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Many organizations begin the new year by assessing what worked and what didn’t during the prior year.
If your evaluation leads to the conclusion that your business needs to kick start its growth, then consider 3 proven actions that will energize your business.
Companies are consumed with surviving and reacting to the marketplace. What began as an opportunistic business loses focus over time, beyond the need to make money. But the risk of failing to grow is unacceptable. As you begin the new year, you don’t need more excuses, you need results. The following actions will energize your business to start the year strong:
1. Ponder Your Purpose: When you forget your Purpose – your reason for existing – you lose the essential fuel that elevates performance and achieves goals. Advantages don’t last. You have to keep strengthening them or finding new ones, and then using them to create new growth opportunities. Revisiting your Purpose generates energy that motivates your people and aligns them around a common cause. Reignite your Purpose by introducing a new idea or technology that disrupts the status quo and compels a response. Radically accelerate your speed to market or response time. Change the infrastructure, the rules or the flow of information to empower or quicken decision-making.
2. Be Preferred By Your Customers:The most productive way to grow sales is to increase the number of transactions you have with existing customers. Customers now have many options available to fill their needs. It’s more productive for them to treat every possible supplier like a commodity, making their choice on the basis of who is better, faster or cheaper. To defeat commoditization, you want to be preferred by your customers. Becoming your customers’ preferred supplier is a simple proposition…you must produce more quantifiable value for your customer than they can get from some other supplier. How? (1) Intensify your distinctiveness and separate from competitors. (2) Produce quantifiable strategic value that propels growth – yours and your customers. (3) Avoid the 3 common No-Growth excuses: (a)“If we don’t offer the lowest price, we don’t get the order.” (b)“Our customers have no time to consider future benefits. They’re focused on reducing today’s pain.” (c)“Our production folks don’t need to know anything about our customers.”
3. Lead With Your Principles:When you can get anything off the internet and technological advantages don’t last, your people become your strongest competitive advantage. If you have Core Principles, do your people know what the words mean – how you expect them to behave? The spirit and drive of an organization contribute far more to its growth than do its resources, structure or timing. These factors contribute significantly to your business, but those contributions are surpassed by how robustly the people in your organization believe in your Principles and how consistently they demonstrate them.
What’s stopping you from growing?
What are the consequences if you fail to grow?
