Do Business Better

21Your Business Personality

Successful people make a habit of understanding and working within their business personality.

Business personality, you say? Yes. It's like your “personality” personality except it presents itself in how you work. Similar to your personal personality, changing your business personality is difficult. It's who you are.

You need to understand your business personality so you can capitalize on it. In some cases, work around it, if necessary.

The Five P's

In Marketing 101 they teach the Four P's of the marketing mix: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

Playing off of that, I developed what I call the Five P's of Business Personality: Product, Process, People, Promotion, and Profitability.

You probably identify with aspects of all of these traits. Good. You should. Because each of them is important to running your own endeavor. Eventually you'll discover—and maybe you already have—you're strong at a couple of the P's and struggle with the others.

That's okay. Knowing your business personality is half the battle. Exploiting it for success is the other half. Let's cover the five elements of business personality.

Product

A lot of people think a really good product is all that matters. They're wrong. The DeLorean was a good car. It was stainless steel in the era of rust bucket automobiles. Remember Ziebart rust protection?

The DeLorean was peppy, efficient, and cool to look at. The car had a role in one of the best films of the 1980s, Back to the Future ...