Why did you start your business? This is a key question you should be able to explain to a prospect. The post includes several others.
Why Did You Start Your Business?
Last week I attended “Marketing Strategies in a Down Economy”by Steve Moore. Steve stressed the importance of why you are different than your competition. One key differential can just be the reason why you started your business: what is the passion you bring to this business?
Following that meeting, I updated our website home page. Here are the questions I hope our home page answers:
- Who we are?
- What we do?
- What type of clients we work with?
- What type of projects we take on?
- Why we started this business?
- Why existing clients use us?
This is a good list for most businesses.
O’Donnell’s Law of History: There are no true stories.
Story-tellers are in the iron grip of readers’ expectations. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends, heroes, villains, clarity, resolution. Life has none of those things, so any story gets to be a story (especially if it’s a good story) by edging away from what really happened (which we don’t know in anywhere near enough detail anyway) towards what makes a good story. Historians exist to wrestle with the story temptation the way Laocoon wrestled with the snakes.
James J. O’Donnell in “What’s Your Law (Edge.org)”
I think it’s an argument that all experience is ineffable. But I think the counterargument is that stories are how we process meaning and can therefore transmit useful and actionable approximations of history that prepares listeners for (more) effective action.
Related Blog Posts
- Startup Origin Story: Why Did You Start Your Business?
- August 2023 Newsletter – Origin Story
- What To Do Before You Find a Cofounder
- What to Do Before You Find a Counder Part 2
- Founder Story: Edith Harbaugh of LaunchDarkly
- Kent Beck and Don Reinertsen on Value of Storytelling
- Founder Story: Steve DiBartolomeo of Artwork Conversion Software
- So…What’s Your Story?
- Be Careful How You Tell Yourself “The Story So Far”