Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Are you complacent about your business and your customers?

Are you complacent about your business and your customers?

A recent new venture of mine has highlighted that many businesses do just that.

I identified a niche - that Holy Grail of business ideas.

The niche was created when one business, that had gone part way to fulfilling that niche, ceased on the death of the owner. For 12 months I looked at the void that was left and fully expected one of the remaining providers to snap up the opportunity.

But no, they just carried on doing what they've always done, happy with the extra market share that fell into their hands as they were the only alternatives.

Just under a year ago I said 'enough is enough'. If no one else is going to do it, then I will.

So the planning started.

The venture was launched at the back of 2010 and the formula, as I predicted, has proved very successful.

Now at that point, if I was one of the existing businesses, I would have at last woken up to the fact that I needed to re-think my offering by working hard to change, and update so that I could compete at the same level.

The bizarre thing is that they're not! All they are doing is trying to make it difficult for me to continue and, you might not believe this, bullying their current customers into boycotting me (both totally unsuccessful I might add).

What can you learn from this?

Every business MUST avoid sitting back on it's laurels.
It's all too easy to be complacent and believe that the status quo will continue. Reality is that there is always someone looking at your success, trying to work out how they can improve or modify what you do and carve themselves sufficient market share to make a decent profit.

You MUST constantly look at ways to improve your product or service to retain your customers.

Businesses either decline or grow. They very rarely stand still for long.