If your ideal life includes spending your days happily doing what you love, there’s no reason you can’t leverage that passion into some serious money.
You don’t have to settle for a business model that doesn’t suit your personality; you don’t have to provide products or services that don’t resonate with you just for the sake of a good paycheck. If you’re a little creative and you believe that what you love to do can help others, you can make serious bank doing what you love. Here’s how:
1. Know yourself. What’s your passion? What do you feel happiest doing and sharing? Look at your activities; find the common thread and clarify what you gravitate toward time and time again. You may be a natural artist; you may enjoy number-crunching; you may love to install tile or design closets. If you have several different passions that seem to be unrelated, you can still morph them together into a fantastic new business… but first, get clear on what you would love to spend your time doing.
2. Identify a need in the marketplace. Start with thinking about your ideal clients. Never mind what you think they “should” be like; imagine and define your IDEAL clients; the types of people you would WANT to interact with and provide a service to on a daily basis. Where do they live? What do they do? What’s their income level? Education level? What are their interests and passions? And most of all, what do they need? How can what you love to do, fill that need? Imagine what you want the ideal scenario to look like.
3. Perfect your elevator pitch. If you were in an elevator with someone and you had 30 seconds to tell them what you do, what would you say? REFINE your elevator pitch until it’s second nature. No “ummm….”! No hesitation, not hunting for the right words. First impressions count and you never know who you might meet: it could be the perfect client, and your perfect client has friends. And they have friends.
4. Think about how your service or product can benefit your clients over time as opposed to providing a one-time benefit. Create packages; programs; repeat sales; identify add-on sales opportunities. Think about how you will stay in your clients’ awareness and maintain your relationship with them over time.
5. Leverage your spheres of influence. How can you help people you know? How you can help the people they refer to you? In the process, you might identify even more needs that are not being met by your competitors.
6. Create a compelling offer based on your client’s needs.
- If your offer is compelling, it won’t sound like this: “Hi, I’m Jessica. I make homemade beauty products. Want to buy some?”
- It will sound like this: “Hi, I’m Jessica. I’ve developed a skin care product line that addresses your concerns about toxic additives and environmental impact. All of my products are hand-crafted out of 100% natural ingredients that don’t irritate the skin and they’re completely safe for babies. Do you have any skin problems that might benefit from a natural skin care product?”
7. Design a delivery system (the nuts and bolts of delivering a product or service). Map it out exactly. If you create tangible objects, how long does it take to create one for a client? If you provide services, how long do you schedule for each client?
You have certain talents and interests for a reason. They are there to be shared. So boldly take those passions and create a business plan and start making money doing what you love!
Inspired by a blog post by Ann Welch of www.ideallifevision.com