by Paul Whimp
“Never let a good crisis go to waste” – Winston Churchill
At our recent HB Leaders Forum, we ran through the key learnings from a recent leaders’ survey about their experiences and learnings after coming out of the pandemic and their plans for the future. The key outcomes centered around a theme of a “reset” and positioning for growth. With this theme in mind the HB Leaders Forum focused on three key areas and activities:
Post trauma tail
Every major traumatic event has a tail. During the pandemic, teams rallied together to adapt to the new circumstances to maintain businesses or even just to survive. In an article posted by Dr Darryl Cross, he refers to studies of major disasters that show, whilst the trauma of the event itself is devastating, there is a prolonged period post event where teams suffer.
It was a reminder as leaders to ensure your team are aware of the post pandemic exhaustion that is normal and that sufficient time and resources are allocated to allow the teams to recover and recharge before any acceleration of your growth strategy.
What products or services will you use to grow your business?
As part of the theme of reset and growth, we covered a great tool developed by the Boston Consulting Group in the 1970’s. Referred to under various names, the product portfolio analysis provides a framework to look at your key products and services and identify where you should focus your attention in order to improve your success in the market.
By identifying each product/service market attractiveness and your strength in delivery in that market, it assists to identify your offerings position, the gaps in your strategy and underpins which will feature your in success in the market.
Best in market (for you)
Not everyone wants to be number one in their chosen market or field but every business needs to know where they are positioned.
Without access to third party business and market surveys or reviews, it can be difficult to ascertain how you compete for your customers attention. To assist in this area we ran through a quick and easy competitor analysis which provided leaders with an approach to identify any potential blind spots against their competitors.
The approach involved identifying key factors your customers sought when appraising a potential purchase and ranking your business against your competitors on these factors. Whilst a simplistic model, it provides a great focus to underpin your investment in your growth strategies. If you are interested in exploring any of the areas covered in our Leaders Forum, please reach out to your HB team members.