Hear the words "marketing", "branding" or "positioning" and your heart sinks?
Me too.
For so many founders, especially in the early years, you know how important it is to "get your marketing right". You need leads. You need sales. You need people to understand what you do.
The problem is that every expert has a different opinion.
You need a personal brand.
No, you need to be in a niche of one.
No, you need to guide your buyer by signaling which category you’re in.
No, you need a funnel.
No, you need better social content.
No, you need Meta ads.
No, you need a podcast.
It requires deep work because you can't outsource the thinking. And without that thinking, you never quite nail it.
Your efforts become stop-start. Your messaging becomes random.
The results are poor.
Rinse. And. Repeat.
The irony is that when you first start, you're often at your most authentic.
You're raw. You're playful. You don't know what you don't know.
Then, slowly, you start conforming. You mirror your competitors. You absorb the received wisdom of how things "should" be done.
You discover there are things you're reasonably good at that people will pay for, so you start chasing those opportunities.
You drift out of your lane. You confuse yourself. Then you confuse your customer.
And your messaging becomes simultaneously more complicated and more generic.
I know this because I've been stuck there myself this year.
After months of wrestling with my positioning, I lost it earlier this week.
Frustration became anger. Anger became overwhelm. Overwhelm became apathy.
At my wits' end, my astute (and sexy) partner told me to stop overthinking it, strip it back and go back to the authentic stuff I was doing two years ago.
The next day, sat on a bus listening to Frank Sinatra sing My Way, it clicked.
Stop worrying about categories I don't even want to be in.
Stop agonising over the perfect professional descriptor of what I do.
Stop hiding behind therapy-speak and industry jargon.
I'm not a business guru. I'm not a therapist. I have no bullshit 3-5-7-step system to success.
What I believe is this:
Most people already know what to do.
The challenge is that they can't always be who they need to be in order to do it.
My job is to help them find their way. I’m the Wayfinder!
Right now I work with entrepreneurs. Because I'm on that journey too.
And because an inspired entrepreneur can have a massively positive impact on the people around them, their business and their community, and being part of that is cool.
Maybe the answer isn't becoming more sophisticated.
Maybe it's becoming more yourself.
One final thought.
I reckon My Way might be the entrepreneur's anthem.
What's yours?
