Aaron Hoos

I am secretly addicted to the Food Network. (Okay, not so secretly anymore).

I love cooking competitions and restaurant makeover shows. My PVR is set up to automatically record shows like “Opening Soon”, “Kitchen Nightmares”, and “Restaurant Impossible”.

Many of these shows have one thing in common: A celebrity chef who seems to be equal parts chef and diva.

You don’t really see this level of celebrity in other niches. (Well, there are some celebrity real estate agents and celebrity home renovation people but we don’t attach the word “celebrity” to their title in the same way that we throw around the word “celebrity chef”.)

I was thinking about this the other day while watching some cooking show or another. I wondered: “Why don’t we see more celebrity real estate agents or celebrity real estate investors or celebrity financial advisors or celebrity accountants?”

That idea sort of seems strange. After all, “celebrity accountant” or “celebrity actuary” or “celebrity insurance broker” doesn’t seem to have the same ring as “celebrity chef”… but why not?

Why can’t YOU be the celebrity in your niche? There is plenty of room for celebrities in a number of niches – real estate, investing, insurance, accounting, even collections.

The benefit is there: As a celebrity, you attract people to you who want to orbit your shining star and your constant cross-promotion helps to increase your income.

So what does it take to be a celebrity? Well, let’s look at the six factors that put the “celebrity” into “celebrity chef” and see if we can identify some lessons for you to apply to your practice:

6 FACTORS TO HELP YOU BECOME A CELEBRITY IN YOUR NICHE

1. You need to be skilled. No hacks allowed. We may not always like the celebrity personality of a celebrity chef but the chef-skills always deliver. Great cooking every time. And it’s not just skill, I think, but also mastery, and a dedication to exacting excellence. How can you become a skilled master who is dedicated to exacting excellence in your market? You need to be able to rise above and consistently out-shine your peers. So what skills can you hone to consistently out-shine your peers? For a related post, check out: What the drunk uncle from Family Ties can teach us about success.
2. Success. Some celebrity chefs seem to come out of nowhere to skyrocket to fame and fortune. But “nowhere” usually means that they were slogging it out in a hot kitchen, working their way up from lowly dishwasher to become the head chef at top-name restaurants. In your practice, don’t expect celebrity to suddenly appear out of nowhere. You need to put in the time, grind it out, and build a portfolio of success. (Fortunately, you can do this as the same time as you develop your skills).
3. You need to have some flair. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bland celebrity chef. All celebrity chefs bring something extra to the equation. They’re skilled (see above) but they are more than just skilled. For some, it’s a personality – funny, obnoxious, in-your-face. For others, it’s a particular style or approach – hands-on, innovative, social. (For celebrity chefs it might be fast meals for families or Italian peasant food). To develop your own flair, consider what aspects of your personality are the strongest, or think about your interests and how other people connect with them. This flair or unique approach really becomes the crux of your brand. (Think: Gordon Ramsay’s In-Your-Face approach or Jamie Oliver’s casual approach to delicious, healthy food). I’ve talked a bit about this in the past but I’ve only scratched the surface. For a related post, check out: What is your brand’s personality.
4. A book. Every celebrity chef seems to have at least one book. Probably a cookbook. Probably a dozen cookbooks. A book on its own isn’t the answer but it’s part of the celebrity equation. The good news is, you don’t need to sit down and write a huge novel. What you need is something that you can highlight as an accomplishment and that readers will find helpful. Start with a 100 to 200 page book. They aren’t that hard to write! (Hey, give me a call if you want to talk about writing a book). If you’re really not sure where to start, why not think about an ebook – something smallish at around 50 pages – and test it in the marketplace. Expanding it will be easy and it’s simple to turn into a print book (which still carries plenty of credibility).
5. TV show. Every celebrity chef has a TV show. Or three. They have a cooking show and guest appearances, an I’m-starting-a-restaurant show, and a traveling-the-world-to-taste-food show. Why don’t you have a show? You can. It’s easier than you probably think it is. Start with your own YouTube channel and instead of just filming random thoughts into the camera (as I do from time to time on my YouTube channel), actually treat it like your own show. I think this is a cool idea that is under-used (especially in the financial or real estate space). There are plenty of ideas to draw from (and I’ll give you some ideas in a future blog post).
6. PR Campaign. Celebrity chefs seem to be magnets for fans. Sure, it’s their charisma and great dishes but don’t overlook the fact that they are a brand and they probably have a serious PR engine chugging away in the background. When they are not cooking they are promoting, promoting, promoting, promoting, promoting. For most of you, you’re already doing some promoting already (good!) but if you want to achieve celebrity status, you need to tie together several things (a book, a show, etc.) and promote the heck out of it.

