Your mindset and how you perceive tasks, challenges, and obstacles in life and in business greatly affect your actions which leads to the underlying consequences of success or failure for your company. Taking into account the value of your mindset in your business, then changing it for the improvement of your company is just as important or even more so.
Here are 4 components to help you understand how changing your mindset can help you and your business succeed.
1. Internal and External opportunities
- Internal opportunities are situations where your company can take advantage of situations internally for the benefit of your business. For example, cost-cutting, relocation of assets and staff, change in company locations, facilities and equipment upgrades.
- External opportunities on the other hand are things that happen outside of your company. You can’t change these outside factors, but you can protect your company from these threats or even take advantage of them for your company’s benefit. Some examples of what external opportunities may look like are; technological innovation, changes in political trade agreements, interest rates, changes in cultural lifestyles, and even something closer to your business, new advanced products from your suppliers.
Having set your mind on focusing on only one of these factors is detrimental to your business success because both factors can provide great opportunities and threats. When you understand the full picture of the environment where your business is operating and thriving in, it is a lot easier to take the necessary steps to plan how your company will overcome threats or achieve its set goals. You and your business must evaluate internal and external opportunities for your business’s benefit.
2. Past and Future trends
The evaluation of your company’s past performance is critical for your company’s growth however, you shouldn’t solely fixate on that data either. You should put more weight or focus on creating or developing a strategy on how to tackle future trends that may provide an opportunity or a threat to your company.
This doesn’t necessarily follow that you should ignore the current trend or the information you gathered from previous trends in your business or environment because you can still use that to formulate or develop your products and services. You should still monitor and collect data from them however, they should not hold your primary focus.
You should set your sights and shift your attention from the past to the future and how it may affect your business and plan accordingly. That’s what you should focus on for you to continue to grow in this new environment that we find ourselves in.
3. Benefits and Progressive value
- A benefit for your business is an evident outcome or result that was caused by an action or a decision to help meet your business objectives and goals.
- Progressive value is seeing the value of achievements or goals in an incremental progression instead of a lump sum of achievements.
The concept of progressive value normally means a radical change in a business’s core values. However, I would like us to shift our mindset and look at progressive value as an incremental achievement in progression.
With this in mind, some businesses look at the end results of a project and not the small milestones within that project. They look at the bottom-line and analyze whether the outcome was of value or not. With the world as it now, it is not conducive to your company’s growth to fixate on the outcomes. To improve and have a successful business, especially during these uncertain times, we should shift our focus on a more progressive point of view.
Meaning, we should set smaller goals or milestones and create an incremental achievement scale within every project or endeavor for our business because it is much more valuable to our business in the long-run.
4. Value-based solutions
Instead of just providing products or solutions your business should look into offering its clientele a value-added solution or package.
Value-added solutions are described by SMA Marketing as “The enhancement a company gives its product or service before offering the product to customers.”
With the environment of business today, many people are constantly being bombarded with services and products. These services and products may be something the consumers don’t want or even need. This would then result in a marketing failure and be justified as branding awareness without fully understanding that they are simply clinging to a hope that whatever they create will go viral to their targeted audience and result in an increase in sales. But only a few will realize that for their business to truly be sustainable and grow they need to change gears and focus more on providing added value and solutions for their targeted audience.
Shift your business focus on creating or developing value-added solutions instead of following your industry’s trends. Provide your audience with turn-key or package solutions that answer their needs. Develop these types of packages to best suit your targeted audience instead of just burying them with the industry product or service standard. Understand and cater to what your audience needs and not what the industry expects.
Let’s wrap this up.
Getting stuck in your ways can be detrimental to your business growth. Because change is a constant factor no matter what industry you’re in and so, we must be flexible and adjust our way of thinking and operating for us to sustain our growth and succeed, especially in this challenging period.
When you stop and look at external factors instead of just relying on internal opportunities, direct your attention to future trends instead of constantly evaluating the past and current trends, or when you shift your result-oriented goals and be more progressive in your aims or objectives, and lastly when you add value to your service and or product, you are setting your business up for sustainable success. Because change is constant and adaptability is the key to success.
Shivendra helps construction companies and contractors win more projects and grow profitably. Regarded as a master of practical implementation, Shivendra has guided organizations such as Downer and Siemens as well as smaller contractors to achieve double-digit improvements to their bottom line. Underpinning his extensive industry experience are qualifications in engineering and a Ph.D. focused on rapid cost improvement techniques. He is the author of two books, The Competitive Contractor and From Paper to Profit, host of the Competetive Contractor podcast, and the founder of Shivendra & Co and The Constructors Network. You can find more about Shivendra & Co on www.shivendra.com.