3 Questions That Will Help You Build and Grow a Business You Enjoy
How to start and maximize your business
When I started on my entrepreneurial journey, I thought that there was a right and wrong way to be an entrepreneur. I invested in a course that taught coaches how to create their offer and market it through Instagram. Through working on this course, I realized that I was building a business that I didn’t want to be in. I decided to abandon what this course taught me and work on my business my own way.
After working on my business in my own way, I then found different entrepreneurs that taught different ways of creating a business. Through the building of my business and reading about entrepreneurship, I realized that there are three main questions that you should ask to build a business you enjoy:
- What resources do I have?
- How can I maximize the resources that I have?
- Which way of maximizing my resources do I enjoy the most?
Let's discuss the use of these questions in two main categories of entrepreneurship: product development and marketing.
Products/Services
The goal of entrepreneurship is to provide a product or service that helps people and makes their lives better. The more of an impact you make on a person’s life generally the more money you will be able to make.
What resources do I have?
Therefore, the first part of entrepreneurship is to decide what resources you have that can make people’s lives better. Think about the knowledge that you have and experiences that others can benefit from.
Practically everyone has something that they are passionate about and have expertise and experiences in. Whether it is developing ideas for new video games, creating hair products, or selling houses, you can turn these experiences into a money-making business that provides products or services to help others.
When I was starting my entrepreneur journey, I took stock of the different experiences and expertise that I had. I have a doctorate in chemistry and could create programs to help students understand chemistry. I was successful in graduate school and I could help coach graduate students on how to be successful in their research. I could do similar work but in helping college students increase their success in college.
I had to make a decision on what I wanted to use as my resource to focus my efforts. I decided to focus on my experiences in research and graduate school and help other science graduate students survive and thrive in graduate school. From this idea, the Science Grad School Coach was born.
How can I maximize my resources?
Once you know what resources you have, the question becomes how do you maximize these resources.
If you know that you are a great writer, there are many different avenues for you to maximize your writing potential including writing on medium, having your own blog, self-publishing books, ghostwriting, teaching writing, etc.
If you are an expert in a topic, there are different ways for you to share your expertise such as writing a blog, consulting, coaching, online courses, mastermind groups, online memberships, in-person workshops, etc.
When you know your resources, you should write down all the ways that you can maximize and monetize your resource. Another great idea is to rank the different ways you developed by the expected impact and income. For example, coaching can be a higher priced item but will impact fewer people. Whereas, online courses may be priced lower but will be available to more people.
In my situation, I first decided that the best way to maximize my knowledge of graduate school was to become a dissertation coach specifically for science-based graduate students. However, I also thought of creating online courses, doing in-person workshops at universities, and performing group coaching as alternative ways to share my knowledge and experiences.
Which way of maximizing my resources do I enjoy the most?
The final question you need to ask is which way of maximizing my resources do I enjoy the most.
One thing I never understood is why entrepreneurs create a business that they hate. You have total control over what you do in your business. Of course, there will always be things you do not like to do, but your business should not be built on these things.
Therefore, as you look at your list of how you can maximize and monetize your resource, scratch off the things that you know you do not enjoy. Some things you may have to try first to know whether you enjoy it.
In my case, I started my business in coaching. Soon after working in coaching, I recognized that I was unmotivated to keep working in my business. I didn’t truly enjoy coaching and dealt with high anxiety during every coaching call. I had to discover a different way to maximize my resources and turned to the creation of online courses instead.
The most important thing is to remember that there is more than one way to maximize your resources. You want to pursue one that makes you excited to work in your business.
Marketing
Once you know the product/service you will offer, you then need to determine how people will learn about your product. The idea that if you build something people will come is a lie. People have to know about your product in order to be able to buy it.
Therefore, to be successful as an entrepreneur, you have to decide on a way to market your products or services. You can ask the same three questions to create a marketing plan for your products.
What resources do I have?
Starting with the first question, you need to decide what resources you have available to market your product. These resources may include money, social media, and content marketing.
A resource that can help you market your product is anything that allows you to get yourself or your product in front of people, especially your ideal audience.
When I started out, I had already built a YouTube channel, although it didn’t have much of an audience yet. I didn’t have excess money that I could spend on advertisements. But I did have a basic grasp of social media and how it worked. I also had a network of graduate students that I knew and could discuss my new business with.
Think about the resources you have. Do you have money to fund your marketing efforts? Do you know people in your ideal audience for your product? Can you produce free content that people can find, such as on Youtube, a blog, or even here on Medium? Can you make social media profiles for your business?
How can I maximize my resources?
Just because you make a YouTube channel or have a social media profile does not mean that you are actually marketing your product well. You have to use these resources in a way that maximizes your reach. The strategies for achieving your maximum reach will be different on every platform.
When you are discussing content marketing, such as YouTube videos or Blogs, you likely are not maximizing your resource if you are simply creating promotional content. Instead, you need to create content that is valuable to your audience so that they want to follow you and recognize how your product helps them.
Similarly, with social media, you will not grow a large audience if you post irregularly only letting people know about your product. Instead, you need to give valuable information and connect as a person on social media.
Finally, if you have money for marketing, there are many different ways to utilize it. You can spend the money on advertisements on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. On the other hand, you could also spend the money on a course that teaches you how to maximize your reach on a specific platform. Furthermore, you could spend your money on someone to manage all of your marketing needs.
Through my entrepreneurial journey, I have learned to maximize my resources by spending some money on online courses to learn how to create and market my products, developing my YouTube channel into an educational resource, and using Twitter as my main way to connect with people and provide short-form content.
Which way of maximizing my resources do I enjoy the most?
There are multiple different ways to maximize your resources, but you do not have to do them all to be successful. There are people who primarily use only YouTube content or Instagram content and have become successful at marketing their products.
In fact, attempting to do all of the different marketing techniques can actually be detrimental to your marketing efforts. Most marketing platforms reward consistency. If you cannot be consistent, then you may be doing too much work, and most of it is giving you a low return on investment.
When I took my first online course, it was all about producing Instagram content. I quickly realized that I hated creating Instagram content. I would spend hours trying to make a good piece of content to only have less than 500 impressions and it was only good for 1–2 days.
Then the 2020 presidential election was getting close, and Instagram decided to delete the recent tab for hashtags to prevent misinformation. My 300–500 impressions per post dropped to 1–3 impressions per post from hashtags. I hated every part of creating Instagram content so I stopped. I decided to devote that time and energy to things that I enjoyed such as making consistent YouTube videos or lately creating twitter content.
You should test out each platform to decide what you enjoy doing. If you hate filming yourself, choose writing a blog or creating videos without you in them instead. If you hate writing, make YouTube videos or Instagram content.
If you don’t like making infographics, then Instagram likely is not your platform. Instead, try a platform like Twitter, which is primarily text-based.
Ultimately, your goal is to find a way to market your product that both you enjoy and maximizes the audience that you can reach.
There are many different ways to be a successful entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship gives you a unique ability to focus your time on things that work and you enjoy. Therefore, you should not simply follow what one person says is the right way, even if they are successful.
Instead, test and experiment with the different resources you have and the different ways to maximize those resources to impact the most people in your ideal audience as possible. Refocus your efforts by removing those things that you do not enjoy.
Once you have created a successful product or service and marketed it, start the process over again to continue to create additional great products that help your ideal audience.