Compass: Your Roadmap to Business Reinvention

Transforming your business means looking at all aspects of it, even those pieces you think are sacrosanct, like your target audience. I know you spent a lot of time defining your perfect customer and even more time building relationships with the customers you have.

Here are some “what if” questions to ponder that might open your eyes to new ideas:

• WHAT IF you could serve the people who also serve your customers? For instance, I’m a small business coach. What if I could serve the financial advisors, accountants, virtual assistants, human resource and training companies who serve my customers?
• WHAT IF you could serve a different target audience? Let’s just pretend for a moment that you didn’t want to offer one-on-one private services anymore, but you didn’t want to throw away all that knowledge and experience either. Could you create a training program to teach people how to become what you are? Then they could serve your original target audience.
• WHAT IF you could narrow your target audience to one from a specific demographic? For instance, let’s say you are a graphic artist and you’ve been working with local companies to design their marketing materials. What if you focused solely on service firms, or solely on manufacturing firms? What if you focused only on businesses which make more than $1 million a year? Or focused only on women-owned businesses? Or focused solely on businesses with a strong socially-responsible stand?
• WHAT IF you could ponder all the past customers you’ve had and choose the ones that you most enjoyed working with? What do they have in common?

You don’t have to make a major shift to a brand new target audience, though that is one viable business reinvention strategy. You can re-define who you most enjoy working with and which clients are the most profitable, transforming your business to align more with your goals and values.

Going it alone is scary when you are reinventing your business. Gathering a “group of greats” around you will help.

When I was reinventing a part of my own business, I asked 26 people to be part of my Advisory Group. How did I select them? They are current and previous clients, business colleagues, students, and friends, all who know me and my business and whom I trust to give me honest feedback about my ideas.

They’re also part of my ideal target audience. All of them are self-employed and have been running their own businesses for more than five years, so their advice about what they need most for their business helps me to define new products and services to offer.

As part of my own business reinvention, I wanted to start doing live events after a six-year hiatus and an national economic recession. They were thumbs-up on that idea! I even ran the name of this blog/workshop by them to see how they reacted to it. The group loved the idea of exploring business reinvention as a topic and a process!

Question For You: Do you have an Advisory Group, a trust team of advisors? I’d love to hear how you chose them and why you included certain people in your Advisory Group!