I am often asked what are the key traits I have identified in successful businesses that I have worked with. One vital aspect I have noticed in all of them is as follows:
Their willingness to explore new opportunities in order to take their company to the next level.
This proactive, open-minded outlook tends to produce excellent results, especially if it is an attitude that permeates deep within the company culture.
What must you do in order to stay ahead of your competition?
To stay ahead of your competition, you need to be and stay aware of your business context. It is not enough to passively wait for opportunities to land on your feet. You need to be aware of you and your marketplace—that is, where you are working in locally, regionally, and globally. You should be actively seeking out information to keep yourself up-to-date of what is going on in the marketplace.
What are your competitors doing? What are your customers saying? What are businesses in related or similar industries to yours doing? What are your counterparts abroad doing?
The businesses who make the most out of fresh opportunities are the ones who are aware of the current market conditions. They made it their focus to keep up-to-date of new tools and technology. Such businesses are constantly assessing what can be done to improve and develop,
However, they do not make it all about them. They watch what their competition is doing, and they learn from the successes and failures of other businesses.
Why should you stay alert?
If you make it your company culture to seek out opportunity, then you probably keep abreast of the latest market developments. You most likely consistently appraise whether these changes can alter the way you do business. If you, for example, come across a tool or technology that can boost productivity, you will probably be thinking of ways of how to implement it in your own business practices. By examining the ways in which you can improve your product, services, and efficiency levels, while also thinking of staying ahead of the competition, you will most likely adopt these new tools if you find that they cater to your business needs and that you can afford them.
However, you must be careful that opportunity seeking does not distract you from efficiently performing the daily operations of your business. I have come across business owners who were so engrossed in adopting new technology or looking at what future trends are that they start to ignore the daily grind of the business. Their customer service levels dropped, their fulfillment orders fell. You have to be careful and strive to achieve balance between these two.
- Staying alert helps improve your ‘bottom line’.
No business will focus on looking for fresh opportunities if it did not have a positive impact with the company. Successful business owners are just looking to increase their turnover; they are also looking to improve their overall business efficiency. Be selective of opportunities by evaluating whether they will effectively improve the business and that it provides the benefit of higher turnover and profitability.
- Staying alert moves your business ahead.
It is not enough to simply spot an opportunity. You need to take advantage of it. Take a proactive approach to change the position of your business. While it may not always be a better position, part of the DNA of a successful business is that its position is always changing as it adapts to the market opportunities. If undertaken with the right analytical approach, the chances of an opportunity improving the position of your business rise significantly.
Through the exploration and implementation of new opportunities, you can create a strong business development path. This ensures that your competition needs to work hard just to catch up with you, and this prevents you from getting blindsided by the competition.
If you are interested to know more about what a business has to go through when facing exponential growth, you can download the first chapter of the book, ”$20K to $20 Million in 2 Years” absolutely free here. The chapter talks about the differences between a good and a great business and puts out questions that make you consider how you can turn your business from good to great.
