Planning With A Heart

What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? (Also called a UVP—Unique Value Proposition.)

This is very closely related to the last blog I wrote about scoping out your competition. It’s also akin to the “elevator speech.”

Here’s the game: When someone asks you, “What do you do?” you want to have a ready answer that succinctly tells them the essence of your offer (product or service) and gets them to engage in a conversation.

Your USP is also a way to establish brand identity. For example, “Just Do It!” (Nike) or “When your package absolutely, positively has to get there overnight.” (Fedex) It’s the reason some customers will buy from you and nobody else.

Here’s a little history from wikipedia.org:

The Unique Selling Proposition (also Unique Selling Point or USP) is a marketing concept that was first proposed as a theory to explain a pattern among successful advertising campaigns of the early 1940s. It states that such campaigns made unique propositions to the customer and that this convinced them to switch brands. The term was invented by Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Company. Today the term is used in other fields or just casually to refer to any aspect of an object that differentiates it from similar objects.

According to Scott Sedwick of Hyperformance Media (http://www.hyperformancemedia.com/USP.htm)

The task of coming up with a USP can sometimes be tough. But every company needs to do this, it sets you apart from your competitors . . . it is one or more reasons why prospects should work with you, or buy from you, or do business with you, instead of your competitors, period.

If you’re struggling to come up with your USP, here’s a suggestion. Sit down with your team and brainstorm. Write down all the characteristics of your buyers that you can think of. Now use that list to identify the core problem that your product or service satisfies for these buyers. Now write a short sentence or phrase expressing how your solution solves that problem. Voilà! USP!

Every business, indeed, every thing, that exists on this planet, started as an idea.

I had an idea just the other day. The trouble is, most people don’t act on their ideas and they remain just that – ideas.

Here’s a clue. I believe, that if you have an idea to do something it is because you are uniquely qualified to bring that idea to fruition. For some of you, that may be a radical thought. You immediately start putting yourself down and saying, ‘not me, there’s nothing special about me.’

Oh, but there is. There’s something special about each of us. I believe all of us were put on this planet to learn about how to create on the physical plane.

If you look at the world today, most people are engaged in some kind of business (commerce, trade, barter, exchange, production, craft, cultivation, etc.) for the majority of their working hours. (How we got here and why that’s so is another story.)

Anyhow, the process of creation starts with ideas!

If you’ve seen, or read, The Secret, you know something about this process already.

So let’s explore this more deeply. What are ideas and where do they come from?

I was talking to someone the other day, and I mentioned that from the “discovery” (invention?) of the first “tool” (was it a rock or a stick?), mankind has been continually improving on technology to make our lives easier, more enjoyable, more fulfilling.

So one source of ideas is what already exists, and where there’s a need to fill.

Another place where people get business ideas from is things they already love to do. I’m a great cook. People are always telling me I should open a restaurant. (I also think I could do stand-up comedy.)

If you’re thinking about a business idea, one of the first things I tell my clients is go interview five people in your community who own the most successful businesses doing what you want to do. Learn from them. Learn what they love, learn the pitfalls, learn the process. Get help! Get mentored!

The most important thing about exploring your idea (and by the way, that is taking action!) is to flesh it out as fully as possible before you invest a lot of money. Learning the pitfalls, challenges, processes, as well as the profitability can save you a lot of heartache (and money) later on.

One of the first things investors will ask you is, “how can you do your business faster, better, smarter than anyone else.”

Once you have your idea fully fleshed out, you’re pretty far along in writing a business plan!

Now you can start market testing, and getting real-time feedback about your potential success. (More about this in a future blog.)

However, there’s also a big psychological component you must deal with.

Anytime anyone starts something new, they are outside of their comfort zone, and all of their fears (of the unknown, of failure, etc.) come rushing at them and try to stop them. These must also be dealt with.

The Planning With A Heart™ process helps you address these essential steps to success as well.

Take a moment to click on the link to get your Free “Entrepreneur Quiz” to discover if you have the mind set it takes to start your own successful business.

