This week I was reminded of a great quote from Voltaire: ‘Common sense is not so common’. I like this quote because you can read it in two different ways,
- Most people lack common sense
- Finding agreement on the right sense is not common
I choose to read it as the latter and I feel that Brexit is a very good example of it. Talking to people about current events, as I do, I came to realise that there are many ways in which we read the situation. Whilst some believe the economic market will suffer a decline in the short-medium term, others think it will only affect companies trading with Europe. I even heard that some people feel that if we stay positive there is no reason why there will be a recession at all. Go figure, as no one really knows any of these views could be right, so it becomes a matter of the not so common sense.
So, why do I think you should consider re-inventing yourself this winter?
Here are two good reasons:
- According to Harvard Business Review jumping from the maturity stage of one business to the growth stage of the next—is what separates high performers from those whose time at the top is all too brief.
- As Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever demonstrate in their book Stall Points, ,once a company runs up against a major stall in its growth, it has less than a 10% chance of ever fully recovering.
Both are good reasons because whether you would like to be a high performer business or ensure that your business does recover from an economic downturn in the New Year, you should consider re-inventing yourself this winter.
How do you go about re-inventing your business model?
There are numerous books and articles out there for you to explore but essentially you need to consider two things first:
- Are you going to come up with a completely new product?
- Are you going to consider taking your exiting products to new markets?
The answer is very much down to your current business model, your market and the make-up of your company. Whichever way you choose to go, you need to consider two important factors:
- Developing new business can take time to mature, anything between 6-12 months.
- The longer you leave it the more competition you will have
This is why I recommend that you look into this urgently to make sure that you can start widening your options and developing your sales pipeline. We have recently developed a new lead generation system which we believe can support this process well. In September we run a workshop to share our new system and got some great feedback. Click here to find out more.