It’s Not So Complicated: Authentic Brand Positioning for Solo Entrepreneurs with Timi Orosz

Spyros Tsoukalas: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the GrowthMentor Podcast. I am excited to have with us today, Timi Orosz, founder of Connect One Marketing, and we are going to discuss the topic, It’s not so complicated, authentic brand positioning for solo entrepreneurs. Sounds super interesting. Welcome, Timi.

Timi Orosz: Thank you so much for having me. And it’s a really good topic that you’ve picked. And I can’t wait to dig into it and share some of my tips and knowledge about this topic.

Spyros Tsoukalas: You told me earlier that we love this area. So, let’s dive into it right away. Could you tell us something we don’t know about solo entrepreneurs?

Timi Orosz: Absolutely. I think a lot of people think that being a solo entrepreneur is all great because you’re the only one who’s calling the shots. Or maybe you don’t have to manage teams, or you don’t have anyone to report to you. But it’s definitely not something for everyone. And you need to have a specific kind of character to be able to hold yourself accountable. And I think many people maybe don’t think about this aspect when they decide to become freelancers or solo entrepreneurs, that it’s literally just them in that company in that whole operation. So, if they’re not really good at keeping themselves motivated, and if they’re not really good at sticking to their own deadlines, they’re going to have a really tough time. So, that’s I think, definitely one thing that people need to consider before they decide to become solo entrepreneurs, like, Hey, am I good at keeping my own on self-accountable? Can I make sure that I’m going to be motivated enough to carry on with all of the tasks that they have with the longest To Do List probably that you can receive in the business world?

Spyros Tsoukalas: What do you see going wrong with the way they position themselves?

Timi Orosz: Quite a few things to be honest. But the most common ones that I keep seeing, unfortunately, is that a lot of solo entrepreneurs are trying to portray themselves to look as if they were at a company or as SME, and that usually backfires very often, because you can even see that in their marketing messaging on their websites that they are speaking in the plural, like, we are going to be doing this for you, or we are going to be doing that for you. But when it comes down to the actual project, or the actual activity, or the service, it’s only that one person carrying out the work. And they’re already misleading their customers. And they basically going to be setting them up for wrong expectations, imagining that there’s going to be supporting behind that person, and they’re probably going to expect the whole sales team or anyone that’s going to be dealing with them. So that’s definitely not the best way to position themselves. They are shooting themselves in the foot if they’re going to be doing that. And sometimes another problem that comes up quite often is they try to compare themselves to enterprises and SMEs. So, what do I mean by that if you’re just you in the business, and it’s just you doing everything, the marketing, the sales, the complaints, the strategies, and all of that you don’t have those resources that a bigger corporation would have, or even just an SME when they have clearly infrastructures in place, or they have clear departments and the resources financially. So, try not to compare yourself to all of these larger and more structured organizations, because as a solo entrepreneur, you are going to be a little bit messier. And you should not be looking at those companies as your direct competition, either you’re not competing with them in this space at all.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Actually, that’s very true. So, how should they position themselves? Like what should they be doing?

Timi Orosz: Yeah, a few things as well. But I tried to give you the top tips that they can actually implement straightaway. The easiest way to really make sure that you become a successful solo entrepreneur, meaning that you have a steady flow of clients and revenue as well because that’s what your business is going to need is instead of trying to go after a larger market, it’s much better to become the go-to expert of a sub-niche or a smaller niche and try to even narrow down your target audience more, so you can definitely resonate with them a lot more with your marketing efforts, your services or your product. There is trying to compete in the bigger market against those SMEs and corporations that they sometimes end up comparing themselves with. Because those companies have gigantic marketing budgets that they can spend on advertising, they can spend on retargeting. And as a solo entrepreneur at the beginning, you might not have that. So that’s what I always say, for especially at the beginning, when someone’s trying to position themselves try to look at who is that subgroup of people that could deeply benefit from my services. And how can I speak to them in a way that will feel like I can read their mind so that they feel I am the right partner for their solutions or their problems that needs fixing?

Spyros Tsoukalas: So, here’s your problem that they have faced that is highly relevant, like being solo or being at an early stage, which means that you don’t know many things that we need to deal with. So, you’re responsible for almost everything or pretty much everything. So, how someone uses their intuition to define their strategy or to find answers about things they don’t know?

