy stream yourself (like paddling against a rip current).
When you define the kind of person you want to help, consider the following attributes:
Do they invest in services/products like yours? How much?
How high of standards do they have for themselves? For you?
If they purchased your service/product, what outcome do they expect? What return on investment do they expect?
What is their relationship with their family? With money? With their health? With work? With play?
What language/jargon do they use?
What movies or TV shows do they love?
Where do they typically live? What clothes do they wear?
Who and what do they value?
What is the emotional motivator behind the investment in your service/product?
How old are they? What have they accomplished already? What are looking to accomplish next?
What are they proud of? What might they have sacrificed to achieve that?
How generous are they (with their time? Referrals? Network? Money?)
Are they price-sensitive? Or are they more time-sensitive? Results-sensitive?
Are they soft? Or are they edgy?
Who are their heroes? Who are their enemies?
What kind of things would they hide from their audience?
What social media channel do they prefer? Do they prefer long-form content over short-form? (Or the other way around?)
These are some initial questions for you to ponder. Generally, think of the kind of person you already are or would like to be. Naturally, we attract who we are, not who we want, but also, if you’re “working on yourself,” consider the trajectory to which you’re headed. If you see yourself in the near-future becoming a highly-paid, highly-sought-after ghostwriter, or a world-traveling mechanical engineer with a PhD, then the person you will attract in the near-future may be the person you are already becoming.
Ultimately, your Venn diagram of your ideal client profile, which marries who you are, your skills and capabilities, and the type of people you love helping, will look like this:
I sat down for an hour and used my imagination to fill in the little stickies. It was so fun (as it’s supposed to be).
What does yours look like? Let me know if you get stuck.
Here is what mine looks like:
Once you complete this, you have made a huge step towards dialing in your ideal client profile.
There are only a few steps left, i.e., getting even more specific on your ICP, as well as doing market research on their wants and their definition of value.
Stay tuned for how to do this next week!
In the meantime, what did you think of this exercise? Was it tough? Too easy? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. :)
Thank you for reading! ❤️ Hit the heart button on your way out to help spread this message.
Much love,
Renee
Super interesting and very well-written! Thanks for sharing!