As a solopreneur, it may seem like overkill to develop a business identity. After all, it’s just you. You know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what the end goal is. You have no intention of hiring anyone, so the need to develop a consistent culture throughout your business is moot. However, the advantages to having a distinct business identity for businesses of any size are manifold.
Consider:
- Your time: Does your business eat into your regular life? Do you feel like you can’t really get away from it?
- Your clarity of purpose: If you are your business, your very existence is for the purpose of your business. As a human being, this cannot be the case because you are living – your business is not. Work is for humans – humans are not for work.
- Your client interactions: Is it difficult to keep clients in line? Do you fail to implement and maintain boundaries with clients and work in general? Are you afraid that if you impose boundaries, you won’t have any work to do?
Believe it or not, all of these questions can be resolved with the development of a true understanding of your business’s identity! Why? Because once you understand that
YOU ARE NOT YOUR BUSINESS
you can create guardrails for how your business runs, how it manages clients, how it engages with work that actually protect your own life.
I’m not saying that you’ll never have an instance where you have to work more than you’d like to. Those times are a given in any self-employment space. However, creating space between yourself and your business is an important part of growing your business and setting it up so that it can scale.
Understanding the identity of your business allows you to make decisions that will move the business forward in a consistent direction instead of being pulled this way and that.
Activity: Set the timer for 5 minutes. Consider the questions above. How do you retain a separate identity from that of your business? Is there room to create more differentiation? How might you do so?