Over the past two posts, I’ve introduced you to two of the key elements you need to have in place to guide your educational consultant business-building efforts:
Today, I want to share with you the third and final piece of the puzzle: Your Primary Role.
How to Determine Your Primary Role
So, what is your Primary Role, you ask?
It’s the single thing you do that best serves the Promise. And as such, it’s the one thing most responsible for your company’s success.
In order to identify your company’s Primary Role…
Determine the one activity that most ensures that you deliver on your Promise to your clients.
So, if you followed instructions and identified your Promise in my last post, the question now is, “What is the #1 thing we do at our company to deliver on that Promise?”
That’s your Primary Role.
And the success–in fact, the very existence–of your company depends on executing that Primary Role as flawlessly as possible.
Because when you deliver on your Promise…
- Your customers and clients love you.
- They buy from you over and over.
- And they spread the word about you to others in their networks (the famous “word of mouth advertising”)
The Primary Role “To” Test
Now, I want the relationship between your Promise and your Primary Role to be as clear as possible to you.
First of all, understand that your Promise is always more general than your Primary Role. And the flip side of that statement is that your Primary Role is always some specific action you take to deliver on your Promise.
And the key word in that phrase–”to deliver on your Promise”–is “to.”
You execute your Primary Role in order TO deliver on your Promise. If you state it that way, it should make sense to you.
Here’s the template for this:
“I [verb + your Primary Role] TO [verb + your Promise].”
For example, in my business, it would be…
“I provide personalized 1-on-1 business coaching to help independent educational consultants become more financially successful.”
While I do a lot of other things for consultants, too, my Primary Role is my coaching services because it’s the most hands-on and most effective way I can help them achieve financial success (my Promise).
See how that works?
Promise and Primary Role: A Few More Examples
The business author Mike Michalowicz talks about all of these elements in his book Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself.
Here’s Michalowicz’s Primary Role and Promise statement:
“I write books (Primary Role) to simplify entrepreneurship (Promise).”
How about Amazon?
Their statement would be something like, “We offer seamless online ecommerce (Primary Role) in order to provide the most convenient shopping experience anywhere (Promise).”
Or FedEx…
“We manage shipping and delivery logistics (Primary Role) to deliver packages on time (Promise).”
Make sense?
OK, now it’s your turn.
Think about your Promise to your Clients. Now, ask yourself, “What’s the #1 activity that we do here at our company that delivers on that promise?”
Is it your keynote speaking? Is it your workshops? Is it the books you write? The online courses you sell? You can only have one Primary Role, so really think this through.
Of course, if you’re a solopreneur, then change “we” in the sentence above to “I.” But the question remains the same.
How do you best deliver on your Promise? What’s the most important deliverable (in your clients’ eyes)–be it product or service–that you provide?
That’s your Primary Role. Build everything you do around that role.
You may do other things, as long as they don’t interfere with your Primary Role. But if they do, get rid of them. Because anything else is secondary.
In the past three posts, I’ve laid out a chain of three key elements that guide and focus your business building efforts:
- Your Mission,
- Your Promise,
- And your Primary Role
I hope you’ve gone through the exercise of creating these elements for your business (if you didn’t already have them) as we went along.
If you did, you should be feeling a level of clarity about your business that you’ve never experienced before. If you’ve yet to go through the steps to get this done, I implore you to do so now.
You’ll thank me, I promise.
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–Need an objective third party to run your newly-minted Mission, Promise, and Primary Role drafts by?
I’m game.
Just reply in the comments. I’ll give you my (free) feedback so you can further hone these key elements of your positioning until you have them nailed down.
Or, if you’d rather email them to me directly, send them to willy@edconsultantmarketing.com.
I look forward to hearing from you.