Notice something about these six things? Chefs who move out of the kitchen and into the limelight do so by leveraging their skills into a brand and then leveraging that brand into a media empire.

You can do the same! Celebrity doesn’t have to be limited to chefs. There is A LOT of room for celebrities in your market. You already have the skills and you probably have a brand (or the makings of one). Next, build a media empire to skyrocket your practice to celebrity status.

You’ve probably heard the well-known, often-quoted concept that all products or services possess two of the following three qualities:

Good, Fast, Cheap.

It means that every product or service you buy will be…

• Good and fast but not cheap
• Good and cheap but not fast, or,
• Fast and cheap but not good

Every client who wants to buy a product or service will have an innate preference about which two qualities they want their product or service to possess. And they will seek out products or services that match their preference.

Knowing this, most businesses specifically sell their products in a way that fulfills two of the three qualities. For example, a fast food restaurant might offer food that is fast and cheap but not very good, or a freelance writer (ahem) might offer writing services that are good and fast but not cheap.

HERE’S WHY THIS MATTERS TO REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONALS

If you’re a real estate professional, you might be wondering how this applies to you. I think the answer is quite exciting and can help you become even more successful because it will help you build better relationship with your clients.

Yes, the good, fast, cheap concept applies even to your real estate practice! Here’s how:

Every client you work with — whether they’re listing or buying — wants the home listing or home purchase to satisfy two of the three qualities.

For example, they might want to buy a house quickly and with your great service and therefore they will have less concern about the cost. Or, they might want to buy a house cheaply and with great service and will therefore maybe not get a house as quickly as others.

I’m sure you read the above paragraph and said: ‘Aaron, all of my clients always want all three of those qualities and I deliver all three qualities every time‘.

Here’s my response: I believe that all clients want all three qualities in the service they receive from you but there are only two qualities that are extremely important to them (and the third is less important).

Even if you offer all three qualities all the time and with every client, you will build better relationships with your clients when you intentionally identify what is important to each of them and you highlight that aspect of your service to them whenever you interact with them.

Let’s say that you identify a client whose must-have service qualities are good and cheap and they really don’t care that much about how fast you are. You will build a stronger relationship with them by highlighting the depth of your service and how hard you’re working for them, as well as how much money they are saving. Don’t worry about talking about how quickly you can close the sale or how fast they can find a home. Those don’t matter as much to them.

It’s all about finding out what is important to your client and then making sure that your interaction with them resonates those two most-important qualities.

By highlighting the aspects of your service to them, and by going the extra mile in the two must-have qualities that are important to your client, you’ll demonstrate your value to them much more effectively than if you tried to establish your credentials and ability in all three.

Want to dive into this good-fast-cheap concept even more? My blog post Why good-fast-cheap might be wrong (and how to fix it so you can sell more) will give you an in-depth look at the good-fast-cheap model and help you use it more skillfully to work with your real estate clients.

HERE’S A BONUS IDEA TO SUPER-CHARGE YOUR BRANDING

You can construct your entire business around one of these models — which is exactly what some real estate professionals do. (The flat fee real estate agents are using “cheap” as one of the must-have qualities while other real estate professionals might use “good” or “fast” as one of their must-have qualities).

Although you’ll drive away some clients because you’re focusing on something they don’t care about, you’ll attract more clients by marketing in a way that truly resonates with the must-have qualities they are looking for in a real estate professional.

