Growth Trends 2011

The days of picking a business concept based on what experts say is a hot market are over. Flipping businesses gets little respect, whereas building businesses gets all the respect. Sure there are markets and products that are trending toward growth as understood by consumer behavior studies. There are also plenty of other lessons to learn from.

However, the true bottom line is that if your heart isn’t in it, don’t do it. Too many times business owners start businesses on what people tell them to invest in when in fact they know little about the business or what it really takes to be creative and successful as a new competitor on a long-term basis. This sets owners up to grow tired, disillusioned and skeptical about where they are investing their money. This is a formula for long-term disaster.

With the technology and resources available today, an owner can start a business at any level. There is no need to follow “experts” who don’t put their own efforts where their mouths are. So why not do what you want and what you love?

Business owners are successful when they are self-aware and invest in what they believe in. When they have a true passion for their work, they are creative problem solvers. They create solutions that are intuitive and growth savvy.

Growth-oriented business concepts can originate from anywhere (a basement, a bar napkin, a dream) but regardless, some aspect of the challenge must come from a passion somewhere in the owner’s bones for it to be developed into a successful outcome.

Many businesses are fragmented. Much of their energy is dispersed among too many markets, products, services, customers, employees and investments which confuse the daily tasks of decision makers. In times of uncertainty, many owners subconsciously spread themselves too thin in order to seemingly have their options open. They create an adrenaline rush that creates a false sense of urgency and security about their successes and how to achieve them.

Without integrative forethought, this forces each new idea to have its own set of resources in order to get off the ground. Thus, the organization’s resources become fragmented and have less energy than if ideas and resources were better orchestrated to create a synergistic environment for growth.

Business owners of the future will integrate their passion, strategy, collaboration of people, and work systems into more focused solutions that create specific experiences desired by specific, target customers. While the products and markets can still be plenty, the possibility of being everything to everyone disappeared a long time ago. Most business owners instinctively know this. Yet, most have not transitioned to integrated business models that coordinate activities in their businesses around core deliverables.

These models do not limit the possible deliverables. They simply organize them in ways that focus energy and the appropriate allocation of resources to achieve realistic outcomes for growth and profitability.

Today “growth” can mean many things. It can mean more volume, more profit, more products, more customers, more self-respect, and more personal satisfaction … yet almost always it requires better relationships with yourself and others to be achieved.

Thus, we define growthsourcing as any relationship with you, vendors, customers, employees, sub-contractors, or peers that help you grow in any way that you define as the type of growth you are trying to achieve. Even if a business owner does not want to grow volume or profit, chances are he or she wants to somehow grow a better quality of life. Whatever the game, the resources one surrounds him or her self with will define the ability to achieve that desired growth.

Growthsourcing in the future requires a business owner to define what growth personally means to them and find the best resources that will help him achieve that growth. Growthsourcing also requires a business owner to focus his efforts on his strengths and source services and products from others who will complete non-core activities better than he can. The efficiency and profit-driving potential of growthsourcing partnerships is powerful for today’s entrepreneur.

Every product and service has some degree of competition. If left standing alone with nothing more than its own looks, a product will live a shorter life than if it offered a more unique value. Today, all products and services must “perform” at some level to create memorable experiences for customers. This idea of creating experiences via products and services is often the most differentiating factor that can be executed to make a product, service, and company brand stand out.

Creating products and services with a memorable experience in 2011 requires first knowing who your customers are and what experience they desire from your offering. Then, you must develop product strengths and delivery systems around those perceived desires.

Sometimes your customers will not know the experiences they desire because the context for it may not yet exist. But if you listen to the market and stimulate your creative juices, you can create demand in very original ways.

Your ability to do this will not go unnoticed if you create a synergy between your unique, core product strengths and the very basic but deep desires of your customers. Packaging this synergy into a branded experience that is reliable, unique, and positive, will innovate new trends and build a memorable brand identity for months and years to come.

Some business owners get so excited about the prospect of new innovation that they start rushing products and services into the marketplace without focusing on where success will be best achieved. In the long run, we find this haste makes waste in time and money. It can also take a business off-course from a direction that will bring sustained innovation and growth.

Understanding what is unique about your business model and the values by which you will operate can begin a flurry of ideas for years to come. Creating a unique business model is a basis for innovation that helps focus a large vision down to hundreds of possibilities for new products and services. Otherwise, without a business model programmed by your core strengths, those ‘good’ hundreds of possibilities can easily turn into a mess of thousands that will overwhelm or stifle an organization’s creativity and ability to grow.

For the opportunity-seeking entrepreneur, business modeling may seem like too much structure that could potentially limit the organization. Yet paradoxically, from it can spring innovative products and services that a) currently do not exist, b) are designed by what the business can realistically deliver, and c) reach untapped consumer demand.

That’s why successful business owners in 2011 will create unique business models and use them as tools for introducing new products and services to specific customer segments that make the most sense for their available resources. They will (with a sense of urgency) take a few extra steps to target the most viable segments who desire the business’ most reliable core strengths.

How a business delivers its products and services ultimately defines whether customers will be satisfied and later return for more. For most businesses there can be many steps required to get a product or service successfully out the door to an eager consumer.

In these days of business process engineering, we intellectually know that there are some business processes that are more important than others. We also know that most business processes are intertwined and feed off of one another.

