Is Your Business Set To Compete?

Building a successful business is all about realising where you are looking to place your own organization and understanding the challenges that you will face. Few successful businesses manage to thrive, without considering the threat posed by rivals.

When you are operating your own small business, you may also wish to ponder this fact. If successful companies dedicate time to considering the wider business environment, then should you be doing the same? There are a number of standard answers to this question and it may be worth thinking about each of them in turn.

The first answer that I hear from some business owners is that this simply isn't possible. They would argue that it makes sense for larger firms, but that smaller businesses simply don't have the time and resources available to carry out suitable levels of research.

Although there may be some truth in this answer, it's actually rather revealing about priorities that are being set within the business environment. What is being said here is that carrying out such work is not seen as being something that has a high priority. That's why different decisions are being taken.

The other response is that such a review has already been carried out and that it has been discovered that your rivals can't match what you are able to offer. This is good news and should mean that you will be able to grow your business extremely quickly. There's a chance here to generate serious income levels.

But what happens if you have reached such a conclusion, yet find that you aren't attracting significant numbers of new customers. Indeed, you may be aware of the fact that many people are turning to your rivals. If this is the case, then the suggestion has to be that your original analysis was not objective or correct.

In such a situation, it's important for you to take a step back. You really do need to find the level of objectivity that's required in order to make a reasonable assessment of what's going on. Without being realistic, you'll find that you can't improve the situation.

This is something that should be a real concern because a failure to improve will mean that you are unable to compete. If you want to be successful, then you need to think carefully about your approach, services and the products that you offer.

I frequently advise clients to look particularly closely at the approach that they are taking to marketing. Is this something that is going well? Could things be improved in this area?