In today’s competitive market, you do not want to be a follower always playing catch up and looking to your competitors for signals of what to do next.
But also, you do not want to be so far ahead of everyone else that you create the openings but then don’t profit from them.
There is a lot of rhetoric around ‘first mover advantage’ but that advantage is only worthwhile if you can hold it for a sustained period and yield a great return. Often, in a business context, companies invest heavily in being first into a market but can’t hold that advantage and end up surrendering it to a competitor. From here comes the idea that it is ‘better to be second into the field than first’.
So how do you lead the market and sustain that position?
I believe the key to always outpacing your competitors is mastering the ability to ‘discern and discover’ and ‘deliver and adapt’, while always keeping an eye to customer value. Build these traits into corporate capabilities and you will find your business being the agent of change in your markets.
First mover advantage will always be profitable and sustainable, because by the time competitors have caught up to you and moved into the territory that you claimed, well, you have already moved on. And then they have to start catching up again. This is the quintessential nature of being competitively fit and tactically alive.
Discern and Discover
In one of my earlier articles, Opportunity – Is It Lost In The Noise?, I spoke of the importance of developing a clear and detailed picture of your chosen market, incorporating its boundaries, your customers’ needs, your competitive posture, how you deliver value and any ‘change’ that may impact these aspects. This picture is your reference map so you can reduce the volume of noise coming to you from the market, and decide where you should focus your efforts.
With this picture firmly in hand, the question becomes one of, where to from here? Where does growth lie for us as a business? You do not want to be constantly battling with competitors for every sales dollar, you need to position yourselves with an overwhelming strength in your chosen markets.
The answers to these questions lie in the growth strategy you adopt. It should be built on the cornerstone of purpose and with an increasing focus on customer need. As you focus on need, you shift from a growth strategy built on expansion to monitoring to creation. And as you shift along this path the market share and capital value of your business will grow exponentially. Have a look at this diagram of Real Growth, which represents this process of increasing focus to grow share and value.
Discernment and discovery become key attributes that you must build in your business if you are going to be able to journey down the path of real growth.
Growth in its simplest form starts with expansion, which is growing out what you already have into a wider field – more customers, bigger region etc. The next stage of growth is monitoring your marketplace whereby you search for changes in the marketplace that will provide opportunities for growth. You are not looking for the obvious loud signals that everyone can hear and see – you are searching for the weak signals. Those signals of change and opportunity that are subtle and need to be deciphered and, quite often, need to be pieced together to form the complete picture of the opportunity.
Creation in your marketplace, the third stage of growth, requires the attribute of discovery. You are building something that presently does not exist. It’s human ingenuity at work – thinking and turning customer need around in your mind and exploring changes in the marketplace and technology until that ‘aha’ moment emerges. And you realise that you’ve just worked out how your business can leave your competitors in the dust and provide so much more value to your customers.
Pursuing real growth requires a business that is competitively fit. To discover if your business is competitively fit, take my global benchmark test, ‘Are You Wasting Your Money On Growth?’.
Deliver and Adapt
You may have discerned or discovered the new market space you are going to move into, but your business’s ability to deliver and adapt will be essential. Unfortunately, this is where many businesses fail.
This passage from my book Strategy Play – Crafting Undefeatable Business Strategies explores this:
“Delivery reflects the ability to set the right goals accurately and quickly and to deliver on them. This is no mean feat as most would recognise that the ability to get things done efficiently and effectively is a skill that most businesses lack. Most leaders do not invest in this critical skill but wonder why key projects just seem to never get done. Remember the quintessential goal of strategy is to create and maintain a business that is capable of crafting and delivering on any strategy.
Adaptability is the ability to recognise changing circumstances in the marketplace. Whether they be through a greater understanding of customer needs, changing marketplace conditions or competitor behaviour, or to shift your positioning to maintain your strength of customer value. Adaptability reflects the continuous and dynamic nature of strategy and the fact is often the strategies that work are not formulated, but are unrealised or emergent, or simply needed to move as the marketplace changed.”
First Mover Advantage
Your ability to compete effectively in your chosen market, on an enduring basis, rests in the capabilities you have developed in your business and hopefully, continue to invest in.
This capability is reflected in the ability to:
- Know your market and therefore know what to listen to and what to ignore.
- Be able to focus in on that market and discern changes just as they emerge and build them into opportunity.
- Be able to invest in yourself, your customer needs, and create new ways to deliver even greater value.
And, of course, the core capability to deliver on these opportunities and to make them real, not in years but in days, by adapting to overcome challenges and continuing change.
Your first mover advantage is that your business is capable of moving (before anyone else is even awake) and that you can just keep moving. Always lifting customer value to another level, always growing your market, always finding new opportunities to grow. All the while your competitors sit there, asking themselves, ‘How do they keep doing this?’
First mover or follower, the choice is yours.
Active Knowledge Questions:
- Is your business ‘competitively fit’?
- And what are you doing to make it even fitter?
Act Now:
Need to lift the leadership performance in your business? Learn how in C88 – Leadership Performance Guide and Journal.
How undefeatable is your business strategy? Consider Strategy Play – Crafting Undefeatable Business Strategies.
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
