Build Your Own Business Course

Congratulations on taking the initial step on your personal branding journey! Here you will access all of the course resources you will need, including activities that will sharpen your understanding of the topics. Please watch the videos, read the modules and download the templates and most importantly, do the work! Just like a gym membership, it only works if you work it.

This week we’ll be looking at vision, mission and goals. When you are running your own business, it’s difficult to extract your personal life from the business. The point of these types of businesses is that you build your business around your life, not modify your life for your business. Therefore, we’ll start documenting your vision for your life and how your business works within it.

The Understand part is the most important to start a business so don’t underestimate its relevance. It sets the foundation for your goals, target market, business structure, support required in the form of employees and software, plus what resources you need to get stated.

Values are unique to all individuals and your goal this week is to better understand your own. The additional benefit of knowing about values is that you can recognise others ’values. Your partners, family, friends, work colleagues, clients and more. When you understand what drives people, you can more easily influence them. The inbound personal branding process depends upon finding people with similar values to your own as they will have more desire to work with you. Like attracts like.

Understanding your personality is an important part of the process as it helps decide what role you will have in your business as well as the roles others play in ensuring you can build your portfolio business. There are a wide variety of ways to test personalities.  The ones we use at Social Star are the Myers-Briggs based test called 16 Personalities and the entrepreneurship test from Roger Hamilton called Wealth Dynamics.

Whilst you can start a business at any stage in life, there are certain challenges you’ll face within each stage that are important to be aware of. These Lifestages are generic in nature and not meant to be prescriptive to your situation. They are a guide to stimulate you’re thinking about your own situation and reflect on what challenges may occur in the next five to ten years of your business.

One of the biggest factors to any new portfolio business is the resources you have to apply to it. We classify these resources as time, money, connections and knowledge. These factors relate strongly to the other areas of the Understand process as they are all interdependent areas that need consideration before we start to build your own business.

Going through the Understand process can seem like a very introspective process. However, as we enter the Build section you will see how the foundations laid in the Understand section align our approach in the Build section. Having taken the time to lay these foundations you have a clear direction and vision for your business, directing your efforts in the Build and Leverage sections.

LinkedIn is the main professional network in the world. Since 2002 it has been the go-to social network for employment and business networking.

Websites are a necessary part of having a business. SEO is inextricably linked to how search engines rank them so we will cover both in this section. For most businesses being searchable add greatly to your reputability and if harnessed it can be a means to drive leads.

In the last section we looked at the power of LinkedIn as the main professional Social Media platform. Of course LinkedIn is not the only Social Media platform that can be used for marketing. In this section we’ll delve into some of the other platforms, their strengths and weaknesses and individual features.

Email marketing is an effective way to keep in touch with your community who are in your hot zone and current customers who have purchased your products.

The foundation of successful marketing is creating and distributing content that resonates with your target audience. Content moves people through the stages of your sales funnel: cold, warm, hot, and sale. You begin by understanding your audience and tailoring content to the platforms they use.

In this module, we focus on leveraging your personal and professional connections to build a strong customer base. The heart of your business is your customers, and many of your early customers will come from your existing network. Understanding how to turn connections into clients is essential to your business success.

Pitching is answering someone’s question effectively. We have all been asked the standard warm-up question of ‘So what do you do?’ or ‘What are you up to these days?’. We can choose to answer these questions with a standard response of ‘The usual’ or ‘not much’, but what a wasted opportunity!

In this module, you'll focus on closing sales—one of the most critical aspects of turning your business from an idea into a profitable venture. Closing is about finalising the deal, securing orders, and converting potential customers into paying clients. Without successful closing techniques, your business won't generate income.