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Is your business broken?
For thousands of years, commerce has basically worked in the same way.
Products, services or information have been sold for a profit to those who can’t or can’t be bothered to source them or make them for themselves and a margin has been charged for this – you make the money from selling the ‘stuff’.
But recently, margins for ‘stuff’ have been squeezed, price is more of a concern, clients are doing and making more ‘stuff’ for themselves, everything is changing.
Insurance brokers, retailers, record labels, management consultants, encyclopaedia publishers, and any other industry you can care to think of are under pressure from new ideas, new distribution channels and new technologies. Information is no longer scarce, neither is ‘stuff’, it no longer holds a premium.
The world is changing, no it's changed. People are looking for the next big thing, the vehicle that has been unleashed by Google and the internet, that nobody has yet spotted.
It doesn’t matter which industry you’re in, you need to find this Holy Grail, you need to change what you’re doing, or how you’re delivering what you do to use these new platforms to make it easier for your customers to buy from you. If you don’t, your competitor will – you need to move with the times, because as Seth Godin says ‘we’re all in the fashion industry now’!
But before you run a bath and think about how to take your business online, or reach-out to your customers through social media, or change to a virtual office, remember, the money might not be where you first think it is.
If Google had decided to charge for searches, analytics, gmail etc it wouldn’t be what it is today. The same’s true for Amazon, last minute, Facebook, Twitter et al.
So give a bit of thought to why you business isn’t as profitable as it used to be, is it the recession, is it the offer, or is it just broken?
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Products, services or information have been sold for a profit to those who can’t or can’t be bothered to source them or make them for themselves and a margin has been charged for this – you make the money from selling the ‘stuff’.
But recently, margins for ‘stuff’ have been squeezed, price is more of a concern, clients are doing and making more ‘stuff’ for themselves, everything is changing.
Insurance brokers, retailers, record labels, management consultants, encyclopaedia publishers, and any other industry you can care to think of are under pressure from new ideas, new distribution channels and new technologies. Information is no longer scarce, neither is ‘stuff’, it no longer holds a premium.
The world is changing, no it's changed. People are looking for the next big thing, the vehicle that has been unleashed by Google and the internet, that nobody has yet spotted.
It doesn’t matter which industry you’re in, you need to find this Holy Grail, you need to change what you’re doing, or how you’re delivering what you do to use these new platforms to make it easier for your customers to buy from you. If you don’t, your competitor will – you need to move with the times, because as Seth Godin says ‘we’re all in the fashion industry now’!
But before you run a bath and think about how to take your business online, or reach-out to your customers through social media, or change to a virtual office, remember, the money might not be where you first think it is.
If Google had decided to charge for searches, analytics, gmail etc it wouldn’t be what it is today. The same’s true for Amazon, last minute, Facebook, Twitter et al.
So give a bit of thought to why you business isn’t as profitable as it used to be, is it the recession, is it the offer, or is it just broken?
|
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