Tag Archive for: strategy

Reboot Your Growth!

Photo courtesy of Geoffrey Moore

If your business is like many others, it has progressed through a period of growth, followed by flattening out. The future is up to you. Will you begin the decline as many mature companies before, or will you start a new season of growth? There are two primary areas to consider to energize your growth: your approach to the market, and your approach to your management team.

With regards to the market you pursue and your positioning, it is important to reassess whether doing what has brought you this far is the best course to continue. Many find that developing new products/services for an existing customer base is challenging. Commercializing new category starters often requires different skills and a cultural shift. For others, successful marketing is determined by finding new places to promote and deliver existing offerings.

Management teams in maturing companies can become stagnant. A shot in the arm in terms of professional development of soft skills can be the ideal prescription. It is too easy to allow silos to develop and technical knowledge isolates without intentional growth of individual team members. Whether it is an executive MBA, or certificate programs, or simply using industry continuing education as a way to diversify one’s competencies, do something to make your managers more valuable! Added to the value of learning new skills is the benefit of gaining greater emotional intelligence. A mentor or coach brought in from the outside can guide managers into better decision making.

The best course of action is to combine marketing/business development initiatives with management team professional growth. We hope you are successful in starting a new “S” curve in your business. Let us know if we can help!

Blog excerpted from: Need A New “S” Curve?

Knowing that you have, or will have, a winning product or service does not give you time to rest. You have to grease the skids by making your potential buyers aware that you have a product that solves an important problem they have. Founded upon your in-depth understanding of your buyers, you need to structure the appropriate marketing campaigns that raise buyer awareness of the product’s or service’s value and availability. But, that’s not enough either. You will also have to make all the sales channel partners that sit between you and the buyer also know of the value and availability of the product. All this is needed to get your product or service from your facility into the hands of the buyers.

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This whitepaper is the fourth in a series entitled “Pillars of Success” by Bill Warner.

You don’t have to talk to an investor or company board member for more than five minutes before the word focus comes up. It is death to any business plan that wanders through a dozen possible initiatives for the business. You will be dismissed if you even hint at hiring people or purchasing equipment that is not relevant to your business. If you are not clear about how your product or service is marketed and sold, the prospects of getting the support you need is zero. The message is: “be unwaveringly focused.”How do you, as a small business founder, accomplish laser beam focus? Click here to read more!

This whitepaper is the third in a series entitled “Pillars of Success” by Bill Warner.

To have a winning business, you must have a winning product or service. Well, DUH!! That’s pretty profound.  It’s a simple concept, but it’s quite hard to actually accomplish. To have a winner, your business has to have a product or service that is focused on an attractive market segment, solve a well understood customer problem, have a financially compelling value proposition, be differentiated from your competitors, be effectively distributed, have excellent quality and be supported by outstanding customer service.   That’s a mouthful, but every single aspect of a winner has to be in place in order to succeed in today’s economy, which is now populated with very selective buyers who have a broad range of choices and not much money to pay for anything.  

Want to read how to create and sustain a winning small business? Please fill out the form here and we’ll send it to you right away!

This whitepaper is the second in a series entitled Pillars of Success by Bill Warner:

Sun-tzu expresses it in many ways with respect to preparing for war, when he writes “know your enemy.” Preparing to compete in business is similar in a lot of ways. One of the similarities is the need to know your competition in detail. As in war, you don’t want to enter the battlefield with the wrong weapons, deploying inappropriate tactics, with too few people, and engaging on the wrong terrain.

Want to read more? Please fill out the form here: http:///contact and we’ll send it to you right away!

This whitepaper is the first in a series entitled Pillars of Success by Bill Warner:

Whether you are starting a new company, launching a new business initiative or spinning out a company, the first and most important thing you must do is know your business. I think there are two constituencies that you have to convince, other than yourself. First, you have to know your business concisely enough so that you can quickly explain it to your mother, so that she understands it. The second is you have to comprehensively explain it to potential customers, employees, partners and sophisticated investors so that they are convinced it’s an attractive business to be associated with. If you can do this successfully, you understand your business.

Want to read more? Please fill out the form here: http:///contact and we’ll send it to you right away!