By Nikki Viljoen – Viljoen Consulting.
What I am going to say now, may be offensive to some at first glance, but I promise to explain myself during the course of the article.
Take advantage of the failure of others!
Now that may sound really hard and even very mean, but think about it for a while.
Let’s step back for a moment. We all understand that education equals knowledge. I am equally sure that we have all heard about “knowledge is power”. I would like to suggest however, that it is what we do with that knowledge that makes us powerful.
When we look at businesses to see why they have failed, specifically businesses that have been selling the same or similar products or services as ours, it should be so that we can learn from their mistakes and hopefully thereby avoid the same failure and not to ‘gloat’.
We need to look at what they were doing and where and how it went wrong and then we need to find ways to ensure that whatever they did to make it fall over – is not something that we do.
Questions like (but not limited to);
• who was their target market
• what was the quality of their product and/or services
• what was the value of their product and/or service
• what was the value add to their customers of their product and/or services
• was their product and/or service unique and different to that of their competitors and if so how?
Remember, the more you fail on your market testing, the more you actually succeed in the long run. So keep testing your market all the time. Analyze the results and try to improve the value and the value-add to your target market all the time. Even when you have a “winning formula”, you still need to continually move forward, change, morph and evolve.
Nikki is an Internal Auditor and Business Administration Specialist who can be contacted on 083 702 8849 or nikki@viljoenconsulting.co.za
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