If you’re an executive or a progressive professional, now is the time to take the leap into doing what you love.
Side hustle is not passe or only for the chosen few who can make it to traverse an entrepreneurial journey. Implicitly, entrepreneurship is a mindset. – to grow, to learn, to adapt, to pivot and repeat.
While building your own thing can be utterly challenging, given that barely enough a newly hatched idea can find its fit with the market. And to top it off, testing the idea in the form of a product or solution in the market is not for everyone’s area of resilience and coping up mechanism.
So then the question – how can you still build your dream castle?
Start with why. There’s an entire book written on this by Simon Sinek. To me what this means is to go back to your whiteboard and spell out your mission – why you want to exist in the market at the very first place. This is even before you launch your product/ solution/ idea. Per Ziva Meditation, there’s a saying: ‘Let the how take care of itself.’ When you know your ‘why’, you’ll know how to engineer the ‘how’ through market cues, challenges, trends and developments and areas of focus of your cross functional business stakeholders. Your ‘why’ will help you bring a sense of coherence in your business planning and execution.
Be your own learning company, inc. With the changing digital and technological landscape, it is pivotal to not just upgrade your IQ but also EQ, TQ (Technological Quotient), acquired intelligence and spiritual quotient (especially when you’re articulating your self-expressive/ brand philosophy drivers). So notch up your learning by taking up new-age digital focused courses, attending bootcamps and attending masterclasses and industry webinars. Alongside, joining communities say like CMO Collective, Revenue Collective, among many others, can help you advance in your area of specialisation and apply those market insights to growing your company/ venture.
Always think long term; aberrations are just adjustments. Building on your idea and its sustainability is predicated on how far can you go and stay inspired by your ‘why’. Your long term thinking will help you stay current in terms of new pivots, growth, accelerations and know-how. Passion is sustained enthusiasm; work on the longevity of your purpose than just the short term business profits you make. Balance the short term gains/ learnings with the long term relevance of your purpose.
Focus on the right mix of brand, product, people and market thought leadership. In a recent Linkedin guide, making an impact with executive thought leadership is categorized into industry, brand, product and people. Speaking of which, your brand thought leadership is how you think like a brand custodian of your own company. At the helm of your brand and its vision, mission and values comes the product language that is communicated to your customers in the lexicon they understand and relate to, by the people of your organisation, across disciplines and functions, in the form of narrative that engages with your market ecosystem. This constant harnessing of thought leadership derived from brand, product, people and market will help you create the right brand messaging and storytelling that builds an implicit business rapport with you prospective dream customers.
Over to you.
Have you started working on building your dream castle?
What tools and insights are you applying to make it a reality?
Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash
