Strategize to Succeed in Business
It’s time to consider your business plan for 2021. I want to share some insights about strategy with you from Brad Sugars’ book, Pulling Profits Out of a Hat that will help you aim high. The title makes business success sound like a magic trick, but in fact the author presents actionable plans to achieve massive growth.
Sugars talks about these four pillars of strategy:
Leverage
This pillar suggest finding a way of doing the work once and getting paid forever. It applies to both products and services, with the idea being you put your effort into developing and packaging an offering, and then you get paid repeatedly for the work. A good example is Apple: they created the iPod device, and then sold Apple Music subscriptions to give users access to their music library. There are no limits to the number of Apple Music subscriptions they sell to their platform.
Scaleability
Where the next sale costs less and less each time, and it’s easier. What can you deliver over and over again with the same resources. Here, Airbnb and Uber serve as good examples of business that become more successful the bigger they get. As more people signed up to host guests in their homes, Airbnb could offer more choices and appeal to more varied audiences. Scale is critical to Uber’s success, because the more drivers Uber signs up, the less time a customer has to wait for a car, which makes Uber a more appealing transportation offer than a taxi in many locations.
Opportunity
If you currently have a narrow market, analyze how you can enter and compete in other markets. What might you do differently with your products or services to gain a wider market? During the pandemic, for example, a number of distilleries and breweries pivoted to the hand sanitizer business to grab a share of an entirely different market.
Marketability
This pillar is about selling things that sell themselves. Basic commodities that consumers need and will buy again and again no matter what.
Ask yourself how you might apply one or more of these strategies to change the momentum of your business in 2021.
If you would like to learn more about how this might apply to your business, let’s talk:
