On top of having a strong marketing plan, great location, great product, established customer base as well as other factors; luck also has a hand in determining the success of your business that you’ve bought or built. There is such a thing as creating your own luck that can allow you to take your business to the next level; and set you up to sell at maximum value. However, there are some parameters to keep in mind when trying to accomplish this.
Set Sharp and Clear Priorities
When dealing with a market that’s unpredictable in nature, many business owners will often run multiple experiments and unleash a flurry of new initiatives. When you look at one initiative on its own, it makes sense; however, combined will lead to an abundance of tasks that will overwhelm you as a business owner. Therefore, it’s imperative that you prioritize your tasks from top to bottom, clearly and effectively without losing focus. If you determine which priorities are the highest, that will leave more time to focus on them and achieve; setting aside the ones lower on the ladder that can wait till later.
Maintain a Fuzzy Vision
This may seem unusual but as a business owner, you have to acknowledge that first and foremost you cannot predict or control how the future will unfold. Therefore, don’t create a concrete plan as much as express a fuzzy vision, which can comprise of a business’ domain, geographic scope and aspiration in broad terms such as saying, “You aspire to global leadership in your industry.”
A fuzzy vision will provide a general direction for you and set aspirations without prematurely locking your business into a specific course.
You don’t want to design an overly-detailed, long-term vision as that will cause more problems than solve. They encourage business owners to bet too big and too early that can have disastrous results. They can distract employees from emerging changes that are inconsistent with the vision, and provide a false sense of security that the world is more certain than it is.
Performing Reconnaissance for the Future
By military definition, reconnaissance is the act of sending troops ahead of an advancing army to investigate the terrain, enemy disposition and other factors that lie ahead. In business, it’s the process of probing the fog of unforeseeable events into the future to discover an emerging situation. There are four principles that capture the essence of performing reconnaissance into the future:
Jump into the action: Rather than spending years conducting market research, businesses should make exploratory forays by investing in or partnering with startups, or conducting small-scale experiments to test the market.
Send out multiple probes: A prudent general sends out probes in different directions to broaden the search for opportunities. Business owners should likewise avoid betting the operation in pursuing a single path.
Examine anomalies: In turbulent markets, an owner’s mental map can be quickly outdated. Anomalies provide clues as to where a mental map is wrong, and owners that discover and act upon these clues can seize the initiative from competitors slower to abandon their assumptions.
When you observe an anomaly, you must investigate it firsthand until you are satisfied they understand the source of the discrepancy. Therefore, when conducting reconnaissance, business owners must above all remain alert to anomalies:
- New information that surprises them or doesn’t jibe with expectations;
- Things that should work but don’t or that shouldn’t work but do.
Feeling the Walls for Gaps: Reconnaissance into the future resembles a process of probing a wall of resistance for gaps. Most of the time, a business encounters hard surfaces such as competitors who won’t get out of the way, customers who don’t want to buy and technologies that won’t work. Rather than exhaust resources trying to smash through the wall, business owners should probe for gaps. When they do find one, they should swarm it, pulling other resources in their wake.