Taking distance with your current situation
Working hard on your business, making sure your customers are served, we tend to lose the perspective on our firm’s context and situation.
By keeping on grinding, we may miss opportunities by not seeing them, or worse, letting our competitors take these opportunities, losing the game and become obsolete.
That is what the McDonald’s owners didn’t get in the movie The Founder]. Ray Kroc found out the real opportunity and took advantage of it.
By developing the franchise business, Ray Croc was not making much money for himself, since having the franchise was not the most profitable. After a period of questioning, he realized that owning the real estate and renting it out to the franchisees was the real opportunity for wealth, and control of the franchisees.
After years of development, the real business model of McDonald’s wasn’t fast Restauration but real estate. He was owning the best possible properties in the most attractive locations, at the corners of the most crowded streets in the world.
Assessing the possibilities and finding the opportunity
There are ways to find out the possibilities to improve the business opportunities of your company.
But at the end of the day, it involves switching massively one key aspect of the business or combining two or three major changes.
Here are some of them:
- Looking out for smart business models in other industries
- Going from product-based to service/solution-based
- Adding a technological edge to your industry
- Going from manufacturing to out-sourcing or vice-versa
- Developing a community related to your industry, that makes you indispensable
- Leveraging international sales, or fine-tuning your local network
- Going from direct distribution to a distributor based network of sales
- Using the B2B toolset to B2C or vice versa
Taking action to adjust to the opportunities
It is famously said among the personal development community that the top of the pile has less competition.
Aiming for average is sure to lead to no interesting outcome. You’ll be sure to end up another version of thousands of companies.
What matters is to find the thing that makes you unique, and that no-one else can offer.
For that you need to take distance from your current activities: travel, meet new people, relax with your friends and family until things become clear and idea pollinate.
Once you got an idea, start experimenting until you see the true potential, and become ruthless about executing it.
