When starting and running any business or organization, differentiating yourself from those similar to yours is essential for future growth, and frankly, even for short-term survival. For instance, if you are going to be one of 5 bakeries in a town of 25,000, you need to find a way to stand out—why should anyone prefer your bakery over others? That is the driving question. In the earliest stages of your business you need to establish your USP. Otherwise known as the unique selling proposition, it is a statement that every company develops to describe what they offer, how it takes care of customer needs, and how it distinguishes them from the competition. It’s a declaration of why you’re better than everyone else who essentially does the same thing.

As the business owner of our theoretical bakery, there are many ways you could decide to differentiate yourself before you open the door the first day. Maybe you’re the only 24 hour bakery in the community or the only one open on Mondays. As it relates to product, maybe you’re the only bakery that makes bagels or caters weddings. Whatever it is, you need to state this as your USP as this will guide all of your marketing efforts moving forward, or at least until you reach the point where you need to rethink your unique selling proposition and make appropriate changes as you’re responding to the marketplace.

To be a bit more specific, if your plan is to offer the best customer service ever, your USP might be “Made Fresh 24/7.” If you want to differentiate with more of an emotional tactic, your USP might be “Just Like Mom Baked.” The USP doesn’t have to be an exhaustive document on all the minutia that makes you different, its a summary statement honing in on the one thing that will drive people into your business even though its likely there are many factors that can differentiate one bakery from another.

The USP for my company is “Building Relationships so You can Build Your Business.” While my team is always focused on taking care of client needs, from logo designs to websites and marketing strategy, we want to build a relationship with our clients. After the website is built or the corporate training is complete, we hope to continue to support our clients through encouragement, networking and sending them opportunities as they present themselves. What we’re not building is a conveyor belt system such that when we’re finished with one task we quickly move on to the next one. We want to take care of our customers because we care about them as people, too. Whether local or glocal, we share the same community, and we can thrive together.

Once you have developed your USP, you might want to go back to some of your closest friends and colleagues and run it past them. People who know you, know your passion, and know your business, will be able to provide input that will help you to move forward. It’s always good to have a circle support to shine a light on your path and make the journey a bit easier.

It can be a huge step to finally decide “this is what I want to be known for” because there are other things you also want to be known for. It’s human nature to experience self-doubt and hesitate on a course of action. At some point, any course of action is better than none because there is so much to be learned in the process.

No one in business gets it right every time. And sometimes when they do get it right, its completely by accident. If you’d like some feedback on your unique selling proposition or you’re not sure where to start, let us know. We’d love to connect with you and help you get things started.