Markets are won or lost, and great businesses are built, on the value a business can deliver to its customers. A value delivered in meeting the needs of its customers, today and tomorrow, that outstrips the value anyone else can provide. Businesses compete around this value, but many fail to compete to their greatest capability.
Active Knowledge Questions:
- So how does your business compete, what is its competitive posture, how does it fight the good fight?
- What will it take for you to defeat your competitors?
- How does your business achieve a relentless customer focus?
Optimising The Competitive Engine In Your Business:
Over this season of December 2019 and January 2020, we are revisiting the elements of the competitive engine that exists in every business and considering how that engine supports a CEO in their role of optimising the performance of their business. Six parts in this series and in each part, we will highlight three articles that focus on a different element of the competitive engine in your business.
Part 5 – Bringing Your Best To Bear In Delivering Customer Value, Every Day.
Against Whom Do We Compete In Business?:
Many business leaders do not have a handle on how their businesses compete and in fact, are not comfortable with the frame of competing when it comes to leading their business. However, every moment of everyday every business, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, is competing whether they recognise it or not. Better, therefore, that you do have a clear image of how your business competes.
Success does not come by chance; it requires hard work, focus and diligence. Winning is not achieved through luck but by knowing what it will take to overcome all competitors and being able to deliver on that. In your business, in your markets, are you defeating your competitors?
Achieving A Relentless Focus On The Customer:
I don’t think you will find a CEO who wouldn’t say ‘the customer is our number one priority’. Yet very few businesses ever achieve a true customer focus, and this failing places a ceiling on their success.
A focus on your customer requires that they come first in all of your actions and decisions. Your entire business exists to meet their needs today and into the future. They are today and tomorrow’s lifeblood and the compass for future direction. Failing to place them first is to allow yourself to be defeated in your chosen marketplace.
An entirely new level of performance.
Want to become a part of the Entrepreneurs+ Community and learn how to make your business competitively fit? Join now.
All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
