Branding from inside

Branding. The adventures of branding one’s new business. When I decided to start start a new business, the word ‘business’ was not really in my mind. I was looking for a space to keep all the products/services I could create that can be sold. A smarter person would have understood right away that this necessity is exactly what ‘business’ is about. I was not that. I kept on searching how to tell somebody how to access what I can provide.

I am a dancer. I was a teaching artist. I write occasionally. I am an avid user of paint on canvas. I like watercolors. I am prone to using video edits to make dance-video pieces. I am an interdisciplinary artist. My degree is in that too. It is difficult to even answer anyone’s question - ‘what do you do?’ I normally ask myself right away- ‘what do I do?’

Identity.

Branding of one’s business is defining its identity. ‘Who are you?’ should be the second question as soon as you have the answer for ‘why’. I love dancing so most of the times even when I am doing other jobs, I would answer- ‘I am a dancer. I dance and I teach dance.’ It is much harder to do that when you have intermingled your personal passions with your formal business structure. Your personal identity can overshadow your business. It is a tricky place to be. Your personal aspects of your identity as intimate as your sexual or gender orientation, skin color, race, cultural background can become your business’s identity. Ideally, there might have been a reason to keep personal and business separate. A really good reason for the owner and the potential customers. You may refuse to even entertain the idea of buying a product from a business knowing the owner’s personal identity even though it might prove to be really useful to you.

I am placing my entrepreneurial journey online whether someone reads this or not. It is a record for someone else who can jumpstart over few beginner steps to really quick start their entrepreneurial enterprise. I have already intermingled my personal identity with my business and I am learning how to separate that slowly and intimately. Intimately as in keeping my personal essence of my dance and art passion in it but also hiring someone else to talk about it to the world. Deciding how to separate your personal life from your business should never be a question for you hopefully. The only reason being you might feel getting stuck in a certain pattern of living a life to preserve your business’s identity. If you don’t get to live the life you want with the business you created then why do it? Maybe, you can start certain parts of your business from scratch no matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey. Maybe that is how you can preserve both your business’s identity and your personal joys