In a recent conversation with a colleague about how challenging it is to run a business today, Michael Hammer’s book, Agenda came up as a great reference to our discussion.  One of my favourite quotes from Agenda is  “…above all, business is not a game for amateurs”.  I think this is more critical today than ever before.  

My work allows me the opportunity to meet and collaborate with many entrepreneurs. I have watched start-ups progress to successful businesses and struggle with the shift in capability requirements from creative innovation to running a competitive operational organization that requires a multitude of core competencies.  It has always been tough – but with global competition and highly informed customers, it is tougher than ever.

With the amount of information and choice in front of our customers and ourselves, it is more important than ever to focus on core competencies and strategic partnerships.  Success will depend on the ability to shift both of these as the organization grows, technology changes, new products emerge and our culture shifts.

Knowing the areas where you are ‘an amateur’ and seeking professional help to complement your areas of expertise is critical to competing in this dynamic, competitive global market.

Some of the questions that can help guide these decisions:

• What are our core competencies that we need to focus on to be successful?
• How do we maintain our expertise and leadership position in each of these?
• Which areas are we struggling with to stay current in or innovate in?
• Are there external resources available to form a strategic partnership aligned with business goals?

We practise what we preach!

One of the decisions we made at Dash was to partner with strong analytics vendors, rather than build our own analytics engine.  Although we have the technical team that could build an analytics and reporting engine, keeping up with the constant data availability and changes is a tremendous commitment to do well enough to support our core competencies.  We share our expertise in designing meaningful reports that support making timely and important business decisions with our customers, and let analytics vendors focus on building and supporting the engines to drive these critical reports.  This requires confidence in the analytics partners we chose:

1. they value our business expertise and reporting design and will grow with us
2. they continue to work with us to tune and develop reports and data as technology and data feeds change
3. They see us as a strategic partner who will contribute to their product direction long-term

As you reflect on 2013, note that complacency has a higher risk than ever before.  Start the new year with an internal competency audit, and some great discussions on where to focus your resources, and where you could use some help.