61: Fame vs. Impact: What Matters to You and Your Clients? - a podcast by Natalie Gingrich
from 2020-09-09T08:00
Have you ever worked with a client, and something was just a little off? Maybe you got along great and even believed in their mission, but you couldn’t pinpoint where the breakdown was happening.
If you are taking the risk to run your own business, bring in the revenue you want, and work with the people you want, then you want to be on the path to serving people who you are in alignment with.... because they will be the easiest to serve.
Along these lines, there is an important question you need to ask yourself. Do you want to build a business based on fame or on impact? Today we will talk about the benefits of each.
Fame vs. Impact
You need to figure out the kind of person you are, and then reverse engineer this process to find the type of clients to match.
After I had left my corporate career, and was in the beginning stages of my own business,
I just started serving people. I needed to bring in income, which meant I did the least amount of marketing. At this point, I wasn’t in my highest level of integrity because I was working with anyone who could pay me.
As you may know, I'm a people person, so I love serving people in many capacities. I would fall in love with people and their missions and with the impact that I could make in their business. But after a while I started to feel like I wasn’t a match or that I wasn’t making the biggest impact in their business. I started to question myself… was it the wrong avatar, wrong personality? Was I evolving?
“I was connected to the work, but in conflicting ways.”
It started to become clear to me once I started working with one client in particular. As I started executing on her vision, something started to feel wrong. We were in conflict, and what I figured out was that she wanted fame, and I wanted impact.
Today we are talking about what you want. Are you someone who desires fame or impact? If they are competing against one another, you will experience stagnation, resentment, or frustration.
I’m going to give you the test you can use in your discovery process to understand and evaluate if someone desires fame or impact. You have to reflect on this yourself. Fame tends to have a negative connotation, and I want to debunk this.
“Fame and impact are equal, and what matters is what is important to you.”
Once you identify what you are drawn to, you will use this messaging throughout your business to set yourself up to attract those who desire the same thing.
Fame Characteristics
What does someone who desires fame want? Typically they are masterful marketers. They have the ability to sell easily and they like a wide audience. They are motivated by money, quick thinkers and are self focused. They focus on themselves to sell the product. They are the brand, and their face is easy to identify, because they are selling themselves. They tend to enjoy the spotlight.
Impact Characteristics
On the impact side we have people who are deeply motivated by transformation. They want to be a part of someone's journey and they teach transformation. They are thoughtful, move slower and have a deeper relationship with their audience. They like to sell a duplicatable process, and they follow processes. This makes them incredible thought leaders and they often have some great intellectual property or they are selling a method. Impact is selling transformation; selling an outcome through intellectual property or proven process.
Fame & Impact Both:
- Have the ability to generate revenue
- An individual can be the face of a brand
- Require a significant amount of content and presence, so visibility is important
- Need belief in themselves to create an audience to serve and sell to
Real Life Examples
An example of someone who desires impact is Brene Brown. She has a significant background in social work, and she did not enter this world to become an author. She saw herself helping individuals reach their greatest potential. In her commitment to that transformational work, she became a celebrity. So there can be an intersection of someone who comes up through the impact side of things to then become the face of a brand. The reason that happens is because the number of people she was able to impact is huge. So with greater volumes comes the ability for her to be in the spotlight. But what allowed her to get there was her intellectual property/thought leadership.
Some entrepreneurial examples of people who desire fame are Instagram influencers. If you are working with someone who wants to be an influencer they are looking for the spotlight. They are looking to their personality to generate an income. They may be into fitness one day, lifestyle one day, and organization another, and what they are selling is their personality which is multifaceted. Think about the person that has seven different offers that don’t tie together. They are actually selling themselves; they want to cultivate a broad audience that is wide enough where they have different pockets buying different things.
If you are committed to being a Director of Operations, it is so important to sort this out so you can partner with the kind of clients that will allow you to make the biggest impact from the start!
Weekly Ops Activity
Reflect on fame and impact, and figure out which of these you desire most. What aligns deepest with you? Which of these are in integrity with you to support? Let me know in the Facebook group!
Previous Episodes Mentioned
Episode 59: How To Have a Difficult Conversation
Other Ways to Connect with Me:
This episode was first published at theopsauthority.com/podcast/61.
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