Question of the Week: What Do You Stand For?
I’ve been working on a slight tweak in my message recently with my branding team at Proto. I’m juggling 3 businesses and I’m trying to sell for all of them in a way that doesn’t confuse everybody (including myself). So we’re working on clarifying and communicating my message better.
It’s challenging. Mostly because I’m a doer — I set goals and I make things happen and I try to keep improving. At the end of the day, it’s about the bottom line — have you done everything you could to get to the next level? Have you done enough to be better off when you closed your eyes at night than when you opened them that morning? And I think a lot of entrepreneurs are like that.
“Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth.” – Archimedes
We’re driven to succeed. Otherwise, we’d all be sitting back, pushing paper from 9 to 5 and not dealing with the stress and anxiety of running our own business. It’s a huge risk to go out on your own and drive your own future. If you’re like me, you dig that and you get caught
up in it. You don’t really think about why you’re doing it. You just do it.
But business isn’t just about crossing action items off your to-do list. That’s why I have 3 businesses and why I started a branding and design firm with creative people who ask “why?” all the time. There are a lot of aspects to running a successful business beyond producing a great product or service. You have to make sure you have the right team in place, that your workflow process is running smoothly, that you’re communicating to your customers why they should pick you. Because business nowadays isn’t just about what you’re doing, it’s also more and more about why you do it.
One of the toughest questions my team asked me was, “What do you stand for?” It isn’t just about getting to the next level, but knowing what that level is and why I want to get there. And they tell me I can’t just say “quality and customer service” like everybody else says — because everyone says that. So while I’m thinking about it, I thought I’d throw that question out to everybody.
What do you stand for?
