Differentiating your business is an important element of growing it successfully. But how should you draw the line between pursuing the newest trends and sticking with the fundamentals? Let’s walk through a process that can help you leverage cutting-edge trends without discarding what made you successful in the first place.
Establish Your Fundamentals
Being able to do a backboard-shattering slam dunk is useless if you don’t know how to dribble the ball.
Before you can pursue a new trend, you will need to have established fundamentals for your business success. In Exit Planning, we refer to these fundamentals as Value Drivers.
Establishing your business’s Value Drivers can better position you to create a turnkey business. A turnkey business tends to be most attractive to potential buyers who can offer you financial security in exchange for your business down the road.
You don’t necessarily need to establish every single Value Driver all at once before you pursue more cutting-edge strategies. However, having some of the more important Value Drivers in place could give you more space to discover or experiment with cutting-edge strategies.
For example, three of the most important Value Drivers for a business are:
- Installing a next-level management team
- Creating written, scalable processes to increase cash flow sustainability
- Creating written, ambitious, realistic incentive plans for key employees that handcuff them to the business
A next-level management team could give you more opportunities to research and pursue cutting-edge strategies because the goal of the next-level management team is to take the business beyond what you yourself can do alone.
Having written, scalable processes to increase cash flow sustainability could become a cornerstone of your business’s success. When daily operations run smoothly, it could allow you and your business to pursue more outside-the-box ideas with the comfort of knowing that if things don’t go well with the new ideas, you can fall back on what’s worked before.
Finally, creating written, ambitious, realistic incentive plans can help you lock down your most important employees. When you don’t have to worry as much about losing your best employees because they’re handcuffed to the incentive plan, it can allow you to devote more time to finding new and improved ways to grow your business.
Keep Attending Trade Shows
The goal with staying in touch with your business community through trade shows is twofold.
First, it helps you avoid the echo chamber of only working with people who are closest to you. While those people may have good ideas, they may not have all the ideas you need to succeed.
Second, it helps you get a bead on what everyone else is doing. Knowing what other businesses are doing can help you question whether there’s a better way to be doing things. Because after all, it’s difficult to differentiate yourself if you’re always doing what everyone else is doing.
Whether in person or online, staying plugged into your business community is a strong way to understand what’s working now and what could work in the future.
Lean on Your Experts
Relying on your trusted experts—specifically, your Advisor Team—can help you access insights you may have otherwise overlooked.
It’s true that it’s never been easier to find information when you need it. However, just as you wouldn’t trust a medical website to diagnose you with a serious illness, you wouldn’t rely on the ease of information gathering to make an important business decision.
Expertise doesn’t come easy. However, experts can make it easy for you to access their expertise. In the long run, leaning on experts rather than taking the easiest possible path is a way to solidify your fundamentals and pursue cutting-edge ideas at the same time.
Don’t Fall Prey to the Hype Machine
When you start examining more cutting-edge strategies and ideas, it’s always good to take caution against the hype machine.
New and cutting-edge ideas often require an element of hype to get people excited about the idea. And some of those hyped-up ideas deliver on the hype.
For example, nearly everybody has a smartphone. But when smartphones first came out, they were so new and different from anything before it that it required some hype-making to get people on board. Smartphones succeeded because they delivered on the hype.
On the other hand, it’s important not to get swallowed up by hype alone.
For example, since 2022, there has been story upon story about how generative AI is going to replace as much as 20% of the current workforce, begin thinking for itself, and make absolutely everything easier and more automated.
However, the reality behind generative AI as of this writing is that it requires humans to constantly check its work to ensure that it’s not making serious errors (e.g., violating copyrights), makes countless mistakes on the easiest of tasks (e.g., recommending that you put glue on pizza to keep toppings from falling off), and sometimes makes things up entirely from whole cloth in potentially damaging ways (e.g., inventing non-existent case law).
As it stands, generative AI has come nowhere near meeting the hype, despite being a cutting-edge idea per se.
In short, it’s important to question cutting-edge ideas in the context of your business. Ask yourself: Does this new, shiny thing actually make things better for my business, my employees, and me? Or does it in fact make things more difficult and less unique?
One final note about pursuing cutting-edge ideas: If everyone else is pursuing it, can it really help you differentiate yourself?
We strive to help business owners identify and prioritize their objectives with respect to their businesses, their employees, and their families. If you have questions on this topic, we can help with more information or a referral to another experienced professional.
About Altus Exit Strategies
David Jean is the Director of Altus Exit Strategies and a Principal at Albin, Randall & Bennett, where he is also the Practice Leader of the Succession Planning, Business Advisory, and Construction & Real Estate Services Teams. David works with business owners who want to improve their business’s value before they sell through the Seven-Step Exit Planning Preparation™ process. He has worked with companies from $5 million to $50 million in revenue across a range of industries.
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