Focus On Your Bright Spots

Our Chief Marketing Officer, Wayne Glowac, is a guest columnist in Madison’s July issue of In Business Magazine. Read below to learn how you can scale up your business for greater revenue and profit.

Nearly every day, I find encouragement in the ability of my clients to adapt, grow, and prosper. So, where do you begin to consider how to successfully expand while still serving the needs of your customers? If you’re looking to enhance your business offerings, here are a few diagnostic strategies that you can use to benefit from continuing growth.

Bright Spots

Too often, we spend our time analyzing what is wrong with our business instead of what is going right. In their book titled Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath outline the business practice of focusing on what is going right. They named these successes “bright spots.” Your bright spots can provide a roadmap to move forward at a low cost with an even lower risk of failure.

“Too often, we spend our time analyzing what is wrong with our business instead of what is going right.” – Wayne Glowac, Kramer Madison

What are your bright spots and how can you expand and clone them to find greater success? For example, who are your most profitable customer types? What are your most profitable products or services?

Here’s a useful tool I’ve designed called CROPS to help you uncover and expand upon what’s going well within your business. First, create a list of all the categories of products and services you sell. Next, rate and then rank each of them on a scale of 1-10 on each of the following criteria:

Competence:

How good are you (or how good can you be) at delivering this product or service?

Revenue:

How valuable is this segment at generating revenue? Profitability comes later, but first, consider your ability for this product or service to generate transactions and cash flow.

Opportunity:

How much growth potential is in your market to expand this product or service? How entrenched is the competition? Will the opportunity exist in three, five, or 10 years?

Profitability:

How much does this add to your bottom line? If you’re not able to quickly and accurately get this information, you should consider getting a new accounting system.

Scalability:

How easy will it be for you to do more of this? This is where you have to think hard about your current operation – including people, process, and location.

Growth Drivers

In addition to cultivating your bright spots, you can leverage revenue growth drivers which can be applied to your current successes or be used to leverage new opportunities.

• Add Up: This involves encouraging current customers to switch to your more premium offerings.
• Expand Up: What other products or services can you market?
• Bring In: Focus on attracting new customers to your business.

What generated your success so far will change in the near or distant future. If you have found success elusive, maybe its time to think differently.