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Articles filed in: Strategy
The Value Question
What’s the one unanswered question you believe would unlock the most value in your business?
Why does it matter?
How would knowing the answer change your strategy?
Where can you find the information you need?
What’s stopping you?
Image by Derrick Story.
The Benefits Of Adopting An Ostrich Mindset
filed in Strategy
Think about how many hours you’ve wasted this year worrying about how well your competitors are doing. The meetings where you focused on how to get ahead. The private angst when your numbers wobbled and theirs stayed steady. Can you name one time when your business gained an advantage by obsessing about the competition?
There’s no doubt we could all benefit from adopting an ostrich mindset. The myth is that the ostrich buries her head in the sand in an attempt to hide when she’s threatened. That’s only part of the story. What she’s actually doing is tending to the eggs she has laid in a shallow hole in the ground—turning them over in the nest with her beak.
We have far more chance of creating an impact when we direct our energy towards things we can influence and change.
Image by Mike Cilliers.
Problem Solving 2.0
Think of any one of the myriad of challenges you might face this week. Deliveries are taking longer than expected. There’s a rise in customers complaints. The new product isn’t selling as well as you’d hoped. Your team isn’t gelling.
The solution to almost every problem usually begins with the same question.
How can we get better at this? Nine times out of ten this is the wrong question to begin with, because often what you’re aiming to improve isn’t the real cause of the problem. The better place to start is by asking; What’s the simplest route to the outcome we want?
We fix what’s broken by getting crystal clear about exactly where we want to go—not by obsessing about what we think is in the way.
Image by Nicholas Canup.
What Makes Or Breaks A Business?
When we think about business successes or failures we focus on the highs and lows—the news-worthy triumphs or missteps. These are the moments in which we believe businesses are made or broken. Our theory couldn’t be further from the truth.
Businesses succeed or fail on an ordinary Friday afternoon when a difficult customer calls just before closing, and the minute we hire that receptionist we’re just not sure about. Businesses win in trying moments when ‘the rules’ are replaced by the right thing to do, and lose the second we prioritise process over humanity.
We win when we stop thinking about winning at all, and instead, embrace the equilibrium of doing our best work on the dull days when no one is looking.
Image by Matt Biddulph.
The Brand Awareness Checklist
In a competitive, commercial environment the logic is the more people who know about your business the more successful it will be. So we prioritise making more people aware. But if ‘awareness’ is your problem then asking how to get more of it is the wrong question to begin with. The better place to start is by understanding why the right people don’t already know about your products and services.
The Brand Awareness Checklist
1. Did we make a product people want to buy and then talk about?
2. Why exactly will they want to buy it?
3. Who are our ideal customers?
4. What do they care about?
5. Where are they spending time online and offline?
6. What motivates them to buy products and services?
7. Where are they researching and shopping?
8. Are we where they are, providing the tangible and intangible value they want?
9. What’s our ‘first ten’ strategy?
10.How will we make sure those first ten come back and bring another ten?
You can only reap the rewards that come by getting beyond the last question on the checklist when you’ve successfully answered and addressed the first nine. There is no shortcut to mattering.
Image by Ivan Rigamonti.
Aligning Your Ducks
filed in Strategy
The manager at the burger bar works hard to manage his costs. Part of his strategy is to pay his teen workers below minimum wage. He realises he can save on salaries by cancelling their shifts within an hour’s notice on a slow day. The thing that frustrates him the most is his high staff turnover.
The cafe owner in the park employs people who have previously found it challenging to find work. He provides training and weekly mentoring to each team member—ensuring they’re on track to meet the goals they’ve set themselves. His staff love working there, and it shows, not just because they turn up, but in every interaction with customers.
A good business strategy isn’t just about having all your ducks in a row. It’s about the care you take when choosing which ducks to include and your understanding of how each one impacts your story and success. Aligning the ducks is the easy part.
Image by Bilb.
Are You Pressing The Right Buttons?
