Candace Spears
- Nov 20, 2019
- 4 min read

Ep 154: How to establish CREDIBILITY as an entrepreneur

LISTEN!

So you call yourself an entrepreneur, but everyone looks at you like..."Yeah...sure." It doesn't matter when just anybody says it, but when the people that you're trying to serve have this opinion of you, you might as well pack up. The likelihood that you will be able to serve anyone with your products and services is low. Why? Because they don't believe you! Credibility is the foundation of any good fruitful relationship. So being seen as someone who is either an expert or is know to find the right answer, is important. But how to build that credibility can sometimes be tricky, especially as we're starting out.

In this episode, you'll learn...

How picking a niche will help you dive and serve deep
How your past seemingly irrelevant experiences are a credibility gold mine
Where and how trust plays into our entrepreneurial success

One of the things that I think really helps our credibility as an entrepreneur is picking a niche that is really zeroing in on what is that thing that we want to help people with.

What's that impact that we wanna make?

Who exactly do we want to serve?

How do we want to serve them?

What area does that live in?

Getting really clear about what that is and the reason I say picking the niche is, I've learned this: I won't say the hard way cause I don't think it's been detrimental to me, but I've learned even over the past few months the importance of a niche and then having people understand, "Okay, she's my go-to person for *insert whatever it is*" or helping them see that "Okay, I'm going to go to Candace to talk about this because Hey, she's got some expertise on this subject. She talks about it all the time."

Now imagine if the range of what I talk about goes from entrepreneurship to dog walking to play by plays on football games. As you can imagine here, it becomes less clear how I can help people and it becomes harder to trust when I put out offers cause I can have offers in all of those things. Football offers, dog walking offers, entrepreneurship offers. It becomes hard to say, "What do I trust her for? How do I know she's good at any of these one things that I'm interested in because she does so much now." I think it's super important as we start out to get super focused and hyper-focused on our niche and build that credibility in other people's eyes. For sure as you get bigger, and I've seen it countless times, not in my own experiences, but I've seen it with others as they've grown their audience, as they've grown their business, they've gotten to a place where they can talk about just about anything. But when you're starting out and people don't know you and they don't know if they can trust you and they don't know if they believe that you're the ones who help them, it's important to be super clear in your niche. And that's something that can help us start to build that credibility.

When you're starting out and people don't know you, it's important to be super clear in your niche. (Click to tweet)

Now the other thing I think that we sometimes overlook but could really be a gold mine for us is our past experiences. And I don't just mean the experiences that you're hyper-aware to the fact that they will help you because it's obvious. If for instance, if dog walking was my niche and that's what I wanted to focus on and I was a dog breeder and I used to manage 50 or so dogs. I would have some experiences there that are very obvious. I can take that forward and that will boost my credibility. But what about those things that aren't super obvious and you may discount them as not even relevant to you going forward. So take for example, let's say, you used to work in customer service and you used to be on the call desk and you would take the phone calls, you would help customers get through resolving their issues so that they can move forward. Now when you bring up, let's say a business of dog walking, you may say to yourself, "Well, I would never bring in my customer service experience. How does that even relate to what I do today? But now if you take that experience and you marry it with the fact that you can help the people that you serve better bring out solutions, better troubleshoots through maybe timing issues they may be having with, getting their dogs walked at the same time or at a certain time, or maybe they're having issues with their dog altogether, they're going through some training issues with their dog and there's something complimentary that you can help. You can help your folks because you've got experience helping other customers find solutions to problems that they may be experiencing in a certain area. So there are a lot of experiences that we have in our past, but because they don't directly seem obvious and they don't seem like they directly relate, we kind of leave them behind.

But we do have an opportunity to use those to help bolster our credibility. Also, I think overall trust, and I'm thinking back to that statement, that people buy from people who they know, like, and trust. When you think about the businesses that we're setting off on and the entrepreneurial journeys that we're moving forward with, trust is going to be critical for our success on this entrepreneurial journey. So you and I need to be constantly thinking about how do I create an environment? How do I serve my audience best so that they find me as credible in this thing that I'm telling them I can help with? that they see it in the content that I provide. They see that I am the one who can help them solve a problem and they trust me. So how do I build that relationship where they carry those sentiments and those feelings forward? So those are all things that we have to think about as entrepreneurs but just know that credibility matters.