Episode 5: 6 Questions to Recharge Your Strategy in a Changing Market

We’ve all experienced a lot of changes in the last few years, with some businesses being more impacted than others, and some wondering how they are going to recharge and get going again. Other companies have taken off.

Regardless of how your company is tracking, it is always sound business practice to revisit your strategy, at least annually, and test if the assumptions you have always based your plans on, still apply. For example, have your customers’ needs and businesses changed so significantly, that your business has become less important and less relevant to them? Do these changes represent new opportunities for you that you haven’t fully explored?

The points I’m going to cover in this podcast should help to recharge your strategic focus. Pick the ones that are the most relevant for your business and start with those.

So here are 6 questions as a starting point, to think about as part of your planning preparation for the next 12-18 months...

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💡 Need help scaling your business from 7 to 8 figures? Get in touch jenny@jennystilwell.com.au

Remember: Better strategy, better business, better life! See you next time!

Transcript

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Hi there, this is Jenny Stilwell and welcome to the 7% Club podcast for the 7% of business owners who break through 2 million in sales and for those on track to join this club. If you want to upscale from 7 to 8 figures, you'll need to make some shifts in how you grow, structure and lead your company because you cannot get to 10 million in the same way that you reached your first 1 or 2 million in revenue. This podcast is to help you upscale. Hi there and welcome to this episode of the 7% Club podcast. Today's episode is about how to recharge your strategy in a changing market. So we've all experienced a lot of changes in the last few years with some businesses being more impacted than others and some wondering how they're going to recharge and get going again and other companies have taken off. So regardless of how your company's tracking, it's always sound business practice to revisit your strategy, at least annually, and test if the assumptions you have always based your plans on still apply. For example, have your customers' needs and businesses changed so significantly that your business has become less important and less relevant to them? Do these changes represent new opportunities for you that you haven't fully explored yet? The points I'm going to cover in this episode should help to recharge your strategic focus. Pick the ones that are most relevant for your business and just start with those. So here are six questions as a starting point to think about as part of your planning preparation for the next 12 to 18 months. So point number one, what are the major trends or changes in your market or industry? So when major changes occur in your market, and in how people are doing business, it doesn't mean you need to follow what your competition and other companies are doing. It just means you need to be mindful of these changes and make an assessment in terms of whether they actually impact your business and your customers, whether you need to make the same changes as everybody else, and whether your business needs to respond maybe in a different way. For example, In the consulting and training industry, there's been a major shift toward conferences, workshops, and training online. Now, that was a clever shift in response to lockdowns and has been enabled by technology that we weren't even using just a few short years ago, which is pretty incredible when you think about it. If you consult to large organizations and regularly run workshops and in-person training groups, you would have needed to follow suit with these changes in order to keep your revenue flowing. Running events and seminars using platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn Live enabled you and your business to remain relevant and valuable to your clients. So making the same changes as others was actually the right strategy in this situation. However, other organisations were slow to adopt service delivery via online platforms and would have been severely impacted. And other smaller businesses decided it was time to create more DIY digital training programs. But how many of these would you need to sell for every client workshop? And that's always a huge consideration just because, you know, you can create an online training program doesn't mean that the return on investment is going to be there. So that's something you really need to think about before you invest time and money in creating something like that. So during this time, clever hospitality businesses used things like QR codes for customer self-service, so to speak, and reduced the need for staff that were hard to find anyway. So they enabled themselves to keep going with reduced staff numbers by using clever apps. Software as a service was a major trend many years ago now that shifted from the need for in-house software installations with associated maintenance contracts and help desk support to online user access. Xero is a great example of a company that most people know of, and I quote them as a bit of a success story in this space often, that has grown with this model. So software as a service is now the norm. So you don't always have to react immediately to new trends and market changes. But if you are aware of them and what others are doing in response to them, you'll be able to craft a better strategy in response to these changes. Point number two, who are now your ideal clients? Has the profile changed? This, of course, is a standard component of any planning process. But now we need to reassess if this has changed. Any of your clients struggling as a result of the last few years? Will they view your product or service now as discretionary or essential or no longer relevant? The best way to determine this is with a client survey. And I discuss this in more detail in podcast number one. So find out how relevant you are to your customers now and how that may change in a positive or a negative way in the future. It's really important because we have these assumptions about our clients and customer behavior that we tend to carry with us in our planning processes year in year out but it