10 Ways Defining Your Business Can Increase Your Productivity Blog
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): TomKin Consulting, LLC
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020
Successful businesses are the exception, not the rule. To become a successful business or entrepreneur requires keeping this in mind because the expectation should be failure, while the steps for success should be afforded due consideration to reduce the chances of failure, the main consideration in the foundation of a business is to ask, “What is the business?” To define the business, this sets forth a vision, mission, targeted objectives, the intended audience, and foci for the business.
1. Pick a Domain
All businesses function in a specified capacity rather than a generalized capacity. Even the largest corporate models operate on these principles, for example, Coca-Cola, Apple, and Amazon, maintain an international and ominously gargantuan financial and brand presence. One of the reasons is the selection of a specified domain of operation and then optimization within this domain or space of business. Coca-Cola picked pop; Apple picked personal computers and cellular communications technology; Amazon picked online delivery platforms.
2. Add Fidelity
Even if you’ve selected a space for the business to operate, there are numerous other factors to bear in mind about the development trajectory within the space. A business cannot do everything, all the time, in a singular space within some specifications as to what that business does better than other businesses. To define the business requires not only a space but an actual image of its purpose within the space, we can call this, “Adding fidelity.” You’re ‘enhancing the image’ – so to speak – of the business.
3. Make a Vision Statement
When you’ve carved out the space and then added fidelity, so as to create a niche product market within the space, you can begin to work on the formal trajectory – long-term – of the business. This will include a vision statement about the intended purpose of the business and its values within the space, the niche, and the identified “intended purpose.” A vision statement should be concise, powerful, and definitive, speaking to the values of the organization overall.
4. Make a Mission
Out of the embers of the vision statement, you should have the stipulated values of the organization. While this can provide an arc to the intended story of the organization and give an image of the values of the business, it will still require steps, not time-wise or linear “steps” but, within the vision. What is the individualized components within the vision of the business, within the space and the niche carved out for the business? These answers can provide a guide about the mission of the business.
5. Formulate Targeted Objectives
Goals, targeted objectives, are crucial for the creation of a viable business. It’s great to have an idea about the general domain of the business as a rough ballpark estimate, the niche in which it intends to provide services in this domain, as well as the vision of the business and its mission statements comprising the sub-components of this vision. These are theory. They have not actualized into something pragmatic, practical, or concrete. Targeted objectives would follow from 1. through 4. while providing concrete specifics, timelines, and a structure for the intended trajectory of the organization. Targeted objectives are a fulcrum of the functioning of the organization as a whole.
6. Know Your Audience
Within the targeted objectives, the mission statements, the vision, the niche, and the space, the business will have a structure and a pathway for its progression over time. However, who is the audience? Equally important, who isn’t the audience? You’re trying to make a sale, provide a service, to people. So, some things will appeal to some, but not others. You should create brainstorm on who the potential audience for the business is following from 1. through 5. In addition, knowing who the potential audience might be, you can know who the possible customers aren’t. And the business considerations don’t have to be linear, you could start brainstorming based on who the audience isn’t and then can know who is based on those reflections.
7. Delivery of Service
To make a product, whether food, an app, a video game, a Netflix movie, and the like, each will have different demographics of the population who like or prefer different things over others. In free societies with the ability for businesses to flourish, the true diversity of customer tastes come forward. These cases are no different. If you know who your audience isn’t, and have selected particularized targeted goals over time, you can work to deliver the best product or service via the business to the intended audience within the framework of the targeted objectives over time. Your business will be well on its way to becoming well-defined and knowing itself and, therefore, its place.
8. Foci of Business
1. through 7. are extremely important because of the defining of the business cycle: Its domain, niche, vision, mission, targeted objectives, audience, and services/products. All these definitions of a business make the process of streamlining a business at every stage easier, which, in the end, increases the productivity of the business. Insofar as every consideration of a business matter, we can have the little increases in productivity over time, and at each stage, because the business is known to the most integral person for its operation: presumably, you. Within these overarching factorizations of the business, you can then begin to select foci, thematic elements, of he business to make the business less robotic and more colourful and suited within the niche. The distribution of the services can then streamline into areas of thematic focus for increase productivity.
9. Hired Help
With the increased definition or fidelity of the business at all stages and over time, and some thematic colourings of the organization, it can be an incredible help when looking for hired assistance because the business is clear in terms of vision, mission, and targeted objectives. If a potential employee or volunteer is looking at businesses, then they are looking at the skills ad talents for themselves and the suitability to the work environment. This will include the boundaries of definition that the business has when putting itself out there. With these well-defined boundaries of the business, it can be straightforward because the people who come for possible hiring to work for the business will be more likely to be suitable in values and skills for it. Thus, the right people for the right job. This kind of proper fit will, undoubtedly, increase the overall productivity of the business because of an alignment with the values an skills of the individual & the values and needs of the business. With more proper hired help, the productivity of the business will be yet higher than previously expected.
10. Everyone on the Same Page
With the appropriate domain/space of the business, the niche for its marketing, the stipulated vision and values, the mission statement of the organization, the formulated targeted objectives, the self-knowledge of the business owner about the intended audience, the ways in which there will be a delivery of a service, the various foci of the business, and the right people hired as help for the right job, the meetings, the correspondence, the external image, the internal dynamics, will never be perfect, but the business will have well-defined self-understanding to create a unified work culture. Everyone will be, more or less, on the same page, which, in the end, will create a far, far more productive business.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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