My own experience as an entrepreneur led me to confront the issue of authenticity in business: the dilemma of what seems to work for other business owners and what will actually work for you.
When I worked as an image consultant, almost everyone in the industry focused heavily on visuals. Rather than follow the crowd, I tapped into my strength in writing, and that choice brought me significant progress in my online visibility.
It’s a thin line and a slippery slope, though. A thin line because authenticity is not for its own sake but should generate results. It’s also a slippery slope because some may confuse authenticity with staying in the comfort zone, which would be dreadful.
Authenticity, to borrow the words of Dolly Parton, is finding who you are and doing it on purpose. Doing it on purpose connotes intentionality, but before you are intentional, you need awareness: an awareness of who you are.
What do you know about yourself for sure? Personally, that question has led me to my true identity.
We underestimate the power of authenticity in business. Look around, and you’ll see copy-and-paste everywhere. Copy-and-paste, however, can only get you so far. Businesses are chasing the same trend, the same offer, even the same content, ditto-ditto.
That’s what creates a red ocean: a market clustered with replicas, competing on price and noise because they all chased what they thought was working for the other business owner, not what would actually work for them.
They didn’t care to find out. Original thinking takes a deep dive into the blue ocean, the unexplored terrain, and you cannot think originally about your business while borrowing someone else’s identity.
Here are four ways authenticity plays a vital role for business owners:
- It is a business matchmaker: Authenticity while running a business is important, but it’s worth considering even before venturing into any business. Is the type of business aligned with who you truly are? Does it align with your purpose and your core values?
Or is it because someone else is making money from it? Well, that does not mean you will succeed doing the same thing. As Adnan Saani, a Ghanaian entrepreneur, said, “For every business that someone has failed at, there is a person that has succeeded at it.” A lot of factors play a role in determining if a business will succeed or not. How the business aligns with the person running it is one of them, because what aligns with who you are fulfils you.
That fulfilment is what makes consistency possible, and consistency is one of the foundations of business success.
Running a transport business may seem lucrative, but for an aesthetically inclined person, a beauty-related business would be better suited. This really matters, but it is not discussed enough.
2. It acts as the differentiator: When business owners leverage their true identity, it becomes what sets them apart from everyone else in the same industry. This is even more critical now because people are increasingly drawn to personal brands, not just business brands.
This can be a key advantage in industries whose products and services are inherently identical. Take the human hair industry: the product isn’t noticeably different from one seller to the next.
There are no real markers of differentiation, unlike the car industry, for example, where models look fairly different. Leveraging identity, for instance, can mean building your personal brand as a founder around your purpose, values and strengths. Here, people are drawn to the business because of the personal brand behind it.
A classic example is Gwen Addo of Hair Senta, who built her hair business by leaning into her personality rather than fighting for attention on product alone.
She showed up and shared life lessons, and that’s what drew people in. She sold hair, but what she shared was true to her, and that became her edge.
3. It is the source of social media content: In this era of social media marketing, content creation is almost non-negotiable. Social media is an affordable and accessible medium for business promotion; however, just because everyone’s dancing with their products on TikTok doesn’t mean you should, if that does not align with who you are.
Some people dance for content, others teach, and some show their lifestyle along with their products and services. Content creation feels like a struggle when you haven’t yet tapped into what’s natural to you. The moment you do, it stops feeling like performance. You are able to keep showing up when what you’re doing as content feels authentic. You can consistently post dancing videos if that’s genuinely you. You can consistently share Bible verses if that’s genuinely you.
What you can’t do is consistently fake something that isn’t you; it dries up. When you create content from within yourself, you become more creative and interesting. What do you already do in your daily life? That should be the source of your content.
4. It is the guiding light for decision-making: When the business owner has a clear sense of purpose and direction, deciding what to do, and what not to do, gets easier. That ability is strategic power. That clear sense of purpose is derived from the founder’s identity: authenticity. It brings the clarity that propels intentionality and action. Not every piece of advice you are given as an entrepreneur needs to be followed.
Businesses lose their way by taking every suggestion instead of checking it against who they are. In this age of information overload, your authenticity becomes the filter for generic advice. The direction to go is within you, once you are making informed and intuitive choices.
Some of these pressures can look like being told to scale up your school to the elementary level when your core focus and competence lie in pre-school, or being advised to display some handbags in your make-up store just because sales seem slow. Businesses playing to win must play their best by staying focused.
You can run out of who to copy, but you cannot run out of who you are. It is an endless resource to tap into. AI, as the new gold rush, has created a thirst for originality and connection; entrepreneurs should capitalize on authenticity to provide that. Yet it is all too quickly becoming rare.
As markets become fiercely competitive with porous entry, and business capabilities continuously become replicable, founders who see that what remains truly not replicable is simply who they are, are better poised to lead in their industries.
They are true to purpose, true to their values and aligned with their strengths. Entrepreneur, to thine own self be true.