Real estate and financial advisors are under a lot of pressure to lower their fees for clients.

The pressure is sometimes audibly heard from clients who blatantly ask: “Would you consider lowering your fee for me?“. And sometimes it’s not heard at all because the prospective client doesn’t bother using your service and decides to go a “do-it-themselves” route.

How can real estate and financial professionals overcome this pricing pressure and charge what they deserve to earn for their services? And, how can you attract and retain clients who happily pay this rate instead of trying to grind you down or try to do it themselves without your help?

LOOKING ELSEWHERE FOR INSIGHT

We can find the answer by looking at businesses (in other industries) that get clients to pay higher fees:

• Movie theatres charge higher-than-average prices for a ticket to a movie… and then they charge even more for popcorn and drinks.
• Apple charges higher-than-average fees for their iPhones and iPads and yet they enjoy massive growth and marketshare retention.
• Visa and MasterCard charge controversially high interest rates (19% on the low-end) but that doesn’t stop people from running their expenses through their cards and even maxing them out sometimes.

What do all of these businesses have in common? They offer something that the customer cannot get anywhere else.

That’s the secret.

Although there are cheaper alternatives (such as renting a movie, buying a non-Apple mobile device or tablet, or paying with cash or debit), the businesses listed above offer products and services that make the cheaper alternatives pale in comparison.

Customers perceive that the theater experience or the Apple brand or the own-it-now-instead-of-later convenience of credit cards are so valuable that the extra cost is worthwhile.

For many years, the financial and real estate industries enjoyed a similar “exclusive” reputation but…

FINANCIAL AND REAL ESTATE HAVE CHANGED

Clients used to put a lot of trust into their financial advisors and real estate agents because these professionals provided exclusive high-value service that the client could not get anywhere else. But the internet transformed these industries and levelled the playing field between professionals and their clients.

Clients could perform far more of their own research and gain easier access to information and services that were difficult to access.

Although financial and real estate professionals still provide an invaluable service, clients don’t perceive the value that they used to perceive so they want to try doing the same thing on their own. Unlike the businesses we listed earlier, the difference between the higher-priced offering and the lower-priced alternative does not seem different enough (in the clients’ eyes).

Therefore, professionals need offer even more services and demonstrate even greater value than they ever have before.

It’s time to put your innovation hat on and do the following:

• List all of the services you perform (both free and paid). Then find ways to ramp them up and make them even more valuable for your client. Consider adding more information, new technology, and go-the-extra-mile service.
• Think about the information you currently provide. Chances are, quite a bit of it is available online for free. So dig deep and find additional insight you can give to your clients that they can’t get anywhere else.
• Brainstorm activities that your clients do, which are related to your service but not something you currently provide. Figure out how you can extend your services to include those related activities. For real estate professionals: Once a client buys a home, they have to make arrangements to move in. Can you extend your services to include managing those end-to-end moving details for them? For financial professionals: Clients who buy investments and insurance from you might also need accounting done. Can you bring an accountant into your office to provide a full net worth management service?
• A big part of the value difference is simply perception. People who go for the do-it-themselves approach instead of hiring you are doing so because they don’t see a difference between your services and the cheaper alternative. Revisit your marketing to see how it positions you. If your marketing isn’t positioning you as the ONLY professional for your prospective clients’ needs, find out how you can be different and rework that marketing content. If you’re not sure where to start, try listing all of the things that clients would miss out by choosing a do-it-themselves approach instead of using your approach. List as many items as you can. Then brainstorm further to create a larger list (and develop new services of your own, if possible). The larger the list, the better.

One of the most important things a financial or real estate professional can do to grow their business is identify what makes them unique in the marketplace.

It’s so important because the market is saturated with financial and real estate professionals and many (dare I say “most”?) offer almost exactly the same service at exactly the same price.

Financial advisors offer guidance that isn’t too different from other financial advisors. Real estate agents help to list or buy a home in a way that isn’t too different from other real estate agents. (There might be some differences, but often it’s not enough for the clients to spot them easily).

