The topic for our newsletter and blogs this month is “Taking advantage of opportunities.” It’s up to company leadership to keep careful watch of potential opportunities for the company and its products and services.
While leadership is doing that, though, it must keep its team focused on producing the business’s mainstream products and services that have been foundational to its success.
The Scattershot Approach
Too often, a company can take a scattershot approach in attempting to be the most successful in their field. When a company does this, it ends up losing sight of what made them profitable in the first place.
For example, a company might specialize in building materials and hardware for homeowners and become successful in its area as the “go-to” place for DIYers. They relate well to customers, seeing that they stock what customers are most often seeking and special order what customers need.
But then a nursery opens up in the area and attracts a great deal of business selling plants and trees. The DIY building materials store realizes it could sell garden items to its customers and suddenly devotes most of its resources to opening up a nursery line of business, neglecting the line of goods that its customers have come to know and trust. Staff are taken out of the DIY part of the store and put in the nursery section, and vital items sold in the DIY line are allowed to run out of stock.
What will happen? Because the store is not maintaining the successful portion of its business, customers can no longer find what they’re looking for. The store employee they always counted on for help and advice is no longer available. Disappointed, longtime customers end up going elsewhere, and business drops off. The company might then realize what they’ve done and bring their original products and services back to their original levels—but hopefully, it won’t be too late. Recovering business is much more difficult than obtaining it in the first place.
Keeping the Main Focus
Now let’s have a look at what our DIY store should have done.
There is certainly nothing wrong with taking advantage of new opportunities as they’re seen, as we’ll be exploring in greater depth in later articles this month. In our example, the building materials and hardware retailer could add a nursery section to their store. Its regular customers would most likely appreciate being able to pick up plants and trees when they come in for their supplies. Often, landscaping is part of home remodeling.
However, those customers will not show up if the original line of business that attracted them to the store is neglected, and they can no longer find what they’re looking for. So, the store must keep its primary attention on the building materials and hardware line.
This approach is the correct one for any business of any type. Never neglect what brought you success in the first place.
Always Keep the Main Line
The lesson to be learned is to always be on the watch for new opportunities. But never let those opportunities distract and rob resources from the company’s primary focus—without that focus, the company won’t survive.
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