Here at The Voice Bureau, we LOVE data.

Getting a 360-degree picture of our Right People clients and customers is important to us — it helps us anticipate needs, put requests in context, and see a bigger picture for our relationship with them.

Good data is a form of intimacy.

While gathering data on your Right People is never going to replace a good old-fashioned voice conversation, data holds powerful patterns that can tell you things people will never cop to in conversation.

While happily gathering data (volunteered data, I should clarify) on our clients and course participants, Tami and I noticed that many of them had many things in common.

One such thing: they share a common Voice Value.

Among Voice Bureau clients and customers, Intimacy is the most common Voice Value.

Haven’t discovered your Voice Values yet? 48 questions, about 10 minutes of your time, and you’ll self-score your way to clarity on what’s naturally powerful about the way you tweet, Facebook, write blog posts, and email your list.

You’ll also learn a bit about why certain people are drawn to you and what you should watch out for as you grow your brand.

Enter your best email address below and click Go to get started.

Intimacy is the Voice Value most interested in getting up close and personal.

It doesn’t necessarily cover you with affection (like Love does). It doesn’t necessarily yearn for a huge degree of self-disclosure, like Transparency does. It isn’t necessarily interested in complexity or in parsing layers, like Depth is.

Intimacy peers, pursues, and positions itself near the person, place, thing, or idea that calls to it. Intimacy wants to know. Intimacy wants to see. Intimacy seeks closeness, proximity, familiarity.

It’s no surprise to us that, among our clientele, Intimacy tops all other Voice Values in the rundown of 16.

After all, most of our clients and course participants run what I call “soft skills” businesses — coaching, consulting, advising, and/or mentoring in some way. Note for the personality-typing obsessed: these are common vocation among Keirsey’s ‘NF’ set, or the Intuitive-Feeling types.

The intuitive-feeling types LOVE doing business in an up-close-and-personal way. Tami herself has a high Intimacy value, making her especially well-suited to develop teaching for a high Intimacy client experience.

While Voice Values can suggest a whole world of customization possibilities for a values-based business and brand, one element of business that can never be overlooked is the need for organization and a terrific client experience.

We know that high Intimacy business owners quite naturally focus more on people than on systems.

I admire the empathy capacity of high Intimacy business owners. And I empathize with their need for lightweight, elegant systems to support clients behind the scenes.

I actually LOVE systems and structures but struggled in the first year of my business to create the right ones, because I knew every client was an individual and I wanted each one to be treated as such. I wanted to control all of the touches in their experience with my brand, from start to finish. And as a branding specialist, I didn’t want anything to be ugly.

As I share in the details page for our latest course, when I met Tami, she demonstrated to me how Google’s free and nearly-free suite of apps were the customizable tools I’d been looking for. (I use only free ones, by the way, on the back-end of The Voice Bureau.) These tools were under my nose the entire time — I mean, it’s Google, for gosh sake’s — but I didn’t know what was possible because I hadn’t yet seen it in action. One tour from Tami, and I knew that within this suite was all the customization ability I needed, allowing me to keep things simple and easy while focusing on the clients I love to serve.

Tami and I put together for you the best of our experiences creating attractive and client-friendly systems and structures in our new course, aptly named Branded Business Structures & Systems: Integrate Your Solo Work Behind the Scenes.

Registration is open until Wednesday, February 26th. We’d love to have you join the terrific values-based business owners already gathering.

In the comments, we’d love to hear:

Do you have a high Intimacy value? If so, how do you find it translates into your work with clients and customers?