Business solutions

Finding your centre

~ dan

porters five forces1.jpgWhere ever you are in your business chances are you want to make it a grow a bit or a least make it a bit easier on yourself in the trenches. This is where Porters fives competitive forces can come in really handy. Just by asking yourself these 5 simple questions you can get a better idea of your competitive landscape no matter what kind of business you are running.

New Entrants: How likely are new people likely to enter your business? Are their barriers that stop them entering

Substitutes: Is their a substitute that can replace your product or service? Sometimes this is a completely new product or technology?

Customers: What is the bargaining power of your customers? Are they price sensative

Suppliers: Are you dependant on any suppliers, How much power do they have?

Your Rivals: How competitive is the industry you are in? How many other options are there

Usually at least one of these forces is dominant. Just by identifying this force and doing something about it is a key to improving your competitiveness and overall success! For example with hind sight we can see that the digital camera was a substitute that eventually did in Kodak, who ironically were the inventor of the digital camera.

Whats your most powerful force and what can you do about it? Once you know it, it’s important to let your customers and potential customer know about it!

Turing your hobby into a business

~ dan

doing what you don't like1.jpgIt’s an attractive idea isn’t it?, take something you really enjoy doing and turn it into your career. The trouble is a dream turned into reality can sometime become a nightmare. Somewhere in the process it could also takes away the very thing you love,  by taking al the fun out of it…but this need not be the case.

Your hobby and probably your passion is probably your key competitive advantage, perhaps you are already making some income out of it already. The challenge to making it viable is finding the key things people willing to pay for.  For many just thinking about turning a dollar somehow cheapens their endeavour, but it the secret of making a successful go of it.

Finding customers and developing channels (ways of reaching them) are then the vital key ingredient for sustainable. This involves doing and developing a whole new range of activities that will work hand in hand with your passion to bring it to realisation. 

The trouble for the newly converted hobbyist is that where passion fuels the business activity itself, but finding customers and reaching them through channels is well not nearly as exciting. Some of it you won’t mind, but some of it you really won’t want to do This is where discipline comes it, doing the need to do the activities that aren’t very exciting. For the activities that you don’t want to do, you cannot fuel these will passion…they need something else.. a discipline and a will to succeed!

3 things you need to succeed in business

~ dan

3 things to succeed in business.pngThere are only 3 things you need to succeed in business.

1. A product or service

2. A market ie customers

3. A way to reach customers 

First up you need a product and that someone wants (and is willing to pay for). Steve Blank calls this the product-market fit and its pretty much Startup 101. 

The third thing are your channels these are what connect to two and without these you are likely to make it as a business. Most businesses start with a few customers and grow a bit by word of mouth referrals. Getting beyond this understanding your channels is critical to making your business grow, will you /do you advertise for example to who and how do you do it

A digital shop front (i.e. a website)  can super charge your word of mouth by acting as a ‘confirmation page’ as one of the first things customers do is look you up and check you out. Its also an important bit of glue linking your other channels and funnelling them back to you.

 

When was your last backup?

~ dan
brisbane-backup-strategy.JPG
Two Synology NAS systems, size and cost effective  backup solution

When was your last backup? If you answer is anything longer than an hour ago  you probably don’t have an effective backup strategy! If you can’t remember when you ast did a backup hope to it and do something about it right now.

For many a USB thumb drive or external hard drive is the strategy of choice. Unfortunately the former is all to easily lost and the latter you need to remember to do it.  Fortunately there are lots of great products around that can do backups on a schedule for you, with many now offering incremental backups. Incremental backups take a snapshot of your hard drive and record changes made every hour or so. Incremental backups are a great tool if you are doing some document intensive work and need to recover an earlier version – it can easily save you a days work.

For many home and small business Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a very affordable solution that can backup multiple computers. A good NAS system has multiple drives mirroring each other , so that in the event of drive failure you don’t use any data.

Cloud systems are recently becoming popular, because all you need to is sign up to a service (google drive, dropbox etc..), you do need a reliable data connection though, there are storage limits and data security is also an important consideration (get out your tin foil hat). How you manage data amongst a team is also important. The big plus for cloud storage is usually for a modest annual fee everything is taken care of, with no hardware to invest in. Cloud storage gets around the systemic risk of damage to the premises of your place of business.

A good NAS coupled with an external hard drive that you take home once a week is a preferred solution of many business and relatively easy to setup too.

The basis of competition

~ dan

brisbane website strategy
If your in business then there is a good chance you have competitors. Having a basic understanding of how you are competing with them can improve the bottom line immensely.

The bright minds at Harvard University c/- Michael Porter have turned their attention to this back in the 1980’s.  Essentially in comes to to how do you want to compete (i.e. what business you are in? ) and where your competitive advantage lies (what do you do that is special?)

If your business is broad in nature vs something very specific it entails a different approach think . What approach you take depends on if you want to focus on being a cost leader or being different?

It turns out that thinking about these basic competitive strategies is pretty handy in the way you present yourself on a website too.