A superior customer experience subdues competitors
Protecting your “great idea” is often paramount to entrepreneurial thinking.
One of my favorite sayings is that I can create faster than a competitor can steal. To my knowledge, I have never witnessed someone stealing and executing my idea and competing with me or one of my clients. Though not an impossibility, this rarely, if ever, happens.
The key lies in the execution of the idea, bringing it to fruition. If it were easy, everyone would do it. You can’t steal execution! The best way to create competitive advantage is to execute the customer experience with excellence.
Even the best ideas can fail when execution is weak.
Many entrepreneurs live in a state of fear that the competition will steal their strategy. The point they miss is that their strategy is already known to the marketplace, if not explicitly, then implicitly. Strategy is meaningless without good execution.
Many businesses are in a state of mediocrity because they are good but not great at execution. At the heart of strategy is delivering superior execution on the products or services that customers value and competitors find hard to imitate or steal.
As I work with clients, it’s not surprising for them to be very protective of their business plan documents. They don’t want to share their plans too broadly, or at all, with employees.
Who do they expect is going to get the work done? In my experience, I consistently find that the greatest challenge companies face is not in developing their plans, but in executing them. I have asked business owners who are hesitant to communicate their plans with their staff: If you struggle with execution, what makes you think your competitors are going to be able to take your plan, based on your unique situation, and then execute it successfully?
Execution is by far the most important aspect. Anyone can have an idea, but it takes drive, determination and hard work for even the best ideas to gain enough traction to become a business. Without a passion for your work or a real desire to make it a success, your great idea is essentially useless.
You can waste a lot of energy trying to keep others from stealing your ideas or finding out your secrets. In the end, it’s the energy you put into innovation, building your team and executing your plans that propel your company forward.
It’s important to openly discuss your ideas because you’ll find the best insights and connections come from people you wouldn’t expect. At the same time, you’re creating word-of-mouth awareness and shouldn’t worry about theft. A head start is very intimidating.
Businesses operating out of fear and paranoia by fiercely protecting their secrets are unknowingly admitting to being misaligned with buyers. The contemporary buyer demands transparency into how a company operates, its values, what’s special about its products, and how the company is actively working to address the buyer’s unique challenges. If transparency isn’t there, the buyer simply moves on until they find a competitor that provides it.
Ideas need action to bring them to life. User interface, technology and the product itself are commodities these days. It takes relentless execution of well-thought-out plans to achieve success.
Most people are either too lazy, too ignorant, or too arrogant to successfully execute an idea properly, let alone someone else’s idea. There is not much to worry about when it comes to your company’s secrets if you’re not at the top of the food chain.
Your competitors won’t usually take you seriously; if they do, they typically will only have a piece of the secret. There are always more aspects to any company’s innovative products, such as marketing style, niche targeting, customer base, timing, company culture and mission, how you present it and having the necessary resources to be successful.
Execution trumps innovation every time. Execute well or risk execution in the market.
Dennis Zink is an Exit Strategist, business analyst and consultant, a Certified Value Builder and SCORE mentor, and past chapter chair of SCORE Manasota. Dennis created and hosts “Been There, Done That! with Dennis Zink,” a nationally syndicated business podcast series and “SCORE Business TV” available at Time4Exit.com. He facilitates CEO roundtables for the Manatee and Venice chambers of commerce. Dennis led a SCORE team to create the Exit Strategy Canvas and Exit Strategy Roadmap program that provides a real world methodology for business equity realization. Email him at [email protected].