Francis Bacon once wrote, “A prudent question is one half of wisdom”. One of the most important things to do as an entrepreneur is to understand your brand before you attempt to sell it. Knowledge comes from the right amount of curiosity and asking the right questions. You are indeed one question away from changing your life. These questions pose reality checks on your business and help to reevaluate. Some of them are as follows.
What is your vision
Understanding your brand goals and visions tells your future clients that you do know what you’re doing. You need to be clear on what you intend to achieve.
What is my unfair advantage
Who is your ideal customer ? For a brand, business or product, you must have a target audience. This may enlarge over time but starting out with one in mind when creating a product or service suggests that there is in fact a need that such brand is meeting. Say for a company or business that makes lingerie, and say its ideal customer is a career woman in her early 30s who isn’t married but loves the idea. This gives a sense of direction because even the publicity will be targeted at women at that age range.
What are the risks involved
A person in the bureau de change business would have to understand the unstable nature of the capital market, the security risks in keeping large amounts of money in cash and a host of other undesirable challenges. Entrepreneurs face different risks at different levels and they must reconcile their goals with what they are willing to risk. Once these risks are identified the question becomes ‘can I accept those risks and sacrifices?’
What are your weaknesses
Every business and business owner have certain weak points that they do not want their rivals capitalizing on. When you recognize your Achilles heel or that of the business, you can take the necessary steps to improve and build on it. The problem usually is accepting that these weak points exist.
What’s working
Over a certain period of time, you should be able to tell what’s working and what’s not. The question is what formula brings in the numbers in your business and what causes the downturn.
What strategies do I have in place
When seizing short term opportunities, think about the long term goals and strategies. This will enable you to build capabilities and resources. When a good strategy is in place, ventures made can survive poor leaderships and crisis. A good strategy must be well defined to include the business aspirations, long term policies, geographical reach, capabilities and other considerations. It must be able to generate and sustain sufficient profits and growth and it must have the capacity to serve the enterprise over the long term.
What direction do you see your business going
This is more of a long term plan. A perfect brand identity works better if you can align your business or company with a specific outcome in the following years. This boosts confidence and helps your intending clients to understand where your head’s at.
What have you achieved
Believe it or not this is a confidence booster for all entrepreneurs. This should be asked at every month’s end to review investments and returns. It helps to improve energy line and also shows you where you are most productive.
What do you do best
This helps to decipher what to let go on your opportunity cost. Learn to exploit your unfair advantage, do what you do best and outsource the rest. An industry should focus on manufacturing its products and better ways to improve its quality rather than on how best to market it. Outsource the marketing to experts and bear down on producing state of the art products.
Every business has stories to tell about the development of it strategies but the right questions will bring the right set of answers. These answers will set you off to building a result oriented business with the right resources.
