This is a ton of text, I know.** But it's worth the read. Let me know what you think.
Her boot was gone.
After weeks of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in the remote wilderness of California, Cheryl Strayed watched in disbelief as her backpack knocked into one of her boots, sending it catapulting down the steep mountain and into the trees below.
Boot number two followed soon after, this time with quite a bit more intention – and anger – from Cheryl.
Watching her boots tumble away into oblivion probably had a weird sense of satisfaction. Even though she didn’t have another pair to put on, those boots had plagued her for hundreds of miles. They were too small for her feet and were the likely cause of a lost toenail or three.
Losing your footwear in the middle of a long-distance hike is a very serious matter. You can’t really appreciate how much your feet go through on a hike of this kind until you’ve tried something similar, but proper footwear is essential if you want to avoid excruciating pain and other complications.
Combined with the demons she was already facing, this is the type of event that could have easily ended the hike well short of the intended finish line.
But Cheryl hiked on, mostly due to the fact that she was fiercely determined and strong willed, but there was something else that made this event not quite as bad as it could have been.
She already had a new pair of boots waiting for her up the trail.
She had been told over and over again that her boots were too small by other hikers. At first, she ignored everything that they said because she already spent all of her money in preparing for the trail. There was no way she could afford another pair of boots. She was going to hike the trail in a pair of boots that were too small, or not hike it at all.
That all changed when she found out that REI, the place she had purchased the boots, had a 100% satisfaction guarantee and were willing to ship her a new pair of properly sized boots completely free. They were even willing to send them with expedited shipping to one of the ‘mail drops’ along the trail.
All for free.
That simple act may have been the difference between Cheryl Strayed finishing the trail or quitting soon after. More importantly…
REI Knew What They Valued & Who Their Customers Were. Do You?
The point of that story was not to tell you about Cheryl Strayed, although her story is incredible and worth reading. Instead, I want you to think about the importance of actually understanding who you are, what you value, and who your customers are.
If I were to ask you if you know these things, you’d almost certainly say yes.
From my experience, most people assume that they understand these things simply because it’s their business. How could they not know what they value or who their customers are?
Yet in practice, they don’t. They have a vague idea of who they’ll make money off of, but this is a pretty superficial understanding for a business.
The basic formula that people have in their heads is usually along these lines:
I’m selling X to Y.
And that’s it. This is as true for many established businesses as it is for startups.
Some take it one step further
If you’ve checked out any site about marketing, you’ve almost certainly come across two incredibly trendy subjects right now. Unique selling points (USPs) and customer personas.
Marketers and copywriters love to talk about these because they know that most people are operating with the simple I’m selling X to Y formula, and these two concepts fit nicely inside it.
USPs replace X, while the customer personas replace Y.
I don’t want to get too far into these two subjects because they’re buzzwords right now and you’re probably sick of reading about them. On the off chance you’ve never come across the ideas before…
At its most basic, a unique selling proposition is just a benefit that customers want that you offer and your competitors don’t. Your USP becomes the center of your marketing and advertising claims in order to differentiate you from your competitors. Sometimes the USP is something that customers can only get from your product or service, while other times it’s simply something that other brands aren’t focusing on.
Customer personas are an attempt to go further than demographic information about your target market. You create fictional bios of what you envision your ideal customer being like. The goal is to help you internalize who they are, what they value, and why they are interested in your company.
I don’t have a problem with these concepts on their own. They’re useful exercises. But I just explained the basics of both using just one paragraph each. Marketers run around and tell people about these like they’ve had some sort of revelation.
Thousands of articles with click-baity headlines have been written about them. Entire books focus just on USPs!
And on top of it all, these concepts don’t take you the whole way. If you want to set up a great business, you’re going to need to do a little more than creating USPs and customer personas.
A (slightly) better approach…
I’m not going to pretend that I have a secret formula for success. But I do have a method that I find helps people go deeper and develop a better understanding of their business.
Feel free to make any adjustments that you’d like, but here is what I recommend.
The basic idea is we are going to answer five questions in an open-ended format. The things you write down don’t have to directly answer each question, the goal is to capture any ideas that you think of for each.
I encourage you to be creative. You don’t have to write everything down in lists. Recently I’ve been trying mind maps for these exercises, and they seem to be a good way to visualize your responses. You can even draw pictures if you want.
All that matters is you have five separate sheets of paper, one for each of the questions.
This exercise isn’t one that you should complete in a few minutes, an hour, or even a day. When I do this with clients, I have them work on their answers for at least a week. New ideas will come every day, especially when you give yourself a break from thinking about them.
These are very simple rules to follow. They’re there to help you be creative and to make sure you don’t take shortcuts. Your goal with these exercises is to develop a thorough understanding of what your business stands for.
Here are the questions. The order doesn’t matter. Answers will overlap. They’re nothing more than jumping off points to get your brain thinking. Write each at the top or center of it’s own piece of paper, then fill it with ideas. Remember to think both big and small.
What does my brand stand for?
