Your 3 Contexts

As you grow your business, sometimes it can be disorienting to try to make sense of all the different agendas and perspectives as you move things forward. And it can make things a mess. I want to suggest that there are three contexts that are really important for your business and give you some ideas on how you can use these three views to help you prioritize and simplify your outlook and make decisions better decisions and make them more easily.

Company
First context is your company. So that is you, but it’s also your team, right? What do we think? What are we striving for? What are our goals? So from that perspective, if you put that hat on, it’s a really good place to understand your mission, your purpose. Why are we here? Why are we getting up every day to do this hard work? It’s a great starting place for what I like to call your true story, which is the meaning behind your business that is gonna be powerful for you, with your team and with you to motivate you, but also with your prospects and your customers, knowing that having, having a solid grounding in your context can be an anchor that keeps you consistent and nonplussed as you go out in the world and things change over time. 

Customers
Another context is your customers, right? Prospects and customers. So this is who you’re doing it for, and seeing things through their eyes is so powerful, and there’s a lot of companies that miss that step and they stay stuck in their view, their company context of what they’re doing. And the problem with that is when your messages, when your communications, when your intents come to your customers at, in the terms of what you do and what you say and what you want, they’re likely not to really pay attention to you because they’re very busy. They have a lot of challenges as you do, and they don’t have time to translate from what you think to what they need. So it’s really powerful for you to spend time in the context of what do our customers want, need, think, see, and, take the time with your team to put that hat on, to see the world through their eyes and how have that be what drives your message, your product, and how you support the delivery of that product.

Competitors
There’s a third context I want to mention, and that’s your competitors. And for some people this can be a really overwhelming, consuming topic. What are they doing? How do we compete? What I want to suggest is, yes, spend time thinking about your competitors and what their goals are and how they’re trying to achieve what they’re doing. But I encourage you to do it in the frame of how are we unlike every other competitor, and strive to come up with a spot in the world where you are the only alternative with the particular product, service, location, delivery method, whatever combination of variables that make you the only one in the world that does things the way you do it for your clients. So knowing your competitors is important, but your best case is that you’re not consumed with trying to measure up to them much better is if you don’t have any valid comparisons.

So for me, I would suggest focus number one on your customers after being grounded in your company and check in on your competitors, but don’t let them determine your fate.