This week's post comes from Elisa Peimer, one of Oren Hope's founding partners.
Marketing isn't just about positioning your products for maximum positive exposure. It's also about positioning your company to be seen in a positive light. And if you're an entrepreneur of any kind, your company is you.
If you don't believe what you offer is valuable, you can't expect clients and customers to believe it. Yet of all the things I’ve learned about getting your own business in gear and being successful, maintaining this positive attitude is often the most difficult thing, even if it seems the most basic.
A positive attitude means saying and believing that, even in the midst of a recession, with no clients, and being a start-up, you’re going to make your business work. For a glass-half-empty kind of person, adopting that mindset can be a real challenge. But it’s imperative. If you’re going to convince people that your services are valuable, the first person who has to believe it is you.
This really hit home for me recently after speaking to a couple of friends, both of whom have run their own businesses for their entire professional careers. They’re in completely different fields, but they have two things in common. The first is that their companies have had moments of both real success and real challenges. The second is that they never seem to doubt that they can succeed moving forward. What I find admirable about that is that they maintain that positive attitude despite the fact that their businesses have not followed a straight uphill trajectory. It isn't an unbroken string of success that has made them impervious to negative thinking, it's their own internal energy and drive. The fact that sometimes they stumble doesn’t make them doubt their ability to succeed.
Article comments
1 - Joanne Huspek
Good points. It's hard to maintain a positive attitude when the world is crumbling around you, but the alternative doesn't help and can actually hinder growth.