CLIENTS DON’T SEE THE DIFFERENCE

There’s no motivation or loyalty among clients because they do not perceive a significant difference between service providers – one financial provider looks very similar to another and one real estate professional looks very similar to another.

When customers don’t perceive a difference, they don’t care who they call and they’ll go with whatever is most convenient for them – whoever happens to have an office closer to their home or whoever happens to be at the top of their mind when they pick up the phone to call.

Take control of your brand and your reputation. Be different than the rest and you’ll glue your name in your customers’ minds for the next time they need your services.

So how DO you demonstrate your difference? How DO you prove to prospects that they should sign with you right now because they’ll never find anyone like you again? How DO you prove to customers that it’s worth driving across town to do business with you even when there are other professionals who are located closer to them?

A USP — “Unique Selling Proposition” — is a way to understand that difference.

INTRODUCING THE USP

There’s a good chance that you’ve heard of a USP even if you haven’t identified one for yourself.

A USP is a comprehensive statement about what makes you different than anyone else in your industry. When you state your USP, it should describe you and only you, and it shouldn’t describe anyone else.

A USP is not a slogan or tagline. You might never actually say your USP to people. But the message of your USP should be loud and clear in everything you do. Most importantly (and this is the part that many financial and real estate professionals miss), a USP should describe only you.

When I say it should describe only you, here’s what I mean: Let’s say that you work with a customer once and then years later that customer needs your services again. The problem is that customers might not be able to remember your actual name. But if you have a strong, dynamic USP, there’s a better chance they’ll remember that and it might be enough for them to find you.

So if your USP currently is something like “I care about my customers and wouldn’t recommend that they invest in anything that I wouldn’t invest in myself” or “I’ll sell my client’s homes with the same care and attention that I’d sell my own home” then you don’t have a Unique Selling Proposition. Sorry. All you have is a half-baked statement that doesn’t stand up and call attention to you. It calls attention to just about every professional out there.

A USP should work like this: It should be able to describe you to the point where it excludes almost everyone else who could be a direct competitor. (Sure, there might be a financial advisor in Arkansas who has a similar USP or there might be a real estate agent in Alaska who has exactly the same USP as you, but if you’re doing business anywhere else, they’re not direct competitors).

To borrow USPs from other industries, consider how Apple products are extremely user friendly and owning an Apple product gives users a sense of community. Or, consider how Google “owns” the idea of being the first choice in search, even though there are lots of other search engines out there.

WHEN DO YOU USE YOUR USP?

You may or may not ever state your USP in your marketing. However, you will use your USP as the foundation for everything else in your business – your brand and all of its elements (like your slogan, your logo, your brand colors, your brand attitude, your brand concept, your brand promise, etc.), as well as your marketing and deliverables.

Your USP, therefore is one of the building blocks on which you will create your business and it will enable you to sell more: When your clients are asked by their friends why they chose you to help them, your USP will probably be a key reason.

Think of your USP not as a tagline but as a framework on which you’ll build your brand.

STEP 1: FIGURE OUT WHO YOU ARE

To write create a USP, you need to figure out who you are. Yeah, we’re really going back to basics here but you’ll thank me for it.

Go get a big pile of 3×5 cards. Using the list below, write down at least one thing that describes you in that area. (Preferably, write down several things – one on each card).

• Education
• Experience
• Expertise
• Skills/Talent
• Interests
• Credentials
• Methodology
• Deliverables
• Target market
• Personality

If possible, write several cards for each topic. I’ve done that, below for myself.

Write down as many descriptions as you can think of for each of the areas listed above. (Note that I’ve included two interests of mine — “beer” and “poker” — along with several other more professional elements like my education and experience).

Spend some time doing this. Don’t try to squeeze the entire exercise into a half hour. Force yourself to go deeper. Education and experience might be easy but the other stuff may prove to be slightly more challenging. When I did this very exercise, I uncovered some compelling ideas I hadn’t considered but it took some digging.

