At last week’s Yorkshire Mafia Festival of Business there was a recurring theme in the workshops we attended – the importance of having a strong value proposition.
By clearly defining and being able to articulate your values, you can maintain a clear strategy, stay focused, limit distractions/displacement activities, keep everyone on board and sell yourself more easily.
Many start-ups fail because they don’t think they need a clear value proposition and/or they don’t know how to articulate it. We are still learning and evolving as a business but before we launched Engage Comms back in June 2012, we made a commitment to practice what we preach. Alongside our ‘elevator pitch’ (we make engagement easy!) we came up with a set of core values which prospective clients have told us helps to set us apart and influences their buying decision.
Here they are:
- Engagement made easy
‘Engagement made easy’ is our mantra. Our services are designed to make your life easier and keep you abreast of the latest communication trends. We are completely transparent about what we do and never try to make it seem more complicated than it is. No-one knows more about your business or organisation than you do – and we respect that, so we won’t tell you how to run it. We’ll just help you make the most of what you’ve got.
- Quality over quantity
Everything we do is about quality, not quantity. That’s because we don’t try to demonstrate our value through numbers and we don’t do anything for the sake of it. We always ask ‘why?’ ‘what is the purpose?’ ‘what value will it add?’ ‘what outcomes can we expect?’ ‘will it give a return on investment?’ If the answer is no, we don’t do it.
- Honesty and integrity
It goes without saying that honesty and integrity is vital to our business as reputation management experts. But, we go the extra mile to give something back to our profession. We are also committed to our own personal development so that we keep our finger on the pulse and never stop learning.
- More for less
We are a deliberately small, lean business which means that you don’t pay over the odds to cover our overheads, administration and staff costs – and we can give you the best possible value for money. It also means we’re kind to the environment!
- Work life balance
We believe that a healthy work life balance leads to better productivity and better results for our clients – it also makes us more interesting, well rounded people! We can’t promise to answer emails at 2am or on a Sunday afternoon but we can promise that during working hours we will be fresh and raring to go with passion, drive, enthusiasm and new ideas.
Not only are these on our website for all to see, we’ve got them up in the office and we force ourselves to look at them before writing any proposal. And we’ve got plans in place to review them regularly to check they are still fit for purpose.
What do you think of them? Do you think they have any relevance for us and our clients?
If you need help articulating your core values, engage with us now.
