5 Competitive Pressures on your Small Business

Competitive forces have the power to break or make your small business almost overnight. Do you know what competitive forces your small business and it’s industry are under?

In 1979 Michael Porter identified 5 forces, or sources of pressure, that influence competition in an industry and which ‘determine the ultimate profit potential of an industry’. Not only was the model he proposed widely accepted but it is still at the centre of competitive strategy thirty years later.

Competitor Forces in Small Business

Potential Entrants

How attractive is your market or industry to potential entrants?

What […]

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Innovation in Small Business Development

If you want new creative ideas for your small business development then ‘SCAMPER’ is a technique that can help you. ‘SCAMPER’ is a framework of questions that you can use when brainstorming that helps encourage creativity and new ideas.

Scamper Small Business Innovation

‘SCAMPER’ is an acronym that stands for:

  • Substitute
  • Combine
  • Adapt
  • Magnify (or Minimize)
  • Put to another use
  • Eliminate
  • Rearrange (or Reverse)

Substitute

What part of the product or service could be substituted or replaced for something else?

Combine

Can two or more of your products or services be sold together?

Adapt

Can you change the product or service to better meet customer needs?

Magnify (or […]

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4 Steps to Small Business Development

Small business development requires a commitment to start working ‘on’ your business rather than just working ‘in’ your business. The Plan-Do-Review-Improve model is a simple way of helping you with the business development process.

Small Business Development

Step 1: Plan

Decide on what area of the business you want to work on. Identify what your goal for that area of the business is. The goal should be ‘smart’ – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. Develop a plan of action that will get the business to that goal from where it […]

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Prioritising your Small Business Tasks

You have too much to do in your small business and don’t know where to start. How are you going to decide what to do next? It is human nature to do the easy things first and to put off the things you are dreading.

The “Prioritization Matrix” is a simple way of categorising your ‘To-Do’ list so that you can be confident that you are dealing with things in the most efficient order.

 

Small Business Priortization Matrix

Step 1: Task Importance

Split your ‘To-Do’ list into ‘High Importance’ and ‘Low Importance’.  This is usually fairly […]

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5 Keys to Small Business Growth

Understanding the barriers to small business growth is important. Often small businesses concentrate on the external factors affecting growth but fail to recognise the important internal factors.

To grow your small business over time you will need to:

  1. Create: a product/service
  2. Manage (or Direct): the business
  3. Delegate: to employees
  4. Co-ordinate: activities
  5. Collaborate: flexibly across teams

Greiner’s organisational growth model (Larry Greiner, 1972) shown below consists of these 5 consecutive phases of business growth – Creativity, Direction (Management), Delegation, Co-ordination and Collaboration.

Within each phase of growth Greiner observed that there is a period of growth through evolution followed by a crisis and then a period of growth through revolution.  To understand the model it is important […]

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