Do Your Strengths and Your Core Offering Match Up?

by Kenneth Vogt
Content Crooner Inc.

You and your strengths are the most important assets that you business has. Although this may seem self-evident, there are businesses every year that fail because they failed to fully utilize their own strengths. If you are just starting out, or if your business is not performing at the level you want, it may be a good time to take inventory of your strengths and see if they are being used to their full potential.

What is Strength? The Gallup Poll defines "strength" as this: a pre-existing capacity to provide near-perfect performance in a specific activity (Gallup.com). Essentially, if something is a strength that you possess, you will find using that strength energizing, intuitive, and highly productive. When we work to our strengths, the work itself becomes its own motivation. When we try to work in areas that are not natural strengths, we find that we quickly become bored, tired, or discouraged.

Using your strengths in your business needs to start from the very beginning. Every business has a core offering, but too often, their choice of core offering is dependent on the wrong factors. Basing your business's core offerings on market research, consumer needs, and internet trends may seem like the smart thing to do. If you are not starting from your personal strengths, you are crippling your business potential. Your core offering needs to be based on your personal strengths, not trends, research, and definitely not based on your competitor's weaknesses.

How do you know if your strengths and your core offering match up? Although it may seem obvious, take some time to think about your strengths. There are several excellent resources available for finding your strengths at bookstores and online. The Gallup Poll has developed an excellent online test to measure innate strengths. Their book "Strengthsfinder 2.0" has a listing of all the strengths they have identified through their research, and includes access to the online test. You may also want to ask your friends, relatives, and coworkers what they think your top 3-5 strengths are. You may be surprised to learn that some traits that you have are actually powerful strengths that remain untapped.

Now that you know your strengths, do you really understand your core offering? Many times we take the obvious for granted but working towards your strengths means working beyond the obvious. Think about your business. Do you offer a product or a service? What does that product or service really offer the consumer? Does the product or service provide information, save time, give them confidence? What need does your product or service fill? Asking yourself questions like these may seem simplistic but it is a great way to begin thinking about how what you offer improves lives. For example, if you sell pets, you are really providing companionship. If you sell information about pets, you are offering people the ability to understand and provide for their companions. If you sell pet products, you are making it easier for people to have companions in their life.

Now you that you know what you really offer, does that offering flow directly from your strengths? For example, let's say that you are using the Gallup Strengths Finder to identify your strengths and your top strength is "maximizer". A person with "maximizer" as a strength is an expert at seeing the potential in a person or situation, and making minor changes that will produce major positive results. If your business is coaching, then you have a core offering that matches up with your top strength.

Alternatively, consider the person whose top strength is "learner". A person with "learner" as a strength excels at absorbing new information. This strength might help in a coaching situation, but it does not directly work towards the core offering of coaching. Tweaking the core offering to researching coaching methods would be a better fit.

So how can you be sure that your core offering is matching up with your strengths? To a certain extent, this should be intuitive. If you are striding into work every day with confidence, enthusiasm and a high level of motivation, you are probably on the right track. If your employees at work have good engagement and high productivity, you are on the right track. If your customers consistently praise your product or service, and cannot say enough about how you have helped them, you are certainly matching your core offering with your strengths. If on the other hand you find that you cannot quite get motivated to start the day, that you have trouble making business decisions, or that your customers seem underwhelmed by your services, then you may have a problem in this area.

Take the time today to examine how your core offering matches up with your strengths. When you play to your strengths, you will natural see the results you want in your life and your business.

Kenneth Vogt is CEO of Content Crooner, a high quality content distribution service that gets you more targeted web traffic. Discover how to create quality content that drives targeted traffic to your web site in our free report.

Article submitted Sunday, December 11, 2011 & read 1 times.

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