Tag: Positioning

How you position your business determines your ability to grow.

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on May 29, 2023. Posted in Asset of Value, Creating time, Insights, Operational systems, Scale & Grow.

Pavlo recently had a valuable conversation that highlighted the common challenges faced by many business owners. One crucial aspect that determines the effectiveness of your business in terms of competition, scalability, growth, and industry dominance is how you position it.

Here’s the context: the business in question deals with second-generation door and window frames, and it has been operating for three generations. The owners have been blindly loyal to their suppliers, but they are experiencing a decrease in customer loyalty. Additionally, they are grappling with an aging workforce and the absence of apprenticeships and artisanal skill development.

The business has hit a growth ceiling, and what makes matters more pressing is the fact that the average age of competitors across the industry is approaching 61. This poses a challenge as the business needs to grow to combat inflation and secure retirement and pensions for the third generation, who are constantly uncertain about the future.

The owners are aware of what needs to be done to foster growth, but they find themselves lacking the time to dedicate to it. Their daily, weekly, and monthly operations are the center of their attention.

To overcome these challenges, the resolution lies in repositioning the business. The following steps should be taken:

Position: Clearly define the business and its core focus. Determine precisely who you serve, and what experience you provide in delivering your solution to them.
Build a system of delivery that codifies every action and step that enables that delivery, consistently.
Do it with your team: Acknowledging that growth cannot be achieved alone, they engaged their team in the decision-making process. By leveraging collective knowledge and expertise, they instilled a sense of ownership and commitment, inspiring everyone to work towards a shared goal.
Release your time: Recognizing the value of the business owner’s time, they delegated and automated tasks that could be handled by others. This freed up time for the owner to focus on growth strategies, explore new opportunities, and build connections with industry leaders.

As the business owner, you need to ask yourself, “What is your job”? In our door and window frame company example, the business owners shifted from being immersed in daily operations to becoming leaders. Guiding and inspiring the team towards achieving growth objectives became their primary focus. To get this right, take a leaf out of their playbook:

Start: What business are you in? Revisiting their core purpose, they identified the specific niche within the door and window frame industry where they aimed to excel. This allowed them to differentiate themselves and concentrate efforts on areas with the greatest growth potential.
Build – create a chassis to support growth: By decoding what they did and how, they established a solid foundation to develop apprenticeships and skill development initiatives to attract and nurture new talent, ensuring a sustainable workforce for the future.
Grow and lead it: The business owner took the lead as the driving force behind the company’s growth. Actively seeking expansion opportunities, exploring strategic partnerships, and embracing innovation became their mantra to stay ahead of the competition.
Sell and package it: Understanding the value of their business, and with a system and team in place that showed potential buyers the sustainability and growth trajectory, the owners have built the business into an asset that functions without them in it, and thus can be succeeded or sold.

Positioning your business effectively is crucial for competition, growth, and industry dominance. The experiences and challenges faced by this door and window frame company underscore the significance of strategic decision-making, fostering a growth-oriented culture, and adapting to changing market dynamics.

To listen to the full discussion from the show:

This Week@Work: Create opportunities through business development

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on March 16, 2023. Posted in Lead generation and conversion, Leadership, Operational systems, Positioning, Team, Week at Work.

This Week@Work Pavlo went to play in the traffic, to make a point about actively hunting for business, rather than passively waiting for it to come to you.

Business Development is more than marketing or sales and it allows us to see the opportunities in the market, which you can’t see if you’re simply waiting for the phone to ring.

This Week@Work: A brilliant product or service is only half of the business

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on February 23, 2023. Posted in Mindset, Positioning, Scale & Grow, Week at Work.

This Week@Work Pavlo met with a business owner who has a brilliant product that genuinely competes with the best in their industry. But a product only exists for one reason – to solve a problem for someone. The team and commercial system that allows people to find, use and want more of the product is the 2nd half the business.

Watch as Pavlo discusses this idea of 2 parts of a business.

Variety of canned beans, This week @ work

This Week@Work: Beans are not just beans, but they can help you get your positioning right!

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on February 16, 2023. Posted in Mindset, Positioning, Scale & Grow, Week at Work.

This Week@Work Pavlo met with a business that is deeply entrenched in all things solar – a great sector to be in but their problem is that they have evolved to be everything to everyone. Their positioning is not clear, and they won’t be able to scale and grow until they get that right.

