Small Business Digital CoachGROW REVENUES BY 25 TO 100% OR MORE IN 90 DAYS OR LESS while reducing advertising cost and effort

Simply devoting 2-3 hours each month to asking a few questions can help you substantially increase your revenues and profits.

One of the simplest but most paradigm shifting questions you can ask yourself is,

“What is my business”?

My answer to this question is:

“A business is a moving matrix of relationships and abilities leveraging other portfolios of relationships and abilities.”

This definition is a variant of a definition given by Dr. Venkat Venkatraman, a leading business thinker, who instructs business leaders to…

“…look at a corporation as a portfolio of abilities leveraging a portfolio of relationships.”

In consulting with prospective clients, I’ve found that when I share this definition with them, it allows them to see all kinds of new profit centers and new permutations of their business that lead to “soft innovation” and increased profits.

As often as possible, you should ask yourself some of the following questions.

What business am I in?
The truth is that no matter what business or industry you’re in, you are first and foremost in the marketing business. Any business owner who doesn’t understand this, or doesn’t apply the lessons of this conclusion will fall victim to a market twist and turn (or an economic downturn) sooner or later.

Could I create a new category by adding or subtracting something?
The excellent book “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, takes a look at how some companies have managed to create businesses completely outside the “red ocean” (heavily competitive categories), by essentially creating their own category.

Cirque du soleil is a particularly memorable example of a business that has created a “competition-free” zone for itself for decades now by creating a category that is neither completely high performance art, or circus, but a hybrid of both. And so when businesses within both categories were competing each other to death, Cirque du Soleil just kept expanding to greater and greater heights.

In the Internet business systems niche, SiteSell is another such “Blue Ocean” company (in my opinion). Neither simply a web host, nor a website software provider, nor a membership-based internet education platform, but all those things and more at a very affordable price. (Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Sitesell, a company whose products I absolutely believe in).

Could I create new uniqueness or advantage by stripping something out?
There’s also the possibility of creating a unique company by stripping out most of what other competitors typically include so that you end up faster, leaner, more efficient and more affordable by giving the marketplace only what it wants and leaving the rest out.

To a certain extent, this is how Southwest rose to prominence during a time when airlines where offering full service and other amenities, Southwest came through with stripping out the decorations (i.e. meals on short flights) and amped up the customer service combined with more affordable flying.

Could I re-arrange my whole service delivery (operations) and communications (marketing) around what is currently only a small component or profit center in my business?
This is what I call the “Tail That Wags The Dog” Strategy.
In Seth Godin’s book “The Free Prize Inside”, he discusses the curious phenomenon of buyers often making their purchasing decision based on some seemingly tangential attribute of the product/service they eventually chose. The “soft innovations” (according to Seth), that constitute “the second reason to buy the thing”.

I can’t help but think about a spa within 10 minutes from my house. I first noticed it when a hot pink limousine full of screaming teenage girls (or what I presume to be screaming teenage girls…it could have been aliens), rolled past me… I later discovered they were coming from a sort of Spa where girls could really get their birthday treatment with all their closest friends.

As you might suspect, the limo ride has become the highlight of the day!!