Curt's Corner: Top Business Questions
By Curtis Nelson, EDC President & CEO
When running a business, many business owners tend to work “in” the business, not “on” their business. Whether you’re just getting started or have been in business for 20-plus years, taking a step back and validating your fit in the marketplace, assessing your strengths and weaknesses, and where you’re headed is a critical exercise. It will uncover why you can or can not be as successful as you would like to be.
At the Entrepreneurial Development Center, we work to help our clients understand their strategic fit. This often begins by simply asking them a series of business questions. The questions we ask are fairly straightforward, but more times than not, the companies don’t have solid answers. That’s why this ends up being a useful exercise—it uncovers areas or issues that require attention.
An in-depth fit analysis requires more thorough research and questioning, but you can use our set of Top 12 Business Questions to give you a good baseline for the strengths and weaknesses of your company, and what opportunities and challenges lie ahead.
A subset of the Top 12 Business Questions we subscribe to can be found below. You may find that writing down the answers to these questions, or discussing the answers to these questions with your management team, can be an enlightening experience.
Subset of Top 12 Business Questions:
What business are you in?
--Defined in terms of what you deliver
--Define your brand
Who are your customers / markets? What is your market share?
--By product
--By service
--By profitability
How are your products / services priced in relation to competitive offerings?
--By product
--By service
--By client / market
How do you define your competitive differentiation?
--By product
--By service
--By client / market
When you lose business, why do you lose?
--Price
--Product / Service?
--Relationship?
--Sales skills?
--Image
--Other?
Do you know your profitability in %?
--By product
--By service
--By client / market
If you are interested in the complete list of Top 12 Business Questions – please click here.
While it can be useful to work on these questions on your own, going through them with a third party like the EDC, local SBDC or other area service provider, can offer a sometimes needed independent perspective.
