Entrepreneurs regularly find new ideas and new opportunities to bring to market and establishing the business, the product, and the service to meet a customer need gradually develops over time. Established businesses can lose the connection between the original core value of the business and its present state. The true value of a business is embedded in three distinct areas:
1.1 The Purpose
Businesses exist to provide something that their market requires or needs, but they also exist to meet a higher need or purpose, and clarity of purpose enables businesses to remain focused on delivering in that area of passion and need. Establishing a core value or set of core values and putting it to paper solidifies your purpose for your business. The billionaires of this world clearly have that understanding of what their business is about and what they hope to achieve or have achieved as the end result of their own personal strategy. Everyone from Bill Gates to Donald Trump is in this video, and it is worth checking out:
1.2 The Product and Service
Products and services that are entirely aligned to meeting the purpose are required for any successful business, but established entrepreneurial businesses often find their products have changed and drifted off purpose and so perform sub-optimally compared to expectations. Regular re-evaluations of the products and services provided by you and your business will tell you just where you are in the process and whether or not the “drifting” has occurred even marginally. Reinventing the products and services such that they are realigned with the purpose is what makes established entrepreneurs more successful over their competition. Taking cues from those that have maintained the delicate balance between products and services and the purposes they are meant to serve, you can stay on track with your business goals. This video from a business conference at Harvard brings an entrepreneurial meeting of the minds together for a look at the common strategies and goals you should be concerned with:
1.3 Problem and Solution
The final part of the core value of a business is clarity about the problem that the business is seeking to solve for its customers and how it achieves that solution. Without that clarity the value cannot be made clear to its potential customers, its staff, its suppliers and its other collaborative partners. You can not sell a polar bear in a snowstorm to an Alaskan Native American if you first can not define for him why it is he would need and/ or want to purchase such a thing. You can not even work on implementation of your solution if you do not first understand what the problem is, and without knowing the value of your products and services and being able to clarify that to the customers, you can’t even get that far. Thus you have come full circle and must first establish the first two principles here before resolving the problem you have found!
Finally, once you have reached to this point, you must then decide how to use the proper strategy as part of the solution. Implementation of the solution then brings success, which is exactly what you’re hoping for when you began your journey as an entrepreneur. Stay focused, stay on track; provide a valuable product or service and make clear what it’s worth to you and to your customers. That’s the solid advice of many established entrepreneurs. For more solid advice, check out this video on the mistakes most often committed by entrepreneurs and how to avoid them:
