Just when you thought you had the killer product, effective marketing campaign, perfect partner or key person or process in your business it can already be in the process of winding down to be replaced by the next great product, next great marketing campaign…business goes to those who adapt quickly to market desire and opportunity.
I’ve been around and at the forefront of enough businesses to know that failing to reinvent constantly is a sure way to drive your business into the ground. One minute you can be sitting on top of the world, the next you can be in a crisis meeting with what is left of your staff or partners looking for magical ways out of the whole you suddenly find yourself in.
It doesn’t have to be that way, markets and buyers love speed…they will reward speed with their investment, so you want to structure your business around speed.
To do that, consider these 3 critical factors in taking advantage of the speed to market and profit rewards this brings.
1. Invest In Yourself
You can only handle the speed, change, constant upheaval and hit to your ego that all of this can represent IF you prepare yourself as if going to battle. You want to train yourself to be the ultimate warrior…to stay calm, focused, creative and have good judgement during times of rapid change. Prepare yourself to be only partly right and let your market direct you to the ultimate answers…think of yourself as the catalyst toward crowdsourced solutions for your market versus the all-knowing, all-doing wizard.
What skills does this demand of you?
- Health and energy…you will need lots of both to move consistently fast
- Passion and knowing yourself…you can only keep up if you are honest and clear with yourself about what your passions are, if you are purpose driven
- Listening…I can’t tell you how many business leaders are holding back their potential right now simply because they do not really listen to what their market is saying
- Communication…you get as much back as effort you put into communicating with your market and your peers
- Decision making…learning to have just enough information is a skill itself. You will never be perfect but you can improve your decision making
- Stress management & Managing Your Fear…building your business will bring stress and will test your resolve over and over, knowing how to trust yourself and manage stress are key components to building a successful business
2. Good Enough…Then Better
Learning when to test ideas, concepts, products, marketing messages and business models is key to being successful and reinventing your business.
You can have the best market knowledge, top people around you but in the end your market will tell you.
So, you deliberately want to build a relationship with early adopters/champions in your market who you can co-build and test your key products and messages with, that care enough to help you refine those products and messages from something good to something great.
Nothing happens until you release or share though, holding things back until they are perfect will almost always result in failure. Since reinvention calls for constant testing, obviously this becomes a crucial part of your daily business planning and execution.
3. Constant Improvement (Living In Beta…)
In the software engineering community we used to call it “iterative development”, with books it is the “first edition”…any way you word it the concept is that your product, business and marketing are never complete, only evolving.
While our businesses have always been designed around the adages of constant improvement, iteration and growth – this blog post titled “Living in A Permanent Beta” is one of the better communications of exactly this concept. Continuously nurturing your closest allies within your marketplace, continually reinvesting and reinventing your business and constantly driving toward a larger life mission are all concepts that help bring focus to how dynamic businesses are run.
You may wonder as an individual entrepreneur, does all of this apply to me?
Absolutely – even to a greater degree as individual entrepreneurs or micro businesses depend heavily on their link to the market, their limberness to evolve and stay one-step (at least) ahead of their competition.
So are you ready to reinvent yourself and your business plan to live in beta? Your success and wealth depend on it.
