Are you willing to look at your business from a very different point of view?
In the environment we now face of financial crises and eroding of business confidence, pandemics facing our nation, and whatever else the world can throw at us in the next few months, what are the most important things our businesses should be doing this year? And I warn you, they are not what you think they are.
The first question I have of you is: Are you willing to destroy and uncreate all you have decided is your business. This does not mean you destroy your business.. It does mean you destroy all your points of view that you have already decided are your business. Are you willing to look at things differently, and destroy and uncreate all you have decided is right, or wrong, about your business? Are you willing to look at your business from a very different point of view?
Look at everything that you and your organization have assumed or decided you have got right, which is no longer working for you, and identify other ways that you might undertake whatever is not working for your business. Case in point, many businesses rely very substantially on very few sources of funding. The Pareto principle of 80% of your funding coming from 20% of your clients, leads to an overreliance on a very few major customers, even though at the same time you are very proud of your clients and your relationship with them.
This is a great time for these organizations to say, "We still want to receive revenue from these few major customers, but what else is possible?" The key question for all businesses right now is - "what else is possible?" "We've got these great 3 major clients, now can we introduce some different user pay services? Can we introduce some new product services? Can we introduce things that we do so well that we can turn them into services or products that other organizations might be willing to pay money for?" What if you looked at every service or product you now offered, and truly believed that there were 3 new sources of revenue from those existing services/products. What would you do?? What would that look like?
Every business has the capacity to do this. This is a great opportunity, a great wake-up call for all those organizations out there that overly rely on one source of income. Continue to generate revenue from those sources, but continue to ask what else is possible.
What would it take for you and your organisation to function from: "Okay so what is it that we do so well that we actually create other revenue sources from this skill? Given that we do this so well, how can we turn this into another product or service that is actually going to generate further revenue for us? And, if we're very good at this, and we do it really well and we know we do it really well because we keep generating revenue from this, then maybe we can work with a University and have some of their film people come out and spend a week in the life of our company, video-taping what it is that we do and the way we as a business go about doing it. Then we can provide that in a short succinct one hour video, which we then provide as training to government departments and other organizations which then they're willing to pay for. On top of that, we could also possibly even get a grant or sponsorship to develop it." Just an example....
All of a sudden, that which the organization is really good at doing, which is their programs or products or services, they have actually developed into a new product suite, which is not dependant on two or three revenue sources. That's just an example of where businesses can look at what they've taken for granted and look to see what else is possible here.
Look at every thing that you and your organization have assumed or decided you have got right, which is no longer working for you, and identify other ways that you might undertake whatever is not working for your business. Don't fall into the trap of insanity.......Einstein's definition of insanity-doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.