As Business Owner
- Are you anxious for survival of your business?
- Unable to penetrate areas of your business rivals?
- Lacking the requisite strategy and vision to boost your business?
Then, It is high time you spend some good time to chalk out a Strategy to Beat Business Competition and Thrive!
In essence, what is required of you is to have a well-documented GAME PLAN TO BEAT YOUR COMPETITORS.
Essentially, Five Different Types Of Strategies Can Help You Push Your Efforts For Success.
1. Review Your Current Business Model.
- What do you sell?
- Who do you sell it to?
- How do you market, sell and deliver your product/service?
- How and when do you get paid?
- What resources do you currently require i.e., people, premises, equipment, funding, working capital and so on.
A clear understanding of how you run your business currently will help you to ensure:
- where improvements could be made.
- where to make things easier in future.
- how to compete with your new ‘low cost’ competitors.
2. Revisit Your Business Strategy
- Vision – What do you do and how do you help your customers?
- Notice how it is outward looking it is about your customers – not about yourselves.
- Values – how do you operate your business and how do you want to be perceived?
- Strategic Intent – How do you plan to move forward and where do you plan to move to?
- Understand your current constraints and how you plan to overcome them.
- Accept that you can not expect to keep doing the same things to get a different result.
- Retain focus with total commitment.
- When you try and fail…fail fast, regroup, and move again.
3. SWOT Analysis
Do a brainstorming session. and ask the following questions:
What are your Strengths?
- How do you compare to others in your market?
- What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)?
- How are you better than your competitors?
- How can you maintain and develop your strengths?
What are your Weaknesses?
- How can you overcome or eliminate them?
What are your Opportunities
- What are your peers in industry doing?
- What is happening on global level?
- What government/environment changes are occurring and how you can leverage them?
- What other things could you produce with your current resources?
- It might be time to wind-down some current activities in favour of new ones that have future income potential.
- How can technology help you to deliver at lower cost to a wider market?
What are your Threats?
- Are there new low-cost competitors entering your market?
- Are there government/environmental changes happening that may affect you in future?
- Could your product/service be rendered obsolete by innovation/technology?
4. Competitor Analysis
- Who are you competing with?
- How do they run their business?
- Can you learn anything from them to improve your offering/mode of delivering?
How do you compete with them?
- Price
How do your costs compare?
You may struggle to compete on price if Competitors have a lower cost base than yours.
2. Value
What is your USP?
Customers do not always buy on price alone.
If you can demonstrate better value, you could win over competitors.
- Convenience –If your product or service delivers better convenience and you can clearly articulate it-customers may be prepared to pay a premium.
5. Business Plan Initiatives
Now you must formulate your Game Plan laying down:
- Objectives
- Activity plan
- Action plan
- Set priorities
- Set timeframes for each action- when do you plan to achieve them?
- Set responsibility for actions – who will perform them?
- Plan resources and finance required to achieve actions e.g. will you need any new equipment to be more efficient at things? Will you need to invest in systems or staff to achieve actions?
- Set targets for measuring success of actions using KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
- Provide a clear target for people to work towards.
- Provide evidence and need for improvement in actions.
- Provide evidence and reason to celebrate achievements.
WRAPPING UP
Business in the prevailing environment is quite a challenge in itself. Every stage of progress warrants new and fresh initiatives to beat the business competition. However, there is no reason to despair. One has to combat the rivals head-on. Concentrating on the above Five Strategic Areas in mind shall help the business owner meet the problem halfway. Is it not what is required instead of a complicated recipe of actions?
Competition whose motive is merely to compete, to drive some other fellow out, never carries very far. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time. Businesses that grow by development and improvement do not die.
Henry Ford