is really worthwhile when there have been major shifts in the market overall both the local and the global markets to reassess these assumptions. Now the best way to rise to the top of your market is to specialise. So specialise in your offering or what you do for your customers and your clients and who you do it for. For example, I specialize in helping my clients upscale from seven to eight figures in a manageable and a profitable way. I work with clients that have more than five full-time employees and around the one to two million mark in revenue. Now that may be a little bit more, but that's sort of a benchmark for who I specialize in helping. So a client of mine, this was a really interesting story. He was going through low seven figures. And although the business was successful and profitable, growth was slow. And because it was slow, it was frustrating. So once the decision was made to specialize in a niche market where the customers were all big consumer brand names with big budgets that could afford my client's offerings, and that is really important. If you pick a niche, pick one that can afford your products and your services. that is actually doing well. Once they'd made that decision, the company took off. So since that decision, they have become the dominant player in this space. And their clients actually rely on them to not only provide their core offering, but my client has become the go-to source for anything new that their clients need. And even on occasion have sat in on their client's behalf with some important meetings. They've grown from a small business to a powerful mid-range company based on the specialization strategy. So getting back to you, are there any market niches that you could choose to specialize in that would help make you a more dominant player in that niche? Now, if you've already done that, fantastic. Let's move on to point three. So is it time to repackage or develop new service or product offerings? For example, Related to what I've just said, it's certainly going to be much harder to sell a generic offering rather than a specific one designed specifically for your ideal client targets. So I saw a profile for a service professional on LinkedIn the other day. Now this person is a business coach and also a life coach and provides support for small businesses and corporates. and also people in career transition. I actually have no idea what that person does because their service offering is so broad and varied and they have different target markets that it's not actually speaking to anybody in particular. So based on my point about specialising in a niche, do you need to rework your offer for a specific niche? Now, while we're on products and services and repackaging and revisiting, I always say that your offer, whether it is a product or a service, it needs to be easy to sell and easy to buy. So let's look at easy to sell. You or your team need to be able to clearly articulate your offer with a clear value proposition. Now, if they can't or if they struggle, your offer is not easy to sell. In that case, you need to delve deeper with them and unearth where and why they struggle with this and make the necessary changes so it does become easy to sell. Now, easy to buy is from the buyer perspective. Make sure the content on your website and other platforms like LinkedIn talks to your target market and make sure your product and service offerings are clear, not like the business coach, life coach that services every market there possibly is. Now you may think your offer is crystal clear, but others may wonder what it is you're selling. And we're not always 100% objective when we're looking at our own business and our own offerings. I think everybody would agree with that. So if you do conduct any research with your clients, ask their opinion. What do they think? Now they're going to know what you do anyway because they're a client. But if they look at a brochure or look at a page on your website, with a fresh perspective, they may not think that your offer is so clear. So it's definitely worthwhile getting their opinion. And part of the easy to buy component is that you also need to structure your offer in a way that helps your clients and customers self-select. So I refer to this often because it's a really good model. Look at how software packages are sold in basic, standard, and professional types of tiers with associated features for each, or reduced feature sets for the entry-level versions. And research repeatedly shows that when presented with three options, more purchasers will opt for the middle option, not the cheapest, but not the one with all the bells and whistles. So is it time to provide an entry-level offering to help get new customers on board? Or would it make more sense to create a new high-end offer that does have all the bells and whistles? Because there will be customers who want the best product or service on offer from your company. So I know of companies that have built a very niche customer base and then created apps to deliver new value to the same clients and lock them in at the same time. So if you are invaluable to your customers, they will come to you when they need new solutions. Based on your relationships and knowledge of their businesses, you could potentially always have new product and service opportunities for these customers that will create new revenue streams for your business. Now, that is certainly worth investigating. Okay, so on to point number four. Can you change the structure and overheads of your business? Now, this may or may not be relevant to you, but to other companies, it's definitely worth revisiting. Because again, this is something that we tend to take for granted until we take a really new look at it and look at different ways we could be operating. So given that people costs are a hefty part of most business expenses, it's really worth looking at how they're all structured. So people are now used to working from home, working more flexible hours, and some have embraced that fully and would be happy to work from home for the majority of their work week. And I know the flip side of that can be a challenge for employers, but finding a happy medium is obviously the way to go to suit how people are now used to working because it's not going to go away. So can you restructure their hours and remuneration accordingly to help reduce overheads? Do