Over the past 16 days, we’ve been talking about strategy. If you’ve missed any of these posts, you can go here and start digging in.
The goal of these posts has been to show the importance of having a strategy and how the right strategy allows your business to win in the marketplace.
Winning is defined as:
- Increases profit
- Increased cash flow
- The ever-broadening of your business impact and mission you are trying to achieve.
We shared how to determine which strategic moves to make to win, focusing on the competitive landscape and how you add value to the customer.
If you don’t know how your company specifically adds value to your customers, you should find out right away, since this holds the keys for long-term success.
In a recent strategy session with a client yesterday, we determined that the company didn’t want to make any “big” strategic moves like adding another dimension to their service or products, but felt that they needed to improve their operational efficiency. They had some broken or poorly executed processes.
Although we said that focusing on costs within the business is a race to the bottom, it could be that your business needs to come up to parity with your competitors.
Maybe there are internal processes that are not working as well as you like which is, in turn, impacting the customer.
My point here is that your strategic moves do not need to be some grand action. You can decide to focus on one internal process that you know is not working well. If you know it is not working well it is not going to fix itself and is most likely impacting your customers more than you realize.
Ask your team, “if we could only improve one thing next year what would it be?”
Need help with strategy? Contact us.