THRIVE: Update Your Vision & Roadmap

With the key blunders and mistakes businesses make during a recession behind us, we move now to capturing the opportunities and emerging possibilities for growth resulting from shifting markets and landscape.

The very first question to ask is whether your company’s vision or dream is still relevant given recent market changes. Does your current vision get you the results you want? Does it inspire and energize you and your team? If not, then now is the time to pivot and re-design your future.

To determine what opportunities might be available for your business during this recession and recovery, we apply our Assess, Design, and Evaluate methodology to identify critical areas that create a more sustainable future while maximizing your competitive advantage. We will show you how to get there.

Assess

Your company’s north star is its vision and dream. Unfortunately, many short- and long-term visions have crumbled in this downturn. Assessing how external forces may have impacted your current vision and determining how to pivot is essential to kicking off this process.

The best place to start is recalling or reviewing the high-level mistakes outlined in our last series Beyond the Blunders. What, if anything, needs to change to deliver on your vision, or is it perhaps your vision itself that needs adjusting?

If your vision remains relevant, what activities do you need to adjust to get the outcomes you desire? Do you need new revenue streams or to expand to new locations? Are there new markets created because of this recession that you could be entering? Do your services or products need to change completely or adjust how they are bought?

Take, for example, the businesses that have pivoted to meet new customer needs including several craft breweries and distilleries that shifted their production lines at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak to manufacture hand sanitizer. This forward-thinking move aligned their efforts with rapidly heightened product demand in a growth market as well as provided brand exposure.

Remember, hope is not a strategy. Proactively reviewing your vision will help you and your team refocus its energy on moving the company forward and seizing opportunities ahead of your competition.

Design

In the design phase, we expand our reasoning to envision new opportunities to those that are more relevant due to the current circumstances. Your customer needs may have changed thus your organizational capabilities must evolve. This requires a willingness to adjust.

There are many paths your company can take during this next recovery:

• Grow incrementally through organic strategies moving cautiously through the economic cycle with the hope you can retain market share – this is not a good strategy as your wise competitors will sprint past you;
• Hope to rise with the tide and wait until the economy recovers and hope to rebound with the pack – though you may find that you lose your market position as we highlighted in Mistake #1; or
• Grab market share through proactive strategies to improve your market position.

Once you decide to respond by grabbing market share, it’s vital to assess your risk appetite and risk tolerance profile as we outlined using our 10-point scale in Mistake #3. This risk assessment will aid you in prioritizing which growth opportunities are good strategic and culture fits for you, your team, and your business.

We design growth strategies specific for our client’s vision by working through an exercise to determine areas of potential growth opportunities, including:

1. New markets
2. New products
3. New pricing or packaging
4. Repositioning
5. Re-skilling
6. Innovating
7. Acquiring

With the best areas to capture market share selected, you emerge with a blueprint of the resources necessary to execute the decision.

Evaluate

This final process tests assumptions and modifies your strategies based on market and pilot customer feedback and analysis. These results determine the likelihood and level of success for each growth strategy. Those yielding strong results continue. Those that do not are either retooled or discontinued.

We recently worked with a middle-market healthcare company to revise its vision, resulting in increasing the scope of its services in a new market. Although the company had its foundations in pediatric care, expanding its services to include adults enabled it to meet the needs of a larger population over an extended period of their lives.

Let us help you craft your revised vision and select the best growth strategies for your company’s future by contacting Adrian Bray, Co-Founder here.

Opportunity 2: Repositioning for the recovery