You may not realize it yet, but chances are a lot of your friends, or even some family members might not actually have a clue how you put food on the table. It happens more often than you’d like to think to small businesses.
Everybody likes to do business with their friends, so it would behoove you to inform them about what you do.
Recognize that you need to educate your friends and acquaintances about your small business. With your friends on board, they might even refer you to other new clients, thus making your sales and your business as a whole grow exponentially.
Right now you have lots of social and business networks of people who know you personally: from your clubs, recreational activities, school activities, religious affiliations, hobby groups and so on.
Your friends and acquaintances know you for the person and character you demonstrate to them in person. They are your friends, and that would apply before anything else. Your means of livelihood is not their main concern.
So you would now have a responsibility to educate these intimates about the product you sell and how it could be of use to them. Your bottom line means everything in the business milieu, and your friends and acquaintances just might be the X-factor you need to increase those sales.
You want to be your friends’ meal ticket, the Karl Malone to their John Stockton, the “Mailman” who will “deliver.” It is perhaps time for a paradigm shift – the ubiquitous WIIFM, or What’s in it for Me maxim might as well be replaced by WCYDFM, which stands for What Can You Do for Me? In other words, “Can I turn to you for valuable advice to help me solve my problem?”
Sure, your friends may know what type of business you are in. “He has a garage, she owns a consulting service, he is a mortgage broker, she sells real estate” and so on. In many cases, small business names might be nebulous to the casual consumer, and beg to be clarified by the person who owns the business.
Your goal should be to relay the message to your friends in a pithy, precise manner, what your business is all about. Share your tales. Give easy-to-understand examples.
You probably already have one or two “elevator” speeches of 10 or 30 seconds explaining what you do. Now what you want is to make one specifically designed for general purposes.
When you tell others what you do, use your own personal style of story-telling. Be prudent and do not just sneak in your message at a time that would turn out to be inopportune, and learn how to discern the best impromptu situation.
Be conversational and free-flowing with your explanation and other people will tell THEIR own friends and acquaintances about that swell business you have. What happens is a Doppler effect of sorts, where friends tell their friends who tell their friends, until perhaps even President Obama has heard of your business.
A friend of mine once likened the search for new customers and clients to Sisyphus rolling that boulder up and down the hill – while it may seem endless, such routine becomes worth it when you seize the day and grab those opportunities as they come.
As an aside, you might also want to learn about what your friends do. Pay it forward!
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