The key to success in any business is a profound understanding of how you should run and grow your business online and offline.
Let’s start right at the beginning: you need to see and value yourself as a business. Whether you’re a freelancer, a small company or a big company you have to determine the one thing that is unique about your product or service.
What is your unique value proposition (UVP)? Why are you different and worth paying for? Each person has their own UVP. This might be a language combination that is considered scarce, but it could also be that you are very experienced in interpreting complicated medical issues or you have a degree in law besides being a certified interpreter and therefore you know a lot about competition law. Think and you will find your UVP.
If you are now thinking, “I never thought about it that way”, you’re not the only one.
I meet and speak to a lot of interpreters who have no strategic plan for themselves or their businesses. They simply don’t see themselves as a business. They run their business with whatever comes to their desk via agencies or sometimes through their own website but they never take the lead themselves and play an active role in acquiring new business.
They have no overall plan, no ultimate goal, however small, that they want to achieve in let’s say 5 years. They have no idea what problem they solve or who their target customers are and where to find them. They never think about the costs for customer acquisitions and what their revenue model is.
Sounds familiar?
Start seeing yourself as a business from today and start acting that way. Think big, but act small. Always keep in mind your bold vision when writing down your daily to-do list. One of the tools that helped me to always keep in mind the broader picture with whatever decision I had to make for Translin, was a lean canvas (www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas).
Take a look at the video. Within 20 minutes you will be able to draw your own canvas and know where your interpreting business is going next. Do it now!