Episode 279: What is your behaviour like?
What would your audience say about the behaviour of your brand? In today's episode, Fiona shares a quick tip from the book "If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair" by Anya Hindmarch. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
What is the behaviour that we want to be known for?
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 279 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. Today it is a quick tip episode, and this is an important one. I believe as anyone who is running a small business, is likely to forget this at times or maybe just not keep it front of mind, especially when things are stressful or chaotic or you are having just a bit of a tough time in business. I hope that today it'll be a reminder tip to keep this front of mind as you move forward.
Before we get stuck in, I wanted to of course acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful land on which I get to record this podcast, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledged that sovereignty has never been ceded. Today it is a quick tip episode. Let's just get right in.
If you follow me on Instagram, I'm @mydailybusinesscoach, you may well know that I am a bit of an avid reader or likely also if you are on my Sunday email. I send a Sunday email every single week. I've been doing that for years and years. If you want to subscribe, you can do that over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/subscribe. I am somebody who just loves reading. I also think that reading forces me to get off my phone, although I also listen to a lot of audiobooks as I'm doing something else. Usually quite often when I'm hanging out the clothes, I hate hanging out clothes. I don't know why. I just find the whole laundry thing. I find it quite rewarding, but I have to be listening to something else. It reduces the tediousness of it. But I do listen to a lot of audiobooks, but I also try and read physical books wherever I can. I buy a lot of books through OpShops. OpShop always has new books for a third of the price, if not less. And you are keeping that book you're giving it another life.
Anyway, I read a lot of books as much as I can. That one of the books that I recently consumed was one of the best books I have listened to. I listened to this one in particular. I didn't read it, but I actually might go out and buy a physical copy. It was so good. I finished it in record time. I couldn't stop listening to it. Even my husband was trying to talk to me at one point and I had five minutes left of the audiobook, and I just said to him, "I'm sorry this book is so good. I just have to finish it. I've got five minutes left." The book is called If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair by Anya Hindmarch. Anya Hindmarch is an incredible designer in bags and accessories and cool stationary and quirky, fun, interesting, unique stuff out of London. Anya Hindmarch wrote this book as a way of sharing her knowledge, and her advice bestowing information from somebody in their fifties to younger women. Whether it's about career advice, she gives some incredible advice about business and running a business from hiring or firing staff through to systems, through to her selling, her business, and then she bought her business back, all sorts of things.
She has so much business advice, but she also has so much advice about being a mother and how she navigates parenting and has done, her children are grown, or at least I think the youngest one is like their teenagers, a late teenager I think, and she has five children. She has the experience to back it up by giving parental advice, but the way that she advises in this book, whether it is about decluttering an organization in the home, whether it is about business, or whether it is about parenting, it's just so genuine. You wouldn't think that she's this big-name fashion designer it's going to be unrelatable. But it was so relatable, honestly, like I said, it's one of the best books I've read in years.
But today I wanted to highlight not just that book, but something in particular that she talked about in that book, and she talked about, if she was to look at the word brand in terms of business and brand, she would replace it with behaviour. Instead of saying, “we need to grow our brand,” or “we want to be recognized for our brand.” If you replace that with, we want to be recognized for our behaviour, we want to be we want to grow our behaviour, we want to be known for our behaviour worldwide, it changes things. I thought for today's quick tip episode, it's to ask yourself, if somebody was to judge your behaviour as a business, as a brand what would they say? Would they be saying, "well, they're rude, "or "they're stuck up," or "they are late, they are always late to things?"
What would be the words that come out of them? Your audience, whether that audience is your clients or your customers, or if it is your suppliers or manufacturers or contractors or people that work with you. What would they say about the behaviour of the brand? I think it was a clever way to look at it and to talk about how your behaviour has to be consistent. Firstly, it needs to be consistent, but also that it has to consistently be showing up to the values and beliefs that you have as a business. What are you trying to be known for? And that too often we get fixated on things that don't matter, like social media accounts or other things, rather than getting fixated on what our behaviour says about our business. I guess that's the question for today.
The tip is to consider your brand. What are you building out there? If you were to change the word brand to behaviour as Anya Hindmarch so wonderfully, put it in her book If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair what would be the outcome? What do you think the people would say about your behaviour over the last 12 months or maybe over the last 10 years? Has it been consistent? Is it in line with how you want to be known? Are there certain things that need to be fixed or amended or changed? Is there too much going on? Therefore the systems aren't there to support their behaviour. You'd love to be known for it, but you just haven't got the time or haven't got the systems in place to be able to come across the way that you want to come across.
That is it to think about that question. If I was to change the word brand into behaviour for your own business, what would people be saying about our behaviour? What is the behaviour that we want to be known for? I think it's a really important question to ask yourself and to ask regularly, as the leader of your business, of your brand, what is the behaviour that we're putting out there? What are we known for? What do we want to be known for? And how far are we from that point?
That is it for today's quick tip episode. As I said, that book was just so good. I am actually going to listen to it again, which is something I rarely do, but I just found so many tips and insights, and I often listen to audiobooks while I'm doing something else. I want to just listen to it and take notes. I might buy the physical book as well. But we'll link to that in the show notes and you can find those over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/279. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