What do you value and how does it relate to your business? Are you making the world’s best automation hardware for factories? Maybe you are going to teach people how to dance. It doesn’t matter.
Make sure you don’t get too bogged down in specifics. Think abstractly as well and write down things that you want to guide your decision making that don’t directly relate to what you are doing. A good example of this is Apple’s famous ‘Think different’ ad campaign. It helped define them in the eyes of the public, despite not referencing a computer at all.
Who am I helping and why?
Consider this an exercise where demographic details meets customer personas meets personal motivation.
What am I giving?
What value are you providing? What format is the value being delivered? Are you providing products, services, information, or some combination of all three? Are you going to give anything away for free? What do other people gain by interacting with you? What will people be willing to pay for?
This question is very similar to the last, but I want to stress how important it is to make sure you understand where the money will come from. You would be astounded at the amount of people who realize they could be making money off something that they are doing for free. You need to make sure you have a balance between things you do for free and things that people pay for. Big picture ideas in this category will relate to the goals you are helping people fulfill or the pain you are helping them avoid. Knowing this will help you find new ways to monetize in the future. Specifics are the actual products, services, or information that you are selling them.
Where will you connect?
How will you find your clients or customers? Are there communities (online or offline) that you can become a part of? Where is the main place that people will find you? The answer to the last one is usually a website these days, but it’s still important to think about.
This isn’t graded…
I repeatedly see people getting tripped up in the same places, so let’s go over the rules again.
This isn’t graded. There are no right or wrong answers. You can scratch things out and add things later. The ideas don’t have to relate to each other at all. You can use any format for writing down the ideas and categorizing them that you want.
The only real rule is to work on your answers for at least a week. When you are sure that you’ve thought of everything, take a break and keep thinking the next day.
Go as deep into your ideas as you can. Get everything you can out on paper so you can formalize and internalize it later.
Running out of paper is good. Just get a new sheet and keep going.
The Obvious Trap
Most people who do these exercises on their own will do it exactly how I said not to.
They’ll either read the questions and assume they know the answers so they couldn’t possibly benefit from them, or they’ll scratch out answers for an hour and then come to the conclusion that they’re wasting their time because the answers are obvious. When things seem self-apparent or obvious, the natural response is to assume thinking about them has no value. The problem is that these things are only obvious when you actually take the time to think about them.
Obvious doesn’t mean that an idea is already guiding your actions. It only means that once you think about it, you can accept it as true without further pontification.
This is exactly why writing down the obvious can have tremendous value. You are forcing yourself to think about the things that other people assume they don’t have to. This seemingly simple step can end up making a huge difference in your business.
Why all this matters…
If you’re not sold on the idea of doing this exercise yet, let me explain why this will help you.
It all comes down to decision making. When you know the answers to the above questions, you will be able to make better decisions faster.
And decision making is at the heart of developing a successful business.
You can do all the preparation in the world, but there will still be countless obstacles for you to get past that you can’t plan for ahead of time. Every day will bring new challenges. If you don’t have a clear mental model of what you are working towards, you are at risk of making costly mistakes.
The temptation to take shortcuts will be greater. You’ll look for the easy road, even though the easy road doesn’t really exist. It’s a road to nowhere.
Think Back To REI
When Cheryl Strayed called in to REI customer service, they didn’t have to help her. She was one woman who was stuck in the wilderness.
She had purchased the wrong size shoe, and didn’t even realize it until she had broken them in over hundreds of miles of trail. This was hardly their fault.
Perhaps most importantly, at least from the perspective of most business owners, she had virtually no ability or desire to complain. She didn’t blame REI. Even if she did, publicly complaining in the 90s wasn’t as easy as taking to your favorite social network to vent.
Most businesses wouldn’t have offered her an exchange. Some would have considered it if she brought the shoes into the store. None would have done it without at least getting the old pair back, regardless of the condition.
Except REI.
REI not only offered her a replacement pair of expensive boots for free without getting the old pair back, they also sent them with expedited shipping to a location along the trail so that Cheryl wouldn’t have to leave.
She was not the only one to get such stellar treatment. In fact, this type of service is a large part of the reason that REI was able to grow from a Seattle store selling climbing gear in 1938 to the dominant national outdoor brand that they are today.
Do you think the decisions to give so much away were easy?
If the decisions were easy, it was only because REI had a very clear idea of what they stood for, who they were serving, and what they were giving them.
Do you?
The Moral of the Story…
If your goal is to build a successful and sustainable business, a good path is finding people to serve and going above and beyond to do so.
This isn’t easy.
Developing a business involves making hard decisions, often on a daily basis. Most of these decisions are unexpected. You won’t be able to anticipate them and spend months deliberating the right answer.
If you want to be able to make good decisions in these moments, you’ll need a deep understanding of who you are, what you offer, and who you are helping.
There’s no one way to do this, but the process I’ve outlined above is a place to start. It’s helped many businesses that I’ve worked with, and it’s designed to make sure you think about things that most people skip over.
More importantly, there is no risk to trying it and it’s completely free.
Try it.
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