If you’ve read my last post, why do I need a niche for my business, you’ll see that this is something I struggled with for a long time, and that I’ve only recently got clarity on it.
So how I did get to this point?
Well it’s not a short story or one obvious solution, so I think I’ll start with one of the things that I think was fundamental. I attended an event for International Women’s Day, and one of the speakers was talking about having a vision and a mission for your business to guide your decisions.
I have heard this topic talked about so many times in my years in business, long before I had a business of my own. But it never really did anything for me. Yet for some reason, maybe the way the speaker framed it, maybe I was just ready to hear it and act on it, it clicked for me.
In the session, I scribbled down my vision for my working life and what I want it to be like in 5 years time. And then outside the session I asked myself what it is that I really care about. What do I really want to help people with.
I did actually use Claude A.I. to help me with some thinking too – picking out themes from all my client testimonials, and taking it right back to basics. As well as combining that with the thoughts from my book, Things I Know About Creativity, in which I had already distilled my philosophy on creativity into a book of colourful doodles.
Ultimately, what I want to do is help people do work they care about that allows them to be creatively fulfilled and to be themselves. Which might sound lame to you – or maybe it doesn’t. But having spent so much time in my life agonising over career choices and freelance decisions and often feeling like the odd one out in a room, not seeing my value, this feels like an important mission to me. One with a lot of layers and nuances. But one that I can bring so many different skills and bits of knowledge to.
My focus is self-employed people because that’s the world I live and breathe now. And I’m drawn to the crazy creatives, the ideas people, the people with enthusiasm and passion for their work or their cause, people who aren’t afraid to show their weirdness to the world. And fortunately, those are the people I am best able to help.
In some ways I’ve been talking about this for years. But maybe I hadn’t narrowed it down enough, or described it properly, or truly connected the dots. Whatever it was, I hadn’t made it stick in my own head.
But now I have, and I have already found that this mission frames everything I do so perfectly, and having it written down really does seem to be guiding my decisions. Including clarifying my niche and how I package my services.
Of course while that piece of information helped me to get to this point, it was just one of the elements that helped me finally figure out how to explain what I do really simply. I’ll write more about the other elements in a future post.
And you can read more about my services if you go back to the home page of this website.