Ideas Blossom into successful Businesses

“Why do I need a mission statement?” you ask.

Glad you did.

What is a mission statement anyway? Is it some long, flowery explanation of why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first place? Is it meant to impress your shareholders, investors, partners and employees? Is it something you “have to do” but have no idea why?

That’s how people often think of a mission statement.

Man, this is going to be hard work! If only there were some magic wand I could wave over the whole thing and just get it done! After all, I’m an entrepreneur, not a business plan writer.

Hold on here, there actually is an easy way, and I’m going to give it to you in just a moment. But first (but first… the commercial announcement.) No, not really, just kidding…

So let’s get serious here – what is a mission statement?

In succinct terms, a mission statement clearly explains your “reason for being.” It is short (yes, that’s right, I said short!), flexible and distinctive.

Short is self explanatory—it should be easy for people to remember.

Flexible, because a mission is something you never completely fulfill, however, as time goes by, you may have to restate it in terms that reflect current market conditions. For example, Otis Elevators original mission (in the 1850s) was about lifting people. Today, it is known as the world’s largest manufacturer and maintainer of people-moving products including elevators, escalators and moving walkways.

“Distinctive” immediately sets you apart from the competition and lets people know who you are and what you stand for, like Apple’s “Think Different” is all about design and creativity and the user experience.

Here’s an exercise suggested by Guy Kawasaki in his 1991 book Marketplace Evangelism. It’s about how to write an effective mission statement. If you were standing on a street corner, waving a flag, rallying people to your cause, what would it say on the flag?

Now this may seem like more mumbo jumbo to you, but if you’ve done the visioning exercise I suggested in the last blog, then you’ve already tapped into your desired future, seen, in complete detail, what it is you want to create, and have captured a lot of the “felt sense” of that reality. Now, all you have to do is bring that vision back into the present and put it in words.

There’s an interesting phenomenon about your brain and how it works here. It’s been proven over and over that if you allow your creative right brain to have its way with images, symbols, clusters of thought, free association, felt sense, then at some point in this inherently creative process the synapses get crossed through the corpus callosum and your left brain (full of language and logic) kicks in and you’ll get a coherent sentence in words that usually needs very little polishing to be turned into a mission statement.

Try it! You’ll like it!

If you are finding these exercises helpful, and know a friend who wants to start a new business, link them up to this web site. They’ll thank you for helping them get on a path to a successful business plan.

Why Planning With A Heart you might ask. It all began a long time ago.

I was teaching in Prescott, Arizona (in the mid-1990’s) and involved with the Episcopal church there. The church was overflowing its physical building and brought in an architect to talk to the board about building a new building. The architect was “innovative.” He had written a paper, called “Vision With Planning.” What he proposed was that after he got the new building built, he would then lead a visioning session with all the members of the congregation to “vision” what we might want to do with the new space.

I became incensed! I thought he had done it backwards. Vision first, then planning! I wrote a paper in response, called “Planning With Vision” which later became “Planning With A Heart”. That paper is now a chapter in the book.

“Without a vision, the people perish.” (PR 29:18)

This quote has been interpreted in many different ways. To me it means that there is some hunger in our soul, some need for inspiration, without which we don’t lead as full a life.

A friend of mine, Enrique Montiel, often says, “We all contribute. Some of us contribute while we’re still alive; some of us don’t contribute until after we’re dead.” If you think about it, wouldn’t you really rather contribute now?

To contribute means to exercise your God-given talents and abilities to create a unique expression of you. Many of us do that in the context of business. To create a business takes both vision and planning. Vision, to see the future as it already exists, to know how the world will be after your vision is fulfilled. Planning – the blueprinting of your idea in as much specific detail as possible, to map out the vision that you want to fulfill.

Planning With A Heart begins by helping you to uncover the vision of your heart. It takes you through the process of fleshing out the details of your idea to make it a viable business in today’s economy. It is filled with exercises and examples to help you along the way. It is a process, not a destination.