Entrepreneurship throughout the history of commerce, has always been a journey of discovering a customer need and passionately following up in order to innovate and excel in delivering a product or service that fulfills that requirement.
Today’s entrepreneurs
undertake the same journey; however, there are some modern day rules that have
become critical to sustaining the success of their ventures. I list four that I
believe can be challenging in these days of very short attention spans of all
types of stakeholders, be they investors, customers or employees!
Wowing
the Customer
I’ve
decided to have myself frozen until science discovers a cure for bad customer
service.
You’d wonder as to why
organisations are so poor at consistently delivering satisfaction to customers,
let alone wowing them! CRM processes and benchmarks are now technology-enabled,
so why do we still hear or read bad stories so often? Is it that customers have
become fickle-minded or excessively intolerant, and that traditional concepts
of brand loyalty have become obsolete?
Geography
is History
I
pretty much live on the Internet, so I wrote down Cyberspace as my legal
address.
The tricky part of today’s
entrepreneurial journey pertains to navigating skillfully across the journeys of
various stakeholders; and the one common aspect of those journeys relates to
the disproportionate influence and impact that the digital world is playing. So
as customers get sucked into multiple digital touch points in their lifestyles,
as human resource skill-sets prefer to play in the gig economy, as traditional
intellectual property regimes face a whiplash from the impacts of blockchain
models, the entrepreneur needs to have impeccable clarity of vision in the
business model, if the enterprise is to be sustained efficiently.
Smart
Work not Hard Work
I
choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy
way to do it.
Tell
me, how many people work in your company? Hmm… Approximately half.”
With claims that Generative AI
tools will soon be as easy as, and perhaps more impactful than a google search,
it is natural that there will be challenges to tracking the actual productivity
and impact of individual employee effort. The good thing is that there will be
more recognition to the collective work of teams and to rewarding teams for
smart and timely outcomes.
Opportunities
from Adversities
People
who wonder whether the glass is half empty or half full are missing the point.
The glass is refillable.
Entrepreneurs who practice the
art of seeking to track trends, understand that gaps in strategy and business
models are starting points to discover lost opportunities and accordingly
exhort their teams to learn and develop; for value-creation through continuous
learning and development will be the actual harbinger for success!
