Business: Strategy 101: what you are good at (or trying to be)
101 may even be an overstatement. I’m hesitant to talk to you about this, because I’m likely to be overly simplistic, but I also know it is something you would take a passing interest in, so let’s hit some highlights.
Normally, I start with ‘what are you trying to achieve’ but I’m going to take it as read that the answer is ‘make a good profit, help people get/stay as healthy as possible, (in no particular order).
Strategies: Quality vs Cost vs focus
This bit you probably know, and probably has limited applicability to your business, so again, we are hitting the basics. There are three core approaches to focus your business to achieve its goals.
Cost is the easiest and most obvious- a strategy of cost leadership is being able to provide the product or service cheaper than your competitors.
Differentiation could be roughly simplified as quality- making your product stand out from others by unique and distinct features of the product.
Focus is targeting specific segments on the market only, and looking to capture small sections of a market only- by providing tailored solutions to specific needs. This is really easy to see in health- specializing in a subsection (Occ health, geriatric, pain management etc).
And if you’re thinking 1 and 3, don’t. Trying to do more than 1 doesn’t work. Focusing on one doesn’t mean you need to be rubbish at the others, but trying to do two things at once is like tying your shoes and brushing your teeth at the same time- you need up doing neither.
Core competencies
So now let’s give you a hard question. Are you good at what you do? Obviously this leads to either (or both) ‘I believe in myself’ affirmation, or 3am self-doubt. But let’s keep the psychology out of it- is Cadbury’s good at making chocolate? Is Whitakers? The answer is yes, for both. But a nuanced consideration shows that one is good at making chocolate at a high quality, the other at a good price. So both are good, focused in different ways.
Most organisations are competent, so yours will be too. You’re capable to doing what needs to be done to justify the price you charge. But is there something you think your team are particularly good at? Are you an efficient, smooth-running machine? Do you do a more thorough investigative job? Do you have expertise in a specific area of treatment?
Get bigger or get smaller?
Most businesses try to get bigger. Sometimes they deliberately get smaller. Why? It’s a question of being good at something. If you are good at something, you attempt to expand because you think you can perform better than those already in that space. But don’t think about the service itself, think about the strategy- can you do cheaper? Can you do it to a higher quality? To give a focus example- an optometrist with expertise in myopia control might expand into a new region because they can serve that community better on that condition that the generalists in that area.
Businesses that get smaller by choice do so because they don’t think they good at it, so focus on what they can do. A physio trying to also run a small gym on the side may get out of that because they can’t compete with the big gym down the road.
So what to think about
The temptation might be to think about the medicine, but don’t. From a business growth point of view, that’s the service you sell, and that service is competing with others. To grow, your service needs to perform better than others.
Think- how is my service better than others- is it cheaper, better, or more attuned to specific needs?
