Business is no different from a conflict. The market is the battlefield and your marketing tactics and strategies are the weapons you use to defeat the ever increasing competition and bring profit to your business or organization. There are business dictators who know the tricks to win all kinds of battles and in any battlefield admin
. The elite businesses control the market at their disposal and these are the people who set the standards for us and we need to view that as a benchmark or a target to achieve. These big guns stamp their authority from the roots of the market to the very top of the business chain.
Small businesses have very little scope to succeed when it comes to competing with bigger or more established businesses. The market is already flooded with many businesses competing for profits and customer and consumer attraction, so in a practical sense there small businesses stand no chance amongst them. The reasons for the same are given below-
Big businesses have been in the market since a considerable period of time so they have established their name and popularity across all corners of the market. Small businesses are lesser known so their capacity to attract customers is meager.
In an established business clients, customers and consumers are in abundance and because of the long relationship between the business and the people, there is a trust which develops easily. A reputation is earned. When small businesses compete with the bigger ones, they find it hard to get clients as most of the latter are with the bigger businesses and the upcoming prospects will mostly opt to follow the reputed ones rather than new ones.
Big businesses have a humongous amount of money. Small businesses don’t. So when it comes to marketing, smaller ones are found in the shadows of the investment done by the bigger ones. Without the money the smaller businesses either perish or join the bigger ones.
Business Excellence simply means being the best you can possibly be as an organization. The intent of this article is to outline what is involved if your organization decides to undertake this never-ending journey. When implemented properly, business excellence yields immense benefits to private, public and not-for-profit organisations.
However, let me issue a warning here… as a result of running my own businesses plus facilitating or advising on practical implementations for approximately 1,000 other businesses over the past 35 years, I have found that the traditional recommended implementation approaches are just not practical enough for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This overview is therefore written for any SME aspiring to excellence and is built on 3 foundations: Simplify; Integrate; Sequence.
Not surprisingly after some 60 years of application and testing, there is now a high degree of alignment between the nationally advocated frameworks for business excellence from around the world. But there are 3 major problems for an SME when trying to implement any one of these frameworks:
The recommended approach is to begin with a comprehensive review of the organisation’s current performance against each of the 7-9 criteria and then to address the highest priority areas for improvement – but this takes significant time and money and doesn’t involve all the employees.
We have found that a simplified framework is essential to integrate all the implementation activities. This framework is consistent with the internationally recognized frameworks but has only 5 Master Steps (instead of 7-9 evaluation criteria). We have also found that these 5 Master Steps should be implemented in a logical sequence. With Customer Focus as the overriding driver, the 5 Master Steps (all of which are prerequisites for Business Excellence) are: