A Discussion About the Discovery of What Makes You (and Me) Special.
I am excited to be launching the Consequences blog, the final piece of my new website. In thinking about what my first blog post might look like, I decided it would be a great opportunity to talk about how I got here and what my plans are moving forward in hopes that it might inspire others that I work with, aspire to work with, or even those who just happen upon this post to look deep inside you or your company to find what makes you special too.
Specializing, the Difference Between Good and Great
After having run a successful startup branding firm for about 9 years, I began to realize what exactly I liked about my job and what I didn’t. Probably not unlike what it feels like to get older and be single…. the older you get, the more you know what you don’t want. My problem was 2 pronged, finding exactly what “it” was and then finding the courage to speak up about “it”. About two years ago, I met a really wise business consultant who among other things…told me that I was “too good to go on having a mediocre firm”. Ouch. I thought we were pretty good… and we were good. Over 65+ awards for advertising and design, published many times over, with good reputation among peers and clients. What I had to do was look deep to really understand what he meant. After all, I wasn’t interested in being good. I wanted to be great. When you work as a marketing consultant it is important that you have the ability to spot themes, trends, and be able to connect those to goals and vision when you are working with a client on marketing strategy. So, finally I decided to do that for myself. If I looked at the collective body of work that we were producing, and I thought about what brought me the most satisfaction I was able to boil that down to two types of businesses, nonprofits and creative businesses. (Little did I know the consultant had already realized this and wrote it down on a slip of paper that I was supposed to hold in my pocket until the end of our session.) Just before our time was up, I blurted out what about “nonprofits” and all the reasons I love working with them. The rest is history.
Taking that a Step Further.
After that day, I looked even deeper at the WHY? WHY are my clients working with me? When do they get the most out of it? When do I make the biggest impact? I found that was mostly surrounding disruption. For example when a client undergoes a change in management, structure, or goals. Here is a cool infographic that was inspired by the “WHY” as well as how I work with clients to make change reality.
The Risks and the Rewards of Making a Strategic Move like this
Ultimately, this was a business decision, part about what I choose to concentrate on, read about, and surround myself with but also it is partly about marketing, more specifically, it is about positioning, which is what I do for clients everyday. I suppose there are definitely risks involved in making a strategic move to focus more specifically on a target market or on particular service offering, but for me the rewards have outweighed the risk. So far, I find when I am authentic about what I want to do; I get better opportunities and waste less time on the ones that I should pass on. I also find that being more specialized has made me more effective, increased my value to clients, and ultimately made me more confident in what I’m advising my clients to do. Consequence of Innovation is still a work in progress but I am very much looking forward to helping clients tighten up their own positioning in 2014. Hopefully resulting in less of what they don’t want and more of what they do. That is the point, isn’t it?
–aimee heimbinder, marketing & design consultant, Consequence of Innovation
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