From Shaved Ice to Selling Expertise,Part 1/3
Lessons for Entrepreneurial Experts
My first business was a shaved ice truck.
This was the actual, adorable first truck we bought off Craigslist for $5k then renovated ourselves. It's pretty on the outside but...let's just say you get what you pay for.
27-year-old, first time business owner Elizabeth was all the things most first time business owners are: brave, optimistic, and completely naive. At this point in my life, I knew NOTHING about running a business, but I was about to find out.
Over the next 8 years, my business partners and I grew our little shaved ice business from 1 truck to 3 trucks + a retail shop. We did all of the big events in the city as well as a lot of private events like weddings, corporate appreciation days, kids birthday parties, etc. So this business was part retail/restaurant, part events company, and we would hire 20-30 people in the spring to make it all happen.
Just like in 100% of the companies I work with today, we needed processes and training in place so we could hire these (mostly) college students in the spring, and get each of them up to speed FAST. Whether they were at a private event downtown, a corporate event in the burbs, or in the retail shop—they all had to be serving the same product in the same way, every time.
We made 80% of our money between May-September, so hiring and training were absolutely critical to our bottom line.
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What you just read is the story I share with clients and prospects to demonstrate 3 things: 1) I’ve been in their shoes, 2) I’ve felt their pain, and 3) It’s not easy, but I can help them do it too.
Figuring out the sales and marketing for my first business felt easy. We sold a tangible product our customers could see, hold, and taste.
We drove trucks around the city that were brightly colored and beautiful, a magnet for kids on summer break, and for 2013-era hipsters listening to live music in the park.
I’ve done this successfully once before!
How hard can it be!
I have a MARKETING DEGREE!!!
Turns out I was completely ignorant of how I would generate new business this time around.
Fortunately I had some good instincts that served me well in the beginning. I positioned myself well, focusing at the time on developing employee training for independent restaurants in Nashville that were scaling from one unit to multi-unit. This was at the peak of Nashville’s rapid growth, so there were a lot of those.
I called, texted, or emailed pretty much everyone I knew to tell them what I was doing now, and to see if they knew anyone I could help. That was a fantastic place to start.
But as I worked my way through my personal network in Nashville’s hospitality industry, I could see the expiration date on those referrals. We might have a big reputation, but we’re still a small town. And I had no clue how to continue growing my business.
Which was, I hired a marketing agency to help me with paid ads. It might have gone differently had I already known the content types that were resonating with my target audience, but I didn’t, the agency didn’t either, so I depleted my marketing budget and got 0 new clients.
My second mistake was repeating something that had worked in my shaved ice business, which was to sell my company brand instead of myself.
My first business was a products and services business…so naturally, the brand was about the value of buying those products and services.
Make your kid’s birthday party special
Add something unique to your wedding day
Walk around the event downtown with something beautiful and be the envy of them all
I definitely wasn’t selling a product, even though I had a productized offering. And I wasn’t really selling a service, either. I was selling my expertise.
I was selling my ability to listen to the words a business owner used to describe their problem, understand what was actually going on, then develop a path forward to solve that problem.
And every single sales and marketing tool I had in my toolbox, dating all the way back to my days as a marketing major in the mid 2000s, was not working. So I had to get some new tools.
There is being an expert, and there is showing people that you’re an expert.
So if you also think of your business as “expertise-as-a-service” I want to share some insights I’ve had and I hope they help.
I have a lot to say on this subject, so I’ve broken it up into a 3-part series I’ll be sharing between now and the end of the year. Until then, here are those insights:
Sell what you know, not what you do
Sell yourself, not your company (YES, even if you have a team. I can’t wait to change your mind on this.)
Demonstrate your proven process in sales conversations
Parts 2 and 3 are coming in December. Until then…
Recap
Selling your expertise is a totally different ball game than sharing a product your customer can see, hold, and taste
Those of us in the expertise-as-a-service business need some of the same tools in our toolbox as our product/service friends…but we also need some different ones
In the next few weeks I’ll be sharing my 3 specific insights and some tactical ways to use them in your own expertise-as-a-service business
Resources
Two experts who have been hugely influential for me in learning how to sell my expertise are David C. Baker and Kait LeDonne. You should read everything they write.
Let’s Talk
Are you an expert who doesn’t quite know what your proven process is yet? You do it, but you’re not crystal clear on what it is. You’ve had lots of clients, you get great results consistently…you’re just not sure how. You want to hire and replicate yourself, or you want to be able to better articulate how you do what you do.
Let’s talk, because you are my favorite type of client. I love working with entrepreneurial experts who want to uncover their unique intellectual capital.
You can reach me on this platform through a DM, or at elizabeth at untangleyourbiz dot com.
