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| The vibes are right when you hit it sweet |
We have been working through these and other "sweet spots" this year with clients and on my coaching blog you can find an article about combining this thinking into your SWOT analysis (you can read my other blog at http://coachingpartnership.blogspot.com/2011/12/sweet-swot-strategy-6.html).
Here are my top ten business sweet spots - a round up the reviews with clients in the last few months.
- Personal flair
Everyone has strengths - their personal "tap-dance", so to speak. So often in business we find people focussed on process, risk and rule based approaches. All good but do they take space and opportunity away from your people, preventing them from bringing you their flair?
Remember Jim Collins exhortation, in "Good to Great", to work in the space where your passion and your skill touch the economic wheels of your business. Our rule of thumb is that process is designed to speed up and perfect the chores, maximising the time available for people to do what needs to be done personally and that they are great at. - Special projects
Where is the space in the routine of work for this flair to have a chance? Special projects around improvement issues - with a few people drawn from across status, structure, and location, with real opportunity to fail and learn are fabulous for identifying leaders in your team. - Recruitment decision matrix
Getting the right people into your team is such a crucial factor - this year's recruitment sweet spot has been working through the key attributes, running pareto to identify the top 5, weighting each relative to the others for importance and then grid ranking candidates as a super approach to improving recruitment accuracy. - Star product/service in the product portfolio analysis (ppa)
To remind you, star products are those with high market attractiveness and where your business is strong relative to competition. Maximise these and ensure you have pushed them as far as they can go, check in on them for lessons, use them to cross sell others. - Top Wildcat product/service in the ppa
These are high market attractiveness, but your task is still to build your competitive strength. Don't waste your time developing too many at once - ensure adequate "bat swing" is applied to ensure your best shot wildcats become stars. - Leadership beats process
Process will get you so far and is essential. Process is as much key to change as it is to being stuck - as it sticks routine activity into your business. However, great leaders will always be able to draw more motivation and quality than process will achieve by improving feel good factor, learning and development of key people. Leaders can layer processes and build businesses with great people. - Having the courage to discuss the cash
Get the terms discussion out and clear at the start and then stick to it. So much time is wasted mopping up after a sloppy start on your terms. A clear winner of a sweet spot is having the courage to address up front your pricing and cash terms. - Double prices on the bottom 20% of your customers, and divert your time to the best 20% instead
If you are working hard but not making money, look at your pricing and focus your market to the quality end. - Innovate with your best clients
R&D/innovation that has worked best has been in the contract and with the clients rather than back in the board room. Look to improve value right at the edge and you will very quickly hear what you need to do. - Leadership attribute matrix
This is an essential point to end on. The choice of investment partner and director team for a new venture is the essential initial condition for success. So many businesses fail due to this team mix being wrong or going predictably wrong. Mind-map the attributes you need for your crucial leadership team, select the top 5 or so and weight them relative to each other for importance and then realistically go through each partner/potential partner and rank them. Take the problems seriously and talk them through.
A great investment and leadership team is the "business sweet-spot" I wish you for 2012 - with all the challenges, excitement and "rocks in the road" of business in the current economic realities you will find a close knit and capable team a real blessing for the next twelve months.
Feel free to contact me about any issues this raises for you.