STEP 2: MIX TO DISCOVER POTENTIAL USP’S

Now that you’ve written down who you are on several 3×5 cards, it’s time to figure out how you can be different. In this step, you’re going to select just a few of the elements to highlight in your USP. Just because you highlight a few elements doesn’t eliminate the others. However, it’s good to highlight just a few – it will make your brand development and marketing easier, and it will make you more memorable.

So, shuffle the cards together and select a few at once, laying them out in front of you. Try dealing out 2-5 in a batch and seeing what sticks. You should see one of the following combinations:

• Groups of cards that don’t make sense together. That’s okay. It happens. Creativity requires a lot of failures.
• Groups of cards that don’t really make sense but are maybe the start of something. Good! Write down that combination for later!
• Groups of cards that nicely capture something about what you do in a unique way. Excellent!

On a separate sheet of paper, write down the combination if it seems good or great then reshuffle the cards and deal out another 2-5 cards.

At the end of this part of the exercise you should have dealt out dozens of combinations and you should have a few (hopefully a handful of at least 4-7 card-groups) that you can work with. These are the starting points and you’ll work with them and narrow them down into just one great USP.

Here are some examples:

This is an example of a jazz-loving real estate professional in the Dallas/Fort Worth area:

And here’s an example of a financial advisor who has a combination of interests that seem related:

The examples above show a few “starting points” that a financial advisor and a real estate agent might build from to create their USP.

STEP 3: TAKE IT UP A NOTCH

Now you’re just getting warmed up! The next step is to give these some zing. Turn them into something special by tightening them up a little. You don’t have to polish them perfectly (because you’re only going to choose one from the group you have), but this process helps you to think a little further about them.
To make each one better, try doing some of the following:

• Try making it more specific rather than just a few words strung together: “I’m the jazz saxophone real estate agent”.
• Dust off your copywriting skills and compress the group of words down to a tight sentence that nicely summarizes how you are different.
• Tie your USP in with something familiar. The James-Bond-style USP (pictured as an example earlier) is familiar enough but there might be other things you can use – a famous character or landmark are handy. Just be careful of trademarks.
• Start your sentence with declaration. For example, “I am the only real estate agent who…” or “I am the only financial advisor who…”. (Hat tip to Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap for this great technique).
• Identify a group of words that you can “own”. Think of this group of words as a keyword set in Google. So when someone types in those keywords, your name (and ONLY your name) appears in the Google search. (Hat tip to Al Ries and Jack Trout for this technique).
• Give it an edge. If “real estate agent” is too blasé, see if you can find something that means the same thing but says it in a different way. Will “Home Sale Expert” help to separate you by clearly identify a specific area of expertise? The “Jazz-loving Home Sale Expert” sounds much more dynamic and memorable than “real estate agent”.

You can also add some other elements to help you narrow your USP in different ways. For example, try narrowing your USP by geography…

or try combining one focus with another, like I’ve shown below…

or try narrowing your USP by some other specialty…

Now it’s time to rate each potential USP on a quick-and-dirty scale of “I don’t like it”, “It’s a decent starting point”, and “I really like this”. Get rid of the ones you don’t like. See if you can’t tweak the decent batch. Try to end up with 2-4 USPs that you can move forward with.

Then it’s time to figure out what other people think.

STEP 4: VALIDATE YOUR FINDINGS

Validating your potential USPs will help you to narrow the field even further. The two easiest ways to validate your findings is to validate against competitors and validate with customers.

Validate against competitors: Using a list of local professionals who compete directly with you, compare each of your potential USPs to each competitor. Are they actually Unique (to you) Selling Propositions? If you used them as your USP, would they only describe you or could they describe someone else?

For example, if your USP was something like: “I’m the real estate professional who loves the art of the deal” – well that sounds great but we can make the safe assumption that most of your real estate agent competitors love the art of the deal (or would at least tell their clients that they do). Or, if your USP is “I’m the only financial advisor who acts professionally by wearing a suit to the office” – well that sounds great but probably many financial advisors do that. Those USPs aren’t really “U” so they’ll need to be scrapped.

Compare each of your potential USPs to each of your competitors. This might sound like a long step but it will probably go faster than you realize.

Validate with clients: Validating with customers is a little trickier but not impossible. For example, you can write articles around the specific USP and post them on your website then measure traffic. Or if you have the time and/or financial budget, you can easily test this with Google AdWords. Create one AdWords ad for each USP and run them for a short period of time. Then measure click-through rates to see how people respond.

Or, if you don’t mind just asking your clients then just ask them! That’s easy enough. Say something like: “I’m designing some marketing for the upcoming season and I wondered which of these 5 descriptions really jumps out at you?“, and, “if you had to describe me to your friends, which of these 5 descriptions would most describe me?“. It’s good to ask both questions because the first question separates you from the USP to ask about marketability and memorability, while the second question asks them to identify how congruent you are with the USP.

If you ask your clients, you should ask a few. Don’t base your decision on just one or two clients. And, just because they pick one doesn’t mean you have to choose that one. But their input will be informative. Perhaps they’ll give good advice about one USP that you eventually weave into a different USP.

STEP 5: GUT CHECK. WILL IT WORK FOR YOU?

Now that you’ve done some leg-work in creating and then validating your potential USPs, you should have narrowed your USPs down to just a couple of really strong ones.

Your next question needs to be: Can you support this USP? By that I mean: Will you be able to build a brand and marketing content around this USP? And, can you live with this USP?

In most cases, creating brand and marketing content around a USP should be possible… but you might find a potential USP you really like that doesn’t lend itself well to a brand.

The great challenge, though, will be “can you live with this USP?” In other words, what will your response be if someone calls you up out of the blue and just quotes your USP back to you? For example, “Are you the real estate agent who wears the chicken costume?” What happens if your friends or family find out what your USP is. Can you live with that? I’ve found this question to be quite challenging at times and have scrapped several potential USPs because I realized that I didn’t want to be known as that 5 or 10 years down the road.

STEP 6: NARROW IT DOWN

At this point, you should only have a couple of potential USPs that are really compelling, have been validated against competitors and with clients, and are USPs that you can get excited about. Now it’s time to pick one. If you’re really unsure, it might be worth doing some more testing (maybe using Google AdWords or asking more clients). Do this until you have one. Just one. One big, shiny, happy, awesome, compelling USP that describes you and only you.

WANT AN EXAMPLE?

I wasn’t going to use my own USP as an example because I don’t want it to seem like I’m overly promoting myself here. I don’t want my blog to seem like an ego trip. But I think it’s a good example of a rough-around-the-edges USP that works nicely. So, if you’ll forgive me for talking about myself for a moment, I’ll demonstrate with my own USP.

For the past several years, my USP has remained the same (even though my brand has been tweaked and improved). In general, my USP is this: I’m a (formerly) licensed stockbroker/insurance agent with an MBA who has spent over a decade writing online content for financial and real estate businesses.

It’s not pretty but it’s not supposed to be. It’s an “internal” summary of what makes me unique among freelance writers. And, if you click around my site and other marketing channels, you’ll see that I’ve incorporated elements of it in just about everything – from my tagline to my bios to my About Me page to the stuff I write about.

And it works. That’s why I’ve stuck with it. It gets me business and it is continually validated by clients who say something like “I hired you because you worked in the industry” or “I hired you because your MBA provides you with a bigger picture.”

Okay, enough about me. I’m not here to stroke my ego. I just wanted to show you an example of one that has worked. It’s a framework that I build my entire business off of.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT

Now that you have your USP, you’re ready to start building your brand and your marketing. Here’s how:

• Create a slogan or tagline that hints at your USP
• Revisit your professional photographs to make sure that they reflect your USP
• Rewrite your bio content and About Me pages to reflect your USP.
• Make it a point to weave elements of your USP into all of your marketing content, no matter what the channel
• Identify a keyword or keyphrase that you can “own” in Google that relates to your USP.

From there, continue to incorporate your USP into everything. Make sure that all content that leaves your office communicates at least some aspect of your USP in some way.

If you’ve read this far, congratulations! It’s possibly the world’s longest blog post. Hey, do me a favor and put your USP into the comments. I’d love to read it!