effective business practices 101 (6/8): disruption and collaboration strategies

Disruption & collaboration.How small businesses can stand up and win big against large corporations that control the market. And the importance of healthy, diverse marketplace.

What you’ll learn.

• Understand how disruption and collaboration can help small businesses.

• Understand how you can leverage your community to create opportunities and the importance of maintaining that community and the environment you are operating in.

Outline for today’s and tomorrow’s lessons:

Review.

❶What is the competition?

❷What is the demand?

❸What are the costs?

❹What is the ROI?

What tools can you use to research your decisions?

What is diversification?

Experiments.• Try your ideas on small scale

before going big.

• Learn from those test runs whether it is a good idea.

• Not the same as market research, your own opinion or prediction about what would happen. Experiments are actually you conducting the business on a small scale.

Measure, individually.

Things you can measure:

• Income.

• Costs.

• Amount of work required.

Feedback is a gift.

Collect & synthesize.

• Collect a good sample of feedback (at least 10 people).

• Sort your feedback based on opinions and suggestions.

• Think how it could apply to your business.

Applying feedback.Evaluate each customer complaint, praise or suggesting:

• Is it feasible to make the changes?

• Does it align with your business objectives?

• Learn about your business from the customers’ perspective.

Empathy exercises.

• Create a customer story for your business or product.

• Be your own customer. If you hate your product, your customer probably does too.

Kinds of information.

• Data about the market: competition, demand.

• Operational data: costs, potential revenues, ROI.

• Customer data: feedback, average & ideal customer traits.

Google Sheets.Have you downloaded Google Sheets? Did you start tracking your data? Don’t

forget to add more data every day. Any questions or problems with Google Sheets?

Creating charts.Do you remember how to do it with Google Sheets?

Disruption & collaboration.Lessons from some of the most successful businesses in

the world.

Collaboration.

• Successful business collaborations could completely change the bottom line of an enterprise.

• Badly managed or non-existent ties with other businesses and agencies could damage your business. Big time.

Collaboration.• A team of like-minded small

businesses have a potential to change attitudes and even laws.

• Together, small businesses might negotiate better prices from the suppliers.

• When businesses get together they can have a larger buying power to advertise, thus bringing more customers to their sector.

• It’s very common for businesses to partner with governments to mutually benefit each other.

What are some examples of collaboration that you

know?

Mini-assignment.

❶Pick a business/product.

❷ Think of how and whom/which org with could you collaborate.

❸Come up with at least 3 collaboration ideas and present in class.

Disruption.• Disruption means finding new ways of

conducting a business.

• This method can “disrupt” or “break” the existing market or industry. The “old” way of doing things is no longer good enough.

• Companies who can achieve this often become very prosperous very quickly.

• Alternatively, those companies benefit or change the marketplace and are often good for the customer.

• Most often “disruption” is referred to in online business but there are examples in the real-world as well.

Mini-assignment.

❶ Think of an example how an industry has got disrupted in the past. Example: cars replaced horses.

❷Present in class.

Recap.Let’s list all the things we’ve learned so far that we have

to know and work on to have a successful business.

The list.• Research.

• Diversify.

• Manage feedback.

• Apply empathy.

• Track everything.

• Collaborate.

• Disrupt*.

*Depends on your business objectives.

Let’s make a plan.

Assignment.❶Research your opportunities online.

Ex.: what is the most popular business type here? What can this community use more of?

❷Plan how you are going to diversify your business.

❸Create a strategy how you are going to collect data and which one (i.e.: customer feedback, earnings etc.)

❹Can you create meaningful, beneficial collaborations? Make your case.

❺ Is your business disruptive? If so, explain how.