obk blog

Have you ever wondered why some small businesses succeed while others fail?  Some people will tell you “it’s the market and there’s nothing you can do”, while others point to the lack of available external finance.  Some will even tell you “it’s all down to luck!”  But these things affect all businesses and they do not explain why some businesses are currently on their proverbial knees while other businesses in the same industry and in the same town are flying.

Having worked with many successful businesses over many years we believe that superior performance has nothing to do with external circumstances. So what does make the difference between a successful business and the rest?

The answer lies in the way they think.  Successful businesses have business owners who think in a different way.  The way a business performs is a direct result of the way the businesses’ owners think.   As Napoleon Hill intimated in his seminal book “Think and grow Rich,” the source of all wealth is, and always has been, the way people think.  So how do most business owners think?

Most business owners didn’t go to managing-director school before running their business. Often the business owners have technical skills associated with the product or service they make and sell, but little skills on how they should run a business.  Worse, their only model in their head as to how to run a business is the one they used to work for before!  So they do what they know – it’s all they know - and end up pursuing what we call a “me too” strategy, doing the same thing as their competitors in much the same way.  In the absence of any differentiation their customers focus on price and margins are squeezed.  Worse still, business owners also believe “it’s all about the price” and offer discounts they assume their customers require.  A self-inflicted wound.

Perhaps surprisingly, successful businesses do not have significant cost advantages over their competitors.  They recruit in the same labour market and they pay roughly the same rent per square feet.  Nor is their success a result of being more efficient!

Rather than focusing on efficiency, successful business owners focus on being effective.   Instead of doing things better they do better things, choosing what they do and for whom.

Developing a successful business is not difficult but does require a lot of thought and huge discipline to implement a plan. At O’Byrne and Kennedy we run seminars for business owners who are serious about doing something with their business.  We specialise in providing business owners with a way of analysing, thinking about and re-designing their businesses. At the risk of sounding like we have all the answers, this June and September we are re-running our widely acclaimed seminars called Grow your business and get a life! and Building a saleable business.