By Pon Angara, VisionReady storyteller

Speak directly to your target audience…

The more specifically defined your niche audience is, the better your brand can be differentiated from your competition. This helps your target customer to perceive your product or service as a more unique offering. This is how you get customers to engage as early adopters who can help you build your brand, and from there, you can scale on to different audiences.

…However, do not be in a rush to scale your business.

Ask yourself first if you have a valid reason to scale. You might be perfectly happy making $50k a year AND have enough time to explore other interests, instead of making $1M but being bogged down by having to manage more overhead and/or staff. Only scale if you have a repeatable business model that works, is profitable, and allows you to look for the next best option regarding audiences and the kind of team you will need to support that.

Identify missing components of your plan preventing you from reaching your goals.

While keeping your team lean for as long as possible, create your Objectives and Key Results for the next quarter and for the next year then figure out what is missing. After identifying what you need to move forward with these goals, you can determine who you’d want to hire. But start with subcontractors to give you the flexibility regarding staffing that aligns with the ebbs and flows of your business before you hire anyone full time.

 Take a “problem-first” approach to ideating.

Ask yourself if you’ve done enough audience research that tells you specific needs and wants from your target demographic. This is the key to an audience-driven approach to designing your offering instead of product-driven. It’s an opportunity to create a hot audience database of individuals who are willing to fully engage with your pilot or proof of concept. This enables you to build trust with a community of potential customers around your brand who will be looking forward to the time you’re ready to launch.

Overall, the key to READINESS is building an audience of partners and stakeholders and giving them the opportunity to become involved in shaping a working business model that answers their need.

If you think you’re ready to turn your idea into a business, contact us by emailing info@visionready.org or calling (305) 791-2610.