I recently had a chance to catch up with power couple, Akin and Tara Omotosho, CEOs of Increase Biz Now a digital marketing agency, Designerall, a do-it-yourself website builder, and co-owners of a printing company called Fast Signs Print, to talk about how they are helping business owners tap into building “skills to pay the bills” and leveraging that skill set.
Akin, a graduate of Hampton University, and Tara, a graduate of Xavier University, are equipping entrepreneurs across the country by bringing increasing value to power the digital economy.
“My husband has always had an entrepreneurial mindset. He started in 2005 in real estate and in 2011, started coaching and teaching people how to start their own business. I became a product of “skills that pay the bills” when I learned the skill set of designing websites and other digital products for our business and for others,” says Tara.
The Omotosho’s know how to make entrepreneurship work for them in balance. They have always worked well together in parenting and decision making and decided to take that same mindset into business together. Tara is the implementation person and likes putting new software and services into action. Akin is the visionary and the strategic back-end systems guy. He focuses on the structure, systems, and scalability. He believes that God has gifted him with the ability to look at companies or businesses from the aspect of identifying how to create a strong structure, systems, and scale their vision up.
The concept behind “skills to pay the bills” was derived from seeing a lot of people transition from their 9-to-5 job. Everyone has a skill set that can be marketed and it’s never too late to learn a new skill, whether you’re young or seasoned. Because we live in an information age, oftentimes people can get information overload. Therefore, it’s critical to work with those who have a proven track record to cultivate and bring out your talents and skills that are valuable to the marketplace and can be monetized. To assist people with this process, they launched Ideas Into Paydays that offers course material and training on how to develop various skill sets. The beauty is the opportunity and ability to create your own income so that you can focus on making profits as opposed to earning wages.
Akin and Tara share five steps they take to help individuals recognize their marketplace skills:
Discovery – First, we need to find out what people are good at. The objective is to tap into the subject matter expert of every person. Everyone is a subject matter expert at something. We find out what they like to do or find out what skill they want to develop.
Determination – The second step is to inquire if they have a service or product that they’re intending to introduce to and sell in the marketplace. Service-based business in many cases are better than products because you make more money selling what you know rather than doing what you know.
Identification – This involves market research and testing to help the individual identify the right market for the skill(s) that they have. Understanding your target niche is critical to the success of your product or service.
Packaging – Once it’s clear who you are targeting, then comes the “packaging.” This most likely comes in the form of service offerings. Knowing exactly what is being sold, the value that’s attached and the price points that are associated with the exchange.
Delivery – The final step is how to deliver service offerings through innovative marketing. For example, assisting with marketplace delivery solutions through various mediums such via Facebook advertising, webinars, and sales funnels.