I've had a good number of thoughts on two businesses I'm involved in and what we can do to overcome a struggle that each is individually facing. Both businesses are in dissimilar industries and their problems are not even remotely similar. One business is struggling hard with failure and the other is not; it is struggling how to grow its business after a period of significant change.
The key to each business's success will be innovation. There is nothing that says this innovation needs to be life-changing. In fact, the concept I have is that the innovation will be decidedly non-life-changing - i.e. we will remain who we are but modify what we actually do and say. It will be simple steps in the direction of improving how we conduct ourselves and communicate with our customers. A few of the change we need to make are not without much work and dedication towards modifying how we do certain things.
At some later point, I hope to delve into one of the details and to talk about what my thoughts are, but to keep this short, I wanted to add only this: The idea that innovation in simple steps will be necessary and bring about positive results came to me when I was looking at a website of a competitor. In reality, we wouldn't dare compete against them because they really do a much better job than us in being good at a large number of items that we don't have the staffing or equipment to handle. Plus, they have the resources to take on much larger projects than we could hope for. We are comparable to them in terms of pricing and personalized service. While we win in pricing, we fail miserably in personalized service/support. We also fail horribly at collecting on payments owed to us. Both of these items are 100% our fault. We have continually over-promised and under-delivered. We have not taken the necessary steps to guarantee payment (as much as anything can be guaranteed) either. Both of these items should be easily resolved. We need to ask customers whose service we cannot hope to manage to find another vendor and we need to make sure that those we keep and those we add are within our sphere of capabilities. When this requires growth, then we have to bite the bullet and grow.
The above is just a short version of what we need to change about what we are doing. To top it off, if we look at reality and ask the question about whether or not we are even capable of providing the services we promise, we can't. Not with how we are currently conducting the business. We will need to innovate what and how we do things to meet these needs and fulfill our obligations. The innovation I have in mind is not revolutionary, it is evolutionary, and without burden of not having to create a new paradigm, we can take the slow, measured steps needed to be inventive and improve. And, we will improve and we will succeed.
So, the key to our success is innovation. The reason for our disappointments has been failure to do so.
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