It gets complex, confusing and intimidating. Every business has areas where it knows its service and delivery are less than acceptable; therefore being a leader in 2011 requires increased focus on making process development a practical part of growing a business.

Savvy business owners will press the topic of starting somewhere with process improvement. They will start to get people in their businesses to realize that process comes before people; meaning that people cannot be successful without processes to support them.
Getting beyond the petty problems and moving toward bigger solutions that form collaboration and cooperation will be the focus that owners of small and medium businesses will finally start to embrace. They will accept that this is no longer just a topic for only big companies. It is a topic that means efficiency, productivity and a competitive edge for any size business.

Successful business owners in 2011 will know that people are king. Thus, they will be looking for any opportunity to know who their people are and what they want from their lives and work. Otherwise, they know that the great ones will leave for better opportunities that resonate with their personal interests.

The best employers in 2011 will utilize proven assessment tools to first understand their existing top performers in the areas of preferences, attitude, behavioral instincts and skills. They will utilize this information to hire others from the outside who will complement the current culture and help them transition to new talent that will positively impact their momentum toward the envisioned future.

They will implement performance planning tools on an ongoing basis that will help them keep touch with the ongoing development, training, performance and goals of their employees. This means owners will take an interest in their people like they do all other revenue generating aspects of their business … even more so.

Blanketed awareness and branding advertising for small and medium size businesses is cost prohibitive and not effective. If business owners are depending on blanketed advertising it is because they have not yet defined their target markets, and are in a world of hurt. They are wasting money.

Your customers want to know what you have to offer and what is in it for them. The best way to communicate this is via planned, strategic, direct marketing tactics. Creating a defined list of targets, making clear the message that needs to be delivered and executing regular, relentless follow-up on each and every exposure will pay more return on investment than any Yellow Pages ad, non-targeted magazine ad, or email blast campaign.

This means that the tighter the target the better the returns versus the old-style marketing-to-the-masses. Direct marketing to a list of 200 prospects with a multiple card postcard campaign will be more effective than a magazine ad reaching 10,000 magazine subscribers.

The trick is to strategically plan a systematic approach from design of the postcards, to the mailing list, to the person making telephone calls and finally to the product presentations. The effort must be integrated and synchronized or don’t bother.

The future survival of businesses depends on their abilities to connect their communities with others halfway around the world. Owners who do not accept the impact of globalization especially in manufacturing industries will fail. This is often dismissed because most owners expect to be in business 5-7 years from now.

Thus, such threats seem controllable and too extreme and drastic to actually threaten their businesses. Yet, many globally aware professionals can reassure you that any business operating today in manufacturing and replicated service capacities will need to dramatically change their business models in order to survive beyond the next 5-7 years.

This will affect vendor, engineering, production, sales, and customer service capacities. The pace of change in many industries is so dramatic that most of what is happening is not even recognized until it is almost too late. Suddenly your largest customer is gone to some company you never even heard of.

The best way to imagine the role of American business is as global innovators. We will create what the rest of the world produces. Businesses that learn to thrive in 2011 and beyond will be smaller, entrepreneurial and innovative in creating product and service solutions that can be executed worldwide in any size of organization.

The business owners of 2011 will start preparations to be ready for what’s to come in utilizing global sources to execute their ideas, while expanding new economic opportunities to their local communities.

According to Microsoft and many other technology innovators, the days of the desktop PC with hard-drive installed software will soon be over. As high-speed internet technologies race to become available in the most rural of neighborhoods, software systems as mainstream as Microsoft Word will be instantly downloaded from their web-based server (with the latest upgrades included) every time you write a letter.

The fact is: computer hardware technology cannot keep up with today’s software applications. Therefore, web-based software solutions are the future because they require little to no hardware capacity – except perhaps storage of your finished documents.

Think about all the operations in your businesses that are reliant on the calculations and efficiencies of a computer. How many are web-based versus on-site server operated? If you just finished a system upgrade to an internal ERP system, know that innovative business owners are thinking again and shifting to web-based systems within the next five years.

Web-based systems are secure, available anytime and anywhere, require no software installations, offer instant upgrades, will be more cost effective, and require much less IT support, if any at all. Seriously be thinking about databases and systems that are centralized and more efficient.

Businesses that focus on giving back to communities beyond offering jobs will be the leaders. Every business owner evolves to realizing a deeper desire to make a difference beyond bottom-line financial performance. In fact, matters of social responsibility can force a business owner to focus more on business measurements in order to have the means to give back in meaningful ways. This will be a growing trend as today’s owners age and retire over the next five years. The growing desire for establishing a legacy will creep in. In many cases, owners will not have family members to pass their businesses on to. Thus, looking for social-based alternatives is an excellent way to sustain the business and grow loyalty in the communities to which they serve.

Owners are exploring ways to evolve their business endeavors beyond an individual or family fortune. This creates an amazing way to propel a business into a new growth cycle. A business that manufactures metal components can all of a sudden expand and create a sense of urgency for change through a social purpose beyond producing parts. Every owner has a vision for how his or her community can be better: better schools, environmental care, supporting other entrepreneurs, finding cures for disease, global awareness, or family unity are just a few to mention. We challenge you to clearly define what difference your organization can make in your community. Then build strategies for making bottom-line contributions to serve that cause. See what happens.