Reinvent and Rescale Your Business
“One secret to maintaining a thriving business is recognizing when it needs a fundamental change.”
Mark Johnson, Harvard Business School
Change in business can be driven by a number of things: new competition, changing customer needs, and very importantly today, new technologies. The Internet is the key technological driver of change for businesses today, as characterized by:
- Commoditization of software, computing power and data storage
- Dramatically expanded communication channels and volumes
- Social applications and networks
- Open source software, and open APIs for interfacing between systems and databases
- Two billion people on the Internet
- Five billion devices on the Internet
- Five billion cell phones in use
With billions of people in China and India joining the west in the technology race over the last 20 years, the pace of change is mind-boggling. It is a rare business that has not felt the impact of these changes or off-shore competition.
“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” William Gibson
In other words, the next technology changes have already emerged somewhere on the planet, they just haven’t spread everywhere yet.
How To Think About Reinventing or Rescaling Your Business
We’re talking about innovation here – there is no set formula or process. However, here are some example seeds of thought you can use to start the process flowing:
- What are implicit assumptions in your industry?
- Can you target non-customers, low-margin customers, or unhappy customers?
- Can you resegment your customer base, or desegment them?
- Can you offer complementary products and services, or bundle them, or focus more on solutions than products?
- Look at the overall customer experience and purchase-disposal cycle.
- How can you reinvent your customer relationships and interactions?
- What new revenue streams and pricing options can you create?
- How can you dramatically lower your costs?
Technologies That Can Reshape Your Business
The list is literally changing by the day. Follow TechCrunch or Techmeme if you need proof. At a high level here are some tools that are being used to fundamentally change how business is done:
- Social applications such as Facebook and Twitter for increasing customer involvement and retention
- Use of tools like social contests, customer participation in product development, analysis of customer comments
- Mobile and geo applications such as Foursquare that bring in new customers and involve them in local businesses
- Collaboration and distributed workforce tools like Google Docs
- Cloud-based databases like Intuit’s QuickBase
- A legion of cloud-based business process applications that reduce IT costs and provide access to anyone, anytime, anywhere
How Kilnernet Can help You
We can facililate the process of looking for opportunities to reinvent or rescale your business. We utilize a structured discussion process that reviews over 100 business thought provoking questions. We merge the results of that discussion with our own knowledge of available technologies and lead a joint brainstorming of opportunities for further exploration.
Once opportunities are identified and researched we also lead the implementation of new technologies.
Click here to contact us for a free initial consultation.
Case Studies
One of the trailblazers of crowdsourcing, Threadless has grown to a $38 million company by outsourcing its t-shirt designs to contestants and then letting its customers vote for the winners. It then only produces the top vote-getters, knowing it has a ready-made customer base for each design.
One of the most successful purely online law firms, LegalZoom achieved its success by narrowing its focus to legal services and documents whose delivery could be highly automated and done almost entirely online. An excellent example of “less is more”.
An excellent example of blending numerous straightforward technologies, ZipCar enables its members to reserve cars on the web or an iPhone for as little as an hour. Cars are picked up and dropped off in locations as needed and are easily individually found with web and phone geo-based software.
A great example of transforming costs into profits, Dell created revenue and profit from its inventory of returned and refurbished merchandise, relying primarily on Twitter to promote its outlet. Initially slow to catch on, tweaks and adjustments resulted in sales doubling every month and number of followers leaping from 8,000 to 1.5 million in just over one year.
Free initial consultation
For approved businesses, we will hold a one hour, no cost discussion with you on any topic related to your business and the internet - marketing, operations, intelligence, etc. Within three business days we will then give you three written recommendations on how to improve your marketing or operations using the internet.
Click here to contact us.