Change: How about…the Product?
Product Changes
Be open to change. Just because you (or your industry) has always done it this way doesn’t make it right, today. Or maybe is it done some other way elsewhere? In our steak restaurant we cook out back on electric. Meanwhile in Argentina they’d cook out front on charcoal. Who’s right? More importantly, be curious. What if you stopped doing it the way you’ve always done it? Can you try it differently and be inundated with a following of new customers?
Or imagine for a moment you own a chain of delis. Your specialty is cheese and you have large refrigerated display cases full of cheeses for your staff to cut portions off for customers. You encourage your staff to discuss the various flavors to ensure the customers get exactly what will suit them best. Then, perhaps at lunchtimes, your stores get busy. People perceive it will take too long to be served, which is particularly annoying for them if they know what they want without having to listen to the spiel again. They leave, you lose that custom and possibly that customer forever. So why not have a few handwritten cards describing cheeses in displays of precut, weighed, and priced portions created when the stores are not busy? And perhaps maybe an offer of “paired” crackers to go with a particular cheese. Perhaps too, to indicate the right wine for a cheese, and stock that too—or provide a link to a wine supplier … Whatever your product or service, we encourage you to relook at it with a fresh pair of eyes.
First ask yourself … should your widgets or related processes be and are they not:
• Simplified: Are many of the features nice to have rather than necessary, and would removing them to a more basic configuration gain customer approval?
• Deregulated: Can you make a version which doesn’t have to comply with needless regulation especially where it is not used in that particular field?
• Exported: Helping yourself to some government-sponsored support for export might mean you can sell beyond these shores.
• Replaced by software: Maybe a stretch, maybe the inspiration you need.
• Utilized: Do you have spare capacity that could be utilized in other ways?
For widgets, perhaps becoming a subcontract manufacturer for a rival to get better use of your expensive plant. For a restaurant, sharing the seating area with an adjoining business. For a local newspaper, forming a buying group with other regional titles to buy newsprint better. We could go on. We trust your thinking will.
Be Disruptive, Again
We’re imagining you arrived with a bang, not a whimper. Though of course you could have built slowly and gently and for you many of the thoughts below apply too.
Disruptive: You took the widget market by surprise, your entry wrong-footed the incumbent suppliers, you won immediate market share, and now you are—let’s face it—an incumbent too. That’s why in the Stop section we suggested you stopped incremental innovation, because all that is now is a race to standstill, and if you are leading that race you are spending money you haven’t got, to force your rivals to spend money they’d rather not, just to match your pace. But if you don’t innovate, will they innovate? The question therefore is: what next?
The answer is to Be Disruptive, Again.
Imagine for a second you are at a local charity bazaar. The entry price lets you place your name and telephone number on one square of a large Treasure Island map grid. The winner, to be announced much later, is based upon some predetermined square where the treasure, that is, the prize, is deemed to be buried. A similar treasure map exists for your widget business. The difference is that for you there is more than one elusive prize and therefore you have to determine where to concentrate your initial grid work. On Widget Island, you could try Organic Beach, Integration Peak, Geographic Cove, Doubling Bay, and Sellup Landing. Offshore is Hooksky Island and various reefs in Lottery Lagoon.
If you feel with widgets that you’ve already been there, done that, got the tee-shirt, you might instead want a completely new playing field and go offshore where you can be disruptive again. Hooksky Island of course is just one of the options open to you.
Let’s just call this: Hookskys.
What do you mean you know nothing about Hookskys? They’ve been around almost as long as widgets and the production of them is as backward today as it was when you walked into the widgets arena all those years ago—and actually, it is a few years, isn’t it? There are lots of synergistic considerations, too. Just pause for a moment: Your staff would use similar skills in radicalizing that product and market; many of your existing customers purchase Hookskys and you’ve got the space to make them.
Maybe some examples might help. Accountants have overlooked the arrival of QuickBooks and more latterly Xero amongst others. Accounting software programs have usurped a lot of practicing accounting firms’ bread and butter to the point where almost every start-up rents the software rather than uses an accountant for its bookkeeping. Likewise for lawyers, the Internet has made a mockery of the once noble art of legal drafting. Specimen contracts for almost any situation are now available for $39.99 or less each online. We bought 2,500 different drafts for less than $300 the other day! Veterinarians can’t have failed to see how much of their once lucrative accessory business has now gone to the mall-based or online, pet mega-super-stores. And we could continue, sector by sector. Please give this more than a moment’s thought. Does this ring any bells with what you do?
There’s much more to say, but are Hookskys the “x on the map” you were looking for?
Pause: Did you make notes of things in the Action This Today section in the back of this book? If not, please take this opportunity to review the prior pages to identify again any thoughts and ideas you want to follow up on.