Essence of Your Business

by Dave Krueger, M.D.

What’s your promise?   

The answer: Your brand.

Your brand is an organizer for everything you do, for every connection with potential clients and readers, including website, blog, articles.. Your brand triggers meaning and connections; it carries its own value. Brand awareness is the link in the consumer’s brain between the brand name and certain associations about the product or service.

What’s the opposite of a brand?   

The answer: Generic.

Our clients — and potential clients — consciously and unconsciously take notes on how we brand and value ourselves, charge what we’re worth, and handle the business of coaching. How we handle this will determine if we have clients, and how successful we—and they—will be.

Brand, value, fees, and best practices constitute four of the greatest challenges for the business aspects for Professional Coaches. And it is crucial to present a model of professionalism as we work with clients and in every aspect of our business.

Neuroeconomic studies show that we make purchase decisions at the midbrain level due to the psychological impact and associations we have to a brand. These midbrain preferences and decisions occur seconds before the choice and action registers in the logical brain—the prefrontal cortex. Once your unconscious mind makes an emotional commitment to a “yes” or a “no” it sends the conscious mind on the mission to gather all the logical reasons to support that decision. This rationalization is called confirmation bias.

Whoever has the best story wins. Storytelling excellence is not something you just pick up along the way. It is an art, a craft, and a discipline to be mastered.

David Krueger, MD is Dean of Curriculum at Coach Training Alliance, CEO of MentorPath, and author of The Secret Language of Money (McGraw Hill), a Business Bestseller translated into 10 languages