Avoiding Checkmate By Thinking Ahead

It has been said that chess is great training for war. It is also great training for business. You learn to balance offense and defense, to make the best use of limited resources, and, most importantly, to think several moves ahead. Given today’s business environment, I suggest we should all be playing a lot more chess!

The minute you think you’ve created a successful business model, it is already out of date. So if you aren’t planning several moves ahead, your business is already in decline.

Over the past three decades written communication has progressed from snail mail to faxes and overnight delivery to e-mail and text messaging. Carbon paper was replaced by mimeographs, then copiers, then computer printers. Music has gone from vinyl to reel-to-reel to eight-track to cassettes to compact discs to MP-3 players to cell phones. The story is similar in every industry. And the interval between changes is becoming increasingly brief.

To be successful in business today, you need to be schizophrenic. Half of you must be thinking about how to optimize your current business model, while the other half must be thinking about how to replace it. Not an easy thing for most people to do!

The way to link these two tasks is to continually focus on providing a unique value for your customers—something that your company is perceived as doing better than anyone else. You can accomplish this by rigorously following these four steps:

Define the group you want to do business with (your target market)
Understand what your target market wants
Find the best way to provide what they want
Repeat this process on a regular basis

It is the last step that is the hardest (and most often ignored). None of us have unlimited resources, and once you have identified a need and become good at filling it, there is a tendency to coast. The more successful you are with your first pass through steps one through three, the less likely you are to repeat the process on a timely basis (if ever).

But the expectations and wants of your target market are constantly changing, fueled by technology and an increasingly efficient marketplace in which a simple internet search can match buyers and sellers with a couple of clicks. As a result, a business that fails to think at least a couple moves ahead is likely to find itself checkmated.

Steps one through three are marketing territory—feel free to give me a call if you would like to get some outside perspective on how to your polish your product portfolio or sharpen your competitive edge. Or if you’d like a game of chess!