I was working through an English assignment with my eight-year-old son when I first connected the dots. He was learning how to construct more interesting sentences by including the “Who – What – When – Where – How – Why” elements of the story. It’s a fairly elementary writing technique that is immensely powerful in helping emerging writers get beyond the stage of…
“I like baseball. My dog is big.”
and into the far more interesting phase of…
“Yesterday, my sister’s enormous Golden Retriever stole my baseball mitt from under my bed and ran outside so I would play fetch with him.”
There at the kitchen table, with all those question words laid out before us on index cards, it occurred to me that every entrepreneur needs to answer some of the exact same questions about a business if it’s going to succeed.
If you have a business today, or are thinking about ever starting one in the future, answering these questions will provide much-needed clarity that can guide your product or service development. These answers will inform each decision you’ll face about what to create, what to say in your marketing materials, and even how to frame everyday conversations about what you do.
Of course, if answering these questions for your business were as easy as a second-grade writing lesson, everyone would be doing it. But there are challenges to answering each one rooted deeply in our psychology, and if we don’t push past our initial discomfort, our businesses won’t thrive.
Let’s take a look at the Big Three: Who, What, and How of Entrepreneurship…
You can read the rest of this post on Best Kept Self, where I am a featured contributor.