The guy who knocks on the door at 5 pm is armed with an iPad, a sales pitch and an assumption. He denies he’s trying to sell something. ‘It’s not a sale—it’s a reduction.’ He asks if I’ve looked at the back of my power bills lately. Tells me the prices have risen and he’s just switched a couple of neighbours in the street who wanted to avoid the increases, to his company. When I explain how happy I am with my energy provider, he presses on, mentioning price twice more as the reason people are switching. The assumption being that every person he speaks to will be motivated by price regardless of their experience—that everyone shares a similar worldview.
The salesman is doing his best within the limitations of the strategy his company has adopted. What this energy company doesn’t know about the potential customer (practically everything apart from where they live), affects their success rate. The story the company is telling today leaves it open to being easily disrupted by a new, cheaper competitor tomorrow.
If your growth strategy relies on pressing your customer’s buttons, then it pays to know which ones to press. The flipside, of course, is that if you’re just differentiating and competing on something that requires less insight and effort, then it won’t be long before someone else uses a similar strategy. The harder a story is to replicate the more valuable it is.
Image by Thomas Hawk.
The Value Of Fixing The Root Of The Problem
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
The first step to fixing any problem is to acknowledge there is one.
If you find yourself starting every email with ‘sorry’, question why you’re constantly doing that.
If the software doesn’t work the first time, every time, dig deeper before you need to use it again.
If your projects always run over budget look for patterns that reveal the holes in your estimates.
If deadlines consistently allude you be honest about what you need to do to change that.
The simplest way to create exponential value is to make promises you intend to keep and then to keep them. You know from experience hardly anyone does this. Promises are often hastily made and casually broken. Find a way to be the exception and not the rule.
Image by Tobias Toft.
A Simple Truth About Business Growth
We’ve all seen what happens when a business is poorly scaled. The cult restaurant adds more tables and loses its magic. The software is ruined when too many features are added. The bespoke tourist attraction becomes tacky.
Growth doesn’t come from looking for more opportunities to expand, it’s a result of finding better ways to serve. This doesn’t mean thinking small and staying small. It means being more thoughtful about the need to go bigger, instead of going big for the sake of being big.
Image by Roberto Trobretta.
Why Meaning Is A Competitive Advantage
The day after she turned fourteen, my mum (number ten in a family of eleven), woke early to catch the bus that would take her to work at her first full-time job in a sweet factory. I don’t remember her telling me about how she got the job. It’s likely it happened through word of mouth, and she never had an interview. The factory supervisor simply needed bodies who were motivated to clock in and do repetitive, mind-numbing work, that has long since been automated, for eight hours every day.
By the end of day one, my mum knew she wouldn’t care if she never saw a caramel toffee again. She wouldn’t spend her says dipping caramel squares into vats of pink and white icing. She told her widowed mother so as soon as she got home that evening. ‘I’m not going back,’ she said. Her protests fell on deaf ears. Work was work, and the family needed the money. She finally left the factory when she turned eighteen.
My mum’s greatest aspiration was to be a seamstress. She wanted to sew and to make things—later evidenced by the number of colour-coordinated fair isle patterned jumpers me and my brother and sister wore, for as long as she could make us. But she didn’t have the luxury of choosing.
Last year, one of my sons graduated with a degree in design and architecture. He commutes four hours a day, there and back, to a casual job where he works with his head, hands and heart—helping to design and build custom cubby houses that will bring joy to families in back yards around Melbourne for years. What’s worth more to him than the money in the bank at the end of the week, is the feeling he’s doing meaningful work each day. All the while his grandmother worries and wonders that the degree hasn’t landed him a steady, tie-wearing desk job.
Most people reading this are fortunate to be working for reasons beyond only bringing in enough money to put food on the table. We are the lucky ones—intrinsically motivated to do work we care about and enjoy. Work that gives us a sense of purpose while helping us to fulfil our potential.
In our quest for success, we spend the majority of our time chasing the kind of growth we believe bolsters the bottom line. We aim to expand our reach, convert more customers and overtake our competitors—sometimes at the expense of doing what lights us up. We often ignore the things that motivate us to do the great work that will ironically enable us to expand our reach, attract more customers, be competitive and feel fulfilled. When we prioritise meaning the marketing and sales fall into place. Putting purpose before profits is still and underrated business strategy.
Image by Frans Persoon.