you need the same size office to work in? Maybe you could make do with half the office space and half the cost of office lease. So for example, and I love this example, it's a big global example. Schroders is a London-based firm with two and a half thousand staff. Now the CEO announced during the pandemic that those staff did not have to go back to working from an office five days a week, even after lockdowns had become a thing of the past. And the bulk of the employees work will be done from home, with the remainder seeing groups converse on a more ad hoc basis to work together as needed in much smaller physical spaces. So the CEO said that because of the pandemic forcing people to work from home, that it had pushed workplace flexibility forward 20 years. Now that is pretty amazing. And it's certainly worth thinking about how that could relate to your business. and your overheads and your structure. So while we're on the topic of reducing overheads and changing structure, take an honest look at your team. Are they all performing? Do you really need all those people performing all those functions or could you streamline and become more efficient? I went into a client company as a virtual CEO to address some issues. I reduced headcount by more than 10 people over a period of time. through making processes far more efficient and less people dependent, changing reporting structures and revisiting KPIs. Now, I didn't go in and cut jobs and cut people. There was a gradual attrition over time and it needed to be done because the amount of people that were in that business not actually contributing warranted the numbers that we let go over that period of time. But again, you know, if you've got some very convoluted process that are high touch sensitive, could be three or four people who are involved in a process, it could be spreadsheet driven, there could be errors, it's not systemized, you know, you really need to look at these things particularly for your core processes because where you can make things far more efficient and far more streamlined is where you can look at better utilization of your team, whether that means you need less people or you can utilize them elsewhere more effectively, that's something you should look at. And since operations are all underpinned by more efficient processes, that's really where you should look. And that in turn can impact your overhead expenses. Okay, but we can go into that in more detail in another podcast on another day. So point five, how are you going to engage with your clients and customers? So apart from structured meetings and calls with clients and possibly some other ad hoc communication, how do you plan on getting closer to them in a business world that is likely to have less personal contact with more people working remotely? So it's worth brainstorming all the ways in which you could connect and include some of the more old-fashioned methods like personal handwritten cards. Personal communication really is key. And we need to remember that the people who follow you or who are in-person clients of your company or who subscribe to any of your communication, they are actually real people who have chosen to work with you or have a relationship with you. It's not all online and virtual and faceless. If you call a client just to see how they're going as the sole purpose of the call, invite customers for coffee, invite them to an event or a function that you think they'd be interested in, send them a personal handwritten card or note. It's these personal touch points that will be remembered and valued. So we really need to respect that and give it even more attention now. Okay, and finally, point number six, marketing is even more critical than ever before. Do you have a plan? And when I talk about a plan, we're not talking about war and peace here. It could be a one-pager. It could be some bullet points that you've stuck up on the wall next to you to keep you on track for what you need to do. Communication with clients and prospects, knowing exactly who your ideal clients are, revisiting and possibly repackaging your products and services in a changed market, and thinking about potential new delivery channels are all a vital part of your marketing strategy. For most businesses, many aspects of how we used to do business have changed. And I believe the result will be to make us better at doing what we do and thinking about that in a more creative way and a more proactive way. You know, it's not set and forget, not that it ever was, but I think it's even more important now to be constantly revisiting your strategy, revisiting your assumptions, moving quickly and being a little bit ahead of the game. So apart from managing costs and restructuring opportunities and other critical commercial considerations, marketing as a function is so critical to the success, growth and ongoing viability of any business. I have always said that. I continue to say it. I think I will say it forever because I really believe that. So break down your marketing plan to look at Most of the things we just talked about, your target market and your ideal client profile. Products and services. Packaging, pricing, delivery. And remember, easy to sell, easy to buy. Communication and content. So your messages, the methods of delivery for both existing clients and prospective clients. Make sure you've got calls to action in all your communication as part of your customer's journey. And above all, make it personal. Impersonal, automated, unsolicited messages and communication do not work. Personal, considered, intentional communication does. So I hope these points will help you revisit and recharge your strategy for the next 12 to 18 months. And even if you only start with one point, it will give your strategy a fresh perspective. Good luck with your planning. Until next time. And that's all for today's episode of the 7% Club podcast. And thank you so much for listening. If you'd like advice and support on how to grow your business from seven to eight figures in a manageable and profitable way, get in touch via my website, jennystillwell.com.au and that's one L in the middle and two on the end or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to chat to you. I'd love to hear from you and I'd love to be able to help you. And as always, wherever you are in the world, remember, better strategy, better business, better life.