Invest where your business value is the highest.
Where does the actual business value lie? Is it in the product, people, or processes? The lazy answer is that it relies on all three, but a deeper look into it might surprise you.
Product
Physical or service, the product of a business refers to what the business offers to solve a customer’s problem. Sourcing, developing, and building a product or suite of products is essential for any business that trades. This often creates a mindset that centers the value of a company on its product.
People
Pavlo says he’s “heard utterances from my team is everything to if you want something done correctly, do it yourself.” So, which is it? Without your team, you are not a business. A one-person or two-person business is one that you create for yourself. The team is vital to “SCALE & GROW”, and advance the size, profitability, and ability of a business.
Processes
The daily, weekly, and monthly activities that you need to perform across your business functions govern the customer experience, the team experience, the supplier experience, and any other stakeholder in your business. Without process, chaos reigns. Too much process creates a pool of treacle for anything new to happen.
The best approach is to adopt an investor mindset, something especially hard for any company founder or owner to achieve.
Listen to this podcast from The Money Show where Pavlo Phitidis discusses “product, people, or processes”
Products can and will be imitated and replicated by competitors. With time and money, their value erodes. People come and go, and skills are more available now than ever before. A mindset arguing that people hold the business value. Then if that’s so, where is the value in the business if people come and go? Processes create the experience behind every engagement with a business. If a good experience a customer, supplier, or employee has with the company is reliable and predictable, they will continue to support that business. To get this right means that you need to understand your customers’ needs, wants, psychographics, and behaviours. It means you need to have a definitive culture and set of values that attract and repel employees, leaving you with those that identify with your company and, therefore, customers. In the order of processes, these elements need good products to trade effectively.
This equation of business value….it all starts, and ends, with processes leading the value investment!