Business Strategy Leads to Success

A strategic plan requires a strong commitment from management and employees to be successful. This is great for companies who have a solid plan to drive them but unfortunately the ones that don't could lose everything they have. As an owner, you bet your company's future on a strategic plan. If you haven't gotten the details right or shaped it from the proper perspective, you could be directing your business towards trouble. This article has good examples of small business strategies that are leading to success.

Ticket City, an Austin based ticket broker,was just laying off workers and cutting managers pay three years ago. Then the founder, Randy Cohen realized that he was playing too much defense. He decided to change his approach and be more aggressive by hiring 10 more employees and increasing his investment in marketing. The outcome? He boosted revenue by 33% in 2010 to $40 million. Ticket City even sponsors a nationally televised college bowl game. Sometimes leaders just need to be confident and try to be bold to establish a brand image.

Another suggestion is to listen to customers when thinking about redeveloping a strategic plan. Ask yourself what customers are missing in their experience, what value can you add? Coastal Contacts sells contanct-lens online and is doing well for themselves but the CEO was looking to rev up growth. He was having trouble coming up with ideas so he decided to turn to customers for ideas. Customer Service reps called customers and asked for feedback and management found a trend in their responses; many wanted their lenses the next day. So the organization began shipping everything overnight and the result has been phenomenal, sales in the U.S have jumped up over 40%. Customer responsiveness was the key to their boost in business but this should be done with caution. Sometimes customers can also steer you into making bad decisions. This company also developed a program based off of customer suggestions for their eye-glass business. Coastal Contacts sent four frames to their customers to give them a choice and then return the testers after making a decision. Soon after implementing this strategy the company realized that customers were just as likely to return purchases as before. Furthermore, the costs of this service weren't offset by the additional sales.

The article provided other suggestions that I generalize as tips. What I took out of this article was that big decisions require proper analysis to reduce the risk of failure. It's a good idea to look at problems from different perspectives. If you can't look at a situation from different angles, get input and communicate with others. The important thing is that the leader of an organization is capable of noticing trouble and can adapt. When strategies aren't working, they need to be the ones to not only recognize it but to step up and recognize the need for change.

Article: http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/05/smallbusiness/small_business_strategy.fortune/index.htm

Team Three
Sunny Shah