This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey friends, hey listeners, community, welcome to Cytusle School. This is Chris Guillebeau, your host. Whether you are just starting out or looking to take your small business to the next level, this is the daily podcast for you. Seven days a week, totally free, with stories you won't hear anywhere else, and less than 10 minutes a day. That's our pitch, that's our mission.
That is our guiding force, that's what we do every day, every day since January 1, 2017. And today we're gonna hear from Charisse, who is interested in starting a personal shopping business. Okay, we talked about personal shopping recently and a story in which personal shopping didn't go so well. It was a failure Friday story, in fact. Now, because Charisse is smart, she wants to not have a failure Friday story, she wants to approach this from the right way.
So, let us see if we can help. How can I start a personal shopping business? What's the best approach? All that's coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]
Hi, my name is Charisse, and I'm interested in starting a personal shopping business.
I have a passion for fashion and shopping, so I've got that covered. But I'm not sure how to market my service effectively. What strategies can I use to differentiate myself from competitors? Am I even on the right track, or should I try thinking of different ideas? [Music]
All right, I wanna focus on a single part of this question.
Just keeping the bite-sized less than 10 minutes a day model in mind here. I want listeners to always be able to learn something, to go away feeling inspired, to have a next step. So, there's a lot we could talk about when it comes to starting a personal shopping business. But as Charisse mentioned, it can be a competitive industry. And as I mentioned, like we recently had that failure Friday story from someone who had a less than stellar experience with the personal shopping world.
So, here's the most important thing to consider at the whole top of the exercise, like when you're like, when I've got this idea, do I want to go down this road? The question is, personal shopping for whom? Like who are the clients? Like who is your number one client? Even just thinking about a single person, a single customer avatar to use some marketing language, but you can just call them your ideal customer.
Long ago, I wrote a book called "Side Hustle," and I had this exercise of taking your ideal customer to coffee, having coffee with your ideal customer to kind of get to know them. And of course it's a bit of an imaginary exercise, but it's important because personal shopping for whom? Again, who are the clients? You have to really think in terms of the nuts and bolts. Like, once you've got that ideal client in mind, imagine the sales process, imagine the customer experience, imagine what they pay for and how they pay it, how you set the appointments, any follow-up, all that kind of logistic stuff.
And here's the deciding factor, when you're trying to decide, do I move forward or not with something like this? If you try to imagine that ideal customer and you try to think through the sales process, the customer experience, and it's really hard. In some ways you could say maybe it's hard because it's new, if you haven't thought that way before, but if you spend some time with it and you still struggle, I'd say it's because you don't actually have good answers for those questions. And listen, no judgment, I've been there. I've had lots of different business ideas where I didn't do this, and I thought, well, I know better, and I spend some time going down that path and then realize, oh, this business isn't gonna work so well, just because I didn't clearly think about the customer and I didn't really imagine the nuts and bolts in thinking through the sales process, customer experience.
So all that to say, let's do that on the front end. And in that case, the idea needs more development if it's gonna have a real chance of success. So Charisse, that is my advice to you. Spend some time doing that before you do anything else. And listeners, if you have a question or something you're trying to work through, let me know, I'd love to help as much as possible.
Maybe our listeners can help as well, some other listeners. sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll continue to feature them in a new episode every day. Every week, we're hearing different stories and case studies and tips and such. And I just so appreciate you being part of this community.
All right, that's all for today. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
from the Onward Project.