Pavlo looks to baked beans to illustrate how to think about your business’s positioning.

POSITION YOUR BUSINESS FOR SUCCESS AND MAXIMUM IMPACT

Written by pippa@aurik.com on October 19, 2020. Posted in Leadership, Positioning.

Wing Chun Kung Fu, a style of martial arts, requires that you have a secure footing on the ground in all its defensive and offensive actions. This footing “anchors” you to the ground. It translates the force of your strike or block from your foot to your knees to your hips and torso to your strike or block. It lends integrity, strength and power to your action be it a kick or a punch.

Building and growing a business is no different. It all begins with positioning and leads all the effort and activity based on that positioning. Weak positioning or poorly articulated positioning will lead to misguided actions, investments, hires and decisions. It fragments and crumbles the businesses platform, leads to a life of chaos and frustrations as a #businessowner and will almost assure you a future where what you have built will never be saleable.

WHAT IS POSITIONING

This is all about what makes you special as a business. not in your view, but in the view of your customers. Not in what they say, as much as in what they do. that means, they say they like your service or product and they show it by returning again and again. They promote your business to friends and family. They turn their talk into walk.

WHY DOES IT MATTER

A well-built business that consistently gets to both the next level of growth and value is one that has been built of a clearly articulated, relevant positioning. It enjoys clarity and certainty in why it exists and how it will grow. Its “foot” is planted on the ground and points towards the direction that the strike or block needs to follow. The solid footing ensures that all the actions leading up to that strike are aligned, efficient and direct the maximum effort of the body’s movement into that strike.

These actions include marketing to generate leads, sales to convert those leads and operations to deliver the promise of the sales proposition. The team employed by the business understands how to work together, is well-coordinated and includes the right people doing the right thing at the right time.

A business that has no positioning or a poorly defined positioning can never direct and concentrate all its actions towards achieving its objectives. The actions would be fragmented and misaligned and the team would behave inconsistently and chaotically.

Poorly positioned business bleed effort, money and time since they are following an unstable footing.

WEAK POSITIONING STATEMENTS

When I ask most business owners what makes their business special, they say one of three things 99% of the time.

Product – they argue the merits of their product in terms of its features and benefits. They might go so far as to say that their suppliers or manufacturing approach is unique and special. These aspects make their product superior. It’s the product that they have, hold and own or represent that makes them special.

The origins of this way of thinking date back to the mid-seventeen hundred when Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”. This is to say that a great product will always create a destination for customers to come to you. In the 18^th century he was right. There were hardly any products around. Simply having one meant business!

Service – many, in fact most, say it’s their service. that they offer personal service and will bend over backwards to accommodate and please their customers. Service wins the day and they offer that.
Price – sometimes they argue price. Few argue that in fact because to attain price advantage over something in a competitive market is hard. If you are not in a competitive market, then price probably doesn’t matter in any event.

The fact is that seldom do any of these positions translate into a successful result.

Whilst each of these attributes may be true for a while, none remain true consistently. Money can build a better product, service is largely driven directly by the business owner (and that is not sustainable) and price advantage seldom lasts.

HOW DO YOU CREATE A WINNING POSITIONING?

Today, the world has become more fragmented and more individual than ever before in its trading history. IN 1922, Henry Ford produced the Model T Ford. He was quipped saying “you can have any model you want so long as it’s black”. Choices were limited then and more importantly, access to information and choice even more so. The trends today are focusing more on customised products and services than ever before and that is only going to increase.

In this world, spoilt for choice, customers want solutions to problems. These problems need to be lived, felt and experienced by the customers that a business serves. This means your positioning as a business needs to talk to the problems that you solve and who has them. If this is clear, then any marketing effort will contain messaging that resonates with the customers you want to reach. They will hear and identify with the problem that you claim to solve. Thereafter, any selling effort needs to demonstrate how your product or service will solve the problems you have articulated. Finally, the delivery of the product or service needs to create an experience that resonates with how customers, with the problems you have identified, want to be served.

It is the single most difficult thing to get right in a business. but when you do, all the actions that follow it will be aligned to generate momentum behind every investment and action you make in your business.

Working with Aurik, we revisit your positioning first. Once sure that it is relevant and clearly defined, we work with you to build all the actions your business needs to get to the next level of growth and value. Through this, we will ensure that you maximise your return on money, effort and time. Contact us today and let’s start the conversation.