First You Need Customers

Recently there’ve been several requests for “tag lines” for budding businesses on forums that help “business start-up people.” Business start-up people are people who are thinking about starting a business. They may have taken some steps to get their business started: they have a business name, domain name and an idea for a business. Entrepreneurs are people who go out and do things, they might-and-probably-will-not follow a list, so there is a distinction between these two types of people.

There seems to be some “magic secret” order of tasks that must be done to get a business started.
1. Idea for a business, example: “I want to help people.”
2. Business name
3. Domain name for the website
4. Logo, including colors, fonts, graphics
5. Tag Line
6. Branding Plan
7. Marketing Plan
8. Accounting software
9. Business Plan
10. Special phone number

When you complete the list above you will be missing one very important component to your business. Can you see what’s missing? Yes, what’s missing is customers.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1st I have an idea for a business, “I want to help people.” Question, what problem are you solving for your customers? Find the unresolved problem.

2nd Who are your customers? If you say, “Everyone” then you are setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. Example: If you are charging money for what you do in your business, people with no money are NOT your potential customers. No business on the face of the earth has a 100% market share.

What is missing from the magic secret list is the answer to the question: How is what you are doing different than the other businesses that do this? Differentiation will drive your marketing and sales.

3rd Now you know what your “differentiation” is…great,

4th Go get a customer. A paying customer. Get another one.

About business names: most people agonize over their business name. When you look at the Fortune 500 list of names many of them have nothing to do with what the company is or does. Chevron, Wal-Mart, IBM, Amazon is a river, Google is a number, (from googolplex), and eBay? What’s eBay got to do with auctions? (Wikipedia has the story of why the company and domain was named eBay.)

Domain names: the myth is that the best domain names are 4 letters long. There are 456,976 four letter combinations in the English alphabet. (That includes repeating letters.) There is a very good possibility that all of the four letter combinations have been registered. You’ll have to check this out yourself, my very cursory experiment at www.whois.com yielded results that showed mmbr.com bbbr.com and many other random sets of 4 letters were registered. OK, how about 5 letter combinations? After a very short time this all becomes silly. Your domain name does NOT have to describe your business. Amazon.com, ebay.com, google.com, yahoo.com, I rest my case.

You don’t need a “tag line” to have a successful business. Many of the world’s most successful companies have had several tag lines. The tag line did not make that business successful. Many budding business start-up people think they need a “brand” before they begin their business. It’s not true. And they think their “brand” is a clever tag line, a clever website name and a clever graphic with jus the right colors. That is backwards thinking. There are $ 100 million companies that never had a tag line and never consciously “branded” themselves. They may have become branded. Very often they were branded by…wait for it…their customers.

Much of what I wrote above is considered heresy by many people. People who want to start a business want a business card with: the cute and powerful name of their company, done in just the correct font and the most memorable colors and the unforgettable logo and a phone number that spells something incredibly clever. 1 800 I AM COOL. These people believe that to start a business you must check of the “magic secret” business start up list, see above. And once they have all of that list checked off, the customers will just appear.

So, the search begins for those magic ingredients begins. There are companies that will name your company for a price of $ 10,000 to $ 10 million. There are graphic arts companies that will make you a log for $ 5,000 to $ 5 million. And there are branding consultants who will help you “brand” your company. Most business start-up people opt to get advice from their friends, on-line acquaintances, relatives and co-workers. And it’s usually in the form of a poll. Please, stop and think about this: You’re going to base your future life, your dream, your precious time, talent, treasure, heart and soul on a poll based on the answers of people whose skills, talents, background and expertise about which you have no clue, whatsoever. Entrepreneurs as opposed to business start-up people don’t take polls about tag lines, fonts and logo colors, they DO THINGS. Sometimes it’s the WRONG THING, and if they learn from what they did wrong and then it’s education well paid for.

The most usual request I get from potential clients is, “We want to brand our business. Can you do it?” I ask the next question: Who do you want to be branded with? I continue very quickly in the conversation with, “The reason I ask this is because it costs Proctor and Gamble hundreds of millions of dollars to brand one single product with 25% of the population of this country.” The next question is, “How quickly do you want to be branded?” It has taken some companies a decade to be known by their brand. And finally I ask, “What do you think your brand is?” And then the kicker question: How much are you willing to spend to be branded? You want Proctor and Gamble branding or Joe’s Diner branding? (Joe is branded with less than 1,000 people.)

There is a difference between a brand and a tag line. The people who go to Joe’s Diner have branded his business, “It’s real good food and it don’t cost a lot.” Sub brand: “Joe’s chicken fried steak is the best.” That’s Joe’s brand. Joe had a marketing expert do his tag line: “Excellent food at a great price and outstanding customer service.” Only the marketing consultant and Joe know the “tag line.” The “excellent customer service” part is because Mavis will come over to your table and call you, “Honey.”

There are some tag lines that have worked magic. “When it absolutely, positively has to be there over-night.” “We’re number 2, we try harder.” “Just do it.” “It’s the real thing.” “Snap. Crackle. Pop.” Package delivery, car rental, shoes, soft drink and cereal. And you can see very clearly that none of those tag lines explain what the business does. Did the tag line sell anything? When coupled with a multi-million dollar advertising budget the answer is, sometimes the tag line sold it.

Until you become a mega-corporation there is an interesting truth to building a successful business: People do business with people they like.

Now go out and get a customer, then start your business.