Business-Building: Identify Your Market

Being happy in my work involves two main things: loving what I do, and loving the people I work with.

The second group I consider my market. So how can I simply and easily identify my market?

I start with these questions:

Who pops up in my brain when I think of who I want to work with? What kind of person do I resonate with? Who can I imagine spending time with? Who in my experience listens to me, values my opinions, asks me for advice and counsel?

That gives me such a great visual of who is in my market.

The second step is to write down all the descriptive words about these people: Their age and gender, financial situation and education level. Their concerns and hopes, their mindset and how they think, what they value and want out of life, the problems and challenges they face, the needs they have. The first part is "demographics" and the second is "psychographics."

Hopefully the people you describe are people with whom you will happily spend a lot of hours. If not, they are not your market.

Let go of any judgment. There are no "shoulds" in deciding your market. Either you resonate with these people or you don't. So surrender to what you already know and let yourself move to the next step of building a business - identifying those needs and challenges you want to meet with your product or service.