Yesterday, we talked about the disruptive forces that are the barbarians at the gates of your business. These disruptive forces come in the guise of technology, financial utopianism, the demands of human resources and the changed nature of customer relations. But every time I criticize something, I make a pledge to offer solutions. So in the interest of at least trying to pay lip service to my promises, consider this the opening salvo in a new direction here at ZAC.
How To Think Differently About Competition
Competitive forces keep business owners awake at night, and on-edge throughout the day. Every customer or potential customer I talk to worries about their competition. But they are missing the point. There is no competition anymore. At least not in the way that we’ve all been trained to think of competition. Zero Sum competition is over. They Win, I Lose, I Win, They Lose? That is over. That is the 20th century in all its failed beauty and simplicity. It is easier to think of things that way. But its lazy and it doesn’t begin to even imagine a world where you are succeeding. Because even if you win at that game, you are still losing in the long run, chasing client after client in a nihilistic merry go round of silent suspicion. Is this the best that I can do? Is this what I wanted when I went into business? Is this how I want my legacy to look?
How To Think Differently About Planning
The fault lines have been exposed in business. On that side of the trench is pre-recessionary America. A time of gaudy consumerism, ironic detachment, faux-sophistication and bold, naked branding for branding’s sake. On that side of the trench was business that so wrapped up in growth that it forget to ask what it was growing into. Was it growing into something worthwhile? Was it growing into something that you would be proud of?
On this side of the fault line lies a world where all of these questions need to be confronted now, before you even begin to map out the next ten years of your life, of your business. Where will you be in ten years? Where will your business be? And your industry? What about the community of which you are a part? Do you think about what your community needs? What are you doing to see that it gets it?
If you are like every other business owner I know then you aren’t planning for a future you want. You are planning only for the future you think lies before you. But right now all the rules are being rewritten. They are being rewritten with or without your participation. And what your industry, what your community needs right now is for you to pick up the pen and join in the process of that rule making. It’s like we are sitting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. The convention is in session, the delegates are all here. And just like that historic summer, no one knows what is going to come out of this. All they know is that the British are coming. The future is here, is now. And the only responsible thing to do is to step up to the plate and put the pen to paper.
What kind of planning will you need? What kind of costs are associated with them? Is your current line of thinking incorporating the next great disruption?
How To Think Differently About Staffing and Human Resources
What kind of employees do you want with you? Are they the ones that you have? What are you doing to ensure you have the help that you need?
Most business owners refuse to learn this lesson. All they wonder about is how much are they going to cost. Thinking like this boils the most important elements of your business into an equation. This isn’t a formula for success. It’s just a formula. Stay away from the reasonable and the rational. Is that the world we live in? Is business reasonable and rational? Are politics? Is the weather?
When you boil staffing and human resources down into a discussion of money, you are automatically short changing yourself. You are forgetting to calculate the incalculable. How much does it cost for someone to anticipate what my business might need before I do? What is the cost of someone who grew up in a culture where technology wasn’t just present, but was essential to their everyday lives? How differently does that mindset work than your own?
You want to have a different business for yourself? You want to build something lasting and sustainable, something that you can be proud of? Then you are going to have to challenge all the assumptions you’ve built that business on. The assumptions of the last generation are broken. You can still get by with them, but that is all you’ll be doing, getting by. You wont, most decidedly, be succeeding.
Next up for tomorrow is sustainability and profits. These are the elements that if you get right can shepherd your business. Get these right, and you’ll be on track to streamline everything else.
Image Source Courtesy of Howdy, I’m H. Michael Karshis on Flickr
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Great day in American Capitalism today. Markets are at the points they hit in the Flash Market 1.0 scare of last week. Frankly, I’m buying twinkies. From a calories/dollar perspective, they offer the most bang for your buck of any swallowable asset. I’d buy gold but if stuff gets really ugly I want to be able to eat my assets.
We’ll really be screwed if the consumerism movement dries up, but otherwise the world will move on from all of this. And yes this is a fantastic time to be in business. Anytime the world is disrupted and things change, there’s a chance to be the first to figure out how to play it, and capitalizing on being a first mover is one hustle that will never end, as long as things keep moving.
BTW I think a lot bout how to fix the world, and when I come up with something good I tell my rich friends and they set the plans into action (jewlluminati, rich and secretive and connected). Government juices economies by spending more than they take in, more cheap money on the top of the balance sheet means more free cash flow to equity. This can’t be sustained. Too many people would rather get rich today at the expense of some other shmuck tomorrow, short term gain trumping long term gain in the psyche, but in the end I think either by force or by pleasure we will see governments spend within their means, and only step outside of that when capital improvements can really be shown to have an ROI; and that’s a sustainable model for long term prosperity.
Anyway, to your posting, I did a lot of venture turn around consulting in the past. I like the space because you can see someone has a great idea, a real value proposition, and they are basically still early enough in the game that you can set them on a good course to monetizing it fully, before there are so many entrenched players and the business is stuck adjusting in tiny steps, rather than in big swaths on a blank canvas. Great work, good fun, amazing opportunity to exact value. Such a dynamic, interrelated, matrix-of-matrices sort of consulting engagements.
What is the point of my rambling? It’s a brave new world, get a lot of opinions, take a clean slate approach to it, come up with the best / most efficient ideas, then step back and figure out if its possible to get there from where you are, what with your entrenched vendors, locale, employees, etc. Get creative, be very very active. My dad says be the best damn ditch digger (thanks dad for implying I’m too stupid for anything but manual labor).
thanks cassel, you are right on when it comes to building sustainable profit models, and moving away from leveraging today’s discrepancies at the expense of tomorrow’s civilties