This is Part 1 in a three-part series about tooting your own business’s horn in a way that makes your right people love you and become more addicted to what your business is all about, as opposed to just thinking you’re a self-important big mouth, which is what you’re afraid of, anyway.
Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography courtesy of Flick Creative Commons.
I’m really good at tooting my own horn. I come by it honestly: my dad is a born horn-tooter from way back. If there’s a press-worthy story he’s even peripherally involved in, he’s the first one on the phone calling the papers. And if he can be the face of said story? He’s all over it. While I don’t share my dad’s craving for the spotlight, I do appreciate that he raised me to talk confidently about myself and my accomplishments, and to look people in the eye as I did it. It never once occurred to me to be embarrassed for speaking forthrightly about what I was working on and what I’d done well.
This skill comes in handy in business.
Before Abby Kerr Ink, I owned a French-y lifestyle boutique in my hometown for four years. In four years of business, we were honored with five or six more-or-less major accolades, including a national retail industry award, a six-page photo spread with an article in an internationally distributed decor magazine, and some local honors voted on by the public.
I hope you noticed something about that last paragraph: we were honored with five or six accolades in four years. Not ten. Not twenty. Not fifty.
Five or six accolades was enough to build a reputation on, because I made the most of every single one of them, for as long as I possibly could, in as many salient, creative ways as I could.
And I never once felt funny about spreading our good news. I knew that sharing our good news as facts — which they were — was the key to building social proof locally and online, and thus instantly upping our addictability factor in our right people’s eyes.
So why don’t we all do this — frame our business accomplishments as facts and share them regularly to brighten our star factor?
Somewhere along the line, some of us have absorbed the notion that talking about ourselves and our accomplishments is a surefire way to draw a negative reaction, or judgment, from onlookers. We’ve intuited, or have been taught, that self promotion is the same as self aggrandizement. The world has schooled us to believe that drawing attention to ourselves for what we’ve done well is the equivalent of saying to others, I’m better than you. I’m special. Look at me.
I’m here today to drop a few new truths on you.
Your business is better — or at least different — than some others by certain measures that have absolutely nothing to do with your personal worth or the other person’s. You are special and so is your business. And if you’re in business, you’d better want your right people to look at you.
It’s time to disabuse yourself of limiting notions about self promotion.
Self promotion is not self aggrandizement. Showcasing your business in a flattering and best-foot-forward way does not mean that you fancy your business as better than your peers or competitors’ businesses. {Though really, there is nothing inherently evil about this thought.} And we can immediately discard the idea that marketing your business with your own mouth has anything to do with how well you think of yourself. {Trust me on this one — it doesn’t.}
The fact is, your business’s accomplishments are facts, and should be seen and reported as such, first and foremost by you.
As the creator of your business, you should see your accolades list as falling into the same category as the following: your business’s name and tagline, a description of who you serve, your brick and mortar location/URL, your description of goods and services, and how long you’ve been in operation.
Your business has a star factor, or will have at some point in the future {if you’re playing your cards right}.
What if you could reframe being “full of yourself” and your business as a righteous fullness that contains the whole truth?
What if you could see your hiding your light under a bushel as unnecessary guardedness, even cagey-ness, and at a certain level, selfishness?
Here’s how I mean that: when you don’t share the facts about your business’s successes, you are taking care of you — avoiding the judgment you fear — but you’re not taking care of your right people. Don’t you think they’d want to know how you could help them, and rest a little easier knowing that you’ve been wildly successful at helping others in the same way?
Let’s think about what your world would be like if some of the talented people and worthwhile organizations you admire felt weird about sharing their awesomeness.
You might admire naturally humble personalities {while noticing that there are few things ickier than false humility}, but have you considered that the opposite of humble is not self-promotional?
Would you be crestfallen if you missed out on your favorite business blogger’s advanced discount offer for a program you really wanted because he was concerned his list would get irritated by yet another self-promotional email?
Would you be disappointed if you missed out on participating in an important holiday charity drive because the organizers didn’t want the local press to see them as too self-aggrandizing?
Would you be downright angry if your favorite band didn’t promote their upcoming concert in your town because they didn’t want people to think they were full of themselves?
Um, yes to all of the above.
Thing is, despite how you feel about sharing the great stuff you’ve done/are doing/will do, no one will have a chance to feel any way about it — good, bad, or indifferent — if you don’t tell them about it in the first place.
Here’s the only reason why some people know that my little retail shop here in Ohio won a national retail industry award and got featured in an internationally-distributed shelter magazine:
Because I told them about it.
Because I sent out a local press release. Because I personally emailed the Features editor of our biggest local paper and explained to her what the award meant. Because I rented a sign for the road in front of my shop and trumpeted the news there at key shopping times during the year. Because I programmed it to print out on our sales receipts. Because I hung the framed award prominently behind our cash wrap. Because I included “winner of the…” in the sidebar copy of my blog.
I leveraged every salient opportunity I could to share these facts. But I could’ve easily chosen not to do this, and then our shop wouldn’t have seemed “famous” at all.
We could’ve won the retail award and I could’ve never mentioned it and no one in my town would’ve known about it, because it wasn’t news that made the non-trade papers.
We could’ve been featured in the magazine and not told a soul and very few people locally would”ve noticed it, only the ones who bought that particular issue of that magazine on local newsstands, read the article, noticed where the shop was located, and actually decided to drive to the shop to check it out in person.
The great things your business has done? They are facts, you know.
Sharing good news about your business is not the same as the overzealous soccer mom at the field, bragging to all the other moms about her kid’s sporting accomplishments.
Your business is not your baby or child, and you’re not its parent.
Your business is an entity all of its own. It comes from you but it’s bigger than you. And if you’re a solopreneur, you are the creator, the brand manager, the primary marketer, and the talent.
And as a small business owner, you’ve got to get as comfortable stating the facts about your business as you are saying, My name is So-and-So.
Okay, Abby, you might be saying. So you got over it and shared the good news about your shop. You got as used to stating these facts as you were used to saying your own name. But didn’t people get sick of hearing about it?
Nope. In fact, over time, these facts only grew bigger and the shop became more legendary in our right people’s eyes.
In the second post of this three-part series, I’ll tell you why it worked out like this, and how the good news about your business can have this same spreadable impact and brighten your business’s star factor.
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