The “big boys”, if you like, have the financial capacity and brand presence to take some risk, but what of your business? The small local foundry, the machine jobbing shop, the powder-coating service or even the suburban milk bar – what can be done for these micro businesses?
The simple answer is innovation.
Find out what people are doing that is working and do it better. Not everybody in your industry is “going to the wall”; some will be great survivors. What is it they have that you don’t, what are they doing differently or better?
You can you embrace innovation by changing products to add improvements, by using “channel enhancement” by leveraging your existing customer relationships, or “complementary products” by fulfilling the entire customer needs or by adding accessories to platform products you have already sold.
There are huge opportunities available if you are systematic and strategic in your search.
Further, do you have a systematic opportunity search mechanism? An opportunity is simply An observed fortunate set of circumstances. Do you know how to position yourself to find this set of circumstances?
Most definitely not. Embrace innovation and opportunity capture and remember that only the fit survive the bad times, after that, good times always follow. If you are a survivor, the way ahead will soon be clear for you to prosper like never before.
Roger La Salle is the creator of the Matrix Thinking™ technique and is widely sought after as an international speaker on innovation, opportunity and business development. He is the author of four books, the director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as companies in Australian and overseas. He has been responsible for various successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panellist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at The Queens University in Belfast. Roger also chairs two syndicates of the national organisation, The CEO Institute. Matrix Thinking is now used in more than 26 countries and licensed to Deloitte, one of the world’s largest consulting firms.
