The key question every SME owner should ask themselves. Often.
Every business starts small. The biggest on the planet all started somewhere, in a garage, dorm room, lab, somewhere between the ears of the entrepreneur. Most fail, or at best deliver a return that would have been dwarfed by the interest on the same investment in a...
‘Innovation’ is often just an attractively coloured herring
Everyone wants ‘innovation’. Fair enough, unless we innovate, we stand still, and get killed in the rush. However, in my experience, it is not the number or quality of ideas that is the limiting factor, it is the execution of those ideas that limits us. We do not need...
Try being a ‘Strategic Quitter’.
When do you quit, let go of the sunk cost? How do you decide when to quit? It is a hugely important component of deciding how and where to allocate your scarce resources. Quitting, and taking the 'hit' is also much harder than just planning. There are always...
4 steps to build a value proposition that delivers sales
We all use mental models, it is how we get through life without overloading our cognitive capacity all the time. Mental models are evolutions way of enabling us to respond automatically, without a lot of thought, over, and over again, as we come up against...
‘Snowmobiling,’ Covid, and confirmation bias.
'Snowmobiling' is a term created by Col. John Boyd, USAF to describe the process of pulling down a set of existing items, drivers, or perceptions, and putting them back together in an entirely different way, simply not seen by anyone else, just because it is...
Is strategic planning still relevant?
It is November, typically the beginning of the planning cycle for budget year 21/22. First point of call in a formal review is generally 'How did we perform so far this year against the plan we set ourselves back in November 2018? Few could reasonably mark...
The timeless wisdom of Philip Fisher.
Warren Buffet is renowned as perhaps the greatest investor of our time. To be noted as a mentor, as was Philip Fisher, is indeed being stuck on a pedestal. Fisher published quite a bit, his seminal work being 'Common stocks and uncommon profits' first published in...
How to sell a risky proposition
Almost every piece of advice about selling, including a lot on this site, contains in one way or another, the notion that in order to be successful, you have to solve a problem for the buyer. In other words, scratch the itch and the itch will go away. We all...
What is your defining word?
What is the one word, perhaps two, that best defines and communicates the promise your product delivers. This is not an easy thing to define, but when you do, it is a powerful 'moat' around your brand that insulates you from competitive pressure. However, like any...
The ‘corner piece’ method of strategy development.
My daughter and wife do jigsaw puzzles together. The dining room table is often covered with a 5,000 piece puzzle in varying stages of completion. I simply do not have the patience, but the process they use to piece together the puzzle is instructive. First, they make...