Timi Orosz: Absolutely, good question. And I love the intuition topic as well when it comes to entrepreneurship because this is something that is maybe not being talked about that often. And being an entrepreneur actually has one of the coolest traits ever, which is we have those kinds of skills that we can follow our gut feeling, which is nothing both our intuition, so we can take those risks. And we can go maybe sometimes even against specific trends because we feel like this is the right move for us as entrepreneurs. So, when that happens, especially at the beginning, when you are doing everything as a solo entrepreneur, you need to also take a bit of a breather and look at your own operations and your own to-do list from an external set of eyes and try to look at what really needs to be done right now. What is that immediate focal point, I need to shift my attention to, some people are maybe familiar with the Pareto Principle, which is the 80-20 rule that works like a charm for solo entrepreneurs, which in this case, would translate to understanding what are those top 20% of your activities that will bring 80% of your results. So looking at it from that perspective, and going with the angles that will really help you not just manage your own sanity, so that you can carry on with all of your tasks, but you actually going to be able to bring better and bigger results a lot quicker in your own business.

Spyros Tsoukalas: So, brand positioning is the connection you build between who you are and what you do, and who your customers are. But in order to make it more successful or efficient, or whatever the adjectives here should be you need to map the customers you’re talking to with what you’re offering. So,  how do you map your customers, especially when talking about startups? Like how would you do that?

Timi Orosz: There are so many ways of doing that. But something that usually gets overlooked, which is actually a very crucial aspect, really understanding what your customer is thinking and are going through. So, probably many of the listeners have heard about specific methods and specific angles of doing market research when you decide on who your ideal customer is, creating your customer avatar and the different profiles for those, those target audiences that you want to be reckoned with. That’s great. But then what people normally do not do is what I call the four-step customer mapping, which goes a little bit more zoomed in on what they should be even looking at. So what does that mean, the four steps would really help you understand what the customer says. So that will be the number one, the second one helps you understand what the customer thinks. So some of the things that they might not say out loud, but they are thinking in their head. The third one is what they actually do. So actual activities that your customer is doing. And the fourth one, which is the most overlooked one, understanding their belief systems, what are some of their beliefs, what are some of their feelings that they are functioning and is going to influence their purchase behavior because if you don’t know what they believe in, you’re not going to be able to optimize your conversions, because you don’t know what needs to be said out loud in your marketing or sales copies. So the easiest way to start to map this out for someone who’s either just going into a new market or you just want to launch a new service is literally create a little map either if you’re old school, then use pen and paper or you can go there are some really cool platforms as well such as Envision I love using their platform to map things out visually and figure out what are some of the things that a customer could be saying out loud to their families,  to their colleagues, to just in general, in their day to day lives. Use those specific sentences in your marketing copy. So that’s going to become the foundation of your core messaging and how you address that customer. And with the thinking part, you’re going to be using that in your sales copy. So when you want a customer, actually to take some action on your landing pages, make sure that you’re going to be including some of those deeper thoughts, you can do this with standard market research as well, you can get a simple focus group together, and make sure that you understand how they actually behave. So, I think this is something that everyone can easily get started with. And when they do that, they’re going to see a lot better results in their overall performance, especially if they do not have the resources to delegate some of the work if they don’t have an entire copywriting team behind them. Or if they don’t have someone who can look into their conversion rate optimization which happens very often, for solo entrepreneurs, you kind of have to have all of that. So, if you’re going to be doing that, you might as well do it in a most efficient, and fun way. It’s actually quite a fun exercise. So, I would recommend this for everyone to carry out.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Thanks for sharing your process. So, last thing a question for the night. And one of my favorite ones, any tools that you recommend on top of envisioning that you already mentioned, like what are your favorite tools, or processes, if there are any?

Timi Orosz: Absolutely, I, there are so many that I love. But I absolutely cannot live without Trello. And that’s something that helped me, myself keep organized. Because when you have multiple projects happening all at once, I love seeing them visually as well and seeing how I’m progressing with certain tasks. And I can also prioritize some of my tasks. And when I do, and that working with other freelancers or I have someone that is joining the small team, then it’s a great way for them as well to easily get caught up with what’s happening within the business without having to spend a ton of time on explaining every single procedure. So, getting things organized is definitely a big thing. And I know some people prefer other tools as well for that. But I think anyone as a solo entrepreneur has to have some kind of organization management in place. If you don’t want to be going insane with all of your never-ending to-do list.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Timi, thanks for joining us tonight and helping us learn about solo entrepreneurs. That topic was particularly interesting for me and I hope it will be interesting for our listeners.

Timi Orosz: Thank you so much for having me and I hope it was helpful as well for the listeners.