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Size Does Matter

Grow Your Business, Thinking Big

Leadership & Attitude

In this chapter Rony talks about the importance of leadership. It is a topic being widely discussed but leadership doesn’t have to be complicated. Everyone has a leader inside them, its about channeling your thoughts and energy. The type of attitude you bring to the table makes you a good, strong, and visionary leader. Most of the time it takes a compelling reason to bring out the leader in you. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, they all had their compelling moments in life to bring out the leader in them. What’s your’s? Rony simplifies the concept of leadership and focuses on seven main areas of leadership. If you want to bring out the leader within whether it’s leading yourself into taking action or your community or your business, rush to this chapter and read it asap.

Strategic Planning

As the business leader you need a clear vision and be able to communicate your organization’s reason for existence to your employees, clients and customers. Strategic planning process helps the leaders create and articulate the vision & mission of their organization. Rony describes the importance of vision and mission statements, and aligning the values of the organization. He helps you go deeper into the planning process to build your business strategy, peel the onion to understand your firm’s capabilities and limitations, and set up the enablers for success.

Operations Management

In strategic planning process you define the destination where you are going and plot the path to get there. The operations management actually helps you in reaching your destination while navigating all the obstacles along the way. This is where rubber hits the road and you execute on the strategy by deploying your business tactics. This is where your people, processes, technology, support structure and organizational culture come together to deliver on the promise to your customers and stakeholders.

Generating Revenue

Branding, Marketing & Selling: To generate revenue the organization needs to have a business plan that details the marketing strategy including the branding and positioning. Chapter 4 of the book goes into the weeds of marketing right from seven Ps of marketing to networking and social media. Rony talks about the importance of the frontline troops in the trenches, the sales team. A strong business development team can fuel growth and long term success.

Financing: Options to Finance the Growth

There are bunch of people that think if the business has no debt then it’s doing well. However, it is quite the opposite. To be successful a business needs to grow, and to grow the business needs capital. Depending on the stage of the life cycle curve your business is at, the capital requirements and financing options will vary. This is where once again the business plan comes in handy. Financial Institutions and investors will like to see the business plan, its viability and the risks involved before committing their funds to your business. This chapter provides various options for financing the business growth and how to secure that capital.

Strategic Business Advisors

We know all top athletes have coaches, some even have multiple coaches that specialize in different areas of the sport. Similarly, if you want your business to go beyond mediocrity and achieve continued success then invest in a business advisor and/ or coach. Definitely, seek out mentor who can hold you accountable, challenge your ideas or the status quo in your business and give you objective, unbiased and authentic advice. In this chapter you will get to explore the possibilities that you create by working with business consultants, advisors and coaches.

eCommerce Versus Brick & Mortar – The Future is Here to Stay

You will find it interesting to discover the advantages, disadvantages, and synergies between brick & mortar and ecommerce models. At the end of the day we all know that ecommerce is the way of the future however, we don’t know if brick & mortar is dead. In fact Amazon, world’s largest online retailer, recently acquired brick and mortar whole foods chain. In this chapter you can explore if you want to be online only or have physical locations or a hybrid model. You will also discover what it takes to have more effective presence online using influencers and how to do business in the virtual world by building your own customer database.

Customer Experience – The Era of the Customer

Rony believes in differentiating through customer excellence aka the WOW factor. What it means is that every interaction with your customer will be an excellent one. The customer is the centre of all your interactions. Rather than focusing on repeat business from customer, focus on creating such a great customer experience that the customer promotes your business to other people in their sphere of influence. Not only you gain a customer for life but potentially add more customers without any additional cost of customer acquisition. Rony recommends making customer excellence part of your organization’s DNA by empowering your employees to make it right for the customer at every step of the interaction.

The Power of Negotiation – Always Be Negotiating

As a business you want to negotiate the best deals for yourself that work for you in the long-term. You can negotiate with vendors, suppliers, distributors, employees, contractors and the customers. In this chapter Rony recommends that your negotiation strategy should be focused on a win-win for both the parties since you are in a relationship of sorts. When it comes to the customer, negotiation should be such that it leaves the customer feeling empowered. They should feel that they didn’t have to negotiate to receive the best value for their money. You have to create value in the customers’ eyes and they will be willing to pay you the price you quote. In-fact they may even be willing to pay you a premium if they perceive the value in your product or service.

Technology & Innovation

Technology adoption and innovation is essential part of the evolution of business landscape. Change is inevitable and it impacts business world more than anything else. As the speed of technological advancement accelerates so does the evolution of businesses. Organizations that don’t innovate to differentiate and stay ahead of their competition will be left so far behind that they will fade away into the horizon. Nokia is a great example that faded away because they didn’t keep up with the technology of the smart phone evolution. Blackberry is another example, in the same industry, that didn’t innovate enough to keep up with Apple and Samsung. Rony provides valuable advice on technology adoption, innovation and automation. This will make your business more effective, efficient and convenient for both customers and employees. Uber with its convenience factor disrupted the established taxi industry. The Fintech firms are disrupting the entire banking industry that has been struggling to innovate. What is your business, a disruptor or the disrupted one? You decide!

Financial Health

Regular assessment of your business’ financial health is imperative not only to be profitable in the short-term but also for long-term existence of the organization. This is purely numbers and financial analytics of the business performance. Keeping the data and comparing it year over year is important to plot trends in your business and compare to the industry standards. The insights will be valuable to benchmark against your financial forecast, industry standards and against your competitors. Once you have this information you can then make informed data driven decisions. Capital allocation, budgeting, forecasting, cost cutting and financial analysis are all part of the financial health management of the business. Ignoring this aspect and not realigning constantly can cost you your business.

Doing Business with the Government

In this chapter Rony shines light on huge opportunity for organizations. To do business with the largest customer out there, the government. There are tons of opportunities to sell to various levels and departments of the government. You can also receive government grants and funding to grow your business. There are government funding programs for start-ups and mature businesses that are involved in social causes, business expansion, technology, R&D and innovation. Government allocates grants and funding programs to what it deems the priority sectors for country’s the economic growth. As a business you might want to get involved in these initiatives and tap into the government support. There is high level of scrutiny or red tape that comes with government programs but then it’s the tax payers money, your money, and you should be happy that no one can abuse it. There are many non-for-profit agencies and government funded organizations that you can partner with to get the funding support. This is one area where you might want to work with business advisors that can assist you with the funding applications and on going support.

Grow Your Business, Thinking Big

Thinking big and beyond what you think is possible, is the possibility in itself. Generate new ideas and try new things to keep innovating and growing your business. Continuous improvement should become part of the foundation of your business. Every employee should be engaged and involved in continuous improvement efforts at every level of the business. Incremental improvements will keep you growing today, tomorrow and beyond. Size does matter, but don’t let the size of the big organizations in your industry intimidate you. After all you could be the disruptor around the corner just like Tesla, Uber, Amazon, Facebook, Google and so many other businesses that turned the page just because they dared to dream big.