The Long Shortcut to Business Success

The Long Shortcut to Business Success

One of the problems I regularly see in business is the desire of many CEOs to seek shortcuts to product or company success. With their gift of rapid idea generation, these entrepreneurial leaders want to quickly get to the outcomes – without always taking the time to do all the critical steps in between.

Unfortunately, when skimping on execution, the parable of haste makes waste is laid bare in full view – at a high cost of time and money-burn. Upon seeing weak results, businesses operating in a shortcut scenario tend to retrench and rework their time-compressed plans to do it all over again. This yields the same result – a wrong-way progress chart that looks like this:

The reality is that business and product success is achieved through a series of important steps, properly executed, over time.

• Planning: The foundation of success starts with excellent planning. Take the time to understand your customer, their problems, existing competitive solutions, and where the white space is.
  • This means leaving your comfort zone and reaching out to talk to your target users.
  • Ask the right questions. Be open to hard truths.
  • Find the patterns that represent unmet needs and your opportunity.
• Product: A critical success step is efficiently building a great product.
  • Sure, you want to start with an MVP. But your MVP better be easy to use, elegantly designed, and solve a significant problem (even if it’s missing many future features).
  • In addition, the development must be agile – with short sprints of execution based on scored “story point” rankings addressing developer time, user impact, urgency, cost and whatever else is critical to your project.
  • Create something remarkable that will stand out in your crowded marketplace.
• Marketing: Don’t shortcut marketing with minimal resources and an impatient time frame. You must be prepared to invest. Then, do it the right way.
  • Marketing takes time to create awareness, build a contact list, repeatedly reach that list through targeted activities offering something helpful. And time is required to establish a brand that resonates.
  • Patience is essential. Building a high-growth business will take many months and years of consistently executing well on quality marketing (while your competition is looking for shortcuts).
  • Get the right marketing team: The best marketing teams are in-house (not outsourced) and include a talented marketer, copy writer, designer, and access to a front-end developer.

“Set a goal, and in small, consistent steps, work to reach it.” 

Seth Godin

• Sales: Have the right sales strategy: inbound, outbound, or both.
  • What’s the best strategy for you to sell, given the complexity and price of your product?
  • Hire the right people, train the right way, and offer the right incentives—plan in advance to avoid starting the process again.
• Operations: It takes a village to raise a successful business.
  • Start with the right people in the leadership roles, beginning with a CEO who has a vision and works with, listens to, and gets the most out of a team.
  • Everyone else: Start with strong leaders who can guide quality teams and who are committed to best-in-class, on-time delivery: Product Management, Technology, Finance, Sales & Customer Service, Manufacturing, Distribution, etc.
  • When you’re big enough, HR plays a critical role. They ensure the right talent is brought in. And they can establish an efficient, effective incentive program to maximize output. The HR role helps establish and maintain a winning culture – vital for employee retention and attraction. High-growth companies don’t shortcut this role.
• Execution:
  • Build your business one registrant, one customer and one transaction at-a-time. Each of these is an essential building block of future achievement. With enough happy customers in place, positive results will increase exponentially for your properly positioned and well-constructed product/business.
  • Apply the Lean Startup feedback loop to your product and growth-marketing process: Build-Measure-Learn > Repeat. Know your business by the numbers and react accordingly.

Conclusion

The quickest way to get to your ideal business or product destination – is the long shortcut to business success. Take the time to do things the right way. Go slow, and then go fast (rather than the opposite).

Do it right, so you make this be your progress chart:

I hope you find the article of value. Feedback or questions? Email me at don@afdonex.com