An Essential Practice for Entrepreneurs

Last week Bauke, Max, Jelrik, Christiaan, and I got together for our monthly meetup as part of “The Liberators Friends”. This initiative is part of The Liberators the company Christiaan and I founded the beginning of this year. As The Liberators, it’s our mission to unleash organizational superpowers. To increase the impact of our efforts, we started a close collaboration with other entrepreneurs as Bauke, Max, and Jelrik.

The Liberators Friends we want to…

• Support each other with our entrepreneurial ambitions
• Give feedback by facilitating intervision sessions
• Jointly realize client engagements
• Provide training and workshops together
• Create new products that support our mission
• Share learnings and findings with the community

Last week we’ve had our 2nd monthly meetup. This time the theme was a practice that we consider essential for freelancers, entrepreneurs, or simply everyone that takes his/her profession seriously:

“Creating your professional shop window”

I’ve learned of this practice a couple of years ago when I attended a session by Jos Burgers; a Dutch author and speaker. He used the metaphor of the “shop window” to visualize your professional services, qualities, and unique selling points. He stated that lots of “professionals” lack a clear, concise, or inspiring “shop window” and experience the consequences on a daily basis.

The risk of an unclear shop window

An example of a professional shop window is your personal website or your LinkedIn page. To focus on the latter; LinkedIn is a great platform to emphasize your professional skills & services, connect with potential customers, and build relationships with like-minded professionals.

When having a clear, concise, and inspiring shop window, chances are you quickly connect with the people that match your ambition. However, sometimes I stumble upon LinkedIn profiles that create confusion instead of clarity:

• A name that includes all possible certificate titles (John Doe — CSM/PMP/CSP/SPC)
• A long list of methods they are “specialized” in Agile, Lean, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, XP, DevOps
• A contradiction in the desired roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master, Project Manager, Chief Architect

As a result, you risk attracting the wrong customers or no customers at all because it’s unclear what job offerings match your skills & services. You risk missing opportunities to collaborate with like-minded people, because what is it that you’re really interested in? And you risk blocking your personal growth because you’re doing a bit of everything.

Creating your own shop window

Since I became familiar with the concept of making a professional shop window, I create one almost every quarter. The only thing you need is a piece of paper and some colored markers. Draw a show window and add e.g. the products, services, or skills you want the window shoppers to see.

Questions to consider when creating your own shop window are:

• What am I NOT going to show in my shop window?
• What do I want my visitors to see?
• What do I want my visitors to remember?
• What is the feeling I want to create?
• What services or products do I want to emphasize?
• What is going to distinguish my shop from competitors?
• What is the story behind my shop window?

During our “The Liberators Friends” meetup we used these questions to help each other create a personal shop window. We’ve learned that an iterative & incremental approach works best for this practice as well. Therefore we’ve decided to use the upcoming weeks for processing all the feedback and review the updated version in our next meetup. Inspect & adapt!

Closing

In this blog post, I’ve shared a practice that I consider essential for freelancers, entrepreneurs, or simply everyone that takes his/her profession seriously: creating your professional shop window. I helped me create more focus and clarity in my work, attract cool customers, and collaborating with the right people.

I hope this practice is useful for you as well!

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